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Bergson's non-archival theory of memory

Goldsmiths, University of London, j.burton{at}gold.ac.uk

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.

Key Words: archive • duration • memory studies • the virtual • wax tablet

Memory Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3, 321-339 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1750698008093797


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