Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 5, No.

1, March 2004
Recorded music and practices of
remembering
Ben Anderson
Department of Geography, University of Shefeld, Winter Street,
Shefeld S10 2TN, UK
Despite a resurgence of work that has begun to examine critically the artefactual mediation
of memory, very few accounts have focused upon the interconnections between recorded
music and daily acts of remembering. Drawing upon in-depth case study-based research
into recorded music and everyday life with seventeen lower middle-class households, this
paper describes the composition of three practices of remembering with and through
recorded music. First, remembering how to choose and t specic purchased music to
particular socio-spatial activities: a creative practice of mimicry, discretion and intuition in
which the past is both embodied in the actions of judgement and choice and also functions
to compose a co-present, but not-yet virtual realm. Second, the widespread, ephemeral
and subject-less practice of involuntary remembering in which a trace of a virtual past
affects in itself. Finally, intentional remembering in which a past is conditioned to occur
as a xed, relatively durable memory. The paper describes how such practices of
remembering are bound up with the emergence of domestic time-space, and thus the mode
of being of the past, via the circulation and organization of affect.
Key words: recorded music, remembering, past, everyday life, affect, memory.
Introduction
In this paper I aim to describe how recorded
music works, or functions, as a technique for
the spacing and timing of memory. To link
memory and music is, of course, not new. Since
the advent of popular music as a specic cul-
tural form, there has been a pervasive link in
popular discourse between styles of music and
the perceived dynamics of popular memory as
embodied, for example, in the link between
music genres and particular periods of recent
history (1960s music, 1970s music etc). Conse-
quently, genres of recorded music are fre-
quently marketed, produced and used as a
means to orchestrate, and contest, the timing of
the public sphere (see Negus 1999). Despite, or
perhaps because of this context, social science
work on music has, however, forgotten the
more prosaic connections between listening to
recorded music and those acts of remembering
and forgetting that enable the ongoing conduct
of everyday life. By thinking through this inter-
section the paper folds into a growing body of
literature that avoids grand pronouncements
concerning the linkage between music and so-
ciety and instead connects the materialities of
music to the day-to-day composition of social-
spatial action (Bull 2000; DeNora 2000; Smith
2000). Consequently, to focus on recorded mu-
ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/04/01000318 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1464936042000181281
4 Ben Anderson
sic and the action of memory is simultaneously
to delineate the social and cultural specicity,
and heterogeneity, of contemporary practices
of encountering music. This task is imperative,
I would argue, if work on the geographies of
music consumption is to consider some of the
practical effects that stem from the remarkable
presence recorded music has within the to and
fro of Western everyday life (Amin and Thrift
2002: 94).
In the rst section of this paper I connect
this interest in music to ontological questions
of the timing and spacing of the past that
emerge from a non-representational ap-
proach to the social and cultural geographies
of memory. This attunes to how contextual,
embodied practices of remembering generate
the symbolic content of a memory (Thrift
1996, 1997, 1999). The paper is subsequently
organized around descriptions of three quali-
tatively different, yet interconnected, practices
of remembering that are critical to how
recorded music is used, listened to and heard
within domestic time-space. In the second sec-
tion, I describe forms of embodied skill, re-
volving around habit, intuition and mimicry,
which insist whenever recorded music is
played. By played I mean mundane acts of
discretion, including selecting music from a
collection, holding a record or pressing a se-
ries of buttons on a stereo. The third section
links this practice of remembering to the ex-
perience of memories that re-occur involuntar-
ily, that is without intentional recollection,
whilst music forms part of the not-yet con-
scious background of everyday life. In the nal
section I describe practices of intentional re-
membering in which music is explicitly used
to aid the remembering of something. In
each section, I focus specically on how,
through remembering, the past comes to be
implicated or explicated in the now of
domestic time-space through the organization
of affect. The following section justies this
focus.
Objects, remembering and the past
In recent years a growing body of literature has
attempted to question the automatic link be-
tween memory and the human mind, or body,
by extending the capacity to remember into
the world (Ingold 2000; Shotter 1993). Increas-
ingly, remembering is conceptualized as a set of
practices that take place through an embodi-
ment which is folded into the world by virtue
of the passions of the ve senses (Thrift 1999:
314). In addition, objects have been disclosed as
prosthetic companions that act and afford from
within practices of remembering and forgetting
that are, consequently, materially heteroge-
neous (see Crang 1997; Lury 1998; Radley
1990). The focus of this work, which is broadly
non-representational in emphasis, is therefore
on the process whereby recollections, reminis-
cences and other reminders of remainders
(Thrift 1999: 315) emerge through the inter-
twining of objects with the non-rational modal-
ities of emotion and affect. Focusing on music
and memory around this differential affective
logic of emergence necessitates, in addition,
connecting practices of remembering with on-
tological questions of how time-space is formed
through specic practices. However, these on-
tological issues have, until recently, remained
curiously bracketed from debates over the poli-
tics of representation that have dominated the
literature on popular and collective memory
(see Charlesworth 1994; Peet 1996). It is com-
monly assumed in this work that what is at
stake in memory, or commemoration, is how
the past takes on a presence through a repre-
sentation. For example, a debate has raged
about the authenticity of popular memory as a
privileged means of accessing the past from the
vantage point of the present (see Samuel 1995).
Recorded music and practices of remembering 5
One result is that work on the geography of
memory has, almost despite itself, reproduced
the modern understanding of time as a succes-
sion of separated individual moments (see Frow
1997 for a related critique). Consequently, the
past that is implicated in all discussions of
memory is normally assumed to be separate
from the present as a realm that the present
gradually passes to. Unlike the active present,
the past no longer is (Deleuze 1991). Elizabeth
Grosz (2000: 223) writes that we therefore tend
to believe that when the present is somehow
exhausted or depleted of its current force it
somehow slips into the past, where it is stored
in the form of memories. It is then replaced by
another present. Contrary to this assumption,
and the archeologically based metaphors that
can result, I demonstrate in this paper that
what is at stake in practices of remembering is
the ongoing formation of the ideal-real exist-
ence of the past in a non-synchronous present.
