Cultural Memory and Skateboarding
or A View on the Streets

This short text is about skateboarding in the streets in times of crisis and disorientation – the pandemic Covid-19. What I would like to argue is, that when we talk about the streets and skateboarding we ultimately speak and read a language, which only at first glimpse seems to be abstract. While skating the streets we interact with an (urban) archive which shapes and fortifies a fundamental memory of a community, thus we are able to grasp and understand a significant processes of the creation and development of identity in skateboarding.
In the early stages of skateboarding’s past transfer of knowledge almost exclusively relied on the erection and exercise of a communicative memory. The concept of the communicative memory by the German Aleida and Jan Assmann, Egyptologists and Cultural Scientists (and also Anglist – her, Comparative Religious Studies – him), is an advancement of the basic idea of a collective memory, a term coined by the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. As early as in 1925 Halbwachs developed the collective memory, based on the assumption that, firstly, memory is a social phenomenon that stands in the center of a communities’ memory through the recollection and commemoration of experiences and events which are related to most of its members. Secondly, it unfolds from the community itself or from direct contact with neighbouring communities (Maurice Halbwachs, Das kollektive Gedächtnis (Frankfurt a. M. 1985), p. 25). Halbwachs goes on, “the collective memory derives its’ power and durability from an entity of humans, however it is the individual that actually recollects and commemorates as a part of the community. […] Each and every individual recollection is [however] a lookout point onto the collective memory: this lookout point changes according to the position inside the group, and the position changes according to the relationship of the individual towards other groups, communities and milieus” (ibid. translation by PK).


In this field of collective memory it is the accomplishment of the Assmanns to have very clearly worked out the social aspect of the individual memory by applying what they term a communicative memory. This specific memory is located in the intermediate fields between individuals, it is developed in a highly affective exchange and communication between them, thus generating a dual function: “It is only via affectively engaged forms of communication that structure, perspective, relevance, conciseness and horizon are able to enter memory. However, socialisation not only enables us to remember, it is conversely just as true that memories are enablers for socializing ourselves. Socialisation is thus not only a foundation of memory but also a function.” (Jan Assmann, Körper und Schrift als Gedächtnisspeicher. Vom kommunikativen zum kulturellen Gedächtnis, in: Moritz Csáky, Peter Stachel (ed), Speicher des Gedächtnisses. Bibliotheken, Museen, Archive. Teil 1: Absage an und Wiederherstellung von Vergangenheit – Kompensation von Geschichtsverlust (Wien 2000), pp. 199; translated by PK). Assmann asserts that the normative aspect of memory needs to be stressed; not only is memory built up during socialisation, it is at the same time instilled, even hammered into members of the community (ibid.). Communicative memory is defined by a „significantly high amount of shapelessness, arbitrariness and inorganization” (Jan Assmann, Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität, in: Kultur und Gedächtnis (ed by Jan Assmann, Tonio Hölscher), Frankfurt a. M. 1988, p 9). Finally, it is characterized by a bounded time frame insofar as it moves along with a proceeding present (ibid. p. 10).
One example of all the elements and aspects of  communicative memory in skateboarding as it is described here (besides traditional transfer of knowledge such a “learning new tricks by watching other skaters”, “asking about the origins, inventors, variations of tricks, shapes, sizes etc of boards, trucks …” etc.) is  the highly individualized “Loveletters to Skateboarding”. In these youtube-clips with an average length of roughly ten minutes the pro-skater Jeff Grosso has been taking up various issues and topics of skateboarding, spotlighting his personal opinions about them from his own perspective i.e. the way he has experienced them. Grosso approached the presentations of different aspects of the past from a highly affective and personal point of view; it is no wonder that rants, feelings of rejection, sympathy, joy and guilt intermixed into one great declaration of his (!) love for skateboarding, the one great spirit of contradiction having melded generations of young and older people; it is really his generation he is talking about here. This can of course not be considered historiography and we certainly need to thank Grosso for views from a single perspective being at some points biased at all costs.
There have been other, different, approaches to presenting a „History of Skateboarding“ with respect to ideas and methods of historiography in general; in doing so such efforts are necessarily much broader, they rely on multi-perspectivity, describing a past from – what they believe to be – an unbiased point of view and moving identification with and within the group and the memory of this past into the belief of the possibility of creating unity and unification among the groups’ members. We begin to enter the field of the collective memory of communities when we start to write history. What is most striking during the analysis of such processes of transition is that a look at the time frame collective memory is operating in shows, that – you somehow knew it – there are no frame or boundaries to be found. Construction and transfer of knowledge on the basis of collective memory is thus characterized by a high stability, even immobility sometimes, and a significant everyday remoteness because its horizon of knowledge does not move parallel to the present i.e. when communicative memory dwells in the realm of personal and verbal interaction, collective memory on the other hand feels the need to grasp for individual memory and determines it socially, and also in a cultural mode to construct a commonly agreed on group-identity (ibid. p. 203); the tools for this undertaking are simple: texts (in traditions of the written word) and images, rituals etc. in general (especially in “oral” societies and communities).
If it is correct, that we understand the communicative memory of skateboarding is best represented in the non-canonical “Loveletters to Skateboarding”, which seem to act on the spur of the moment because their presenter himself is vivid and affective, it is almost certainly true, that the collective memory of skateboarding ideally will be found in the “canon” of the history of skateboarding. The collective memory of skateboarding (what has been agreed on as the basic truth, about what has happened, and how we have arrived at the point we are now at, and what will be possibilities and chances of shaping a future skateboarding) is being reconstructed with a direct reference frame to the present. What is more, the construction of such a collective memory has been able to surpass what has been considered limiting in a communicative memory, namely through texts (eg. Iain Borden, Skateboarding and the city – a complete history, Bloomsbury, London 2019), images (eg. „Classics“ – a video-clip format on youtube presenting historically relevant skateboarding videos) and, finally, rites (eg. “Skateboarding Hall of Fame“, operating since 2009). Suddenly, without ever having planned or wanted it – the mechanics of collective memorization are underway: knowledge about the past is being organised through institutional validation and differentiation of the respective holders of knowledge. Ultimately the collective memory creates liability insofar as it defines value systems inside the community (also in opposition to other groups and societies): the past and its’ symbols, remnants and also the present and the future are being (re-)grouped, sorted and constructed (!). In short: somebody decides which symbols and texts are important and relevant for the communities – and which are not.
In the case of skateboarding the collective memory is surprisingly clear and unpretentious. What sounds ridiculously oversimplified is nevertheless the basis content of the average History of Skateboarding you will most likely come across and it goes like this: brave young people waded out of the water and onto the land in the Sixties; in the Seventies the larger number were given concrete skateparks, whereas for a small flock among them flatland skating (tricks, handstand, downhill, slalom) was found; during the following decade all the skateparks were closed and halfpipes were erected over the whole planet, and Rodney Mullen invented Freestyle, but actually he really invented Streetstyle, while slalom and downhill are non-existent. Kings are overthrown again in the Nineties when Vert is pretty much dead – now it is all hail to Streetstyle; since 2000 skateparks are being built again, these are rushed by scooters and skaters alike and it is now forbidden to wear pads, no matter how intimidating transitions seem; on the one hand streetstyle has never been away really, however, it has diverted into the asphalt field cropped with what would be the model for street contests for the next 20 or so years, namely the holy trinity of wooden quarter/launch-ramp, railblock and pyramid-construction before 2010 as early as in 1987 (Savannha Slamma) and lately into the modern clear-cut concrete streetstyle-course.
On the other hand, what was left of the streets in street skating had swiftly been incorporated into a pretty much normative corset of what can be considered “the big three”: rails, gaps, flips. The output of skate-videos has been massive in the recent decade, the content, however, is, besides an acceleration of radicalness of tricks and composition and merging of tricks, interchangeable, repetitive and appears almost bland at times.  Besides the obvious criticism that these videos are staged at their best, they also have gone through the normal process of retreatment, editing and all the usual camouflage tactics that make a videoclip not an ideal witness of historical correctness, but rather a lurid instrument that makes one wonder, why it is so hard to decipher the underlying text. Or rather, if there is any underlying text to be found at all.

