Memory is a kind of accomplishment a sort of renewal even an initiation
—William Carlos Williams, Paterson
This is the use of memory: for liberation—not less of love but expanding of love beyond desire, and so liberation from the future as well as the past.
—T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” (Four Quartets)
In the course of this book we have seen an eidetic and intentional analysis of remembering—in which recollection played a privileged role—give way to a concern with the outreach of memories into the surrounding world of the remembering subject. This outreach led us to explore reminding, reminiscing, and recognizing as three ways in which the mentalistic model of act-intentionality proved to be inadequate. The transcending of mind as a container of memories was even more strikingly evident in our investigations of body memories, place memories, and various forms of commemoration. As we pursued memory beyond mind we continually found a centrifugal movement outward from the rememberers mind into his or her world—a world filled with perceptual objects and historical events, signs and texts, rituals and other people. So engaging is this world that the insertion of memories into it, their manifold modes of connection with it, came to be described as a matter of “thick autonomy”—a density of involvement that, as we saw at the end of the last chapter, inheres in recollection itself.
But even if the validity of this book’s exterocentric direction is granted—especially in the light of theories of memory that have been dominated by mentalistic prejudices—the reader may be moved to ask a final set of questions. Has justice been done to the remembering subject in all this? Won’t this subject come forth to say that in some inalienable sense memories are “mine”—not mine as mere minions of my mind, or as something that I simply possess, but as part and parcel of my personal being? When I remember, after all, do I not engage in an activity that is undeniably my own? However much this activity may be shared with others in ceremonial moments, does it not remain identifiably mine insofar as I enact it and have continuing access to it—where “I” signifies myself-as-rememberer? Moreover, does not the content of a given memory inevitably include perspectives which can only be called “personal” and which reflect my unique position as a rememberer? And will not the same memory become integral to my ongoing life history, not just because it can be re-remembered but because it may alter my personal identity in the process? Indeed, if it is true in general that my existence is “mine to be in one way or another,”1 then are not my memories mine to live out, as intimately as any other aspect of me? In other words, is not the incursion of memories into my life as massive and unavoidable as the rooting of these memories themselves in the world? Isn’t “the world” finally my world in some significant sense?
Even if they cannot be completely answered at this late point, these questions cannot be evaded. This book’s commitment to showing the efficacy and scope of memory beyond mind has been purchased at the risk of neglecting the remembering subject as such. Only this subject’s lived body has been accorded concerted attention. But our headlong hegira from the entrapment of mind into the embrace of the world has meant passing over many personal features of remembering—features that belong intrinsically to my Jemeinigkeit.2 It is about time, therefore, that the rememberer himself or herself reclaim our attention. This book began by setting out an informal grouping of its author’s own, i.e., my memories, and it is only fitting that we come full cycle and return at the end to the personal self of the rememberer.
In the trajectory we have undertaken, this self has been in effect depersonalized. What remained of the self from the externalizing movements of Parts Two and Three was effectively submerged in the treatment of thick autonomy with which the present Part opened. Even in its positive, truth-generating mode, this autonomy expresses the immersion of the rememberer in an anonymous pre-personal level of experience—a level that resists specification in terms of the individual self. Its most characteristic dimension is that of depth, and its description as a layer of the “Lower Regions” reinforces the sense in which thickly autonomous remembering underlies the remembering subject. The very terms by which I have designated its enactment—e.g., “funding,” “background,” “basso continuo,” etc.—only serve to underscore the impersonality of memory’s thick autonomy. In depicting memory as autonomous in this immersionist mode, we court the danger of losing ourselves in our own description; our sense of intact self-identity may dissolve.