This approach, that links the emergence of
memory to explicitly ontological questions,
connects to a number of quasi-vitalist theoreti-
cal resources that imagine time-space to be
forged, formed and disrupted through the prac-
tical circulation of force and affect (see May
and Thrift 2001). To give one example, re-
search heavily inuenced by the different im-
ages of the city as a ruin of intersecting
temporalities as evoked by Benjamin and de
Certeau has begun to disclose the topological
complexity of everyday life through situated
studies of the performance of remembering and
forgetting (see Crang 1994; Crang and Travlou
2001).
From within this background, and in order
to disclose the emergence of the past through
practices of remembering, this paper draws on
empirical research concerned with music con-
sumption and everyday life in seventeen lower
middle-class households in Shefeld, UK. The
research used a range of research methods,
including in-depth individual interviews with
each member of each household, group inter-
views, participant-led listening diaries, periods
of observant participation in each home and
directed listening exercises in which music was
played, listened to and talked about.
1
The pa-
per therefore intertwines with a growing body
of work that has begun to consider music as a
pragmatic set of techniques for the ongoing
elaboration of day-to-day conduct. In compari-
son to the work of Michael Bull (2000) on
public and quasi-public mobile soundscapes, or
Jo Tacchi (1998) on the domestic geographies
of radio listening, the focus of the paper is
primarily on remembering with recorded music
at home. It, therefore, forms just one part of
wider research into a range of domestic music
practices. More specically, the paper aims to
extend recent work that has begun to stress the
import of musically mediated memories to pro-
cesses of self and identity formation (see Bull
2000; DeNora 2000). From within this dual
concern with the domestic geographies of mu-
sic, and remembering practices, the focus of the
paper is not primarily on the content of the
thing remembered or on a remembering sub-
ject. Instead, as de Certeau (1984: xi) is careful
to stress, in work on practice the question at
hand concerns modes of operation or schemata
of action, and not directly the subjects (or
persons) who are their authors or vehicles.
The presentation of the empirical material
around three practices of remembering should
not, however, be read as an argument for their
mutual exclusivity. Instead, despite their ana-
lytic separation, I will argue that each practice
is necessarily inter-dependent. Each rests upon
the unprecedented entanglement that recorded
music now has with what Lefebvre identied as
the everydayness of everyday life: the lived
sense of aliveness, felt in different ways in
boredom or vitality for example, that registers
the self-perception of the circulation of affect
6 Ben Anderson
(see Seigworth 2000). It is here that I begin by
arguing that the use of music, although often
considered to be ordinary in comparison to
performance or composition, relies on the
drawing together of a series of specic, now
habitual, embodied skills that enable music to
become entangled in specic everyday lives.
Habitual remembering and the immanence
of the past
This section provides the ground to the follow-
ing two by describing how the use of recorded
music, a set of frequently repeated acts of
judging, playing, sorting and handling, is en-
abled through a set of specic corporeal skills
that incorporate very particular practices of
remembering but do not produce either a repre-
sentation of the past or a dened memory.
Memory here is without an image or proper-
ties. Instead it is intrinsic to the body, to its
own ways of remembering: how we remember
in and by and through the body (Casey 2000:
147). To exemplify this argument the rst em-
pirical story is of a set of mundane acts of
discretion whereby music is played at home
on a stereo. The following is an extract from
my research diary. It describes a few moments
after I arrive at Mikes rented two-bedroom
council at in Shefeld for an interview. Mike
is 29 and shares his at with his partner of two
years and their daughter:
I go to sit down on the sofa in what is used as a
living room. I remember being a bit nervous as I
always am going into someones house. We talk
about a television program that had been on the
previous evening and wed both watched. I put
down my tape recorder on the table next to the sofa.
Mike glances at a set of CDs which he has lined up
in order of genre. He icks across a couple and then
picks out Marvin Gayes greatest hits. He looks at it.
I glanced around the room as Mike walks towards
the stereo. He switches the Pioneer CD player on, a
button labeled open/close is pressed and the CD is
placed so the laser LCD may read it, the button
marked open/close is then pressed again just before
a button marked play is pressed. The music begins,
its a song I really likewhats going on. Mike
adjusts the volume slightly and then comes and sits
next to me on the sofa. I guess all this took about
thirty seconds as we continued to talk. (Research
diary, 22 March 2001)
To play music incorporates the momentary
performance of an intentional act of discretion
at certain specic junctures: to select one song
over another or to adjust the volume in the
above case. It is at this point, the production of
a discretionary subject position, that the use of
recorded music spins into the social-economic
production of the home as a site of audio
reproduction. Home audio technologies have
increasingly been designed, marketed and pro-
duced around the possibility for choice they
afford (Attali 1985). This momentary time-
space of discretion is also inseparable from the
wider dynamics of familial and gender-based
patterns of control over domestic space. Indeed
the differential ability to play music in the
home, to choose, was repeatedly a source of
pleasure, frustration and anxiety. Rather than
offer an in-depth account of the patterning of
choice I want to stress here only how such
actions do not stem from a volitional human
subject, but are dependent for their effective-
ness on a cacophony of imperceptible acts that
continually pass by unnoticed as they compose
and recompose the presupposed background of
everyday life (Shotter 1993).
Ethnographies of other domestic communi-
cations technologies, such as the television, In-
ternet or telephone, consistently demonstrate
that the novel features of a technology are
rapidly put beyond doubt as they are incor-
Recorded music and practices of remembering 7
porated into the taken for granted stream of
everyday use (Harrison 2000). Mike, for exam-
ple, completed the above actions in approxi-
mately thirty seconds as we talked around a
television programme and prepared for an in-
terview. From my description in the diary ex-
tract we can sense how to listen or hear music
depends on the continued extension of the
body into a set of pragmatic engagements with
the home and technology: in just this example,
to play music on a particular model of stereo
incorporated knowing how to pick a CD up
without scratching or damaging the surface,
how to move through the home towards the
stereo and how to press a series of buttons in a
particular order. It is precisely the ordinariness
of these specic encounters between the body
and audio technologies that register their social
and historical specicity, bound up as they are
with the extraordinary popularization of dom-
estic audio technology over the past forty years
(see Attali 1985; Martin 1995). To be per-
formed successfully, each act is enabled by
what Bergson (1988) terms habit memory.
These are memories that are equivalent to the
body in action and are importantly pre-
reexive, they form a tacit, pre-articulate di-
mension of experience (Casey 2000: 149).
