Thinking through time: From collective memories to collective futures

world we live in. However, as we do for our personal lives, we do not imagine where we may be going solely based on inferences made from the present; we build on past experiences to construct a plausible image of what the future might hold. In the case of collective futures, then, this implies that the way we represent history – our collective memory – plays a fundamental role in the way we can imagine the future. It is precisely this relation between collective memory and imagination of the collective future that this chapter sets to explore. Memory and imagination The deep links between memory and imagination can be summarised by the idea of “Mental Time Travel”, as proposed by Tulving (2002). For him, memory and imagination both grant us the uniquely human ability to mentally travel through time, to experience events that are not anymore or that have not yet been. Although the notion of mental time travel is problematic in more than one respect – I will come back to this in the conclusion – it remains that imagination and memory are deeply associated processes: whether it is because they both involve scene construction (Mullally & Maguire, 2013), interacting with distal experiences (Zittoun & Gillespie, 2015), or moving away from the present (Berntsen & Bohn, 2010), these processes are similar in many ways. To the point that some have gone to suggest that this is because they are one and the same process (Berntsen & Bohn, 2010; Zittoun & Gillespie, 2015), highlighting the complex relation between the two. On the one hand, imagination does rest on past experiences: memory provides the ‘material’ transformed by imagination to produce something new (Vygotsky, 2004; Zittoun & de SaintLaurent, 2015). Indeed, although we often suppose that children’s imagination is the most fertile, it is not the case: experiences add content, thickness and richness to our imagination, and children’s play cannot rival, for instance, with the works of proficient science fiction authors (Vygotsky, 1931). Furthermore, some types of imagination that anticipate the future can take the form of reminiscence of a past that is directly relevant to the situation, what Mattli, Schnitzspahn, Studerus-Germann, Brehmer, & Zöllig (2014) have called “prospective memory”. Finally, some imaginations can become so rehearsed that they blur the line with memory. It is the case, for instance, of some imaginations of the future during adolescence that are engaged with regularly as one plans for one’s life (Zittoun & de Saint-Laurent, 2015). On the other hand, memory is not the mere repetition of the past but a reconstruction (Bartlett, 1932) that requires some form of imagination (de Saint-Laurent & Zittoun, in press). This is because memory is not ultimately oriented towards the past, but towards the future: it allows us to adapt to what is and what will be by flexibly reconstructing past experiences (Bartlett, 1932). This prospective function of memory, nowadays considered its most important one (Dudai & Carruthers, 2005; Schacter & Addis, 2007), has been mainly studied in relation to autobiographical memory. It has been found, for example, that remembering one’s life gives it direction (Habermas, 2012); that autobiographical memory and future imagination develop in parallel and interdependently (D’Argembeau, 2012); or 2