As those mysterious beings in ancient tales rise from the ocean’s bed invested with seaweed, so [your innermost thought] now rises from the sea of remembrance, interwoven with memories.
—Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Vol. I
At this late point in an increasingly demanding project we need to perform our own act of anamnesis lest amnesia set in. We have come a long way from the moment of departure in chapter 1—when brief, straightforward analyses of a few first-hand experiences of remembering sufficed to get things underway. We have come a long way, too, from the self-assurance that accompanied the application of an intentionalist model of mind to memory, not to mention the comparative ease of picking out conspicuous eidetic traits of remembering. Since then, matters have become considerably more complex. We have had to confront the many ways in which we remember in media vita, in the very thick of things. This is why we undertook a trajectory in Part Two that drew us not just into the past world of the remembered but decisively into the life-world of the rememberer. To take such memorial phenomena as reminding or recognizing seriously is to be thrust into the particularities of the perceptual world—just as reflection on the nature of reminiscing lands us squarely in the domain of the communal and the discursive. Still more dramatically, we found ourselves caught up in Part Three in circumstances of growing difficulty and diversity as we explored the roles of body and place in remembering, reaching a climax in a consideration of commemorating that had to account for such disparate factors as text, ritual, and intrapsychic identification. By the end of chapter 10, a situation had been reached in which any pretense of providing a merely formal treatment, especially as measured in the classical phenomenological terms with which the book commenced, had to be given up. At that point, “ecstasy” (i.e., literally “standing outside” oneself) had become just as constitutive as anything “encompassing” (i.e., being surrounded in a comfortably comprehensive way).
As it stands, the situation edges on the entropic. Excess and unbalance seem to have replaced the equipoise attained by the end of Part One. Before things get out of hand altogether, we need to re-member remembering; we must put the pieces back together again. These pieces have become not merely numerous—so far, at least twelve major forms of remembering have been identified,1 along with many minor modes—but difficult to assimilate to each other. The danger is only partly that of ending with a static tableau, a mere listing, of prominent features. This is a danger that inheres in any descriptive enterprise, including the present one. Of graver consequence is the danger of incoherence itself—that the forms and structures discussed in the course of our investigations do not cohere with each other, that the pieces do not fit together. What does reminding share with body memory? How does recognition relate to commemoration? Where do place memory and reminiscing become contiguous?
In asking such questions, I am not seeking for a new set of universal traits held in common by the variety of phenomena scrutinized in this book. To seek such traits would be to attempt yet another eidetic analysis, this time with respect to the results of the book as a whole. Nor is it a question of pursuing in detail the intricate interrelations between particular forms of remembering. Fascinating as these interrelations might prove to be—think only of the subtle interplay that arises between recognition and habitual body memory—they are beyond the scope of the present project. Let me attempt instead to remember where we have been, By this I mean a literal re-membering of the course we have taken, viewing it in terms of what an Aristotelian might label a “unity by analogy.”2 By such unity is not meant a strict synthesis, but a way in which the various parts of the analysis may be seen to cohere with one another in the end.
We may take as a clue—a crucial Leitfaden—the observation that as this book has progressed from Part to Part, and even from chapter to chapter, there has been a noticeably deepening rooting of remembering in what could be called the “native soil” of its own enactment. But this rooting has not meant—as we might expect it to mean—an engulfment of memory, its dissolution in particular contents or contexts. Even in the most engaged moments—say, in the very midst of an Ndembu initiation ceremony—remembering retains its identity as a recognizably memorial event. Such self-persistence is one aspect of what I shall designate as memory’s “autonomy.” But more than autonomy is involved in the distinctive self-identity possessed by remembering in its various forms. These forms exhibit in differing degrees a trait which can be called “thickness.” It is this trait, above all, that offers a guiding thread at this concluding point.
Already, in the opening paragraph just above, I said that in the course of this book we had been thrust into “the very thick of things.” This phrase points to the single most inclusive movement in which earlier chapters have been engaged. This is a movement of progressive thickening. The progress of this movement has its own immanent logic. What may have seemed naive or disingenuous about the first steps undertaken in Part One resulted less from an attempt at simplification than from an effort to consider those features of remembering that are diaphanous by nature—transparently given, as only mind can be to itself. As a consequence, the picture of remembering that emerged, based as it was on an intentionalist paradigm, shared much in common with the quite mentalistic portrait of imagination which I have presented elsewhere. Remembering, like imagining, can be depicted as a lambent, evanescent mode of mentation. At once fragile and pellucid, self-aware and self-transcending, memory seen in this light is modeled on a representationalist view of mind—a view controlled by a concern with clarity of insight and with detachment from the surrounding world.
It is just such clarity and detachment that come into question when remembering is considered apart from the prismatic looking-glass furnished by mentalism. As soon as we look beyond the glass—and in the actual experience of remembering we always do, even when we think we are still confined within it—we encounter an entire circumambient world, filled with such concreta as instruments and words, perceived objects and other people. In Part Two, I began to take account of such critical “intermediaries” by considering ways in which remembering links up concretely with the world of specific tasks, perceptual configurations, and forms of social life. The role of adumbrative signs in reminding, for example, was seen to tie us to instrumental complexes wherein basic actions are accomplished. So too the communal-discursive aspect of reminiscing serves to mediate between the privacy of auto-reminiscence and full-scale reminiscing in public. And the suffusion that is operative in recognition is characteristic not just of our own remembering minds but of the obdurate objects we confront routinely in the everyday world of work and leisure. In singling out these phenomena, we were acknowledging the interpenetration of remembering into the world around us and of this world itself into our remembering. Thanks to this mutual contamination, each could be said to “thicken” the other in the process.
The thickening deepened in Part Three. There, we looked carefully into forms of remembering that draw directly, and not just through intermediaries, on our immersion in the life-world. What could be more intimately connected with the life-world than our own body as it remembers itself? Thanks to its powers of habituation and orientation, this same body moves us resolutely into the places that make up the familiar landscape of our lives. The body-place Gestaltkreis is itself a basic unit—perhaps the basic unit—of human being-in-the-world. Through the stabilized implacement it makes possible, we truly enter into the thick of things, and thus into their enriched memory as well. When still other modes of thickening are in play—thickenings via text, or ritual, or the psychical incorporation of others—we find a dense situation indeed: thickening on thickening, thickening of thickening. This is precisely what we discover in commemoration, which represents an extreme in this very respect. In its multi-layered translucency, it stands as an antipode of recollection’s self-transparency and monoscenic dimensionality.
Other indications of the thickening of memory include the adverbial structures of throughness, aroundness, and withness that were delineated in the Coda to Part Three. Each of these structures represents a special manner of memory’s insertion into a particular life-world. We realize some of our most significant remembering by means of these structures: e.g., enacting bodily skills, or remembering having been in certain places. Perhaps most strikingly, the inherent solipsism of recollecting, that is, recalling the past to myself and by myself, gives way to the collectivism of commemoration, in which the density of group awareness and interaction figures prominently. Furthermore, the participation whose prototype is found in commemoration is also at work in body memory and place memory, and in all three cases the divisive dualisms of body/mind, self/other, and past/present are suspended—in contradistinction to recollection, which thrives on these very dualisms. The suspension itself is a matter of thickening, of allowing for increased coalescence of otherwise disjunctive terms.
