Memory
Steven Schrag
If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.
—Plato, The Phaedrus
Reminders. Now nothing slips your mind.
—Apple Inc., “OS X Apps”
Memory—from the Latin memoria (the faculty of remembering, remembrance, a historical account), and “mnemonic” from Mnemosyne, mother of the nine Muses in Greek myth (see also meme)—is one of the most fundamental concepts of human identity, as well as one of its oldest technologies. It is a process of narrating and making sense of experience, of storage and recovery, at both individual and collective levels. While computer “memory” (itself an expansive category of devices used to store and recall data or programs) is only one mnemonic technology among many, increasingly ubiquitous digital data storage has had a profound effect on contemporary practices of history and remembrance—and even on the way humans construct and perceive their identities. Discussions of a “modernity that forgets” or an “Internet that remembers” often risk conflating individual embodied memory, collective and cultural memory, historical records, storage media, and the archive (see also archive). The ways these categories intersect, conflict, and translate across one another have long served as sites of memory power and politics.
Memory is a polysemic term whose uses rest on the tensions between dueling categories in continual contestation. It, like the term identity, comprises the particular and the universal, the natural and the artificial, the individual and the collective, the internal and the external. Historically construed as an art, practiced as a technique in oral societies, retained in objects and sites, today memory both mediates and is mediated by new analogies between the brain and the digital records of the hard drive. Drawing on diverse sources of our modern imagination of memory, including science fiction, modern industry, and Western thought, this essay outlines several of these tensions—the paradoxical relation between remembrance and history, the apparent tension between technologically induced amnesia and hypermnesia, and the emergent gaps between mnemonic persistence and ephemerality that shape social structures of domination and control, among others—and address how digital memory becomes political in its intersections with individual and cultural memory.
The Paradox of Prosthesis
Conversations about the relationship between technology and memory stretch back to Plato’s injunction in the Phaedrus, in which he argued that the act of creating an archive (an argument committed to paper, or today, a file in a cabinet or an email on a server) is a fundamental act of forgetting. To “externalize memory” to storage media is to no longer commit it to cognitive memory. External records also reconstruct memory—not only extending our cognitive memories across time and space, but manipulating them as media prostheses have long done.
Representational practices thus occupy an uneasy place within our understandings of memory. Derrida pathologizes the psychic process of archiving as an endless reiteration akin to the death drive, which he calls “archive fever”: it marks the body violently, leaving only an imperfect trace of the original (1995). Memory studies, with strong roots in trauma theory and Freudian psychoanalysis, considers how memory can bridge violent ruptures between the present and the past. According to Caruth, the aporia, or internal contradiction, of trauma is the disjunction between the event and its understanding: “a history can only be grasped in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” (1996; see also event). Theories of socially mediated trauma, in which collective identities confront violent histories, underscore the fact that the mnemonic is also memetic: the act of commemoration, whether as a ritual process of storytelling or an intrusive flashback, indexically “relives” an inaccessible past. Memory is not just the stored past: it is an active process of retrieval, rearrangement, and revival that, like an archive, calls to mind that which it archives. This is not simply to acknowledge the obvious shakiness and suggestibility of human memory: it is rather to suggest that every act of remembering is unsettled by attempts to bind the past to the present, and to orient the present to a revisionist sense of the future.
Two parallel paradigms propose that memory media threaten to turn us all into science fiction prostheses of ourselves—understood either as a liberating cybernetic extension of self or as a dangerous, disembodied Other. The cybernetic imaginary, a fusion of bodies and machine memory, suggests a man-machine communication control system, perhaps gesturing toward a transcendent, utopian global consciousness. By contrast, the postmodern cyberpunk imaginary, a disembodiment of what was once essentially ours—our faculties of recall—into a distant other, points to a bleaker future in which memory media speed us toward a traumatic decline in human integrity and experience (Luckhurst 2008).
Both imaginaries ask: are the memories we experience actually ours? Our science-fictional imaginaries give us no reason to conclude either yes or no, leaving the answer no less certain than Deckard’s status as human or Replicant at the conclusion of Blade Runner. Unlike the hopeful hybridity of Haraway’s cyborg, the cyberpunk myth (epitomized by William Gibson’s foundational novels) separates the “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace from “meatspace.” This separation suggests that memory, once transferred to media outside of ourselves, is no longer ours. In fact, without memory, we appear no longer to be ourselves: memory scholars have described reminiscent modern forms of cultural amnesia and the loss of the art of memory in the rush of modern life. For example, Pierre Nora places history and memory in conflict, narrating the “conquest” of memory by an ever-accelerating historical record, a vast standing-reserve of documents piled skyscraper-high, burying the past in an act of archival “terrorism.” These fears of “neuromantic” amnesia confront the “otherness” of prosthetic memory (Landsberg 2004; Csicsery-Ronay 1988). In a Cartesian schism of virtualized mind and subjugated meat, the cyberpunk myth depicts the self as “the victim . . . helpless and sad, against the powers of exteriorized mind” (Csicsery-Ronay, 277). The dual image of the cyborg—at once an enhancement of our embodied minds as well as the collapse of self and collective—confronts modern human uncertainties about the relationship of our bodies to the technologies that extend them.
