Stored virtue : memory, the body and the evolutionary museum

There is a strong tendency, in current critiques of anti-essentialist conceptions of race and identity, to ascribe racial identity to a shared memory rooted in the ancestral history of the body. Figurations of memory that locate it within the body inevitably imply a devaluation of other forms of remembering as inauthentic, and therefore politically debased, coinage. John Frow identifies the consequences of this in the terms used by Pierre Nora to contrast history and memory. For Nora 'true memory' is that which has 'taken refuge in gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body's inherent self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories'. By contrast, Frow argues that the passage of memory through history renders it 'archival' in its reliance on the materiality of writing and representation. In thus being severed from any collective psychologically or bodily grounded mechanisms of transmission that might vouchsafe its rootedness in a connected past, history as memory can only offer what - viewed from the perspective Nora advocates - Frow calls 'the empty traces of a lost plenitude'. A similar devaluation of history is involved, Frow argues, whenever its evidently fabricated nature is contrasted with forms of remembering that are said to arise out of forms of collective memory that function organically as a part of the social tissue of specific groups or movements. The opposition that is at work here is profoundly disabling. In automatically preferring forms of remembering that are inscribed in the body or in the organic consciousness of a particular collectivity, these approaches diminish the political significance that ought properly to attach to the analysis of the different institutional and technological forms in which memory is socially organised. The following questions also arise: what are the mechanisms, the mnemonics, through which organicist conceptions of memory are said to operate? And what are the technological conditions of these mnemonics? With questions of this kind in mind, I argue in what follows that the bodily mnemonics echoed in the formulations of contemporary theorists like Pierre Nora derive their originating rationale and intelligibility from the practices of evolutionary museums. My purpose is to deny the conditions that organicist accounts of memory presuppose by showing how those accounts depend on precisely the kinds of technological and archival conditions which serve as the degraded counterpoint to their own claims to authenticity. For it was only in relation to the archival form of the evolutionary museum - and associated technical and representational devices - that a practice of memory carried in the body was made both thinkable and do-able.