Although I have been drawing thus far mainly on the metaphorical resonances of the word “thick” in the phrase “thick autonomy”—as is most evident in my talk of memorial “thickening” of several kinds—the word has a determinate semantic content. For “thick” as it applies to matters of memory means centrally: possessing a depth not easily penetrable by the direct light of consciousness (most obviously in the case of obdurate body memories but also in circumstances of reminding and recognizing, reminiscing and commemorating); resistant to conceptual understanding (for example, when I cannot understand why a given memory obsesses me so much); sedimented in layers (as occurs when an entire set of memories clusters around a particular place); and having “historical depth” (i.e., when my memories bear on the same thing as those of a preceding generation through our sharing the same symbolic nexus). Also invoked in calling memories “thick” are such things as a specific temporal density (e.g., “perdurance” as this was discussed in chapter 10); a concentrated emotional significance, ranging from feelings of regret or nostalgia to the sheer pleasure of recognizing a long-absent friend; a coarsely textured surface (i.e., as a result of the overlay of successive rememberings); a closely packed or “thickset” format (e.g., filled up with detail); an intimate familiarity in content (as is connoted in the phrase “as thick as thieves”); a compression of objects or events which Freud would label “condensation” in the instance of dreams; and an indistinct presentation (as is true of almost all except “eidetic” memories). As this group of primary and secondary meanings suggests, the semantic scope of “thick” is practically co-extensive with the range of remembering itself. It follows that to remember at all is to connect up with the past in a manner that can be described as thick in one or more of the senses just mentioned. It is to become enmeshed in the thicket of the past—a past which yields itself to remembering only across densely presented (and often multiply mediated) modes of display.
In the very midst of these diverse modes of memorial thickening we can detect an autonomous action of remembering at work. In fact, I am more, not less, autonomous when I remember in place and about place, in and with my body, in and through others. The range as well as the subtlety of my remembering is enhanced as I enter more fully into my memorial in-der-Welt-Sein. The same is true of the mnemonic modes studied in Part Two. By reminding myself and others, I am a more autonomous agent in the world, less dependent on the whims of others or on the vagaries of circumstance. Indeed, I would scarcely be an autonomous being if I could not recognize others in the first place; and my reminiscing with them consolidates social bonds that empower me in various ways. At every step, an increased density goes hand in hand with an undiminished autonomy. Without this autonomy, the density might be suffocating. But we do not yet know in what such autonomy consists.
The thick autonomy of memory exists in relation to what we might call the factor of the “unresolved remainder.” Certain human activities are essentially remainderless. They merely take place—and exhaust themselves in their occurrence without leaving any significant residue. Imagining is often a case in point, especially when it arises gratuitously and disappears without leaving a trace. Given imagination’s proclivity for the purely possible, it is not surprising that many acts of imagining—e.g., those that we would describe as mere “passing” reveries—do not precipitate themselves into our subsequent life in any lasting way. They “go their own way.” What I have called their “thin autonomy” is an expression of this etherealizing, evaporating tendency. It is hardly surprising, either, that one would tend to conceive such thin autonomy in resolutely mentalistic terms. And it is also not surprising that my own eidetic-cum-intentional analysis of imagination could claim completeness, if not exhaustiveness.3 In the domain of imagining, the question of the unresolved remainder, the restance in Derrida’s term, is not of pressing concern. When imagining does move into matters of weight and force (as happens in “active imagination” in Jungian analysis), it moves with more import and yields a more lasting sedimentation. Remembering, in contrast, abides in these same matters as if they constituted its original habitat: it dwells like a native in the realm of remainders. If imaginative autonomy possesses the gossamerlike quality of the wings of Icarus, rising sunward in dry cerulean freedom, any autonomy to which memory may aspire must, like Antaeus, make continued contact with the dense earth of recalcitrant experience.
This does not mean, however, that remembering is anything like a uniform phenomenon. The forms of remembering considered in Part One exhibited minimal density in their operation and so tended to leave very little by way of residue. Such structures as the “mnemonic presentation,” the “memory-frame,” even the “aura” encircling an enframed presentation: all of these imply that remembering consists in a play of surfaces or that it is merely epiphenomenal, having little depth and leaving no important remainder. Similarly, such neatly paired eidetic traits as were explored in chapter 2—i.e., search/display, encapsulment/expansion, and persistence/pastness—suggest that memory can be categorized and condensed into formal patterns without significant residua. The intentionalist account given in chapters 3 and 4 revealed much the same commitment (or more exactly, pre-commitment) to a binary structuring of the phenomenon—as if it could be exhaustively examined in terms of its act and object phases. The combined results of Part One, constituting only a first approach, need not be questioned at their own level. But we cannot help but wonder whether there was not already in play an uncaptured remainder to which a formalistic analysis is not fully sensitive.
It was, of course, much this same kind of concern that led Heidegger to depart from Husserl’s noetico-noematic conception of mind with its stress on act-intentionality and to turn to being-in-the-world as a realm in which phenomenology could deal more adequately with all that fell outside the lucidity of pure consciousness—all that remained over after an intentional analysis of such consciousness had been accomplished. Inspired in part by Heidegger’s example, Part Two of this book turned to the unexamined residues which Part One, in its Husserlian zeal, had left out of consideration. Whether in the form of the perceptual particulars that provide the context for recognizing, the semiotic dimensions of reminding, or the role of concrete discourse in reminiscing, we confronted things that would no longer submit to the austerely formal treatment that had been possible in the opening chapters of this book. With this move beyond the eidetic and the intentional, we moved not so much beyond phenomenology as into some of its deeper reaches.
In Part Three we entered into still deeper domains. Much as Merleau-Ponty, in the wake of Heidegger, taught us to immerse ourselves in a single aspect of being-in-the-world—in his case, that of the lived body—so we took up three ways in which mnemonic remainders exist in depth. One of these is body memory, itself, and its decidedly ingrained character was seen to exhibit a restance resistant to classical or modern categorizations. But we also discovered comparable resistances in the case of place memory and commemoration. Neither unsited landscape features, such as meandering pathways, nor the unplanned movements of rituals can be absorbed without remainder into maps or prescriptions for ceremonial order; and yet precisely as resistant to such modes of organization, these features and movements are crucial for the remembrance of place and of events of collective significance. Not only is there a close affinity between remembering and remaindering in these cases; the thick texture of memory itself is seen in bas-relief.
Freud liked to cite Virgil’s oracular pronouncement: Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo, “if I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Lower Regions.”4 Not altogether unlike Freud, we have turned away from the Higher Powers of mind so as to move into the Lower Regions of body, place, and commemoration—regions where the waters of Acheron, winding circuitously within the memorial underworld of unredeemed remainders, run as thick as they run deep.
Let us grant the remarkable and ever-growing density of memorial phenomena as we descend into the lower depths of remembering. In these depths much has remained unexplored, indeed often unsuspected, in previous accounts. But to acknowledge the thickening of memory, its dark underside, is not the same thing as to affirm its autonomy. In fact, it might seem that autonomy is less and less likely to be found as we move into the full density of the phenomenon. At least this would be so in any classical conception of autonomy as self-controlled and self-regulated action.5 The more we discover how immersed memory is in our lives—and our lives in it—the less we may be inclined to consider it as either a creature or a creator of autonomous action.
