[1] The theory posits that memory is not just an individual, private experience but also part of the collective domain, which both shapes the future and our understanding of the past.
For Richard Terdiman, the French Revolution is the breaking point: the change of a political system, together with the emergence of industrialization and urbanization, made life more complex than ever before.
As people realized that history was only one version of the past, they became more and more concerned with their own cultural heritage (in French called patrimoine) which helped them shape a collective and national identity.
In search for an identity to bind a country or people together, governments have constructed collective memories in the form of commemorations which should bring and keep together minority groups and individuals with conflicting agendas.
Scholars like Tony Bennett rightly point out that representation is a crucial precondition for human perception in general: pure, organic and objective memories can never be witnessed as such.
Although he concentrates on a spatial approach to remembrance, Nora already points out in his early historiographical theories that memory goes beyond just tangible and visual aspects, thereby making it flexible and in flux.
This rather problematic notion, also characterized by Terdiman as the "omnipresence" of memory, implies that for instance on a sensory level, a smell or a sound can become of cultural value, due to its commemorative effect.
[citation needed] This impractical desire for recalling what is gone forever brings to surface a feeling of nostalgia, noticeable in many aspects of daily life but most specifically in cultural products.
[citation needed] The first conceptions of embodied memory, in which the past is 'situated' in the body of the individual, derive from late nineteenth century thoughts of evolutionists like Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Ernst Haeckel.
Lamarck’s law of inheritance of acquired characteristics and Haeckel's theory of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, suggested that the individual is a summation of the whole history that had preceded him or her.
Readings of ancient Egyptian artefacts by Herodotus, Pliny, the Collector Earl of Arundel, 18th-century travellers, Napoleon, Shelley, William Bankes, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale or Sigmund and Lucian Freud, reveal a range of interpretations variously concerned with reconstructing the intentions of their makers.
Historian Guy Beiner argued that "studies of cultural memory tend to privilege literary and artistic representations of the past.
Culture influences experience by offering mediated perceptions that affect it, as Frigga Haug states by opposing conventional theory on femininity to lived memory.
The influence of memory is made obvious in the way the past is experienced in present conditions, for – according to Paul Connerton, for instance – it can never be eliminated from human practice.
[citation needed] On the other hand, it is perception driven by a longing for authenticity that colors memory, which is made clear by a desire to experience the real (Susan Stewart).