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In his recently published memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, the novelist Julian Barnes offers a succinct view of memory:

Memory is identity. I have believed this since… oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life, you cease to be, even before death.

Memory is identity. The reader nods, in agreement. Barnes boils it down to three words and the equation is enticing in its simplicity. It defines two otherwise ambiguous concepts with finality; it is both compact enough to be remembered with ease and grand enough to impress in conversation.

Memory is identity. The letters and words combine to contain a myriad of concepts. The specific order suggests a clear connection. Yet, the phrase ultimately reveals itself to be a paradox, rather than a definition.

Barnes’ definition is one of equating, presenting memory and identity as one in the same. His following logic implies that memory is the active variable, the prerequisite to identity and therefore existence. Yet, he cannot refer to memory without also giving agency to a higher sense of self. It is not memory, but the entity of “you” which dictates what is remembered and what is not. Memory is simultaneously in control of and controlled by identity. The phrase loses its appealing simplicity.

Barnes’ memoir is focused on his thanatophobia, an abnormal and excessive fear of death, and so his excerpt is focused on personal identity. But the connection between memory and the self resonates with the relationship of memory to collective identity, which encounters the same paradox. Archivists often use the metaphor of memory to describe their work of collecting and parsing through information, aiming to preserve the history of a culture, society, institution, or event.

In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, philosopher Jacques Derrida purports that an archive can only be defined as such if it is exterior to actual memory. The work of archivists is therefore bounded and largely directed by the technology of their times. The writing down of a memoir, for example, is a type of archive, as is a museum. In addition to these traditionally recognized archives, a word document, a saved text, or e-mail are also external forms of memory. Regardless of which technology is employed, it is clear that the archivist, if capable of controlling it, is also in control over what that given technology preserves or discards.

Derrida questions whether these new technological advances actually improve the external representation of an individual’s psychic interior or whether they affect the functioning of that interior, perhaps permanently altering it. Looking back at the history of memory, it seems that technology does have the powerful ability to change the psychic interior.

In the classical western world of the first century BC, when the simplest tools of external memory (paper and printing) were unavailable, actual internal memories functioned in an entirely different way. Memory was seen as an intensely visual and internal art that had to be mastered in the pursuit of spreading the art of rhetoric, meant to animate people to action through well-argued speeches, or orations.