It is at this point we begin to understand, that what we are confronted with in the collective memory of skateboarding is characterized mainly by one feature, namely the unattainability of the different elements of the collective memory, which had been created to construct a clearly defined corporate feeling, and that this process must be understood as means to an use (whichever it may be, it is of no interest here). All the different features and elements we have seen until now seem to have disappeared in time already or, as is it the case with recent video-clips, seem to be written in a language that is indecipherable except for the one who transcribed it (the skater, the firm she or he rides for, the magazine the video is shown in etc.). This is also true for the understanding of a history of skateboarding, when it is presented in clear and well defined chapters, a structure suggesting, that there always have been phases in skateboarding, which may have overlapped at some points in time, but overall started sometimes and ended later because they were relieved by the next phase. This is, we understand then, not a feasible text, not even a useful language we need, we feel, to explain the fundamental influence on the community as it is (which is, of course, true for many other sports and societies and communities in general). We have come to a lookout point where we can see that both, the idea of the collective memory (the structural systems defining what skateboarding is, has been and should be in the future) and also the individually organized communicative memory (associative ponderings on seemingly random issues and topics of skateboarding) seem to be inefficient texts, even languages, in order to explain the strange disarrangement inside an object that has been termed Skateboarding, an activity which has consolidated over the past decades, so that we are now able to review a vast landscape of different places providing space for it.

