Editorial: Time. Matter. Multiplicity
Abstract
MichalisKontopodis Humboldt University Berlin, Germany One often hears: that is good but it belongs to yesterday. But I say: yesterday has not yet been born'. (Mandelstam, 1991[1921]: 113) Although the study of memory would signi cantly bene t from the study of time and materiality and vice versa, there is currently very little scholarship that examines how memory, time and materiality interrelate. This special issue of Memory Studies aims at recovering this connection. From the very beginnings of modernity until the present the relation of time, matter or materiality, and memory has remained unsettled. While the mainstream memory studies (e.g. Gazzaniga, 2004) continue to build upon a much- criticized spatial understanding of time (Middleton and Brown, 2005), constructivist, narrative and postmodern approaches to time and memory (Brockmeier, 1999, 2000, 2003; Gergen, 1993, 1999; Hasenfratz, 2003) disregard materiality, materialization and embodied aspects of temporal and memory-related phenomena (Haraway, 1991; Haraway, 1997; Latour, 1993). The above quotation from the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) can be taken as a summary of a very complex dialectic of invention and remembrance that transcends the limitations of both natural-scienti c and postmodern approaches to time and memory while pointing towards a study of