Memory Studies

There are parallels between the emergence of 'memory studies' as a domain of enquiry and the development of 'sexuality studies'. Both confront the difficulty of engaging with a central referent whose historical, cultural and ontological status is indeterminate. Reviewing a selection of articles from the first issue of Memory Studies, three sets of obstacles to be addressed in the area are identified. First, there is the difficulty of arriving at a common conception of memory. It is suggested that inclusive support for rival and conflicting conceptions may be appropriate. Second, the common interdisciplinary dilemma of creating links between distinct levels of analysis is particularly acute. Transversal concepts and links may be more productive here. Third, there is the challenge of building academic community across disciplines and traditions. Rather than seek to substantivize 'memory' further, the notion of mediation is offered in its place as the basis for such a community-to-come.

In this commentary, I compare psychology's treatment of forgetting, especially the works of Ebbinghaus, Bartlett, Ballard, Freud, and modern researchers, to Connerton's approach. I suggest that as the stimuli have become more complex (moving from nonsense syllables and lists of words to stories and real-life events, as found, for example, in clinical and forensic settings), memory theory in psychology becomes increasingly constructivist and motivational, and converges in significant respects with historical-sociological formulations of forgetting, such as Connerton's.

Paul Connerton's inquiry in Memory Studies into the seven types of forgetting highlights forgetting as an active rather than passive process in both individual and larger cultural memory. The present article suggests that `forgetting' may be re-interpreted as a problem of relative accessibility from a larger store of available memory. Seen in this light, emotion, meaning and goal relevance are likely to affect a given memory's personal or cultural accessibility. Each of the seven types of forgetting is re-evaluated with these three critical factors' role in memory accessibility given greater attention and prominence.

In his Memory Studies article `Seven Types of Forgetting', Connerton argues that forgetting on a cultural level is not a unitary phenomenon and that at least seven distinct types can be distinguished. In this commentary, we explore the potential utility of an alternative conceptualization from a psychology perspective. More specifically, we consider how a theoretical framework on individual autobiographical memory may be employed as a metaphor for exploring Connerton's ideas about the forgetting of cultural groups. This metaphor concentrates on commonalities rather than differences between the types of forgetting proposed.

Past, present and emerging technologies of memory are important concerns for memory studies. What is remembered individually and collectively depends in part on technologies of memory and socio-technical practices, which are changing radically. We identify specific concerns about developments in digital memory capture, storage and retrieval. Decisions are being made now that may have far-reaching consequences. Systems are being designed based on models and metaphors in which human memory works much like the computer. We bring to this discussion a critical perspective from science and technology studies (STS) and a grounding in human—computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). We argue that, while these developments are significant for memory studies research, even more important is the need for memory studies to remind and inspire designers of what is possible and useful, and help expand the understanding of human memory on which these systems are based.

This article contends that it is important for scholars to ask what it matters that certain memory stories are told in journalistic prose and format and are received by audiences as `news'. Yet it also suggests that we must understand that journalism works within (not apart from) other cultural memory forms, and that it constructs memory not just with regard to discrete events, but across time and place. Finally, considering parallel debates across disciplines, this article is a call to reassess our definitions of legitimate subjects of study. It argues that scholars should pay attention to forms of journalism beyond elite news organizations and to recognize that journalism is a site of memory construction not only about shocking events, but also about everyday life. Indeed, if we expand our definitions of journalism and of memory, we broaden the relevance and the uses of journalism in memory studies.

Literal and metaphorical associations between memory and archives are found throughout traditional and contemporary thinking about memory. Despite a long-running tendency in the western tradition to doubt the adequacy of archival metaphors for memory, and despite much recent research that implicitly treats memory in terms of dynamic mnemonic and memorial processes, imprint/substrate models epitomized by Plato's wax tablet seem extraordinarily resistant to attempts to think memory beyond them. Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory, in which he makes a radical separation between the processes of recollection and `pure memory', provides both an argument for the tenacity of the memory—archive relation and an alternative, non-archival model of memory. In this article, I suggest the possible implications of this model for the way we think about both memory and the archive, and on the basis of this point towards Bergson's potential significance for the emergent field of memory studies.