ABSTRACT
Social and cultural memory studies begin from a position at odds with the ideological texture of the modern world. As Louis Althusser so famously put it, in the modern capitalist order, ‘ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects’. And nowhere is this more true than in the realm of memory, which appears to contemporary common-sense as a paradigmatically individual capacity. Yet notions of collective, social and cultural memory begin from a different starting point, one that presumes the individual’s embeddedness in shared contexts and enduring traditions: the individual’s memories – both their operations and contents – are the products of these contexts and traditions, not the fixed building blocks of them.