The centrality of such practices of remember-
ing to conduct is most pertinently felt when
habit is momentarily disturbed, for example if
a stereo is unfamiliar in a different home, does
not work or a song cannot be found or recol-
lected (see Harrison 2000).
This brief exposition of habitual remember-
ing, and the momentary performance of discre-
tion, could potentially be expanded to refer to
the use of other domestic communications tech-
nologies that are increasingly marketed and
developed around the conation of habitual use
with a momentarily centred intentional sub-
ject position. However, I now want to turn to
briey argue that acts of discretion are also
based on a form of somatic skill specic to
recorded music use. Each person interviewed
for the research enacted a remarkably detailed
knowledge of which specic pieces or genres of
music tted with particular intensities, feel-
ings or moods. For this t to be effective the
action of choosing music to play, incorporating
a cacophony of habits and on occasion a
eeting act of discretion, also embodies a disor-
dered attitude about how music (or similar
music) has previously affected and will come to
affect. In the extract of talk below, I ask Mike
about how he decided to play Marvin Gaye
before the interview began:
Mike: You just know, you know I guess feeling
when that album will sound right. Like just now I
guess I know itll relax me, get the mood just
right I guess its a bit of an odd situ-
ation interviewing and everything, but I dont
think I really thought much about it.
Ben: Would you listen to it at any other sort of
times?
Mike: I always listen to it if the suns shining, on
a Sunday morning. Laying back. Its just right for
that. (Interview, Mike, 22 March 2001)
It is clear that in the context of an interview
situation Mike nds it difcult to formulate or
systemize the knowledge of how music ts in
terms of a set of transferable context indepen-
dent rules. Instead he equates knowledge with
I guess feeling when that album will sound
right. The moment of discretion when choos-
ing music, to be felt as intentional, is in this
case based on a form of tacit intuition. This
works underneath the performance of those
capacities, such as will, choice and judgement,
that are otherwise taken to form the mind.
Intuition is therefore a form of somatic intelli-
gence that cultivates an embodied sensitivity to
the disordered, unsystematic, circumstances of
8 Ben Anderson
context. It is not idiosyncratic, purely personal
or vaguely mystical (see Thrift and Dewsbury
2000). Instead intuition always points towards
moving with the singularities of affections that
are not yet but may potentially come about
within particular situations (Bloch 1986). In the
above case, of an interview and the nervousness
it can engender, perhaps tiredness intersects
with a slight feeling of anticipatory anxiety to
enable Marvin Gaye to sound right. To be
effective this practice of intuition embodies a
form of sensual mimetic remembering. First, a
non-equivalent similarity endures in the condi-
tions that solicit the playing of Marvin Gaye.
To play Marvin Gaye repeatedly can only oc-
cur if repetitions in the affective imperatives
that solicit that activity reoccur: I always listen
to it if the suns shining, on a Sunday morning.
Laying back. Its just right for that. Second,
the tone, mood and rhythm of music, as dis-
closed through repeated use, thereafter affords
an equivalent non-representational back-
ground for the composition of affective, em-
bodied conduct: in the above interview, for
example, an initial sense of awkwardness dissi-
pated as music opened on to a relaxation that
then permeated into the ow of our talk (see
DeNora 2000).
Consequently, such mundane practices con-
sist of a series of actions whereby people come
to act intuitively over their own conduct and
invariably, as in the interview situation, the
conduct of others. Moreover, this embodied
practice feeds back to offer the potential for a
constant, although not always intentional,
modulation, interruption or inhabitation of the
sense of everydayness that bodies at home
are entangled within. More broadly, the use of
recorded music has therefore become one effec-
tive means of ordering affective conduct via
remembering how to act intuitively in context.
However, despite involving a form of memory,
judging and choosing music to play rarely in-
volve the explicit recall or recollection of an
objectied inert past before such practices
take place. In common with a host of other
domestic practices, past actions are performed
only in and through the repetition of the afore-
mentioned acts of handling, choosing, sorting,
displaying and playing. Henri Bergson (1988:
70) writes of the peculiar becoming of the past
through these forms of memory. Habitual re-
membering, a practice that incorporates the
organization of the home and is therefore more
extensive than the form of the human, no
longer represents our past to us, it acts it; and
if it still deserves the name of memory, it is not
because it conserves bygone images, but be-
cause it preserves their useful effect into the
present moment. To take place, music use
must always involve an active immanence of
the past in the body that informs present bodily
actions in an efcacious, orienting, and regular
manner (Casey 2000: 149). The past prolonged
in the form of a useful effect neither lacks nor
possesses existence (Deleuze 1991). Instead, fol-
lowing Bergson, the past is acted in, amongst
other actions, a particular technique of hand
and nger in relation to the surface of audio
technology or, alternatively, takes place as a
vague feeling of appropriateness when Mike
judges, intuitively, that Marvin Gaye sounds
right. Thus, as Bergson (1988: 80) writes, such
a contracted past is part of my present, exactly
like my habit of walking or of writing; it is
lived and acted, rather than represented. Em-
bodying the past through such actions therefore
enables the ongoing conduct of everyday life.
However, since reminders of the past are there-
fore co-present but never fully realized as such,
practices of habitual remembering also func-
tion to produce the past as a supplementary
virtual dimension to everyday life (see Deleuze
1991). Consequently, the past also takes place
as a not yet, but still immanent, knot of
tendencies and forces that accompanies a situ-
Recorded music and practices of remembering 9
ation, event, object, or entity, and invokes a
process of resolution: actualization (Levy 1998:
24).
Involuntary remembering, actualization
and the past in itself
In this section I want to move on to describe
the somewhat indistinct, ephemeral, practice of
involuntary remembering. I will argue that the
eeting, affectively imbued memory traces that
happen during this practice exemplify the pro-
cess whereby the virtual past, as mentioned
above, is actualized (see also Connolly 2002).