Precisely in this circumstance of submergence in the depths of thick autonomy, it is not surprising that the remembering subject might wish to reclaim responsibility for his or her own actions. To own up to this responsibility is another way of saying “these memories are mine” mine to experience and mine to dispose of as I see fit. But to reclaim mineness in the guise of responsibility is at the same time to claim freedom in remembering, a freedom with which we must now come to terms. To understand this freedom is to gain an understanding of memory’s thick autonomy as it is enacted “in person”—as it is based in the actions of the rememberer as well as in his or her world. Such freedom assumes two main forms, freedom to be oneself and freedom of in-gathering.
Freedom to Be Oneself
It is an inescapable fact about human existence that we are made of our memories: we are what we remember ourselves to be. We cannot dissociate the remembering of our personal past from our present self-identity. Indeed, such remembering brings about this identity. The theme is familiar to readers of John Locke:
For as far as any intelligent being can repeat [i.e., in memory] the idea of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present action; so far it is the same personal self. For it is by the consciousness it has of its present thoughts and actions, that it is self to itself now, and so will be the same self, as far as the same consciousness can extend to actions past or to come . . . the same consciousness uniting these distinct actions into the same person.3
As we have seen, remembering thrives in the constitution of the same (in contrast with the self-identical), and it is not at all surprising to find Locke claiming that sameness of consciousness is established by remembering. This sameness is the basis for a continuous personal identity, which requires that my consciousness now be the same as my consciousness then—where “the same” allows room for the significantly different as well. Thus, where Locke says that it is “the same consciousness” that unites past, present, and future selves “into the same person,” we can just as well say that it is the same memories that unite our temporally disparate selves into one self: my self.
The failure of memory to integrate experiences into a single personal identity can be dire, resulting in the pathological condition of “multiple personality.” In this predicament someone who is historically and physically continuous at the level of gross description is radically splintered at the level of personal identity. Even when there is a central, “official” self, the various separate selves fail to connect with each other, whether directly or through the core self. The critical dysfunction is that of memory: the multiple selves cannot remember one another (if and when they do, it is in a merely superficial fashion, that is, without any sense of belonging to the same self-system).4 The causative mechanism in multiple personality is usually designated as “dissociation.”5 But the dissociation itself reflects a failure of memory to link the multiple selves of the same person into “the same consciousness,” that is to say, the same continuously felt personhood. In still other instances, we may detect an analogous if less severe, failure: e.g., the lack of connection between the true and false selves of the “schizoid” personality. Indeed, whenever I cannot “get my life together” and feel it to be divisively fragmentary, the reconnective powers of memory have failed me.
Short of such situations of dispersion, I find myself able to connect temporally diverse aspects of myself and put them into meaningful communication with each other. Even more importantly, I can consolidate the self I have been and shape the self I am coming to be. As Locke intimates, both my past self and my future self are involved in my personal identity, since “the same consciousness can extend to actions past or to come.” My freedom in remembering is accordingly bi-directional. It bears on prior as well as subsequent aspects of my life, (a) Concerning what has already taken place, it acts to organize what might otherwise be a mere assemblage of contingently connected events. It does this by selecting, emphasizing, collocating—sometimes condensing and sometimes expanding—and in general regrouping and reconfigurating what I have experienced so as to allow a more coherent sense of self to emerge. I am free to reconstruct and reconstrue what I have experienced: there is no set script for my life as I elect to remember it. This does not mean that there are no limits to such backward-looking modes of re-membering my experiences. We confront limits in the empirical and historical actuality in which the thick autonomy of memory immerses us—and even more so in the concern of this autonomy (in its positive form) to be true to the past so far as is possible. Yet these limits do not undercut memorial freedom of the specific sorts just mentioned. They may even collaborate with such freedom, as when an effort to be true to a particular part of my past allows me to recall its detailed infrastructure more freely.
(b) At the same time, I am free in establishing my ongoing and future personal identity by means of my own remembering. This remembering determines (in Lacan’s formula) “what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.” What I shall have been, my eventual personal identity, is very much a function of what I shall remember myself to be—which is in turn a function of what I now remember myself to have been. And what I now remember myself to have been is by no means a fixed affair. It is once more a matter of freedom, specifically the freedom to decide which features of my previous life to honor or reject, celebrate or revile, in the future. This freedom is expressly evaluative; it is a freedom realized through assessing my own past as a prologue for my own future—an assessment carried out on the basis of values I am maintaining in the present.
