Memory studies ignores material
Academic memory studies has become an elaborate exercise in avoiding the fundamental question: who has the economic power to determine which memories get preserved, transmitted, and valued?
The field obsesses over representation while systematically ignoring the material conditions that make representation possible.
──── The academic evasion
Memory studies departments produce endless analyses of “collective memory,” “cultural trauma,” and “memorial practices” while carefully avoiding any examination of the economic infrastructure that determines memory production.
They study monuments without studying who paid for them. They analyze archives without examining who controls access to archival resources. They theorize memory transmission without investigating the material conditions required for memory preservation.
This isn’t oversight. It’s deliberate disciplinary blindness.
──── Who owns the means of memory production?
Memory requires infrastructure: libraries, museums, archives, digital storage, educational institutions, publishing houses, media companies. All of these cost money and are controlled by specific economic interests.
University archives are maintained by institutions dependent on wealthy donors whose interests shape collection priorities. Digital preservation is controlled by technology companies whose business models determine data permanence. Publishing houses decide which memoirs, histories, and testimonies reach public circulation.
The material ownership of memory infrastructure determines whose experiences become “historically significant.”
──── The selectivity mechanism
Economic constraints create systematic selection processes that memory studies refuses to acknowledge:
- Literacy requirements for written memory exclude entire populations
- Technology access determines digital memory participation
- Institutional affiliation controls academic memory production
- Market viability shapes commercial memory products
- Legal frameworks determine what memories can be legally preserved or transmitted
Each filter eliminates memories that don’t align with the economic interests of memory infrastructure owners.
──── Memory as commodity production
The memory industry produces specific types of remembrance that serve market demands:
Trauma narratives sell well in therapeutic culture markets. Nostalgia products appeal to consumer demographics with disposable income. Identity stories get packaged for educational and diversity markets.
Memory studies analyzes these products as if they emerged naturally from collective experience rather than being manufactured for specific economic purposes.
──── The academic memory market
Memory studies itself operates as a specialized market for memory commodities:
Graduate students produce dissertation research on obscure memory topics to satisfy academic job market requirements. Professors generate conference papers and journal articles to meet publication demands. University presses publish memory studies books for library acquisition budgets.
The field has created an entire economic ecosystem based on memory commodity production while pretending to study memory as cultural phenomenon.
──── Digital memory extraction
Technology companies have industrialized memory extraction and monetization:
Social media platforms harvest personal memories to create advertising profiles. Search engines determine which historical information becomes accessible. Cloud storage companies control the persistence of digital memories.
Memory studies treats digital memory as a new frontier for representation analysis rather than recognizing it as a massive infrastructure for memory commodification.
──── Institutional memory control
Powerful institutions systematically shape collective memory through economic leverage:
Corporate archives determine which business histories get preserved. Government classification controls access to political memories. Family foundations influence which cultural memories receive funding support.
Memory studies analyzes the results of these processes without examining the economic mechanisms that produce them.
──── The forgetting economy
Economic interests don’t just shape what gets remembered—they actively organize forgetting:
Statute of limitations laws protect economic actors from historical liability. Corporate restructuring eliminates institutional memory through planned obsolescence. Urban development destroys physical memory sites for profitable redevelopment.
Forgetting is often more profitable than remembering, but memory studies has no analytical framework for understanding organized amnesia as economic strategy.
──── Working class memory erasure
The most systematic memory exclusion affects populations without economic power to maintain their own memory infrastructure:
Labor histories disappear when unions lack resources for archival maintenance. Immigrant memories get lost without institutional support for preservation. Indigenous memories face active suppression backed by economic interests in land and resource extraction.
Memory studies documents these losses as cultural tragedy while avoiding analysis of the economic structures that produce them.
──── Academic complicity
Memory studies scholars benefit from the same economic structures that determine memory selectivity:
Research grants favor memory topics that don’t threaten funding institutions. University employment depends on producing scholarship acceptable to academic market demands. Publishing opportunities require conformity to intellectual property regimes that commodify memory research.
The field’s practitioners have economic incentives to avoid examining memory as economic phenomenon.
──── Alternative material frameworks
Understanding memory as economic infrastructure suggests different analytical approaches:
Memory production costs analysis would examine the economic resources required for different types of memory preservation. Memory ownership analysis would trace the economic interests that control memory infrastructure. Memory labor analysis would study the work required to maintain collective memory.
These approaches would reveal memory as economic activity rather than cultural representation.
──── The class dimension
Memory studies ignores the fundamental class dimension of memory access and production:
Elite memories get preserved through private wealth and institutional connections. Middle-class memories get commodified through commercial memory products. Working-class memories get systematically excluded from preservation infrastructure.
Class position determines not just whose memories get preserved, but what types of memories are considered worth preserving.
──── Technology and memory stratification
Digital technology has created new forms of memory stratification based on economic access:
Premium storage services offer better memory preservation for those who can pay. Digital literacy requirements exclude populations without educational resources. Platform dependencies make memory preservation contingent on corporate survival.
Memory studies celebrates digital democratization while ignoring digital memory’s dependence on economic infrastructure.
──── The therapeutic memory economy
Memory studies has been captured by therapeutic approaches that individualize memory trauma while avoiding structural analysis:
Trauma therapy markets treat memory problems as individual pathology rather than systemic exclusion. Healing narratives focus on personal recovery rather than collective memory justice. Resilience frameworks encourage adaptation to memory inequality rather than challenging its structural causes.
The therapeutic turn serves economic interests by channeling memory grievances away from institutional critique.
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Memory studies has successfully avoided its central analytical task: understanding memory as a material practice shaped by economic power relations.
The field’s focus on representation, narrative, and cultural meaning serves to obscure the economic infrastructure that determines whose memories matter and whose memories disappear.
Until memory studies acknowledges memory production as economic activity controlled by specific class interests, it will remain an elaborate form of intellectual mystification that serves the very power structures it claims to study critically.
The question isn’t how memory works culturally. The question is who owns the means of memory production and how that ownership shapes collective understanding of the past.