In a sense it is therefore a quasi-effect of the
non-idealist co-existence of a past in the pre-
sent that I have detailed above. In the previous
section I have argued that acts of discretion are
simultaneously acts of memory, and that the
use of music inevitably therefore involves pro-
longing, or making present, the past as a re-
source to order the ongoing future-orientated
conduct of domestic daily life. Consequently, it
must be stressed that it is only under certain
historically specic conditions of music use,
namely the unprecedented ordinariness of hear-
ing recorded sound at home more than once,
that the past and present come to coexist with
recorded music in this manner. However, link-
ing the repetition that enables day-to-day living
to memory runs the risk of either presenting
music use as producing a repetitive mimicry of
the ever same or of viewing remembering nega-
tively as only a return or reoccurrence of some-
thing essentially nished. By contrast a focus
on involuntary remembering enables memory
to be linked to an account of repetition as
difference, and thus divergence, by focusing on
the hesitancy, unfolding, uncertainty of the
past as it emerges (Grosz 1999: 25). Following
Proust, the dynamics of involuntary remem-
bering are now widely commented upon in the
literature on remembering, and have been fre-
quently connected to new modes of instan-
taneous, speeded-up temporality (see Urry
2000). I take it here to refer to an immediate
experience of variable intensity whereby traces
of the past happen but without intentional
solicitation. This was only ever an extraordi-
narily brief occurrence. However, it was regu-
larly described to me in diaries, during
interviews and occurred whilst I listened to
particular pieces of music with research partic-
ipants.
A second story: Sharon is 32, lives alone and
works as a nurse. Here she describes listening
to Frank Sinatra one morning before leaving
her house to go to work:
Sharon: And then yesterday, before I went to
work and Id had a hard day at work the day
before so I wasnt I wasnt looking forward to
it, it wasnt hard just difcult I was listening to
Frank Sinatra, to lighten things up a bit, thats not
depressing its a bit more alive. Just sort of tidying
up then sat down ate some breakfast, read a
nursing magazine. So I had this Frank Sinatra tape
on, and suddenly from nowhere I could hear my
mother singing along to it, its really odd that I
should choose to do that. She did use to do that
a lot, you know just sing along to this while
she pottered around and got on with things I
mean I do like it on its own and I actually bought it
because a friend had got it and I really enjoyed it as
background music but there was this element of
it, that as soon as when I stuck it on I was there
again home again, hearing my mother and, and
thats what I then thought about for a couple of
minutes, I think from a memory point of view its
much better to be spontaneous.
Ben: Would you choose the Frank Sinatra one very
deliberately to evoke?
Sharon: No, no I dont think so, no, no its not
so predictable as that but inevitably there is it
10 Ben Anderson
does come into it, and again it was just a bit
surprising at the time God knows why I should
choose to remember that then, to actually hear
her and I had this image in my head of being at
home with her singing away. And it made
me stop what I was doing for a bit, I mean I
was only icking through a magazine killing some
time. It just I dont know it was just like
there like being transported back, you know I got
one of those like shivery feelings really suddenly.
(Interview, Sharon, 23 May 2001)
The experience of involuntary remembering is
never entirely distinct yet nevertheless inter-
rupts and diverts within the context of a multi-
tude of other practices. Something happens
whilst everyday life goes on: reading the maga-
zine Nursing Times, preparing to walk out the
door to work, biting and chewing on an apple.
For the previous ten minutes, as Sharon notes,
the music had tted with the sense of every-
dayness that infused a series of distracted ac-
tions. But then, magically, in an instant, Frank
Sinatras voice becomes her mothers: suddenly
from nowhere I could hear my mother singing
along to it. Subsequently a moment is cut out,
made distinct, leant consistency from within
the not-yet conscious background of domestic
life. Consequently, not only is the temporal
sequence of past/present/future disturbed, but
also the neat boundaries separating Sharons
home from her previous house are twisted and
deformed. She described being transported
and suddenly being there again home again,
hearing my mother. Domestic time-space is
fractured, folded, unhinged in a moment of
stasis (Game 1997: 120). In common with
other practices, such as viewing a certain
photograph, for example, a moment instanta-
neously rises up of its own accord into affec-
tive consciousness (Barthes 1993: 55).
It is important to note that such involuntary
memory traces are only one of a number of
experiences in which something happens to,
on or around individuals. Sharon describes
stopping what she was doing. She pauses. She
casually remarks God knows why I should
choose to remember that then, but I did. The
involuntary produces an enabling irruption of
thought. Yet, initially, before remembering her
mother, Sharon got one of those shivery feel-
ings. Just for a moment: really suddenly.
Here we are drawn directly to how such traces
affect before and after they signify through a
not-yet conscious, visceral, logic of intensity. A
dead mother singing is heard as she is felt
directly in a sensuous excitation of the skin: a
shiver that at least initially is without a corre-
sponding image. There are a number of notable
antecedents for thinking memory and affect.
For example Michael Taussig (1993), drawing
heavily on Walter Benjamin, writes of the force
with which signs of the past can ash forth to
re-order the present. In a similar vein, Roland
Barthes (1993: 4547) writes of the grace of the
punctum as that detail of a photograph which
occurs alongside a system of signication like
a supplement that is at once inevitable and
delightful. Both authors, albeit in different
ways, focus on how traces of the past are
directly encountered through a qualitative
change in a capacity to affect and be affected,
and that the resultant affect, in its singularity,
is irreducible to either a symbolic or emotional
register. Although instantaneous, the emerg-
ence of such involuntary memory traces were
frequently described as being lled with what
William Connolly (2002: 28) has termed affec-
tive charges, running through euphoria, won-
der or nostalgia into a more frequent, but less
intense, momentary inhabitation of surprise.
