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the museum offers a new level of access and a democratization of the meaning-
making process. This can be seen in open stack systems, the use of digital kiosks
and information centres in museums and the advent of the virtual museum.
The same developments might also be interpreted in the context of the
transformation of visitors into ‘customers’ and a new emphasis on customer
choice associated with supermarket supply–demand economics. This ambiva-
lent potential of new exhibition design, open storage systems and new media in
the museum is discussed in more detail in the last section of the chapter.
Those developments in museums which connect them to digital data pro-
cessing might also be understood in the context of a society of accelerated
production, consumption and waste cycles. Stuff and data is sifted through,
designated disposable or worth preserving. The material for memory is already
preselected. However not all waste disappears. Much of it remains, constituting
another form of material memory, a counter-narrative to the memories elicited
by the museum. As Ernst reminds us, the traces of the past exist as pollution
and chemical contamination as much as any deliberately preserved material, so
that ‘the true tragic archive is the soil, the industrial fallow land’ (2000a: 28).
The following section considers some other ways in which traces of the past are
understood to inhere in objects, and what this does to an understanding of
archival memory.

Collection and recollection

I began this chapter by describing modern memory as archival, using Pierre
Nora’s work. Yet the notion that the detritus of industry might constitute a
material memory hints at the possibility that things might be more than sou-
venirs or documents, that they might somehow contain the past without being
designated as mnemonic objects. In fact that is a central aspect of Nora’s
argument: he distinguishes between ‘true memory’, which is ‘rooted in the
concrete: in space, gesture, image and object’ and history, which uses physical
traces as a means to reconstruct the past (Nora 1996: 3, 8). In the archive and
the museum, things symbolize or signify past times, whereas true memory, for
Nora, is embedded and embodied.
Here I will examine Nora’s distinction between true memory and archival
memory more closely, and compare it to Walter Benjamin’s 1930s writings on
memory and collecting. Both writers distinguish between a memory embedded
in material traces and archival memory. They also both periodize memory,
arguing that collective practices of remembering and ways of relating to the
past change with industrialization and modernity. Yet the political difference
between them is significant. Benjamin was concerned with memory as a means