Geoffrey Bowker’s Memory Practices in the Sciences reconceptualises scientific knowledge not as the accumulation of immutable facts but as the outcome of historically situated memory practices embedded within infrastructures, archives, and classificatory systems. Drawing simultaneously upon sociology of science, media archaeology, cybernetics, and historiography, Bowker argues that modern science depends upon elaborate regimes of temporal coordination through which information is stabilised, synchronised, and rendered retrievable across institutions and generations. The essay opens with reflections drawn from Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, where “time” is described as “the money of science,” thereby framing temporality itself as an infrastructural medium enabling coordinated epistemic activity. Bowker subsequently traces the emergence of modern archival consciousness from medieval record-keeping through print culture and into contemporary digital databases, arguing that each epoch generates distinct modes of remembering and forgetting. Particularly significant is his distinction between the “mnemonick deep”—the dense, discontinuous sedimentation of traces from the past—and the “numinous present” through which modern institutions imagine themselves liberated from history. Scientific institutions, he contends, uniquely aspire to produce a form of “perfect memory” in which facts become detached from contingency and stabilised as universally valid laws of nature. Yet this apparent permanence conceals immense infrastructural labour involving classification, synchronisation, and information management. Bowker’s analysis of archives therefore extends beyond libraries or databases to encompass landscapes, institutions, bodily practices, and technological systems themselves. Drawing upon Charles Lyell’s geological metaphors, he proposes that the earth functions as a form of archive whose material strata record the traces of both organic and inorganic history. Equally influential is his engagement with distributed cognition through Hutchins’s “ants on the beach” analogy, demonstrating how intelligence emerges from accumulated environmental traces rather than isolated minds. Ultimately, Bowker reveals that memory is neither purely individual nor representational; it is infrastructural, collective, and deeply material, produced through the continual interaction between technological systems, classificatory regimes, and the temporal architectures of modern knowledge.
Bowker, G.C. (2005) ‘Memory Practices in the Sciences’, in Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
