April 2024

Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou. 2024. 'Epistolary Becomings', https://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/april-2024

On Memory Machines

One of the initial aims of the project has been to develop new cultural frames of references and more nuanced research methods to take women mathematicians out of their archival hideouts and by attending to their philosophical and literary ideas and thoughts, to create a platform wherein they can be seen, heard, understood and possibly followed. In this process, it opens up new theoretical, epistemological and methodological paths in the field of gender and science by making connections with the currently bursting area of memory studies.

In my previous work I have focused on the material turn in philosophical treatments of memory, particularly looking at the strands of embodied and emplaced memories, while excavating memory traces in women workers’ auto/biographical and political writings. In further following entanglements between memory, forgetting and imagination, I have also examined how gender inflects the field of memory studies.

In my current research of writing a feminist genealogy of automathographies, my interest has shifted however, from the materiality of mnemonic inscriptions in women’s auto/biographical documents to the materiality and complexity of the work of memory itself. Drawing on my previous work of theorizing the archive as a living organism, I am thus interested in unravelling discursive, material, spatial and embodied entanglements in memory work.

In this light, what I argue is that memory work in the archive and beyond should be seen within the conceptual framework of the memory machine, a plane for multiplicities to make connections, a contested site for power relations and flows of desire to be enacted. In borrowing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) important notion of the machine, I want to highlight the dynamic process of production, transformation and organization of memories and show how the machine of memory encompasses a wide range of dispositifs (Basu 2010) and assemblages ( Chidgey 2018), including the socio-technical and epistemological effects of the digital revolution. In offering the concept of the memory machine as a tool that brings together the analytical capacities of the dispositif and the assemblage in the wake of the digital revolution, I further highlight the differences not of what they are, but of what they can do. It is through the various working rhythms of memory machines that I thus consider how women mathematicians are remembered or forgotten, how the construction, circulation, transferrability and indeed translation of their memories go on as busily today as in the past and how the study of their 'mnemonic technologies' (Rigney 2005) can help us not only to understand the lasting effects of the past into the present, but also to prefigure and indeed re-imagine the future.

Du Châtelet's desk photo in the public domain

I will give here a short example of Émilie Du Châtelet's memory machine that encompasses intense power relations and forces of desire at play around the fate of her manuscripts. When Du Châtelet died in 1749, her manuscripts were moved to the Château de Cirey, where they stayed for several decades. After her husband’s death the Château was inherited by her son, but he and his wife were guillotined during the French revolution in 1794 and since they had no children, all their possessions went to their niece Diane Adélaïde de Simiane (née Damas), who was their designated heiress, including the Château’s library and Du Châtelet’s manuscripts.

Although the Château was declared as national property, Mme de Simiane managed to reclaim it and prevent its planned demolition, but her heirs sold it in 1892. During this long period Du Châtelet’s manuscripts were kept in the Château de Cirey first and when the Château was sold, the manuscripts moved with the Damas family to a house nearby, in Rosnay-l’Hôpital (Aube). The manuscripts were kept in ten wooden boxes, in the attic of this house and nobody touched them apart from some rodents, who got into one of the boxes and caused irreparable damages. Du Châtelet’s manuscripts were eventually ‘discovered’ in 2010 and were sold at auction in 2012, despite a petition to the French government from 1,4000 researchers worldwide to be kept as national treasure. The manuscripts were bought by an investment company, which later faced accusations of fraud and eventually went bust. They were finally bought at a second auction in 2016 from a party in Sweden. During these political and financial adventures, a large number of Du Châtelet’s literary manuscripts were either lost or scattered during the nineteenth century.

In 2017, the Centre for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists (HWPS) and the National Library of Russia, Saint Petersburg (NLR) agreed upon a collaborative digital edition of the Émilie Du Châtelet manuscripts preserved in the Voltaire Collection of that library and in 2020 they celebrated the release of the first digital and the first historical-critical edition of this important corpus of Du Châtelet’s early works, a project which is still in progress, while its completion is currently uncertain, given the current geopolitical events and crises.

Voltaire's library, photo in the public domain

The story of how Voltaire's papers are housed at the National Library of Russia is equally fascinating. They were bought by Catherine the Great, after his death in 1778, who paid a huge amount of money—30,000 rubbles in gold, besides furs, jewels and diamonds— to his niece Marie-Louise Denis. According to historians, librarians and archivists, the reason for this acquisition had to do with Catherine’s memory work and cultural politics, namely her desire to forge herself as an Enlightened monarch, as well as her political intention to mark the Russian empire as a civilized European country that knew how to appreciate and honour great minds. At the same time, the empress was also castigating France for the way Voltaire, his ideas and his work were persecuted during his lifetime, as well as after his death.

Thus while Voltaire’s library and manuscripts, including some of Du Châtelet’s papers were housed in the Hermitage, the main corpus of Du Châtelet’s scientific manuscripts went through wild adventures, not only during the political upheavals of the French revolution, but also in the storms of contemporary financial instabilities. We can see how memory machines have been in full swing then and now and we can only imagine their precarity in a world where culture is bought and sold in the market. As I have written elsewhere, archives are not just intellectual spaces, where the work of memory goes on incessantly; they are also material spaces that need support to survive, but are academic or state institutions to be trusted with their guardianship? (see Tamboukou 2024, 65)

In mapping archives and studying memory machines for all women mathematicians, scientists and philosophers in this project a number of very interesting themes have emerged, including archives in turbulent times as in the case of Émilie Du Châtelet, financial disasters, archival rhythms and affects in the case of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, archival crimes and machinic mnemonics in the case of Sophie Germain, the work of editing memories in the case of Mary Somerville, memory wars in the case of Ada Lovelace, mythographies and palimpsests for Sofia Kovalevskaya, as well as the familiar theme of lost in translation, as in the case of Wang Zhenyi.

Indeed all five modalities in the work of cultural memory that Anne Rigney 2005 has influentially theorised, namely selection, convergence, recursivity, modelling, as well as translation and transfer have been seen at work in the memory machines that I have configured and studied.