Crumbs of memory: Tracing the ‘more-than-representational’ in family memory

Abstract

This article concerns itself with exploring some of the ways in which we can move beyond the ‘cognitive bias’ within social memory studies. A key obstacle to engaging with the kinds of manifestations of remembering that cannot be reduced to intentional and conscious articulations or representations of the mediated past is a deeply entrenched opposition between representational and non-representational (or declarative and non-declarative) mnemonic practices. It strikes me that this opposition is, at least partially, a product of early thinking on memory and trauma, in which affect and representation were opposed to each other, and the notion of non-representational memory was subsumed in the idea of the traumatic. In this article, I intend to try out the idea of ‘more-than-representational’ coined in the field of human geography to reach out to mnemonic processes and practices that operate on various levels not fully reducible to cognition, with the products of these processes exceeding representational form (rather than being completely outside or beyond it).