I argued in the previous section that the use
of recorded music utilizes culturally specic
corporeal skills which enable recorded music to
become entangled in the minutiae of day-to-day
domestic living. Consequently, I argued that
Recorded music and practices of remembering 11
the past is immanent to the present as both a
useful effect and in the not-yet form of a
co-present virtual realm. In this section I have
described involuntary traces that produce a
moment, or cut, in which domestic time-space
is momentarily unhinged. Ann Game (2001:
229230), whilst describing the experience,
highlights how it affects as a magical enliven-
ing of time-space and writes in a Proustian
vein that it pertains to something more than
past or present, something more essential. It is
also worth noting that, in the context of
Sharons daily actions, a memory trace acts as
a displacement or movement: a shift in atten-
tion from focusing on a magazine in the
kitchen to thoughts of her mother in a previous
home. It therefore forms part of a wider ecol-
ogy of everyday displacements that are internal
to the logic of music, and other artefactual
sound, as an affective background that works
on the sense of everydayness. From the re-
search these include practices such as day-
dreaming, fantasizing, singing along for a
moment or two, focusing attention on one
aspect of a song or dancing with music in the
middle of other actions (Anderson 2003). In
common with the enlivening function of such
displacements, an involuntary memory trace
affects as a momentary actualization of tenden-
cies partially present in the aforementioned
co-present virtual realm. What is encountered
during practices of involuntary remembering
is therefore not primarily a representation of
the past out there but an intensive trace of the
past in itself. The ontology of the past that is
presupposed by this statement is, as Mike
Crang (2001) has noted, difcult to think since
it runs contrary to the aforementioned taken-
for-granted understanding of the past as some-
thing which was and the present as something
that is. Here Deleuze writes on how Henri
Bergson in Matter and Memory turned this
conception on its head, by postulating a realm
of pure past-ness and distinguishing it from a
mobile, always not-yet, present:
We have great difculty in understanding a survival
of the past in itself because we believe that the past
is no longer, that it has ceased to be. We have thus
confused Being with being-present. Nevertheless, the
present is not; rather, it is pure becoming, always
outside itself. It is not, but it acts. Its proper element
is not being but the active or the useful. The past, on
the other hand, has ceased to act or to be useful. But
it has not ceased to be. Useless and inactive, impas-
sive, it IS, in the full sense of the word: It is identical
with being in itself. It should not be said that it
was, since it is the in-itself of being, and the form
under which being is preserved in itself (in oppo-
sition to the present, the form under which being is
consummated and places itself outside itself).
(Deleuze 1991: 55, emphasis in original)
Consequently, given that traces of the past
in-itself suddenly emerge before dissipating
into a broader affective colouring of ongoing
experience, a radical under-determination char-
acterizes involuntary remembering. For two
reasons involuntary memory traces cannot be
identical. First, this is due to the intimacy of
involuntary memory with the particular
rhythms of attention/distraction that constitute
different styles of background listening (see
Anderson 2003). Second, because the process of
actualization, the leap, is always a movement
of differentiation. Hence the slight surprise that
often greets such traces of the past: god knows
why I should choose to remember that then.
For Elizabeth Grosz (2000: 228), drawing on
Deleuze and Bergson, such a process of actual-
ization is a process of genuine creativity and
innovation, the production of singularity or
individuation. Accordingly it is impossible,
and undesirable, to be more specic about the
occurrence of such traces beyond the observa-
tion that involuntary remembering only oc-
12 Ben Anderson
curred with music that had been entangled in
everyday life and was being encountered once
again. Importantly, the obvious counterpoint to
practices of involuntary remembering are col-
lective practices of state-orchestrated remem-
brance or sites of commemoration that aim,
even if they rarely succeed, to make a particular
account of the past durable (see Rowlands
1997). Perhaps the most common involuntary
memorial experience with music was the actu-
alization of such a virtual past in a vague,
inchoate, sensing of a previously inhabited
time-space.
Thus far I have repeated an implicit separ-
ation of talk from the myriad intensities of
memory traces by ignoring how the affect of
hearing Frank Sinatra/Sharons mother does
come to be stopped in particular webs of
signication, in this example as a mother posi-
tioned ordinarily at home. In comparison to
practices of remembering in which the past is
brought back to life through embodiment and
specic forms of somatic skill, this form of
memory was bound up with two distinct prac-
tices of thinking and/or talk. I want to very
briey introduce both forms, as they are crucial
to understanding the affection of the past
through memory. Both work to double the
corporeal affection of a sound by inserting
intensity into semantically and semiotically
formed progressions, into narrativizable ac-
tionreaction circuits, into function and mean-
ing (Massumi 2002: 28). The rst could be
described as naming and involves
identicatory practices of thinking/talk that
work to amplify or heighten intensity. These
include rather vaguely recollecting the sense of
an absent place or perhaps recognizing a past
emotion that is associated with a particular
individual. This form of thinking/talk is one
that resonates with the intensity of memory
traces in that it functions to re-register an
already felt state, for the skin is faster than the
word (Massumi 2002: 25). It enables the past
to be re-encountered primarily as a vague, un-
systematic, attitude or mood rather than
through a representation. It is here that we do
not proceed from an actual present to the past,
that we do not recompose the past with various
presents, but that we place ourselves, directly,
in the past itself (Deleuze 2000: 58). Such
forms of thinking/talk therefore function to
establish a form of resemblance, the identity of
a quality common to the two sensations, or of
a sensation common to the two moments, the
present and the past (Deleuze 2000: 59). The
second form of talk/thinking only occurs when
space opens up for reection on or around the
brief involuntary affect. One such example
would be through my directed talk in the afore-
mentioned interview situation. At these times
the after-image of a memory is directly emplot-
ted within a personal, group or social narra-
tive. This works to dampen atypical irruptions
of intensity, even as it enables the conduct of a
self embedded in a set of social relations, since
it interferes with the already felt affection by
indexing affect to conventional meanings in an
inter-subjective context, its socio-linguistic
qualication (Massumi 2002: 24). An affec-
tively imbued memory trace thereafter becomes
the familiar or known and at this point is
translated into particular emotions. Unqualied
pre-personnel intensity is translated into pos-
sessed subjective content (see Massumi 2002). It
is this second form of thought/talk that works
to establish a separation, rather than identity,
between the sense experience, the intensity of a
memory trace that ashes forth, and an iconic,
referent system (see Carruthers 1990; Yates
1966). The alterity of the past in-itself is lost.
Excitation, a shiver, becomes a mother. A mo-
ment unhinged, or a pause whilst chewing on
an apple, becomes through practices of talk an
image of domestic routine in a once lived home
that Sharon moved out of some fteen years
Recorded music and practices of remembering 13
previously and now visits approximately once a
month to see her father. Importantly, it is
worth remembering that on occasion this
qualication itself can feed forward into the
creation, and circulation, of other intensities.
Nostalgia is the obvious example here.
