If memory and forgetting are significant in Certeau’s work, it is in part because they point to the ambiguity of what is common. Memory is inescapably subject to social pressures that have a bearing both on the control of meaning and on the regulation of social ‘spaces’. Forgetting is no less complex a phenomenon: it deprives memory of its lustre, but can also signify an unacknowledged complicity in processes of fabrication and repression. It is within common life that tensions of this sort are played out: both memory and forgetting can be a sign of the stultifying power of the culture of the singular, or of the emergence of plurality. Tracking memory and forgetting alike enables us to glimpse something of the ambiguity of Certeau’s theorization of culture — as a place of agency and creativity, on the one hand, and of contestation and conflict, on the other.