In a 2007 speech to announce the European digital library project (later to become Europeana), the EC’s former Information Society and Media Commissioner Vivian Reding made this comment:
“Without a collective memory, we are nothing, and can achieve nothing. It defines our identity and we use it continuously for education, work and leisure”.
This claim forms part of a broader shift in the vocabulary of the contemporary cultural heritage sector, which has perpetuated the use of memory in a number of institutional mission statements. The Library of Congress hosts the American Memory project, Library and Archives Canada refer to the ‘continuing memory’ of the nation, UNESCO has the Memory of the World Programme, and the Australian Government Records invoke ‘the memory of our nation’. The move towards memory is more widely embodied in the notion of the memory institution, a descriptive term, which serves as an alternative to ‘cultural heritage institution’ in heritage theory and policy.
Of course, in some respects the concept of the memory institution is not a new one. In their critical work on the rhetorical arts of memory, Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers have drawn attention to the spatial metaphors employed in the classical mnemonic tradition. Mnemonics is identified by Yates as a system of memory, which is exercised in the mental arrangement of images and places as a means of situating knowledge so that it cannot be forgotten. Carruthers refines this characterisation of the art of memory; noting a tendency in Yates' work to ‘reinforce some common misconceptions about the possible cognitive uses of ‘the art of memory’, and thus the nature of its influence on the making of images and ‘places’ for this purpose’. In the ancient text Rhetorica ad Herennium, which was later taken up by medieval scholars, Carruthers notes that the art of memory is described as a form of invention and constructed based on the building plan of a house. Drawing attention to the etymological proximity of the words invention and inventory, both derived from the Latin ‘inventio’, she suggests that while the latter is usually aligned with the mnemonic tradition, the imagination associated with invention is in fact more significant for memory. Architectural tropes were particularly popular as they were thought to provide the most familiar locations for memory, and the process of building these memory places would allow for adaptation and creative revision in the act of recall. Through emphasising the primacy of invention, Carruthers’ work on mnemonics indicates a move away from the common equation of memory with an artificial storage model or inventory. Nevertheless, this aspect of memory occupies a central position and is often taken as an implicit assumption in the contemporary field of memory studies.
Equally, the modern conception of a memory place is now frequently identified with its function as a physical repository. So, while the memory institution superficially functions as a metaphor, the places it designates do have a concrete existence. However, this new incarnation is distinct from those ancient memory places in that it pertains to a set of public spaces, rather than a private, internally constructed space. While exercising a material influence by solidifying relations between museums libraries and archives, it nevertheless embodies the utopian ideal of housing and somehow preserving intact cultural memory.
Sharing similarities with the paradox of tomorrow’s memory, outlined in my introduction, what could be called the utopian ambition of the memory institution is elusive; something that will, but has not yet, come into being. Fredric Jameson articulates the principle of this temporal paradox as follows:
“The presumption is that Utopia, whose business is the future, or not-being, exists only in the present, where it leads the relatively feeble life of desire and fantasy [...] Utopia is philosophically analogous to the trace, only from the other end of time. The aporia of the trace is to belong to past and present all at once, and thus to constitute a mixture of being and not-being quite different from the traditional category of Becoming [...] Utopia, which combines the not-yet-being of the future with a textual existence in the present is no less worthy of the archaeological paradoxes we are willing to grant the trace”.
Through utopia, then, a link is suggested between the rhetoric of cultural heritage and the idea of tomorrow’s memory as an attempt to seize hold of the future through the medium of the present. But, while it may be possible to encompass both the present and the future conceptually, utopia, necessarily a space that is somehow other, must always eventually outdistance the present’s reach. Jameson makes a structural comparison with the trace, described as a present effect of a cause in the past, to illustrate this interaction, implying that a similar relationship with the future holds true of utopia. In this case the causes are being produced in the present, some effects of which are not yet known. Utopia is a projection of these effects. But the reference to the trace is also interesting because it re-introduces the question of material memory traces. Although the point is not picked up by Jameson, some theorists have suggested that, as well as belonging to the present and the past, the memory trace has a bearing on the future.
These traces, representing the material memory, to which the term memory institution refers, endow places with meaning and are accorded the status of authoritative historical documents. Among different types of traces, archival records seem to have a particular inviolability. The 2009 report, ‘Archives for the 21st Century’, produced by the Archives UK, announced, ‘the archival record is [...] the direct, uninterpreted and authentic voice of the past’. There is a dual preoccupation evident here; the need for authenticity and authority is coupled with the human connection to memory, which is invoked as a voice of the past. While these could be taken as indicators of the archive’s perceived significance, they are conditional upon a more complex framework that raises questions such as: who is the voice in question, and what relation does the document hold to other archival records? In his essay Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida recognises the weight of influence attached to those questions. Employing the archive as a theoretical term for discussing the organisational structures associated with heritage sites, he reflects on their nature and function, and the pervasiveness of what he calls ‘archive fever’, that passion for documenting origins. The materiality of the archive is particularly important for Derrida. He maintains: ‘there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression’. As he goes on to explain, in this context the word consignation has a double meaning; it relates not only to the act of consigning or depositing but to a principle of gathering together.
The intersection of physical and transcendental elements I have attributed to the memory institution’s utopian trait reveals itself as a technical process in Derrida’s archive. He clarifies this process later in the essay, writing:
“The technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event”.
Derrida indicates that the archive today is produced by the nature of the technology used to record it. It is therefore impossible for memory traces to ever just be the authentic voice of the past, for the form they take always alters or distorts that voice. The archive’s existence in the future will take shape in the same manner, different again to what it is in the present and what it was in the past. This stake in the future is crucial to understanding the logic of the archive, and archive fever, initially interpreted as an obsession with origins could also expose a desire borne out of the promise of the future.
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