If autonomy appears to be an inappropriate designation at this darkened end of the memorial spectrum, it seems just as inapt at the other end, where luminosity prevails. I am thinking specifically of secondary memory in its canonical form as the visualized representation of an episode or scene. Here all is, or should be, clarity and light: the better the memory, i.e., the more “accurate” it is, the more it ought to resemble the original scene as first experienced. The ideal of what Husserl calls “clarification” (Klärung) is pertinent and frequently invoked: “let’s get clear about this memory” we say in this context.6 With the language of illumination goes the idea of transparency; the most completely clarified secondary memory would represent the past so diaphanously that it would rise before us without any of the distorting effects of an interposed medium such as a text or a bodily action. The absence of any such medium is what allows for the unburdened, the self-illumined character of the situation. We rejoin Kundera at this point: “The absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being.”7
Unbearable as the lightness of being may be when regarded from a metaphysical standpoint, it is highly prized in the realm of mind—especially when the mind is considered capable of reproducing the past by recollecting it in secondary memory. Given the criteria of accuracy and transparency, the aim of such remembering can only be to picture the past as exactly as possible. What does the “secondary” of secondary memory—and its German analogue, the wieder (“again”) of Wiedererinnerung—mean except precisely to offer a reprise, a repetition, a second presentation, a re-presentation, of a past event that has elapsed in its first form of appearance? The more we press in this direction, the closer we come to an ideal of pictoriality that deserves to be called “photographic.” The photograph suggests itself all too naturally as a paradigm of what recollective remembering ought to be in its fullest realization. “Picture your memories” is a standard statement in Kodak advertising. We are also reminded of the high value placed in our culture on a “photographic memory,” as rare as it is impressive. The ancient ars memorativa, as we have seen, called for the use of explicit and detailed visual imagery. Even in ordinary procedures of memorizing the exact picturing of items is consistently prized and encouraged.
The photographic paradigm as applied to memory is a revealing instance of what I called the “passivist” tradition in the Introduction. Passivism, it will be recalled, is the view that all memories of necessity repeat the past in a strictly replicative manner. The contribution of the remembering subject, according to this view, is nugatory—if it is not outright distortive or destructive. From here it is but a short step to the claim that memories are (or should be) copies of past events and objects. Memories should take the form of images that are isomorphic with what they are images of. Aristotle, as we know, was the first to formulate explicitly the claim that remembering is “the having of an image regarded as a copy of that of which it is an image.”8 The claim persists in Russell’s insistence on the pictographic status of “visual memory-images,” which have an “analogy of structure” with their origins.9 Indeed, the hold of passivism is as widespread as it is tenacious, as is evident in a continuing adherence to the idea that memory traces are “structural analogues” of remembered experiences.10
The photographic ideal of a purely pictorial memory brings the tradition of passivism to an extreme point. For it suggests that the reproduction of the past at work in secondary memory or recollection is sheerly mechanical in operation. This is an even more extreme conception than is found in the neurophy-siological view of engrams—a view which at least maintains the idea of an organic basis of replication. The crucial point for our purposes is that to the extent that pictoriality of a quasi-photographic sort becomes a paradigm for recollection, no significant sense of autonomy can attach to such memory. For a photograph is nothing other than the determinate effect of a particular efficient cause: such is its fate as a merely mechanical process. As a purely physical product, it has zero autonomy even when “autonomy” is understood in the most constricted sense. A photograph cannot control or regulate itself; it is entirely dependent on external conditions (i.e., the scene to be photographed, the photographer, the physical camera itself). If recollection is indeed a matter of depicting the past in a crisp, visualized format, a format modeled on that of photographic likeness, it will be deprived of any effective autonomy of its own.
In fact, it will lack even the thin autonomy that can be attributed to imagination in its freest movements. In its “verticalizing” capacity, imaginative autonomy is guided by the pursuit of pure possibilities.11 No such pursuit, and therefore no such autonomy, is possible in a circumstance in which nothing but the strict replication of settled actualities is at stake. For when recollection takes place in the form of an exact image—that is, with a pictoriality that is isomorphic with the scene remembered—the image employed is wholly dependent on the scene it depicts. No autonomous play, much less any free play, is possible in such a closely conditioned setting.12
It must be emphasized, however, that any such situation of zero autonomy is itself a limiting case. It conveys what would obtain if recollection were indeed strictly modeled on the prototype of the photograph. The paradox it presents—the fact that its being disburdened of a distorting medium brings with it the burden of having no autonomy of its own—need not detain us if, in fact, the enactment of recollection rarely attains anything like the photographic ideal but only, at most, a lame approximation to it. And this latter is indeed often the case. Was my memory of vacationing at Yosemite painstakingly pictographic in character? Far from it. Not only were many crucial details lacking—details bearing on such principal matters as time, place, even the sequence of events—but large parts of my recollection were altogether indistinct (e.g., as to where my family ate, the spot we stayed in overnight, the route to the falls). So pictorially imperfect was the memory as a whole that I even called on an actual photograph as an aide-mémoire. My secondary memory itself invoked this photograph as a valuable supplementary object, yet this invocation did not mean that my own act of remembering was quasi-photographic in status.
The truth of the matter is that recollective memory, however much it may strain after an ideal of purely pictorial replication, only rarely achieves this ideal in practice and, still more tellingly, just as rarely considers the actualization of this ideal to be required for successful remembering. My recollection of the Yosemite visit, for all its obvious shortcomings, was perfectly satisfactory for my purposes—for my personal purposes in remembering it spontaneously and even for my didactic purposes in presenting it as an initial example in this book. What complicates matters is not the experience of recollecting itself but the charged expectations that are laid on it—expectations that arise from a tendentious theoretical ideal of clarity and exactitude.
We can be still more positive in our assessment of secondary memory. Not only is most recollecting not purely passive—as it comes to be considered when it is analogized to engrams and especially to photographs—but it contains important elements of activism. These elements include retrospective interpolations, self-interpretations, factors of search-within-memory (as when I ask myself “what must have happened next?”), the heuristic use of imagery or words (i.e., so as to elicit a spontaneous recollection), and even the deliberate use of another quite different recollection to illuminate a currently obscure recollection. In all of these ways I am being anything but passive, much less mechanical. I am not merely picturing my memories; I am bringing them forth in a concerted, and often a quite constructive, manner. Even reproduction, therefore, has a productive aspect. Collection is at work in recollection, and there is something “primary” in secondary memory—something attributable to my own efforts.
This is not to say that such an analysis of recollection would confirm Piaget’s position of extreme activism, whereby the schematizing activity of the recollector is given the lion’s share of the credit for what is recollected.13 But it would certainly rule out the opposite extreme of abject passivism as it is found in Aristotle or Russell—and in many kindred empiricists. In fact, it would suggest that the situation is a mixed one, in which active and passive elements vie with one another in the generation of any given recollection. In this situation, passivism serves to remind us that memory is indeed “of the past”;14 it bears on it and borrows from it. This means that memory must be true to the past in certain basic respects. (These will be examined below in section VI.) But mimicry of the past is not required for remembering to occur: to remember is not to pantomime (literally, to “imitate all”), much less to copy something pre-existent. For one can very well have in mind—or enact in the lived body—a simulacrum of the past without remembering that past at all: as in highly repetitive behavior (e.g., a phobia whose origin we have forgotten), or in a memory image so isolated from an appropriate identifying context as to lose its memorial power (as when an unidentified tune haunts us). Just here passivism reaches the limit of its own truth.