Intentional remembering and a past as
possibility
I concluded the above discussion of involuntary
remembering by arguing that the affection of
memory works on a different level from prac-
tices of thinking/talk, and that certain forms of
talk, amongst other practices, act to amplify or
dampen the intensive emergence of the past (see
Massumi 2002). It is an understanding of the
effects of the latter form of talk, to produce a
division between sense and image, that pro-
vides the bridge to the nal practice of remem-
bering that I want to describe: intentional
remembering. I refer here to the deliberate use
of music to recollect, reminisce or recreate the
content or mood of an already dened mem-
ory. Before proceeding to describe this practice
of remembering it is important to place the
ability to intentionally remember within a
wider constellation of day-to-day regulatory
practices, technologies of the self, that perform
particular modes of individualized self-hood
bound up with an ability to tell a coherent
story of our life (King 2000: 23). The term
intentional is, however, problematic in that it
conjures up unhelpful images of an a priori
sovereign subject. I argued in the rst section
on choice and memory that discretion is pre-
sent in acts of music consumption, but only as
a precarious effect in part afforded by changes
in contemporary audio technologies and bound
up with forms of habitual somatic skill includ-
ing intuition and mimicry. Moreover, in
Heideggerian terms intentionality occurs only
as things within the home are absorbed into
the current of our activity (as indeed, we are
ourselves), become in a sense transparent,
wholly subordinate to the in-order-to of the
task at hand (Ingold 2000: 168). The ability to
intentionally remember is therefore always
partly an effect of the practices of remembering
that I described in the section on habitual
remembering.
In order to discuss this practice of remember-
ing I want to present a third story: of Sarah
using music to remember her father. It will
become clear that the event described actually
embodies numerous practices of remembering.
The following is an extract from the diary
Sarah lled in as part of the research. She is 29
and lives with her partner and her child who
had just turned 1 at the time of the research.
She has the main responsibility for childcare
and usually remains at home during the day.
The below diary extract refers to a time she
played John Lennon at about four oclock on a
Tuesday afternoon:
Feeling nostalgic. Im in the living room. Hannah is
sleeping upstairs. I decide to play a John Lennon
tune called In My Life. It reminds me of my father.
I always feel emotional when I play it. Hannah
seems to have a sense that this song has a particular
memory for me as when shes there she always pays
special attention to it. She likes me to sing along to
it. It is funny that while this song reminds me of my
father, he actually hated John Lennon. I dont sup-
pose he really knew his music or ever listened to the
words. In fact, the song doesnt remind me of my
father it just makes me think of him. I play it a few
times. It is quite cathartic to listen to it. I feel
released afterwards, whatever that means. I guess
music can let the emotion out, I was feeling a bit
stressed from being with Hannah all day. It was nice
to do something for me. (Self-completed listening
diary, Sarah, 18 October 2000)
14 Ben Anderson
In an interview three days later we discuss the
diary. Halfway through the interview the music
Sarah discusses is played in the background.
Ben: It reminds you of your Dad?
Sarah: Yeah that reminds me of my Dad, makes
me think of him, always does, which is really inter-
esting. I think it just makes me think of him, even
though my Dad hates John Lennon. My Dad was
really right wing (whatever) Thatcherite, but a
very good father.
Ben: (Yes.)
Sarah: Umm just thought some stupid different
things to me, but was a very loving and wonderful
father and I, he HATED John Lennon, cos John
Lennons politics were completely different to his.
But yeah theres this song that reminds me In My
Life.
[Sarah stands up from the sofa on which wed been
sitting and skips the CD forward to the song]
[Pause]
Sarah: I wont sing it anyway [laughs] so yeah it
just reminds me of my Dad and things in my
life that are, you know always going to be
there no matter what and it makes them quite
powerful and sort of real again.
Ben: Were you thinking that you said you
played it a few times?
Sarah: I do [laughs], over and over I mean it
made me feel, again its something that makes me
feel nostalgic in a way, I actually cried a
bit but as well happy, not really sad or de-
pressed. (Interview, Sarah, 21 October 2000)
My focus in this section is on the process
whereby the materiality of music, in this case
John Lennons In My Life, is substantiated as
a particular class of thing: one of a number of
mnemic objects that sometimes elicit prior
states of being (Bellos 1993: 33). The event
described occurred only as a moment was
carved out of Sarahs daily schedule for her-
self. Since the birth of her rst child this time
has become increasingly constricted and her use
of music, and other media, is now intimately
bound up with the geographies of care. From
the evidence of diaries and the in-depth inter-
views, Sarah predominantly listened to
recorded music when she was at home alone
with her daughter. She stresses in a later inter-
view that this has changed how she encounters
music: the musics not really for
me it it used to be for me, mine but
it rarely is now its just to keep me going. In
the two hours preceding the event of remem-
bering Sarah had been playing with her daugh-
ter in the living room. Music, in this case Jazz
piano, was present but hardly noticed, its just
background whilst Im doing other things. As
each of the three examples indicate, to encoun-
ter music as a background in the context of a
series of other actions is now remarkably com-
monplace as a means of ordering affective con-
duct in both domestic time-space and across a
range of quasi public/private spaces (see also
Anderson 2003; Bull 2000; DeNora 2000; Tac-
chi 1998).
In contrast to this use of music as a back-
ground, listening to remember involves the
formation of an extended moment that could
be dened as time away not just from others
but time when one does not have to take the
needs of others into account (Davis 2001: 144).
In the context of Sarahs childcare this mo-
ment out is more accurately termed a period of
waiting. Her daughter Hannah was sleeping in
the bedroom above, connected by an intercom.
She was due to wake up in about half an hour
and Sarah had to make two phone calls. In
addition, Sarah stressed how her thoughts and
attention were still drawn to her child. Inten-
tional remembering is in this case simul-
Recorded music and practices of remembering 15
taneously entangled with the wider domestic
geography of stops or pauses in which the
usual ow of work is halted for a period
(Davis 2001: 140). Sarah discusses how, in lis-
tening to John Lennon, her stretched, frenzied
attention is slowed and stresses how this is felt
sensuously through a momentary feeling of
calm or relaxation that contrasts with the
labour of childcare. To pause, or stop, pro-
duces a re-evaluated attitude towards the time
of the now that transforms, for a moment or
two, the ordinary sense of everydayness in
Sarahs home. Music, in this example John
Lennons In My Life, subsequently affects via
a very different relation between affection and
signication to other practices of remembering.