Oblivion and the Archive
Discussions of digital memory often begin with the “memex” (memory-index), Vannevar Bush’s 1943 vision of a permanent, electromechanical archive that would connect documents to each other by means of associative trails and annotations—much as hyperlinks do online today. Bush changed his position about whether memex documents should be permanent: while in his famous proposal all records are fixed, in his unpublished “Memex II” he stresses the need for “a readily alterable record” whose entries can be rewritten or deleted. This section outlines this continuum of records in light of digital memory media.
“Who controls the past controls the future,” George Orwell famously remarked in 1984, and “who controls the present controls the past.” Alterability invites revisionism, whose purest incarnation is the infinitely alterable “memory hole” of 1984’s dystopian society: an omnivorous control technology into which inconvenient documents are deposited and made to disappear or reappear at will, in the service of an official historical narrative. Specters of genocide and violence haunt us, imploring that we “never forget” even as the same imperative compels those who have suffered most to relive their traumatic pasts. Avishai Margalit calls for an “ethics of memory” that ensures descendants of genocidal trauma are not shackled to the ritual duty to commemorate without reflection (2002). His concerns echo Plato’s condemnation of writing: that the historical text can only repeat its “one unvarying answer” to future questioners. Lacking the fluidity of conversation, a fixed record cannot evolve or learn; an alterable record, by contrast, offers hope for redemption, regeneration, and reconciliation in the possibility of radical change that “escapes” the past by rewriting it. Yet such historical revisions invariably reflect present-day values: both matters of public deliberation and knowledge production rehearse the ways individuals and collectives continually rewrite and resist rewriting our records of the past.
The question of how societies remember invites further questions: how and what do we archive? Which actors access and use data to construct cultural narratives? Jeffrey Rosen and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argue for the “virtue” of forgetting as a rearguard defense against the threat of what they call permanent “comprehensive memory”: “all citizens face the difficulty of escaping their past now that the Internet records everything and forgets nothing” (Mayer-Schönberger 2009; Rosen 2010). The persistent myth that “everything is recorded” online, however, fails to acknowledge its many actual “memory holes”—and, moreover, obscures the pressing questions of what is missing from the archive, and why. At the same time, they raise vital concerns about the effects of digital media on memory at the cultural and institutional levels: an expansion of surveillance and mass acquisition of data about individuals; a shift toward technological norms that, by default, record and retain such data; search engines that reveal individual data to the expert few or the trolling mobs; and the diminishment of the individual’s ability to know or influence how those data are collected and used. According to Rosen and Mayer-Schönberger, digital archives that capture both imperfectly and ubiquitously our past preferences and actions compel legal protection of the faculty to forget—or, as in recent European contexts, the “right to be forgotten.” Mayer-Schönberger, for example, proposes “expiration dates” on some types of archival data as a defensive maneuver against the perceived erosion of privacy and autonomy.
In fiction and real-life imagination alike, the search for perfect access to the past threatens to eradicate present privacy. In Asimov’s allegory “The Dead Past,” “comprehensive memory” and a “temporal panopticon” appear inseparable: a fictional “chronoscope,” built for looking into the past, accidentally ends present autonomy to act without surveillance. Asimov writes: “The dead past is just another name for the living present. What if you focus the chronoscope in the past of one-hundredth of a second ago? Aren’t you watching the present?” In Europe, le droit à l’oubli—the “right of oblivion”—signals our modern belief that past deeds and the present day can be kept separate through limitation of our memory media’s chronoscopic creep. In contradistinction to the often hopeful view of representation in archival records (“going down in history”) as an elixir of immortality, here the right to be forgotten ensures a fresh start—the chance to erase and escape traumatic elements of one’s past.
Persistence, Ephemerality, and Power
In practice, neither imaginative extreme reflects technological fact: digital memory today is neither comprehensive nor permanent. “The World Wide Web still is not a library,” concludes Wallace Koehler after conducting a longitudinal study of the “half-life” of online documents—and it is certainly not the universal informational repository imagined by the memex (2004). “Link rot” (hyperlinks whose destination pages are no longer available) introduces significant decay into the Internet’s associative hypertext trails; “bit rot” and “data rot” similarly reveal that software degenerates as it accumulates naturally occurring errors on fragile hard disks and drives (digital memory has yet to stand the test of time); website providers can go out of business, causing thousands of pages to disappear overnight. The comparatively unindexed recesses of the “dark internet” and the “deep web” remind us that contemporary curation of archival data is anything but complete, comprehensive, or static.
