What if memory is less like a storage house for the past and more like a technology for finding our way through the present?
In her new article, Saskia Janina Neumann explores memory as an orientation technology: a system that enables recognition, judgment, and action under uncertain and changing conditions. Drawing on Werner Stegmaier’s philosophy of orientation, the article shows how memory often works unnoticed in the background, providing the footholds that allow us to recognize situations and continue acting within them.
Bringing this philosophical perspective into dialogue with contemporary memory research, Neumann examines memory’s selectivity, reconstructive character, dependence on cues and context, embodied mechanisms, and reliance on social and material supports.
This also reveals a fundamental trade-off: the very flexibility that makes memory useful for orientation can produce omissions, distortions, and failures of access. Memory does not need to preserve everything. It needs to make enough of the past available and usable for the demands of the present.