In contrast, activism is right to remind us of the positive contributions of the rememberer. The mind of this person—quite apart from his or her bodily actions, implacement, and interpersonal relations—makes a very real difference, not only in how things are remembered but even in precisely what is remembered on a given occasion. Here we observe a formative structuring of the remembered in its cognitive, affective, social, and still other aspects. Think merely of all the circumstances in which “believing makes it so”: as often occurs in the notoriously dubious testimony of witnesses to automobile accidents. But this is not to say that memories literally create the past by bringing it into being.15 That thesis lies at the limit of activism, and we need to avoid it as decisively as the corresponding extremity of passivism, while preserving what is permanently insightful in both positions.
What has all this invocation of activism and passivism to do with the issue of autonomy? A great deal indeed. Despite our propensity for subjecting recollection to the passivist paradigm of the photograph, recollecting itself is hardly an unactive affair. It models the past rather than merely remodeling it, and to be able to do this is to be autonomous in a way that is not just “thin,” tempting as it may be to apply this term to it. Recollecting no more pursues pure possibilities than does the most engaged body memory. It deals with past actualities, which it transforms rather than simply transmits. The transformative work of recollection belongs to a complex circumstance in which effort and resistance, recasting and re-viewing, are all in play. The existence of such complexity means that any criterion of immediate transparency, when not rejected altogether, will need to be questioned. So too will any notion of sheer passivity. It would be better to speak with Husserl of a “passivity in activity” that brings with it its own complexity of operation.16
The autonomy of recollection is nevertheless much less dense than that displayed in many other forms of remembering. In such forms there is a more considerable thickening to be observed, one that takes place in the very midst of autonomous actions. No longer is the thickness merely a function of interventions on the part of the rememberer. The medium of remembering comes into prominence as the seeming transparency of recollecting gives way to translucency. The role of context, which is often kept at a decided distance in recollection, becomes indispensable and is acknowledged as such—above all, when attention is given to the factor of place. Perception and language loom large—rendering the mnemonic presentation anything but purely pictorial—as do entire communities of co-rememberers. As the world of the rememberer is brought bodily into his or her remembering, this remembering itself is thickened with all that has remained over, and was unaccounted for, on the regulative ideal of a purely pictorial recollection.
Remembering, rendered ever thicker in these ways and others, is no less autonomous for becoming so intertwined with the circumambient world. In addition to passivism, the other threat to memorial autonomy is memory’s own increasing thickness, its immersion in the remembering/remembered world. Nevertheless, remembering stays autonomous in the thick of things. Not only is its autonomy uncompromised by its immersion: it is even enhanced and strengthened. How can this be?
Let us consider certain indications laid down in the history of language. There we find that the very etymology of the word “memory” already points toward its thick autonomy. As this etymology is extraordinarily diverse and rich—it merits one of the most detailed entries in Eric Partridge’s Origins— I shall restrict consideration to three particularly pertinent cases in point.
MOURNING
Memor, Latin for “mindful,” and the Old English murnan, “to grieve,” are both traceable to the Sanskrit smáratt, “he remembers.”17 This is not entirely surprising, since we realized in the last chapter that mourning, as a process of intrapsychic memorialization, is itself a form of commemoration. “Commemoration,” as we also learned, originally meant an intensified remembering.18 One way to intensify something is to give it a thicker consistency so as to help it to last or remain more substantively. Such thickening is surely the point of any memorialization, whether it be ceremonial, sculptural, scriptural, or psychical. Every kind of commemoration can be considered an effort to create a lasting “remanence” for what we wish to honor in memory—where “remanence” signifies a perduring remainder or residuum (as in the literally thick stone of war memorials or grave markers). Mourning effects such remanence within the psychical sphere; and it is notable that it is accomplished slowly. In the context of mourning, we are especially prone to say that “the old dies hard,” implying the thickness of time and history. Mourning is also concerned with endings—with deaths or absences that linger like ghosts or revenants to haunt us. These ghostly endings are “remanents,” that which is “left behind, remaining, when the rest is removed, used, done, etc.”19 But it is precisely because mourning is a slowly enacted process of working-through that it manages to transform such remanents/revenants into genuine remnants: exorcizing the ghosts of their external haunting power and aiding us in identifying with what is left. In this way, internal presences are moulded from the thick memorial magma of the mourning process. The moment of transfiguration is the moment of autonomy, since it lends new (psychical) life to the departed persons. It is an autonomy that is achieved not despite, or beyond, the memorial magma but in and through this thickened matter itself. Hence, the prolonged grieving, often extending over many years; hence also, a frequent failure to see the process through to its full ending.
CARING
Closely related to mourning is caring: how could I mourn for what is indifferent to me? Caring also implies remembering, that is to say, keeping the other person (or thing) in mind. Thus, it comes as a confirming fact to learn that “memory” is also cognate with the Greek mērimna, “care,” “solicitude,” “anxiety,” “sorrow.”20 Remembering is caring for what we remember—intensified, once more, in commemorating. Indeed, it can be loving as well, via minna: this way lies the heart-memory link. Moreover, both caring and loving take time; neither can occur instantaneously; both require the fullness of time. Yet neither, when fully enacted, becomes time’s fool: each represents a triumph within time, not a subordination to it. And in this “sweet victory” each is autonomous in its memorial action, realizing itself through the density of its immersions.
Care, anxiety, solicitude: these are strikingly Heideggerian terms, bespeaking enmeshment in being-in-the-world. Whereas imagining characteristically glides above and beyond such enmeshment—its thin autonomy signifying freedom from concern and solicitude21—remembering cannot help but engage us in Angst and Sorge along with their many affiliated states of mind. This is how the thick autonomy of remembering is experienced at the level of emotion and mood: as mermeros, “solicitous,” “caring,” “anxious.”22 Brooding is not far afield here, as we are reminded by mimeren, “to muse,” “brood” in Middle Dutch. In its pensive slowness, brooding is the cognitive counterpart of care and solicitude: to brood is to be painfully careful in thought. Brooding also belongs to the Heideggerian Weltbild, in which “the burdensome character of Dasein”23 is so prominent. In all of these closely related ways, the caring aspect of memory’s thick autonomy manifests its tethering action, its tendency to tie things down tenaciously rather than to release them.
