Collective memory studies ignore material bases of remembering
Academic collective memory studies operate with a fundamental blind spot: they treat memory as if it floats free from the material conditions that make remembering possible. This isn’t an oversight. It’s a systematic evasion of the uncomfortable truth that memory is infrastructure, and infrastructure is controlled.
Memory requires resources
Every act of collective remembering demands material support. Archives need buildings, staff, electricity, and maintenance. Digital preservation requires servers, cooling systems, and constant migration between formats. Monuments need land, materials, and ongoing protection from weather and vandalism.
These resource requirements aren’t neutral background conditions. They’re selection mechanisms that determine what survives and what disappears.
The Vatican can preserve documents for centuries because it commands enormous material resources and institutional continuity. Indigenous oral traditions disappear when communities are displaced, impoverished, or culturally disrupted. The difference isn’t about “the power of memory” or “cultural significance.” It’s about who controls the material conditions of preservation.
Infrastructure determines narrative
What we collectively remember is constrained by the technical and economic systems that enable remembering. Print capitalism created certain forms of national memory by making standardized texts economically viable. Television news cycles shaped collective memory around daily repetition and visual drama. Social media algorithms now determine which events achieve memorial persistence based on engagement metrics.
Each shift in memorial infrastructure creates new possibilities and new exclusions. But memory studies typically treat these infrastructural changes as neutral background rather than as active forces shaping what can be remembered.
Consider how Google Search has become the de facto gateway to collective memory. The company’s algorithm changes literally rewrite what aspects of the past remain accessible to most people. This isn’t metaphorical influence—it’s direct material control over the conditions of collective remembering.
Economic value shapes memorial selection
Remembering is expensive. Forgetting is cheap. This economic asymmetry systematically biases collective memory toward whatever serves current power arrangements.
Corporate archives preserve what protects the company legally and financially. State archives preserve what supports current political legitimacy. Academic archives preserve what advances scholarly careers and institutional prestige. Community memory survives only when communities retain enough economic stability to support memorial practices.
Memory studies scholars rarely ask: Who pays for remembering? What economic interests does a particular form of memory serve? How do budget constraints shape archival selection? These aren’t secondary questions about memory—they’re primary determinants of what collective memory becomes possible.
Technology as memorial gatekeeper
Digital preservation appears to solve material constraints through reduced storage costs and expanded access. This appearance deceives. Digital memory introduces new forms of material dependency that are less visible but more absolute.
Digital preservation requires constant technological intervention. File formats become obsolete. Hardware fails. Companies disappear. Platforms change their terms of service. What seemed permanently accessible vanishes without warning.
More fundamentally, digital preservation centralizes control over memory infrastructure in the hands of a small number of technology companies. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure now provide the material foundation for vast portions of collective memory. Their business decisions—what to preserve, how long to maintain it, which regions to serve—directly determine what future generations can remember.
Class dynamics of memorial access
Different social classes experience memory differently because they have different access to memorial infrastructure. Working-class family histories disappear because families lack resources for private preservation and don’t generate the documentary traces that archives collect. Elite family histories persist through private archives, institutional connections, and the professional historians their wealth can employ.
This isn’t about different “memory practices” or “cultural values.” It’s about differential access to the material means of preserving and transmitting memory across generations.
The same dynamic operates at larger scales. Nations with advanced technological infrastructure can digitize and globally distribute their memorial materials. Nations without such infrastructure see their collective memory reduced to whatever foreign institutions choose to preserve—usually materials that serve foreign research agendas rather than local memorial needs.
Academic complicity in mystification
Memory studies as an academic field systematically avoids confronting these material realities. Conferences focus on the “meaning” and “construction” of memory while ignoring the resource requirements that make such construction possible. Graduate students write dissertations about “memory work” and “counter-memory” without examining who pays for the archives that enable their research.
This mystification isn’t accidental. Academic memory studies emerged within institutions that depend on the same power structures that control memorial infrastructure. Acknowledging the material bases of memory would require acknowledging the class position of memory studies scholars and the institutional interests their work serves.
It’s more comfortable to discuss memory as cultural practice than to examine memory as infrastructure controlled by specific economic and political interests.
The preservation privilege
What we call “collective memory” is actually the memory of those groups with sufficient material resources to make their memory collective. Other groups experience systematic forgetting—not because their experiences lack meaning or significance, but because they lack access to preservation infrastructure.
This creates a recursive dynamic where memorial privilege reinforces itself. Groups with preserved memory appear more historically significant, which justifies further memorial investment, which strengthens their position in collective memory. Groups without preserved memory disappear from collective awareness, which reduces justification for memorial investment, which accelerates their disappearance.
Memory studies treats this dynamic as natural rather than as the product of specific material arrangements that could be organized differently.
Technological solutionism as evasion
When memory studies scholars do acknowledge material constraints, they typically retreat into technological solutionism. Digital humanities projects promise to “democratize” memory through crowdsourcing and online platforms. Community history initiatives use social media to “preserve disappearing voices.”
These efforts, however well-intentioned, misunderstand the problem. The issue isn’t that preservation technology is insufficiently accessible. The issue is that preservation requires ongoing material support, and such support flows toward whatever serves existing power arrangements.
Giving communities digital tools for memory preservation without addressing the economic and political conditions that determine memorial resource allocation simply creates more sophisticated ways for marginalized memories to be systematically neglected.
Alternative material arrangements
Recognizing the material bases of collective memory opens possibilities for different memorial arrangements. Community-controlled archives, cooperative preservation initiatives, and publicly funded memorial infrastructure could support different patterns of collective remembering.
But such alternatives require acknowledging that memory is political precisely because it is material. Who controls preservation infrastructure controls what future generations can remember about the past. This control operates through budget decisions, technical choices, and institutional priorities—not through mysterious cultural forces or the inherent power of meaning.
Memory studies’ continued evasion of these material realities serves the interests of those who benefit from current memorial arrangements. A genuinely critical approach to collective memory would begin with the question: Who owns the means of remembering?
The author acknowledges that this analysis itself depends on memorial infrastructure controlled by academic and technological institutions whose interests may not align with the communities whose memory practices are being analyzed.