Twenty years ago Paul Connerton wrote a minor classic, How Societies Remember, which has achieved a well-deserved reputation in studies of social memory. In the intervening years, there has been an explosion of academic interest in memory, although, paradoxically, as Connerton remarks in his new book, over the same period the study of history has been in general decline. This contradiction, between the fascination with memorializing and memory, and the loss of interest in the potential of history, is one of the themes he sets out to explore. The central theme of the book's three elegantly-written, thoughtful, and wide-ranging essays is that the compulsion to forget is a structural feature of advanced capitalist societies.

In his earlier book, Connerton made a particularly useful distinction between inscribing and incorporating practices of memory. Inscribing practices are intentional acts of memory preservation—the making of memorials, the writing of memoirs, creating photo albums, and so forth; incorporating practices are those in which memory is preserved through the repetition of physical actions that may well leave no trace but become part of the subject's consciousness. Of the two, Connerton argued that incorporating practices were generally more effective in prolonging memory. The first of the essays takes this same distinction, but translates it to the things and places that mediate memory, and he contrasts memorials with locus, which is more inexplicit, the space in which memory is aroused. As in his earlier book, Connerton favors locus over memorial, and argues that the places that give rise to memory, especially cities, have a more profound role in the perpetuation of memory than any of the more contrived and artificial practices that we go in for.

The second and longest essay looks at the variety of ways in which capitalism causes forgetting to occur. Following Marx, Connerton argues that the labor processes of capitalism cause not only cultural amnesia of the production of commodities, but he proposes that it also results in amnesia toward the production of places. This tendency to amnesia is accelerated by the forgetting that occurs in the process of the exchange of commodities, by the “short-termism” of labor contracts in contemporary production, and through the effect of mass media in hastening loss of memory. While each of these ideas are familiar to us from Marx and the Frankfurt school, Connerton's contribution is to draw them all together, and to argue that, collectively, they precipitate a cascade of systematic memory loss.

The third essay returns to the locus, and discusses cities as sites of forgetfulness. He takes his cue from Siegfried Kracauer's remark that Berlin in the 1920s was “the place in which one quickly forgets,” and which seemed to have a magical power to erase all memories. In this essay we are on relatively familiar territory, for many of the critiques of modern architecture and urbanism have focused on the amnesiac properties of contemporary cities. Connerton here treads some of the same ground as Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), the Italian architect Aldo Rossi's Architecture of the City (1966), or Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa's more recent The Eyes of the Skin (2005). But unlike the latter two, at least, Connerton has no particular interest in the future of cities and architecture, and takes a heavily nostalgic view of the losses to our memory practices that occur through urban redevelopment. He offers no suggestions as to how we might best reconcile change with the preservation of memory.

Connerton's account of modernist amnesia is essentially pessimistic, and turns out to be conservative at heart. The forgetfulness induced by modernity is, for him, ultimately a loss, and not, as Nietzsche would have had it, a gain.