At play in both phases (a) and (b) of the constitution of personal identity is the noticing of differences between past and present selves. The sameness of personal identity not only incorporates these differences; it may even thrive on them. Thus, just because I grasp my tolerance for sexism on my part and others noticeably decreasing with age, I gain an ever more secure sense of who I am in the present—and very likely will be in the future. Operative here is a peculiar capacity of memorial freedom to consider myself both same and other in one and the same apprehension: the same self precisely in and as differing from itself. Husserl has named such self-differing self-apprehension “de-presentation”6 By remembering myself in this self-differentiating way, I de-present myself to myself. The forging of my personal identity calls continually for such de-presentational activity. Through this activity, I come to know myself, indeed, to be myself.
Therefore, it is clear that, thanks to memory, we have a quite considerable part to play in our own self-begetting as persons—where “person” connotes not just the biological or legal entity but the very self which we know to be an indispensable basis for being-in-the world. It is not a decisive objection to claim (as did Butler in his critique of Locke) that the self that thereby constitutes itself from memories must be presupposed in the process of constitution.7 This must be conceded: there is never a selfless moment—at least not after the earliest phases of an individual’s development—and each successive self is built on its own selective stock of memories. But by the same token, each successive self can re-orient itself by altering its hold on old memories and weaving in new ones; it can reinterpret its history in a different manner; it can even represent itself to itself in a variant manner. Everywhere there is the production of personal identity, a production proceeding by the free remembering of the self by itself.
Freedom of In-Gathering
If it is now evident that personal identity is dependent upon the free activity of remembering, we still do not know how this activity actually works. A clue is contained in a statement of Heideggers: “Memory is the gathering of thought.”8 In its free action, memory gathers much else besides thought; it also gathers emotions, perceptions, bits of discourse—ultimately, all the parts of our life history. “Gathering” connotes assembling, drawing together of items into a provisional unity. When gathering is memorial in character, the unity is no longer merely provisional—it is a unity that we retain, guard, keep. “Keeping,” says Heidegger, “is the fundamental nature and essence of memory. “9 The freedom at work in such gathering-as-keeping is more than merely selective in its operation. It is a freedom of amalgamation, of creating synthetic wholes, and not just of selecting parts. At the same time, this freedom involves the decision to preserve the wholes thus drawn together: to validate them as memorable, as worthy of being retained in memory.
It is striking that the word “recollection,” understood in terms of its origins rather than in terms of the use to which it has been put in Western thought, captures these same two aspects of memorial gathering. “Collection” derives from the Latin collecta, a “gathering together,” and, still more primordially, from colligere, literally a “binding together” (as is signified in the English verb “to colligate”); whereas “re-” signifies “back” or “again.” In a primary act of re-collection, I bind things together, keep them in a gathered unity, so that I can return to them again and again. Such re-collecting contrasts strikingly with recollection qua secondary memory, wherein the basic action is that of reflecting (as in a mirror or photograph) whatever is presented to it. The result of this basic action is a re-presentation that, in claiming to possess likeness to an original presentation, offers no unification of its own, no gathering together that is binding on its own terms. In other words, recollection fails to be genuine re-collection. Or more exactly, it fails to manifest the way in which, despite its derivative status as iconic, it gathers the past together and guards it in its own unique manner.
But the gathering action of free remembering involves still more than a twofold movement of collecting and keeping. The gathering of memory is a gathering in, as is testified in such phrases as “keeping in memory” or “bearing the past in mind.” It is not sufficient for remembering to draw together and retain its content so as to exhibit it—that is, to display it as might a computer screen. The language of “display,” to which I was tempted in chapter 2, all too easily becomes just another expression of the predominance of the visual mode that is already evident in the constrictive interpretation of recollection as iconic re-presentation.10 Beyond the presentational immediacy of display, memory seeks to preserve its content within.
