Memory as Material, Remembrance as Resistance
In an era of machine learning, data mining, productivity tracking, and the persistent blurring of public and private spheres, sentiments of freedom and spontaneity are increasingly eclipsed by those of surveillance and control. Jonathan Crary (2013), for instance, argues that the late-capitalist idea of 24/7 productivity has instated a generalised feeling of ‘docility and separation’ that underlies the reconfiguration of humanity into a population of ‘malleable and assenting individuals’. Similarly, Shoshana Zuboff (2019) identifies the contemporary moment as one of ‘surveillance capitalism’ in which big tech persistently manipulates human behaviour into something that is measurable and controllable.
Memory, as an intrinsic quality of human life, has thus far subverted the neoliberal influence of mineability and trackability. In fact, memory and its associated phenomena of forgetting and misremembering are arguably among the defining factors of what it means to be human: they are highly individual, intimate, private, and inevitably flawed. In an increasingly control-based and technologically mediated world, memory’s resistance to quantification thus becomes a rare and precarious dimension of the human experience. While the conflicted contemporary role of memory is increasingly the focus of scholarly discourse, in music it provides the impetus for new creative processes and artistic expressions.
This paper explores the recent development of what I call ‘memory-works’: compositions in which memory —and particularly, the act of remembering— constitute the compositional material. Examples include Jennifer Walshe’s THMOTES (2013), James Saunders’ overlay (with transience) (2014), Luke Nickel’s Who’s Exploiting Who (2016), and Wendy Eisenberg’s Bloodletting (2019). Rather than relying on written scores, these works nurture a contemporary and technologically mediated version of a historically earlier tradition of oral knowledge transmission. Each in their own unique ways —via Snapchat, voice memo, or email—, these four works provide their performers with a temporally fleeting set of prompts, ideas, or instructions that are then to be remembered in performance. In other words, the sonic realisation of these works is not contingent on musical literacy or technical skill, but is entirely subject to individual memory and the ability, or inevitable failure, of the performer to accurately recall or piece together the materials provided.
This paper appraises the many tensions that such artistically mediated strategies of remembrance engender, in opposition to the increasingly rule and control-based world in which they are created. I argue that these works use memory as a strategy of resistance. Foregrounding notions of dialogue and play, I claim that the ‘memory-work’ actively reinstates subjectivity and failure back into the definitional space of the musical work. This signals a critical move away from preconceptions surrounding some musical power structures, such as the objectivity of the score and the hierarchies between composer and performer. Finally, in considering music as a philosophically relevant material for thinking through societal issues, I claim that the ‘memory-work’ opens up a broad space for rethinking the roles of memory and forgetting in a late-capitalist society of control.
Keywords: memory, activism, late-stage capitalism, compositional practice, aesthetics
Biography
Dr. Christine Dysers is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Musicology at Uppsala University. Her research focuses on music after 1989, with a particular emphasis on repetitive aesthetics and the notion of the uncanny. Christine holds a PhD in music from City, University of London and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). In 2021, she was appointed as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the Department of Music at Columbia University. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Perspectives of New Music, TEMPO, and Musik & Ästhetik. She is the author of Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers: Bernhard Lang (Intellect, 2023) and the co-editor of The Music of Absence: An Aesthetics of Loss in the New Millennium (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in the autumn of 2025).
Uppsala University, Sweden
christine.dysers@musik.uu.se