Foucault and Memory

Foucault’s project to analyse material representations and discursive formations relating to the problem of history is highly influential. The operation of discourse is implicit in the regulation of what statements can and cannot be made and the forms that they can legitimately take. Attention to discourse therefore moves the focus from the interpretive problem of meaning to questions of instrumentality and function. Instead of having meaning statements should be seen as performative of meaning; not as possessing some portable and ‘universal’ content but, rather, as instrumental in the organisation and legitimation of power-relations. Language embodying institutional processes and knowledge is key to subject formation.

In the work of Pierre Nora Foucault’s theory of discourses finds form in the study of cultural memory, which is interesting for my purposes. Isolating materiality as a principal feature of memory, Nora is indebted to both the genealogical method of Michel Foucault and the work of the sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs, an early theoretician of social memory. Foucault is taken up in Nora’s writing and applied to his study of the rhetorical modes of memory and the politics of commemoration.  Just as important is Nora’s development of Halbwachs’ insight into the extent to which collective memory is socially determined, and of the interruption to memory that occurs in process of writing history. Nora’s treatment of the relationship between memory and history, a widely debated topic in the discourse on memory, is one of the more contentious aspects of his work. For him, history and memory are radically opposed in their purposes.

The study of material representations that Foucault's work elaborates is a key concern in the field of cultural memory. As Andreas Huyssen observes in Twilight Memories:

'Looking back and remembering has to confront some difficult problems of representation in its relationship to temporality and memory. Human memory may well be an anthropological given, but closely tied as it is to the ways a culture constructs and lives its temporality, the forms memory will take are invariably contingent and subject to change. Memory and representation, then, figure as key concerns at this fin de siècle when the twilight settles around the memories of this century and their carriers' (p. 2).

Likewise, Alon Confino's conception of cultural memory is formulated as follows:

'I would like to view memory as an outcome of the relationship between a distinct representation of the past and the full spectrum of symbolic representations available in a given culture. This view posits the study of memory as the relationship between the whole and its component parts, seeing society as a global entity-social, symbolic, political-where different memories interact. This approach also seeks to reconstruct the meaning of a given collective memory by using an intertwined, double move: placing it within a global historical context and a global symbolic universe, and analyzing the ideas, values, and practices embedded in and symbolized by its particular imagery'.

In a slightly different vein, the media theorist Wolfgang Ernst has applied Foucauldian archaeologies to the study of digital memory. Although he was influenced by Friedrich Kittler to begin with, Ernst started to develop a reading of media, history and archives based on Foucault (perhaps the initial appeal was related to the fact that Foucault had already turned the cultural theoretical emphasis from archives as concrete places to archives as more abstract (but just as real) conditions of knowledge). Ernst shifted the emphasis from archaeologies of knowledge to archaeologies of knowledge in media or even a sub-discipline of archaeology that that refers to the various media of archaeological excavations. However, media archaeology is less about telling stories or counterhistories (Foucault's model of genealogy insists on the political function of counterhistories), it is more about how stories are recorded, in what kind of physical media, what kind of processes and durations; its focus is on the archaeology of the apparatus that conveys the past as fact not just as a story.

For Ernst, it is the calculation and number logic-based ontology of technical (and especially computational) media through which cultural memory is articulated. This provides an alternative to literary-based narrativization that historians provide in their epistemological and ontological premises. The issue of digital memory, then, is less a matter of representation than of how to think through the algorithmic calculation-based ontology of a memory.