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present from the past, replacing authentic memory, destabilizing the sense of
the past and contributing to the modern memory crisis that it attempts to
resolve (Spencer 1985: 60; Terdiman 1993: 13–16; Huyssen 2000:34).
Nora’s distinction between authentic/true and artificial/archival memory is
one he inherits from philosophy. This distinction implies an earlier wholeness,
a time in which felt and embodied experience meshed with larger collective
narratives, in which the past was felt in the present because it was embedded in
the material environment and embodied in people, in their gestures, their lan-
guage, their appearance. In many ways this opposition between true and arch-
ival memory is problematic. It contrasts an idealized, authentic past with an
artificial and alienating modernity. Furthermore, the notion that memory is
written on the body has its roots in the nineteenth-century understanding of
hereditary, organic memory, where memory was thought of as leaving physical
‘traces’ on the brain, which could then be inherited by successive generations.
Organic memory theory informed nineteenth-century ideas of racial hierarchy
and social degeneration. It also shaped theories of consciousness, history and
memory that have outlived it, such as Freud’s psychoanalysis (Otis 1994).
Tony Bennett has argued that the very concept of true memory that Nora
uses is itself produced in and through the museum. That is, he argues that this
kind of memory is not natural, pre-modern and written on the body as Nora
suggests, but only becomes imaginable in the ‘technological and archival condi-
tions’ of modernity and through certain modern ‘technical and representational
devices’ such as evolutionary museums (Bennett 2003: 41). Organic memory
theories derive from pre-Darwinian theories of evolution which argued that
an organism evolved by responding to particular stimuli that surrounded it,
retaining (‘remembering’) that response as a physical trace and passing it on to
the next generation. In this evolutionary model, the body is a palimpsest on
which experiences or stimuli leave layers of partially erased traces, so that
each individual physically preserves a record of accumulated traits (Otis 1994).
Bennett points to the relationship between the way in which the mind was
thought of as layered and new archaeological understandings of the layers of
the earth as an ‘evolutionary storehouse’. Even the metaphor of the palimpsest
had only come to stand for a text in which past writings were preserved
(rather than erased) because of modern chemical techniques that allowed old
inscriptions to be recovered from vellum manuscripts (Bennett 2003: 48).
In other words, this new concept of a natural, organic memory was the
product of emergent technical and archival practices which gave visible form to
historical, evolutionary change. Bennett argues that the notion of an organic,
or embodied, collective memory is ‘an effect of the evolutionary museum’s
functioning as an evolutionary accumulator in which all pasts are stored and
made simultaneously present’ (2003: 51). In this way, Bennett abolishes any