DELAY
Delay is implicit in mourning and caring alike, both of which act in a patient and slow fashion. Mora is Latin for delay: stopping and pausing; hence moratorium and such words as Old Irish maraim, “I remain,” and Gaelic mair, “to last,” and mairneal, “dilatoriness.” All of these moratorial matters are deeply memorial in character, reflecting not merely the fact that remembering always takes place “after the fact” but more importantly that it is an essentially time-taking operation (whether the time at stake be the micro-seconds of primary memory or the epochal durability of Egyptian monuments). Indeed, many kinds of memory involve massive delaying tactics, that is, concerted efforts to delay time’s erosive force.24
The factor of delay is also found in one of memory’s most distinctive capacities: its “deferred action” or Nachträglichkeit. Freud introduced this notion in a letter to Fliess written in 1896:
I am working on the assumption that our psychical mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory-traces being subjected from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances—to a re-transcription (Umschrift).25
In other words, memories may gain a new psychical efficacy as a result of modifications introduced by evolving circumstances over time. Delay in time, instead of diminishing the force of a given memory, serves to increase this force—to give the memory “a new lease on life.” We encounter here the unsuspected power of belatedness: “the memory-trace is revised belatedly so as to adjust either to new experience or to a new vision of experience.”26 It is not just that new vision calls for re-vision but that the later vision is inherently stronger—more lasting, more forceful—than the first vision. Pausing strengthens; and the remainder of events, their true remanence, may become more powerful than the original events themselves.27
Memory’s delaying power constitutes in effect another critique of passivism, for which the power resides in the initial impressions and not in the memorial outcome. But it also calls into question any pure activism that would invite us to conceive the past as a manipulable, neutral matter without any form or life of its own. The delaying power points instead to a model in which the past provides the very depth of memory, yet is continually reshaped in the present. Rather than being a simple stockpile of dead actualities—an instance of what Heidegger would term “standing-reserve”28—the past “begins now and is always becoming.”29 In short, the past develops, thanks to the delaying action of remembering. Such development is abundantly apparent in the role of narration as re-shaping what we have experienced. As Janet makes clear in his notion of la conduite du récit, a narrative account reilluminates and reformulates the past in multiple ways.30 Any such après coup action in memory gestures toward a middle ground lying between the poles of activism and passivism: an in-between of past and present in which the brunt of the past, its very thickness, is supported and carried forward (often heavily re-vised) by an autonomous remembering in the present that is not the mere proxy of its own origins.
The slowness inherent in delay—and prominently present as well in mourning and caring—evokes what I called “ruminescence” earlier in this book. The fast action of imagination and alert thought gives way to a regime of slow digestion: of considerate ingestion and accrued assimilation. This is not only a temporal affair. The autonomy of remembering is all the thicker for having to deal as well with the spatial densities that populate body and place memories, where the slowness exhibits itself in ritardando movements through space. There, too, ruminescence is solicited as an emotional correlate of memory’s thick autonomy.
Thus far does language speak on the matter. The very etymons of “memory,” in their crisscrossing histories and slow growth, attest eloquently to the thick autonomy of remembering. Etymological dictionaries, after all, are themselves forms of public memory; “digests” of the genealogy of words and their meanings, they constitute a diachronie map of the memory of natural languages.31 But we are by no means restricted to the history of language in witnessing the work of memorial autonomy. Our lives are pervaded by this work, which refuses confinement to any single area of human experience. Nothing human is unmemonal—even if very little is immemorial! And if this is so, it will also be the case that everything human will be touched by the three aspects of memory’s thick autonomy which have just been identified: mourning, caring, and delaying.
To appreciate the pervasiveness of such autonomy, consider a seemingly unpromising instance: a modern wedding ceremony. Such a ceremony certainly has far more to do with beginnings than with endings, and in this respect contrasts graphically with the Eucharist or with funeral rites. Nevertheless, a closer look reveals other dimensions than merely “beginning a new life together.” To start with, any such beginning entails a leaving—hence an ending—whether this be in relation to one’s parents, a former marriage, friends, a part of the country, or one’s previous status as single. For this reason, mourning is by no means absent from weddings, even though it is typically suppressed or delimited; the ceremony itself, by its very formality, acts to forestall excessive displays of grief—e.g., on the part of the father who “gives away his daughter” in a public and pre-established manner. Any contemporary mourning tends to be left to the future—as is fitting, not only for reasons of propriety but in view of the prolonged process of mourning. The ceremony conspires with the process. Notice, further, that a wedding expressly celebrates caring, especially in the forms of cherishing and loving. Indeed, marriage is the very institutionalization of caring over time: “till death do us part.” The ceremony can even be considered the admonitory inculcation of Fürsorge or caringness of the marriage partners for each other. As a performative action, it calls for caring in a committing way that, it is hoped, will last indefinitely. In the face of such commitment, it is only to be expected that anxiety—closely related to care if language does not mislead us—will also arise and will even be quasi-institutionalized (“the nervous groom”). Just as marriage is a leave-taking and a matter of mourning, so it is equally an engagement in Mitsein, in a new being-together-in-the-world, and as such it involves anxious care.
Even beyond what has already been suggested, the role of delay is strikingly present. Rather than a mere instantaneous acknowledgment of affection between two people, a wedding ceremony acts to underscore the fact that the value of a given marriage will only be known in and through a considerable period of time. Its very gravity and solemnity point in this direction and set the tone. At the same time, the ceremony and the occasion themselves serve to lay down memories whose importance can be savored only in a nachträglich manner: they will be most effective precisely in their deferred action. The role of wedding gifts, and especially of wedding photographs, illustrates the power of deferred appreciation. Often barely noticed or considered banal at the time, such gifts and photographs can come to be increasingly cherished as time goes by. Photographs in particular seem to be conventionally taken largely with an eye to possibilities of future enjoyment. The memorability of the occasion is, as it were, displaced onto subsequent moments of ruminescent savoring. Through the medium of the formal photograph, the ceremonial moment becomes belated in respect to itself; it becomes what it will be seen to be; it becomes something which will lastingly come toward us.32 The exchange of rings and vows works in much the same manner. Binding by its very enactment, this ritual will nevertheless gain force only with time—that is, when lived out in new and often trying circumstances. It is evident that delay here links up closely with “perdurance.” A ceremony such as a wedding establishes memories that are meant to perdure—not just because they are encased in photographs or crystalized in gems, but because only as perduring will they gain that deferred efficacy that will render them sustaining and inspiring in the future to come.
It is only as thickly autonomous that remembering can figure in such an unlikely format as this, in which the emphasis falls upon the future. Or more exactly, upon a past on its way to becoming future in a certain present. Remembrance is not only now, but then . . . and then . . . and then. . . . The sequence of then’s indicates that it is not a question of achieving permanence—only memorials and monuments pretend to this—but of attaining a reliable and ongoing remanence. Or we could say that, thanks to its thick autonomy, remembering here remainders itself. The remainders do not consist in depositions laid down—as is assumed in theories preoccupied with leaving marks and traces in an unchanging material base—but in pathways that branch off ever more diversely into a multiple futurity. The belatedness, in other words, is not that of deferred events which have happened, but of expanding eventualities that might happen. As in marriage itself, the issue is less one of actuality (the actual ceremony, the actual guests, the actual vows, the actual gifts and photographs) than of virtuality: what all this will have become in the unchartable course of time (and in the vagaries of space).33
When the past is viewed as something simply actualized or settled, it is reduced to being an inert sedimentation, a mere residuum. It is just such a past that is regarded as acting upon the present by efficient causality, pushing this present into existence by its pre-formed and unchanging actuality. The notion of Nachträglichkeit has forewarned us of the insufficiency of this model, since the present (and the future!) can outdo its own causal origins in terms of effective force. But memorial autonomy is more than a matter of deferred effects: this is still to speak the language of causa efficiens even if by reversal of order. As Heidegger reminds us, the issue is that of human beings’ own distinctive way of putting this autonomy into practice: one “historizes out of [the] future on each occasion.”34 Such historizing happens not just once in a while (e.g., in moments of decision or resolve) but “on each occasion”—not only at weddings but in divorce proceedings, not only in buying clothes but in wearing them daily, not only in setting out to write a book like this one but in finishing it a decade later.
