Memory-Work
Authors: Leavy Patricia 
Published: October 2020

People generally assume that memory is a personal experience which requires little to no work. It just happens. We believe that as human beings we are simply able to recall the past within our own minds. Social memory is actually a public and interactive process requiring ongoing cultural memory-work. Furthermore, the mass media situate cultural recall as largely exterior to the individual. Social beings often engage in cultural work that they are not fully conscious of: memory-work is a site of semi-unconscious labour.
Collective memory is a necessary part of social life because it is through memory of the past that humans are able to situate themselves in the present. We all understand our surroundings and make sense of our place within the present-moment, by contextualising the present in relation to the past. Memory's relationship with time is very unusual as memory is an action that necessarily occurs in the present, yet it must always refer to the past. Having a repository of memory to draw from requires active labour because memory exists through the act of remembering. In other words, remembering is an activity that occurs on various levels of consciousness and presumes a baseline or collection of stored memory available for recall. Accordingly, I present mass remembering as the unconscious work necessary for the maintenance of social memory. In this piece I explore the specific form of memory-work within the mass-mediated realm of popular and commercial culture.
Collective memory is the result of a dynamic process whereby groups come to have a shared mixed-medium narrative of social history. Collective memory requires ongoing cultural practices of remembrance which are the foundation of memory-work. The end products of these cultural practices are popular historical representations that are then mass distributed and subsequently internalised by groups of individuals and a cultural memory is created. In the age of the mass media, memory-work centres on the reproduction, distribution and consumption of mass-mediated representations. Memory-work thus involves memory-workers in commercial culture. As the production of a collective historical memory is a necessary orienting component of any society, historically specific memory systems develop in order to accommodate this need. There are two types of memory-workers who must necessarily work together within the modern system in order to secure and maintain a collective vision of the past: producers and consumers.
Producers within late modernity construct textual, visual, and audio-visual representations of the past that circulate in popular culture. By the twentieth century most of these commemorative practices began to create image-based representations (Hutton 4). These cultural products embody a historically specific vision of social history. Common examples of such products include newspaper accounts of world events and commercial films with historical themes (such as the assassination of JFK or the sinking of Titanic). The production of these rememberings constitutes the conscious aspect of memory-work. Producers represent the numerical minority in the construction of mass mediated collective memory yet they are simultaneously the elite holders of social power within this form of knowledge construction. This is especially important when examining historical representations of those frequently marginalised along lines of gender, race and class within processes of creating social knowledge.
Consumers participate in the maintenance of collective memory by engaging in the consumption of popular historical representations. This modern method of remembering, which is the unconscious work behind memory, generally occurs during leisure time within capitalist commercial culture. Going to the movies or watching television are common leisure time activities that involve the absorption of cultural products which embody historical representations. Collective memory is then a site where the work and leisure realms are blurred. While consumers of popular culture are consciously engaging in recreational activities they are simultaneously participating in memory-work and the incorporation of historical narratives into their memories.

"For some populations at some times, commercialised leisure is history a repository of collective memory that places immediate experience in the context of change over time." (Lipsitz 15)

This phenomenon increases in relation to the growth of commercial culture and technologically driven image-based representations and is therefore at all-time high in the twenty-first century.
The consumption of social historical memory has not traditionally occurred in the realm of leisure. From the fifth century B.C. through the eighteenth century, Western cultures produced and consumed collective memory with the aid of mnemonists who worked in mnemonic theaters (Hutton 27-30). When people attended the mnemonist's theater it was for the explicit purpose of acquiring refined collective memory. Oral cultures relayed narratives of social memory through personal and communal storytelling. Similar to mnemonic theaters, receivers of these stories were cognisant that they were participating in the transmission of social memory. It was not until the advent of print culture, and eventually the audio-visual mass media, that people began to consume social historical memory during recreational activities. This has made memory-work wholly pervasive yet largely invisible.
The nature of collective memory and memory-work has also drastically changed with the coming of the mass media. Citizens of the virtual community are able to remember people, places, and events of which they have no personal experience. This not only transforms the experience of time and space, but also the process of memory-work.

"Time, history, and memory become qualitatively different concepts in a world where electronic mass communication is possible. Instead of relating to the past through a shared sense of place or ancestry, consumers of electronic mass media can experience a common heritage with people they have never seen; they can acquire memories of a past to which they have no geographic or biological connection." (Lipsitz 5)

Social historical memory is then experienced as disembodied and fragmented in the age of the mass media. Additionally, memory-work no longer occurs between small groups of individuals involved in intimate communication, but it is placed exterior to the individual through a proliferation of flowing representations (Hutton 21).
With the placement of memory as exterior to individuals, producers of social memory must engage virtual citizens in memory consumption in order to keep the modern memory system in balance. Memory-workers engage members of consumer culture in remembrance (Irwin-Zarecka 151), which in turn transforms them into silent memory-workers. In order to achieve this end the material to be embedded in cultural rememberings is selected based on its commercial value (Irwin-Zarecka 169). For this reason social memory is (re)constructed to blend in with the prevailing world view. It is simply easier to sell cultural visions that dominant groups already believe to be true. This helps us to understand for example the repeated proliferation of conventional gendered images of social history. Challenging traditional histories through the construction of resistive representations threatens the commercial success of social memory embedded in popular commercial products. Citing the expansion of women on television Lipsitz asserts that the electronic mass media "privilege forms of communication emanating from aggrieved and marginal communities" (14). I could not disagree more strongly. This analysis does not account for the commercial dependence of accepted forms of memory or the exclusion of women and other marginalised persons from positions of authority within the mass media.
The production of social memory within the corporate mass media has exteriorised memory through the construction of historical imagery. Likewise, the media retains control over both the form and content of the material immortalised in news and film. These historical transformations in collective memory have created a mass of memory-workers who unconsciously labour for the maintenance of memory during their leisure time. This phenomenon clearly changes the dissemination of historical memory but it also broadens the definition of memory-work to include unconscious labour on the part of all members of the virtual community. Under this conceptualisation we can envision a two-class labour force consisting of the elite members of the mass media and the majority of memory-labourers, consumers.

References

Hutton, Patrick H. History as an Art of Memory. University Press of New England, 1992.
Irwin-Zarecjka, Iwona. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. Transaction Publishers, 1994.
Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

Citation reference for this article
MLA Style

Leavy, Patricia. "Memory-Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Leavy.xml >.

Chicago Style

Leavy, Patricia, "Memory-Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Leavy.xml > ([your date of access]).

APA Style

Leavy, Patricia. (2001) Memory-Work. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Leavy.xml > ([your date of access]).