Blackwell Reference Online

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You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all … Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing …Luis BuñuelThe American Heritage Dictionary defines memory primarily as (1) the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience, and (2) an act or instance of remembrance, a definition that binds content to process in a single term. Why memory matters to us, however, is better captured in Buñuel's words that serve as an epigram for this chapter: memory is the foundation of the self, mind, and agency, enabling human beings to conceive of themselves as integrated wholes who have the capacity for both reflection and action. But memory – which one can also define more broadly than the dictionary does as the multiple practices through which we keep the past in mind – is also fundamentally social in nature. Since we rely on our memories of the past to know who we are and to make decisions about our present and future, memory is closely connected to political power. As Orwell reminds us, “He who controls the past controls the future; He who controls the present controls the past.”Memory has a peculiar, even vexed, relationship to modernity in two senses. First, the very definition of modernity is often premised on a rupture with the past ... log in or subscribe to read full text