Here the thickness of memory’s autonomy consists in the way in which the past is carried continually forward in being remembered at different moments—indeed, even when it is momentarily forgotten or repressed. But if there were only such conveying actions, we might indeed be overwhelmed by the past in our present and succumb to the efficient causalism of the passivist model; for we could easily become stuck in the past, mired in its repetition. Yet we are not so mired—or need not be—if the carrying forward is anticipatory of a future toward which we are actively tending. To historize out of such a future is to realize a genuinely autonomous action, one that requires us to come to terms with the virtuality of the past itself. Rather than awaiting the future—e.g., by “expectation,” through which we make the future determinate beforehand, a form of inauthenticity35—we make it possible.
We make the future possible precisely by envisaging it in terms of the past we bear in the viscosity of the present, allowing its remanence to arise in an act of foreshadowing what might be. In contrast with the purely possible that is projected in imagining, however, “what might be” is here a function of what has been and thus of the thickness of the past as it comes to bear on the present and on the future. Hence we must modify Eliot’s formula: “What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.”36 Rather: what might be and what has been point to one end, which is the future as enlivened in the present. Only an activity capable of a remarkably compressed density could possess such an intimately interwoven temporality as this. As Lacan states:
What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, nor even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.37
It is precisely because the remembered past is neither “definite” nor “perfect”—is not to be forced onto the Procrustean bed of date and bare event—that a future of open fulfillment (and not of mere projection) becomes possible. And vice versa: an open future helps to keep the remembered past alive. Even “what I shall have been” is not to be confined to the future perfect tense in which it is formulated; as reflecting “what I am in the process of becoming,” it is anterior to its own perfection. At every point—“now” and “then” and “then” (where the “then” can be future as well as past in status)—the thick autonomy of remembering dismantles, by its own massive action, the temporal determinacy of the past.
Since the same deconstructive process is at work in matters of space—as we have observed in chapter 9, where “site” gave way to “place” in being remembered—we begin to discover the larger implications of memorial autonomy. This autonomy acts to undo the stranglehold of the determinate wherever this arises in time or space. The determinate is a perfectly appropriate object of thought—e.g., in the guise of the necessary—but it cannot be regarded as having supreme value even in perceiving, where internal and external horizons introduce an essential indeterminacy. In imagining and remembering it is of distinctly dubious value. Whereas to imagine is to engage in the indeterminate as such—indeterminacy is the close counterpart of pure possibility38—to remember is to commit oneself to an ever-thickening admixture of the determinate (i.e., as actual) and the indeterminate (as virtual). Remembering cannot do without reference to the actual—whether straightforwardly in allusion to the past, or indirectly via perception—but it always manages to exceed any simple actualism of experience. Thanks to the bivalent orientation of its own autonomous action, it is always on the move: away from what was and has been and toward what is now becoming via-à-vis a still-to-be determined futurity. Memory moves us as surely into the realm of what shall be as it moves us back to what has been; by extracting what is indeterminately lasting from the latter, it allows the former to come to us.
To acknowledge the active element in remembering is already to point toward its possible autonomy, at least its negative autonomy. For a major consequence of the findings of thinkers as diverse as Piaget and Freud is that memories are not strictly tied down to their own origins; in varying degrees, they may become free from these origins by virtue of the transforming effects of displacement, projection, sublimation, or schematization. In being negatively autonomous, remembering is not restricted to a sheer replication of the past, as is demanded by the model of passivism. Particular and pertinent origins—e.g., perceptual, historical, linguistic—are certainly incorporated into eventual memories and are often represented in or alluded to by such memories; but they need not provide the sole source of their content, much less their total structure. In gaining this independence of causal/factual origins, memories exhibit a negative autonomy, a capacity not to be determined by the past.
But this leaves unanswered the more difficult question: what positive autonomy, if any, does remembering exhibit? By “positive autonomy” I mean not merely free from (origins, sources, causes regarded as exclusive and sufficient conditions) but free for—for a development, an expressive exfoliation, which moves beyond the heteronomous power of past particularities. Such autonomy is comparatively easy to demonstrate in the case of imagining, which exhibits an indigenous freedom of mind. But the price to be paid for this freedom, which consists largely in the indefinite variability of imagined content, is an equally indigenous ethereality that reflects a dramatic distance from particular origins. The positive autonomy of remembering, in contrast, is enmeshed in its origins even when it seems to be functioning independently of them. The result is an autonomy so dense as often to obscure its own recognition and description—indeed, precisely dense enough to tempt many to view memory as an utterly passive process.
We must acknowledge that there is nothing in remembering that is comparable to imaginative freedom of mind; there is nothing like an open ranging among freely projected variants that have no assignment to instantiate (or even to represent) the actual. Whatever its ability to broach the virtual, the commitment of memory to the already actualized cannot be rescinded. Nor does remembering possess any exact equivalent of two features of imagining that support its inherent freedom of mind: ease of access and assured success of enactment. Precisely because of remembering’s engagement in the actual—its duty to stand in for it faithfully to some significant extent—we are not always able to come up with the particular memory we seek. As everyone knows to his or her frustration—sometimes excrutiatingly so in a tip-of-the-tongue experience—many memories slip away and evade our most earnest efforts to retrieve them. In David Krell’s phrase, they are “on the verge.”39 At the same time, even when a quite crystalline mnemonic presentation does emerge as a possibility, we are by no means assured, by its appearance alone, that its specific content is the content we are looking for: there is no inbuilt guarantee that our intention and its fulfillment will coincide in that seamless Deckung that Husserl posited as an epistemological ideal.40 Quite apart from amnesia (i.e., the inability to remember anything), paramnesia (remembering the wrong thing) threatens us throughout.
The thick autonomy of remembering is therefore a more difficult autonomy to accomplish than is the thin autonomy of imagining. More of “the patient labor of the negative” is required in its realization. As the Sisyphean labors of psychoanalysis painfully attest, it is not uncommon to engage in quite strenuous efforts to bring back certain memories—efforts that include disentangling these memories from the morass of contiguous or similar memories to which they stand closely related. Moreover, internal clarifications of a given memory are also often needed. It is evident, then, that the autonomy of remembering is hard-won; it does not fall into our laps in the way in which autonomous imagining characteristically does. Despite these difficulties, however, autonomous remembering does occur; and the autonomy therein achieved is of a distinctly positive sort.41
I shall restrict consideration of such positive autonomy to a single instance, that of the truth we attain in remembering. The issue of truth arises not just from the ever-present possibility of erroneous memories or from moments of forgetting. It also arises from the fact that the past we recall has a certain definiteness of form, spatial and temporal and qualitative, to which we somehow try to do justice. In other words, we try to be true to it, to speak the truth about it—where both “to” and “about” express an action of positive approximation. Such approximation to the past certainly does not mean producing a duplicate of it, something that would correspond to it point by point. In Platonic language, an eikon does not convey the eidos. Iconicity is neither necessary nor sufficient for remembering, which can be true to its own subject matter in a non-isomorphic fashion. But in what does such truth consist, and how does it embody a positive autonomy of remembering?
The truth in question possesses two basic forms: truth to the “how” and truth to the “that.”
