Memory is a theory machine. And theories are memory machines. In this essay I want to argue that there is a special intertwining between the problem of memory as we have experienced it since the French Revolution, and the forms and generation of cultural theory itself. And I want to make a simple claim: that like most of the mechanisms which determine the materiality of contemporary life-the memory and the theory machines geared up in the nineteenth century. Their output, like that of so many instruments which our society has devised to produce and sustain its forms, has been rising ever since. Calling theory a memory machine foregrounds important elements in the manner in which theories work. Theories organize what we notice, and thereby what we recall. They model representation and determine its field of referentiality-even those theories most reluctant to credit a relationship between discourse and its referents. The organization a theory thus prescribes is never innocent; it is, as the French say, orientedconsonant with certain values and interests, with certain structures for distributing what Pierre Bourdieu terms a culture's symbolic capital [Theory of Practice 171-83]. Necessarily, then, a theory remembers its own organization by such interestsultimately by a politics in the broadest sense. Even the sign, the individual word, carries a palimpsest memory of its long production within a network of cultural struggle. Cognition thus cannot be divorced from the re/cognition of memory. A theory functions like our memory of what we know and what we want to know. But the analogy can be pushed further. Sometimes we remember forgetting. We become conscious, in other words, of how our practice upon the data of the world transforms it. The question would be, is there a parallel metaconsciousness of the memory function in the theoretical realm? Thus we might ask whether theories have the capacity to conceive the process by which they process the material to which they attend. We could go on to wonder whether, in conceiving such processing, theories conceive the particular