Into this landscape Covid-19 invaded in the first half of 2020, bringing along bad company in the shape of a total shutdown of public life and – more important – public space. It took a worldwide pandemic to – what I would like to argue – understand the very foundations of memory and identity of skateboarding. For this we need to come back to the Assmanns once again, because they have developed the idea of the cultural memory as a third variant in the field which had been inhibited by the collective and the communicative memory until then. In the midst of these two forms of memorization, not intermingling with them but rather laying their foundations, supporting them through ramified contact points, lies the cultural memory. In traditions of the written word this specific memory can be seen in the archive, which here is understood as a storehouse for memory.  The cultural memory is without limits or boundaries, it is fundamentally unformed in the sense that parameters of texturing and building of functions for „fullfilling the need of a community for identity, normativity and orientation“ (ibid. 208) are completely absent. Thus, it is also a retreat, even hideaway, for everything outside the normative, everything outside the useable and exploitable, it harbours the subversive and heretical in all forms of media which are part of a broad understanding of culture, namely the communication of all textual and non-textual signs and symbols of and within a group of people (ibid. 210). The cultural memory is a means to act and live (and skate) in the light and under the guidance of memories which lie deep and seemingly beyond our reach in the past, it can be found in the interspaces of knowledge and feelings and moments of suspiciousness, when memories seem to have lost relevance for collective identity. 
Such an interspace was abruptly fanned out in open view in the streets during the last three months, when suddenly everything officially skateable was closed and locked away. It takes unburdened space and architecture, exempted from humans and, thus, sense and function for most of the people, to make it decipherable for skaters. According to the French theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes structuralist analysis is “to reconstitute an object in such a way that in this reconstitution the object’s rules are being unearthed (what it’s functions are). Thus, structure is in fact merely a simulacrum of the object, it is, however, a purposeful - “interested” - simulacrum insofar as the imitating object brings out something, which had been invisible in the original object, or – if you will – which had been incomprehensible. The structural person takes a given object, disassembles it and puts it together again […] between these two objects, or between these two instances of structuralist practice something new is formed and this novelty is nothing less than the universal intelligibility.” (Roland Barthes, Die strukturalistische Tätigkeit, Kursbuch Nr. 5, p. 192; translation by PK). Such a reconstruction on the basis of selectivity and recombination can be considered a suitable tool, if we are at this state unable to find a representative memory of communities, a mode of memory, that is situated between and underneath the communicative and the collective memory i.e. having not reached the level of a normative instrumentalization of the past (collective) and hovering above individual point of views (communicative). The simulacrum skaters witnessed and watched build up during shutdowns all over the world was in fact the a direct view on the one great archive of a group as a whole: the streets (accompanied and represented by, not exclusively but still, urban space and architecture in general) can here be understood as the one cultural memory of skateboarding. The streets in those few moments were deprived of function and sense and suddenly for the first time in a long time during skateboarding the simulacrum of the archive opened its’ doors, speaking a language and a providing readable and ready-made texture and fabric to all skaters. What appeared as an accident of sorts was in fact a major collision of various factors, namely the absence of any official sporting grounds whatsoever (skateparks, skatehalls etc.), secondly, the breakdown of public transport (need to move using skateboards), thirdly, the disappearance of the commanding cars in public space (room to move on the streets) and finally, the retreat of people into private space (skaters were not automatically chased away from the streets anymore). At that point, when all skateboarders were forced to skate the streets and whatever was put on them, braced into them and built upon them, some considered this a short episode in their career under the assumption to return to the parks as soon as possible, others soon took to the streets enjoying wide and open space, third parties again may have hated every moment of it – but all were able to understand and feel the basic and fundamental cultural memory and heritage of the simple life in the streets outside of any normative standards.
All of this happened outside or rather in the forefront of the often deployed characteristic of skateboarding, namely „enacting distinctive new uses and so changing urban terrains“ (Iain Borden, Skateboarding and the city – a complete history, Bloomsbury, London 2019, p. 98). This is what the 1980s streets craze realized and what the last months during the pandemic laid bare, a „concrete jungle“, with „thousands of shreddable terrains“ (Craig Ramsay, „Take San Jose For Example“, in Thrasher (May 1983), p. 22, quoted  in Borden, 194) but this jungle has nothing to do with applying meaning or new meaning to space and architecture in the first place, instead it is rather the simulacrum of the one archive which, for now and only seldom in general, gave away a memory that is the very foundation of skateboarding and which was immediately readable for all skateboarders once they were left with nothing but the streets. You only had to watch the older leopardprint-padded gnargoyles grin and smile (I owe thanks to Chris Castle for this term, which relays connotations of older skaters exclusively riding bowls like eg. Steve Alba) after their first steps on what they thought was unfamiliar terrain – it wasn’t, they immediately realized, it was acting, skating and grasping for elements located in a well-known fabric of freely floating signs and texts: the cultural memory of a whole community 
The streets, and the City, are without any doubt contested terrains, but their foremost quality is that they are not stable. This is what Robert Musil means in his great novel „The man without qualities“, when he describes Vienna and her streets at the turn of the century in 1900 as a place without a single stable identity, the streets are a places of irregularity and change with collisions of all sorts, resembling a vessel which (barely, we imagine!) holds all the material it harbours. When in 2020 the people were swept off the streets the cultural memory and knowledge of the skateboarders as one among many participants in society was made accessible.

I would like to thank Aaron Pzarka for suggesting we’d hit the streets and find new spots in as early as the first days of Covid-19.