TRUTH TO THE HOW
This is a matter of being true to our own experiencing, to how we experienced a given situation. Included under “experiencing” are emotional responses, stray thoughts we had at the time, interpretations we may have made of the original experience, fantasies arising from it, etc. In addition, there is the body’s mode of experiencing—how we assimilated the event corporeally, how it felt “in our bones.” Given the complexity and multi-layeredness of how we experienced the situation, it is clear that we cannot do justice to all such factors as those just mentioned; nor need we do so in order to attain adequate or even accurate remembering. We can be highly selective and still retain the special subjective savor of our experiencing: the selectivity may be the most effective way of preserving the savor. Indeed, even where there is no explicit representation whatsoever of the original experience—as occurs in many body memories—we can be true to how it felt to have been present in that experience by summoning up pertinent feelings or related thoughts.
TRUTH TO THE THAT
This is the truth to the factuality of the event experienced—to the fact of its occurrence. By “event” is usually meant a publicly ascertainable happening; but events may also include my own feelings, perceptions, and thoughts, which I may remember as facts in separation from their experiential content per se. Thus I can recall that I was feeling acute remorse three weeks ago without now engaging in an analogous emotional state or a representation of any such state and its specific content. The evidence for the truth of such a claim will most likely be found within my own experience. Of course, I can consult others who were with me at the time and who may have noticed my remorse; but since I may have been deceiving them by pretending to be happy, their testimony cannot be regarded as requisite, much less definitive, for the truth of what I claim about my own state of mind. Such a situation contrasts with that of remembering a public fact. In that case, corroboration by other people is essential for bearing out the truth of memory claims, which can be definitively disproven by others: as when I claim to recall seeing Joan at noon downtown, whereas she was having lunch in her home with persons who now testify to this fact. Here the factual component of remembering belongs to a public domain in which my own subjective states can no longer count as evidentially decisive. But in neither instance—whether it is a case of a public event or a state of mind—does the memory of a factual occurrence demand detailed representation. Even in the case of public remembering-that, the sketchiest of descriptions may suffice: e.g., “yesterday, sometime in the late afternoon, I remember that the ferry pulled into the dock.”42
Taken together, truth to the “how” and truth to the “that” constitute a distinctive positive autonomy of remembering. Our being true to the past in these two ways does not mean merely that we are not beholden to it—that we are not bound to repeat it. In entering into the domain of truth, something other than negative autonomy—i.e., independence from the past—is at stake. Nor is it just a matter of degrees of latitude allowed with regard to determinate origins. For it is now a question of being able to affirm that the past was thus-and-so as a fact, or was experienced in such-and-such a way. In this circumstance, memories are not reducible to mere evidential sources, mere pre-texts to truth: affirmation cannot be reduced to confirmation. And the affirmation itself is not to be confused with assertion, i.e., its articulation in words. Truth emerges in and through the act of remembering itself. This is what we mean when we say that a given memory is “true to an experience,” or that we are “truly remembering” something. In such cases the truth resides not in statements that may accompany the remembering, or in items of evidence, but in the remembering itself—in its relation to the past with which it is reconnecting, whatever the precise evidence or expression in words may be.
It follows that for such an immanent truth-in-memory to arise no explicit representations of the past, whether in the form of words or images, need to be involved. Memorial truth is attainable without employing representations of any kind. Although we see this most clearly in the case of body memories, it also occurs whenever I think rememoratively and yet non-imagistically and non-verbally of the past—as happens in meditative musings on previous experiences. In fact, I can even remember the past truthfully through a misrepresentation of it, as we observe not only in the instance of screen memories (when I remember something through a false facade) but when a certain figure is misidentified, a detail is omitted, or a false substitution of one thing for another arises. Despite the manifest inaccuracy of such rememberings, they can still manage to convey the “how” of the remembered situation and perhaps also its “that” as well: the gist of the situation. For I can achieve a significant level of truthful remembering even as I frankly fail at the level of documentation or proof. I can regain the past in truth even if I cannot regain it in exactitude, much less in totality. I can regain it as a partial and even distorted presence—as part of my own past as I now reclaim it, or as part of a collective past as an entire group might commemorate it. To be able to do such things—to fly in the face of the ideal of verisimilitude in remembering—is a forceful sign of memory’s positive autonomy.
Such autonomy is not a matter of transcending perceptual or historical or linguistic origins, whether personal or social. Its action occurs in their very midst. Memorial truth is discovered within the various matters of memory, not outside them or beyond them. Because of this immersion, the autonomy of remembering remains thick. Implicit in all remembering is a commitment to truth concerning the past, a truth that reflects the specificity of this past even if it need not offer an exact likeness of it. Once I enter into remembering, there can be no backing out of this commitment, which creates a special bond to the past in its “how” and its “that.” This bond links us to the past in a relation of “certification”:43 to remember is to certify, to oneself or to others, the truth of what one remembers. It is to engage in a claim to truth and a responsibility for it. It is thus to thicken the experience of remembering past a point that is found in experiences of imagining or thinking, neither of which entails a commitment to relations of the truth-to variety.44
Not only is truthful remembering not accountable for each and every detail in its rendering of a given past scene, it can modify in a far-reaching way those details which it does select for purposes of presentation. This is not merely to say that we remember what we want to remember, though this is often the case. We may not know precisely what we want to remember, and still attain to truth, recapturing the brute being of an original scene even though we had no intention of doing so and even though we grasp this scene in a format considerably altered from its original configuration. The recapture, undertaken without conscious motive or aim, is exemplary of the thick autonomy of memory in its unrehearsed operation. Far from being antithetical to the achievement of truth, such unwitting transformation of the remembered may be a quite effective means of attaining truth. Instead of a mechanical rehashing of what has happened in its pointillistic detail, this transformative remembering presents us with the brunt, the force or thrust, of what occurred—what truly happened in what actually happened. We remember the significant thing that occurred. Hence our tendency in many kinds of remembering, consciously pursued or not, to valorize conspicuous but condensed features in what we recall; to make them bearers of the burden of truth. These features are incomplete from the standpoint of an ideal of pictorial representation, but they may be essential from the standpoint of truth. For the truth of which we are capable in remembering is not just a truth about what we remember—an “about” that calls for completeness as well as accuracy—but an actively engaged truth in what we remember.
Precisely in its thickness, memory’s positive autonomy cannot help but reflect its tie to past actualities, whether this tie occurs as rootedness in perception, origination in the past, or involvement in the quest for truth about the past itself. Perception, the past, and truth all act as anchors for remembering, settling it into the dense impasto of human experiencing. This anchoring gives to memory its very materiality, along with a grounding in something at once recalcitrant and substantial. From such grounding, remembering gains not only its ultimate validity—its being well-founded as well as well-funded—but also its value in everyday life. Just because memory is so massively grounded in the past, it can be of inestimable importance in the present, illuminating it with a light not otherwise available, proferring insight that cannot be acquired in any other way—insight “from within,” from within our own experience-as-remembered.
The result of memory’s multiple ties to sources such as perception, language, or thought, over which it does not exert complete control, is its enrichment from these same sources. It imbibes from them what it cannot bring forth from itself alone—a process to which a model of pure activism fails to do justice. Yet it imbibes not in the interest of imitation and transmission—as models of passivism so often propose—but in order to gain sustenance from what exceeds it, from what is outside its own immediate reach in the present. Such sustenance is not taken in dumbly or unappreciatively; it is incorporated selectively and sensitively. As a consequence, memory finds itself continually aggrandized—not simply by the accretion of specific contents remembered but more importantly by the incorporation of new directions and new orders of orientation, new ways of proceeding and new styles. What “remains over”—not to be confused with any bare residuum—becomes embedded in memory as an “abiding possession”45 and is transmuted in the process. In this way memory grows—grows beyond what any pre-established receptacle of experience could absorb or contain.