Sarah mentions at the beginning of the extract
that this song reminds me of my father. This
is the critical difference. Music, to be used
deliberately or intentionally, must have already
been placed within a particular order of
signication before it is encountered as a set of
affections. Consequently, a separation is pro-
duced between a past event (incorporated in
the image of Sarahs father) and the present
sense experience. This separation is enacted
through ways of storing, choosing, classifying
and displaying the objects of music, CDs and
albums, within the home. With the exception
of the interview situation, Sarah, for example,
only ever played John Lennon when she
wanted to remember her father. Whilst icking
through her CD collection she talked about
two other pieces of music that elicited particu-
lar memories. One was used to remind her of a
particular friend, the other to reminisce over a
particular event. Both were only ever played
with these possible purposes in mind. Impor-
tantly, in this practice the use of music follows
a logic of memorialization that is not distinct
to music use but is akin to practices of autobi-
ographical writing or visual practices of view-
ing photographs where one effect is to x,
freeze or frame an event (Lury 1998: 82).
Understood in relation to this background,
the actions described, including carefully
choosing a certain song already placed within a
signied order and taking a break whilst car-
ing, are therefore disclosive (Spinosa, Flores
and Dreyfus 1997). Functioning together as an
assemblage they generate connections between
a past and particular features of the music,
producing certain associations, which are
thereafter fore-grounded in the contemplative
act of listening. The effect is to produce an
event, in this case a process of thinking that
produces a set of past images of Sarahs father,
as a co-existent possibility that can be re-en-
countered through music from the vantage-
point of the present. Pierre Levy describes the
mode of being of the possible:
The possible is already fully constituted but it exists
in a state of limbo. It can be realised without any
change occurring in its determination or nature. It is
a phantom reality, something latent. The possible is
exactly like the real, the only thing missing is exist-
ence. (Levy 1998: 24)
Producing a memory as possible confers an
availability on that which is now made into a
past. In conjunction with the past as a pre-cog-
nitive useful effect which is prolonged in the
habitual acts that surround practices of judge-
ment and choice, a relatively durable past is
primed to return instantly at the press of a
button. To press a button, choose, is therefore
enabled, in the context of the domestic geogra-
phies of care Sarah is entangled within, to act
as a practice of recollection that is, in addition,
one of a number of now-mundane techniques
whereby practices of thinking are altered
in direction, speed, intensity, or sensibility
(Connolly 2002: 100). It is worth noting that
the particular disclosure of the matter of music
that results from this practice meant that dur-
16 Ben Anderson
ing discussions people attributed the re-occur-
rence of a memory to the action of the music
in-itself. Sarah writes that music just brings it
all back. John Lennons In My Life therefore
does not act primarily as an object of meaning
but becomes a facilitator, or affective catalyser,
that enacts the emergence, and therefore affec-
tion, of a memory.
Consequently, music can only come to act as
a mnemic materiality through a whole series of
disclosive actions and the production of a body
with a particular capacity to be affected. Sarah,
in this example, has learnt to be modulated in
particular ways by the affection of this particu-
lar sound so that a possible memory is indeed
catalysed. Intentional remembering was there-
fore frequently described as bringing about a
more sustained period of felt intensity than was
the case when remembering involuntarily. As I
argued above, involuntary remembering was
based around the immediacy of traces that
erupted from a virtual past carried within,
and across, a range of practices with music.
The experience was eeting, embodied viscer-
ally in a slight shudder and often talked about
with a tone of surprise. It was rarely described
in a language of disordered passion. In com-
parison, Sarah describes a set of techniques that
enable her to be momentarily immersed in the
sound through mimetic practices of singing,
replaying the song, thinking of her father and
listening intently. Listening to remember some-
thing is therefore one of a number of peak
experiences of intensied affect that provide
ways of being and living that do not necessarily
always form into a technology of the self (see
Pini 1998; Smith 2000). Such practices of re-
membering can therefore on occasion, and
from within the context of a specic everyday
life, take on a utopian function (see Bloch
1986). Other comparable practices from my
research include fun, joy, play, acts of contem-
plative listening and the use of music in periods
of emotional and affective intensity ranging
from practices of love to the use of music
during periods of despair. Each touches, for a
limited period, that which is present but not-
yet-become in order to re-order the ordinary
sense of domestic everydayness. In this case
rather than feel stressed, Sarah was reminded
of her father, cried involuntarily and thereafter
played it a few times. Just as both of the
previous ways of remembering are bound to
forms of repetition, in this example to play the
same song again and again enacts a process of
recursive feedback that functions to heighten
the force of how a past returns (see Crang
2001). For a moment, and from within the
context of the domestic geographies of the
home, more intensity is momentary inhabited.
Sarah cried a bit but was happy, not really
sad or depressed.
As discussed in each of the previous sections,
a practice of remembering with music does not
represent the past but enacts time-space, and
thus the past, into becoming. In this case the
construction of a separation between the con-
text of a past sensation and the affection of a
present sensation objecties a past as a xed
event that, although encountered in particular
affections, essentially no longer acts and there-
fore lacks the conditions of either present-Being
or of being present (Deleuze 1991). In contrast
to the simultaneity of the past in the present, as
discussed in different ways in the previous two
sections, a distance is therefore established and
maintains between the past and the present that
enables Sarah to feel nostalgic in a way. Inten-
tional remembering is thus one of a number of
everyday practices that enacts cumulative linear
time even as it draws lines of connection with
other time-spaces. As a range of work on West-
ern forms of temporality have argued, the cre-
ation of a past, and the form of temporality it
produces, is remarkably taken for granted in
comparison to the immanent, or unhinged,
Recorded music and practices of remembering 17
time-space that I argued in the previous two
sections characterized acts of discretion and
involuntary practices of remembering with mu-
sic (see Adam 1990). In conjunction with a
range of other mediated memory practices,
such as viewing a home video or photograph,
memory is thereafter structured around the
capacity to intentionally experience at the press
of a button the re-living of an event that has
already happened in linear time rather than an
event as if it were happening now in repetitive
or cyclical time (Rowlands 1997).