Much of the Internet’s content is still characterized by its practical ephemerality: the average thread on 4chan’s popular /b/ message board, for example, spends a mere five seconds on the first page, and five minutes on the site in total, before its content vanishes (Bernstein et al. 2011). “Ephemeral technologies” like Snapchat, which delete information shortly after its receipt, implement forgetting, not remembering, as their digital default. While this inbuilt impermanence can be defeated by a “hack” as simple as a screenshot, the lack of a persistent, searchable digital data archive in such ephemeral platforms demonstrates how some new social norms favor records designed to be fleeting.
The temporal gaps and untraceable depths that characterize our memory media intensify rather than diminish the need for critical scrutiny of historical and archival practices. Our archives are curated, our histories continually constructed, and our traces of events incomplete. Individuals and institutions enjoy asymmetrical levels of control over their ability to access, analyze, and interpret information flows. These realities render David Brin’s “transparent society,” in which individuals and organizations have equal access to each other’s data, unrealizable: in “postulat[ing] the end of privacy,” contend Bossewitch and Sinnreich, “[the transparent society] fails to adequately account for the differential access to analytic processing power available to different individuals and organizations in making sense—and use—of this data” (2013).
Such power differentials shape archival lacunae. As Susan Brison argues, “As a society, we live with the unbearable by pressuring those who have been traumatized to forget and by rejecting the testimonies of those who are forced by fate to remember” (1996). Institutional power dynamics further inform who can seek and find reparation and forgiveness, who enjoys the hidden privileges of memory gaps, and who suffers the unbearable memories of others. As long as we do not live in a symmetrically transparent utopia, crucial concerns about selective cultural amnesia, surveillance, and power will press upon us: who controls the archives, the official histories that modulate collective memory? Who surveys the past, who is surveyed, and who can evade surveillance? How is information from the archive recalled, re-presented, recontextualized, and revised into new narratives about the past? Under what conditions are such narratives emancipatory or deceptive?
Conclusion: Memory as Surrogate or Symbiosis?
Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. (“What else could it be?”) I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.
—John R. Searle, Minds, Brains and Science
The way we conceive of natural symbol systems depends to a large degree on the computational metaphors we use to understand them, and machine learning suggests an understanding of symbolic thought that is very different to traditional views. . . . Our analysis of [predictive, probabilistic symbolic communication] arose out of the idea that the mind can be modeled as a kind of learning machine.
—Michael Ramscar, “Computing Machinery and Understanding”
No memory technology is immune to the influence of its own history (Kalnikaitė and Whittaker 2007); even history itself arises out of the development of the medium of writing. All memory is both mediated and historically contingent. Nonetheless, we can conclude this necessarily speculative framework for thinking about memory in the modern age with a few perennial and pressing questions: Whose are our memories? Do memory media embody or displace our imagined “selves”? Does embodied memory lead to cultural symbiosis, as Plato suggested, while prosthetic memory leads to a technological surrogacy in which external actors and archives deputize the incomplete reinvention of our identities—and how do we construct and maintain distinctions between the two?
As Searle illustrates, our metaphors for that seat of memory, the mind, have historically modeled cognition as a pneumatic system, a clockwork automaton, a helmsman steering a ship, an enchanted mechanical loom; today, we breezily compare the mind to a search engine, algorithmically retrieving stored data from a disorganized network, “learning” from each new search of its archive. As we employ this new media metaphor of memory and use it to reimagine both our individual and our collective identities, we also derive meaning from the mind-metaphors of past eras, and the politics and poetics of their memories preserved. Contemporary “cloud computing” extends cyberpunk notions of disembodied mind into the present day, while proliferating augmented- and virtual-reality technologies reinvigorate hopes and fears about the potential of the cyborg to emancipate or dehumanize. While these old concerns accompany every new paradigm, they yet remain relevant: digitally reconstructed memory and forgetting continue to exist in a state of paradox and plurality, inviting continued conversation about our archives, our histories, and ourselves.
New mnemonic technologies revitalize timeless questions about the contradictory nature of memory—constantly reconstructing the past while prospecting potential futures, in acts as simple as reading old letters from a friend or writing a shopping list—and resurrect familiar specters as well. But as individuals and corporations alike increasingly seek out professional reputation management services to influence their archival afterimages (at least, those who can afford to do so), and the European Court of Justice navigates the tension between privacy and free expression implicated in a (limited) “right to be forgotten” from the index of search engines, these questions and anxieties gain urgency and force. By tracing prevalent themes of information control, surveillance, and power against the background of prosthetic memory, this keyword comes to represent more than either synapses or hard disks—far from signaling either the end of memory or the end of forgetting, our shifting metaphors for memory and mind represent the complex and multivalent influence of the present upon the future and past.
See in this volume: archive, cloud, community, event, forum, meme, mirror, prototype, surrogate
See in Williams: alienation, bureaucracy, civilization, collective, consensus, conventional, dialectic, experience, history, interest, media, modern, representative, society, tradition
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