Rather than a mere repository of experience, remembering becomes thereby a continually growing fund for experience: a source itself, indeed a resource, on which not only future acts of remembering but many other experiential modes can draw as well. This funding function provides more than a storehouse of ready-to-hand information and knowledge (though it certainly does this too, and indispensably so). It also supplies a supportive Hintergrund for ongoing experience: a backdrop which at once unifies and specifies what comes to appear in the foreground. Any experiential scene, even one with a quite minimal unity, possesses such a background, which contributes depth to an otherwise shallow setting. The depth is both temporal, insofar as it leads us back into the past, and spatial, insofar as it furnishes other scenes to the place in which we are presently situated.
This memorial depth is a primary instance of the virtual dimension of remembering. Although such depth is also tied to the actual by numerous historical and perceptual threads, the actual qua actual—the strictly determinate—is superseded in the end. For the impingement of discrete actualities is not what is at stake here; indeed, their too finely detailed recollection can even induce that state of clutter and confusion which Luria’s subject “S” reported as a living nightmare.46 What is at stake is the presence of something much more diffuse—something virtual that has been held in readiness for many eventualities. It is this virtuality which keeps open and proliferates the ways by which unfolding experiences of various kinds can be funded from their abiding memorial background.
Memory thus regarded establishes a basso continuo for much of human experience—a “figured bass” that provides meaning and value. Remembering keeps this experience together, keeps it coherent and continuous, by virtue of its re-membering action from below. Even in this profoundly bass position, it remains positively autonomous, and still more thickly so than ever before. For here it realizes an identity, and achieves a force, of its own. No longer the mere agglomeration of the actualities which it nevertheless presupposes and which on occasion it singles out as such, remembering at this level is a dimension of our experience not reducible to any other—not even to its own ingredients of perception, pastness, and truth. Linked irrevocably to these latter, and made thicker still by its own diffuse virtuality, remembering regarded as “a diverse organized mass”47 funds experience in the life-world from within its own unending resources.
One central conclusion can be drawn without hesitation from the fact of memory’s thick autonomy as it has been described in this chapter. This is that whenever we remember and in whatever way we remember we get a different past every time. If memory is not a matter of pictographic transparency—if it is an active affair of dense interinvolvement with a massive past—it will not bring any particular past experience back again in a pristine format. Or more exactly, if and when it does so, e.g., in “photographic memory,” this will be exceptional, something to wonder at rather than to take for granted. Otherwise—which is to say, most of the time—we keep getting the past back differently. That we do so says something important both about the past and about memory, (a) About the past it says unmistakably that what has become past in relation to the present is in no way comparable to an essence. In other words, Hegel was wrong to claim dogmatically that “Wesen ist was gewesen ist” (essence is what has been).48 As Husserl insisted, an essence or Wesen is precisely what is indefinitely repeatable in acts of cognition, above all those involving eidetic insight. Indeed, as Derrida adds, an essence depends on this repeatability.49 But the presence of thick autonomy means that the clarity of eidetic insight is notably lacking in the case of memory. What memory, including secondary memory, brings back is not the ever-the-sameness of an essence. It retrieves a past that is ever-different—different not just because of the erosion effected by time or because of the different act-form of remembering it corresponds to, but intrinsically different thanks to the action of thick autonomy.
(b) About memory, therefore, something important is also being said. This is that remembering makes a very considerable difference in how we relate to the past. Indeed, through its action of uncovering the past as ever-different, it makes all the difference. In remembering we do not repeat the past as self-identical, as strictly unchanging and invariant. We regain the past as different each time. Or more exactly, we regain it as different in its very sameness. Sameness, as Heidegger (commenting on Hegel) has pointed out, is not to be confused with strict self-identity. Where the self-identical excludes the different altogether, the same allows for the different—even fosters it on occasion.50 One of these occasions, I would suggest, is that of remembering itself. And it is precisely memory’s thick autonomy that makes this possible. In and through the dense operations of autonomous remembering, I recall the same past differently on successive occasions: now as I recapture it in reminiscence, now in body memory, now commemoratively, now even in recognition. Indeed, I regain the same past anew even as I return to it continually in the same act-form of remembering. No wonder we keep coming back to the past in memory—whether in ordinary life or in history or in psychoanalysis—without finding it in the least boring! As autonomous rememberers, we are generating our own ever-differing versions of the same past. No wonder, either, that what had seemed cause for despair when measured against exact recall (wherein we recollect the self-identical past per se) becomes reason for hope. For we are getting the past back as self-same, if not as self-identical. We are remembering this past and not merely spinning off variant versions of it. Each time we remember truly we are refinding the past, our past; however radical the differences between successive rememberings may be, they remain differences that accrue to the same past which we are attempting to recapture. In recognizing and in reminding, in place memory and in commemorating—and in all the other ways in which the thick autonomy of memory expresses itself—we are refashioning the same past differently, making it to be different in its very self-sameness.
This is even true in recollection, which also makes the past in its image, and precisely as an image. For images have their own thickness. As forming part of memory of any kind, they are less than fully diaphanous. Whatever personal or theoretical expectations we may place on them, and however much we might wish or demand that they live up to the highest standards of claritas, they do not render recollecting luminous. Despite my animadversions against recollection regarded as a paradigm for all remembering, it cannot be denied that recollecting itself shares, however sparingly, in the same thickness that we have observed to characterize other forms of remembering in more patent ways. And precisely in having its own thick autonomy, it conveys and transfigures the past in its own distinctive manner.
We may go still further. Even the past as photographed has a unique memorial value. That which serves so readily as a norm for recollection itself possesses its own density as a material medium through which we remember the past differently. Why else would we so assiduously document our travels with multiple photographic images—and savor these images afterwards so much—unless they displayed a peculiar power to re-present (and not just to represent) the past effectively? Hence, the importance of that photograph of myself and my sister standing eagerly and expectantly near the entrance to Yosemite. This photograph has its own dense mode of insertion into the past, which it retrieves and recreates as distinctively as my own flawed secondary memory. Hence, too, the importance of the wedding photographs discussed in section V above. They also reconnect with a poignant moment, forming a bond with it that cannot be described as thin or unsubstantial. Through such photographs we remember the past differently but not less effectively than if we recollected it or reminisced about it.51 At the same time, by this same image—mechanical as it is in its production, and precise as it is in the accuracy of its depiction—we inculcate a funded future of remembering, thereby thickening the matrix of our memorial participation.
If what I have just said is true of recollection as well as of the photograph, then we need not depend exclusively on Lower Regions in gaining an appreciation of the thick autonomy of remembering. This appreciation can be acquired as well among the Higher Powers. In the enactment of thick autonomy the mind itself may play an essential part—and so may recollection and recollection’s own putative prototype, the photograph. Just as remembering reaches out to every aspect of the past as different-in-its-sameness, so every kind of remembering, including the most mentalistic (and this latter as mechanically aided), has pertinence and validity in the effort to recapture the past and to let it flourish in the present and in the future.