Concluding recollections
The point of departure for this paper, as sig-
nalled in the introduction and rst section, was
to rethink the timing and spacing of the past
via a case study of how practices of memory
intertwine with recorded music use. First, I
argued that a number of practices of remem-
bering pass by unnoticed whenever music is
selected, played or heard. These are based
around specic embodied skills. Here the past
is contracted into the domestic present, brought
back to life and thus prolonged as a useful
effect. But also made virtual. Second, I de-
scribed subject-less practices revolving around
the brief intensifying experience of involuntary
remembering. Drawing on Giles Deleuzes
(1991, 2000) re-reading of Bergson and Proust,
I argued that during this practice traces of a
virtual past in-itself are re-encountered
through singular, intensifying irruptions of in-
tensity. These two forms of remembering are
thoroughly interdependent. Involuntary re-
membering is one process whereby the past-
made-virtual by the intimacy of recorded music
with everyday domestic life is actualized. Fi-
nally, intentional remembering refers to a set
of practices in which a possible memory, and
thus a linear sense of time, is re-encountered
through the creation of an interval between the
context of a past affection and an intensied
present affection. Such practices, although oc-
casionally material for the formation of a self
and thus not unique to music use, function to
herald not-yet ways of being and living whilst
remaining dependent on the aforementioned set
of skills that enable music to modulate the
affective imperatives that constitute the sense
of domestic everydayness (see Seigworth
2000).
It is therefore through such practices of re-
membering and forgetting that a non-syn-
chronous everyday life becomes full of specic
ideal but really existing materialities. For ex-
ample, in the three cases described in this
paper, matters such as a mother in a previous
home, the sun that shines on a Sunday morning
and a dead father all become, in different ways,
not quite present. Consequently, one of the
unique effects of the presence of recorded mu-
sic, and other artefactually mediated material,
is the production of an everyday life that can
be more readily folded into a co-present, but
not-yet virtual realm (see Anderson 2003).
Turning, however, from this conclusion to the
literature on the geographies of popular mem-
ory and commemoration, throughout this pa-
per I have described how embodied practices,
including but not necessarily restricted to dis-
cernible acts of remembering and forgetting,
are generative of specic personnel or collective
memories, i.e. acts of recollection, remem-
brance or recall are based upon a whole array
of contextual body practices. Moreover, much
of what may count as memory does not take
the form of a representation, or image, of the
past. Consequently, the focus of the geography
of memory cannot only be upon how represen-
tations of a nished past are produced and
struggled over. In contrast, this paper has de-
scribed how practices of remembering are
bound up with the actual emergence of time-
18 Ben Anderson
space, and thus the mode of being of the past,
by virtue of the differential spacings and tim-
ings of immanent intensities that on-go before,
after and around the production of a dened
memory. Intensities that are inhabited in,
amongst other events, when music feels right
in Mikes home during an interview, the sur-
prise of sensing a mother that Sharon describes
and the tears that come about when Sarah
recollects her father.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Mike, Sharon, Sarah (all
pseudonyms) and the other research partici-
pants who were generous enough to talk to me
about music and memory. Thanks to Divya
Tolia-Kelly, Peter Jackson, Gill Valentine,
three anonymous referees and the participants
at the IBG-RGS session at Belfast 2002 on
Multi-sensorial Memorialisations who were
all kind enough to comment upon various
drafts of this paper. Finally, special thanks to
Rachel Colls for her astute comments regarding
this paper, the constant creation of affectively
imbued memories and, in particular, for know-
ing why the following caveat really matters to
me: all remaining errors/omissions are my
own.
Note
1 All interview quotes/diary material have been
anonymized in line with the usual conventions. A series
of dots indicates a pause in speech.
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Abstract translations
La musique enregistree et les pratiques relatives au
souvenir
Malgre une resurgence de travaux qui sorientent
dun angle critique vers lexamen de la mediation de
la memoire a` travers lartefact, tre`s peu dentre eux
ont mis laccent sur les interconnexions entre la
musique enregistree et les gestes quotidiens lies au
souvenir. A
`
partir dune etude de cas, une recherche
a ete effectuee sur la musique enregistree et la vie
quotidienne de dix-sept menages issus de la classe
moyenne inferieure. Cet article decrit les elements
structurels de trois pratiques se rapportant au sou-
venir evoque par une musique enregistree. Dabord,
la place du souvenir dans le choix des enregistre-
ments musicaux disponibles sur le marche et conven-
ables aux circonstances, qui accompagnent les
20 Ben Anderson
activites sociospatiales speciques; il sagit dune
pratique creative dimitation, de discretion et
dintuition par laquelle le passe prend corps dans les
actes lies aux notions de jugement et de choix et qui
intervient dans la composition dun monde co-pre-
sent mais pas tout a` fait virtuel. Ensuite, il est
question de la pratique etendue, epheme`re et sans
sujet du souvenir involontaire, ou` une trace du
passe virtuel est mise en evidence en soi. Finale-
ment, la pratique du souvenir intentionnel a` partir
duquel un passe est conditionne et prend forme en
tant que memoire xe et relativement durable. Avec
chaque pratique et a` travers la diffusion et
lagencement dune ambiance marquee daffect, la
memoire est nouee a` lemergence dun temps-espace
domestique, et ainsi a` un mode de vie enchasse dans
le passe.
Mots-clefs: musique enregistree, souvenir, passe,
vie quotidienne, affect, memoire.
Musica grabada y la practica de recordar
A pesar del resurgimiento de trabajos que examinan
cri ticamente la mediacion artefactual del recuerdo,
hay pocos que se centran en las interconexiones
entre la musica grabada y el acto cotidiano de
recordar. Este papel hace uso de una investigacion
sobre musica grabada y la vida cotidiana, con base
en estudios de diecisiete fami lias de la clase media
baja. La investigacion describe la composicion de
tres practicas de recordar con, y a traves de, la
musica grabada. La primera es recordar como eligir
una determinada musica adquirida, y encajarla den-
tro de especi cas actividades socio-espaciales; la
practica creativa de imitacion, discrecion e intuicion
en que el pasado se incorpora en los actos de juzgar
y eligir y tambien sirve para crear un terreno que es
co-presente pero todavi a no virtual. La segunda es
la practica extendida, efemeral y sin-sujeto de recor-
dar involuntariamente en que un rastro de un
pasado virtual afecta en si . Y la tercera; el recordar
adrede en que se condiciona el pasado para que
ocurra como un recuerdo jo y relativamente
duradero. En cada practica el recuerdo esta i ntima-
mente conectado con el tiempo-espacio domestico y,
por lo tanto, el modo de ser del pasado, por la
circulacion y la organizacion de afecto.
Palabras claves: musica grabada, recordar, pasado,
vida cotidiana, afecto, recuerdo.