Within what?Within the remembering subject. I say “subject” and not “mind”—despite the force of the idiom, “keeping the past in mind.”11 To keep the past in the mind alone is to keep it within something that fancies itself to be transparent to itself and its objects—indeed, to be the very image of the objects it encounters and knows. Once again we must suspend a dogmatic adherence to “the nobility of sight” in order to uncover layers of our personal being that are not valued for their strictly visual display. The lived body represents one such layer, and it is crucial that we have been able to locate memories in this body: body memories, as we saw in chapter 8, are not just about the body but sedimented into it and at one with it. Yet in its free action remembering gathers itself into every aspect of the human subject—not only into the body and mind of this subject but into his or her emotional life, circle of thoughts, set of social relations, and capacity to speak and listen. It is a matter, in short, of in-gathering memory into the person as a whole. Nothing less than this will do if freedom in remembering is to attain its full range in human existence. As Plato himself put it, remembering of the most significant sort—and this means recollection of forms, anamnesis— takes place “within oneself (ex hautou).12
It is just here that we reach the inwardmost point of our journey in this book. To be within the remembering subject—Plato would say the remembering soul13—is to be at a point considerably more interior than mind itself is. In fact mind, as it has come to be conceived since Descartes, is, for all of its self-encapsulation (and precisely in flight from such self-enclosure), turned resolutely outward in its eagerness to absorb and reflect—to “represent”—the determinate outer world. In its ec-centricity, it lacks the inwardness that remembering requires in the most complete expression of its freedom. How are we to conceive such distinctively memorial interiority if it cannot be conveyed by a mentalistic model and if we hesitate to revert to the language of the soul—if we decide to follow neither Descartes nor Plato?
My suggestion is that the ‘in’ of memory’s in-gathering freedom be conceived as a matrix of matrices. “Matrix” has the curious property of signifying something that is at once material and formal. From its root in mater, “mother,” it stands for a material region of origin and development.14 In the present context, the materiality of a matrix is detectable in the depth of the remembering subject and more particularly in the thick autonomy through which this subject realizes its freedom. As a matrix in depth, the subject who remembers inwardizes experiences, incorporating them into the density of his or her inner being instead of merely refracting these experiences back onto the world. But “matrix” also means formal framework, a topologically defined network in which items can be allotted locations. In this capacity, the notion of matrix points to another aspect of memory’s in-gathering activity, namely, its proclivity for arranging its contents in ordered groupings and for finding a location, a specific topos, for these groupings within the vast keep that we denote by the mass noun “memory.” The density of memory’s material inherence in the subject is here matched by the elegance and economy of its formal arrangements. When we take into account this dual dimensionality, we are led to conceive the in-gathering action of remembering as a material matrix (in depth) of formal matrices (located within this same depth).
In-gathering is a concrete process of drawing in memories from various states of forgetfulness, marginality, virtuality, and indirectness. These memories are grouped or “filed”—put into a formal matrix—in terms of their thematic content: e.g., visits with a close friend to a certain place, traumatic experiences of a given type, my childhood during a particular stretch of time, etc. In relation to these special groupings (each of which represents a discrete domain of my existence), my personal identity can be considered a guiding matrix, that which gives coherence and consistency to all the others, allowing them to articulate with each other. The identity of my person (itself a product as well as a repository of remembering) enables me to identify these formal aggregates as “my memories,” and it lends to them a peculiar depth they would not otherwise possess. As a matrix of matrices, my personal being is a being-in-depth, a moi profond, in and through which my thematically distinct memories come to be connected from below. In this Lower Region memories fuse and become owned as mine; here the autonomy of memory is as thick as the self is deep; and here, too, my freedom in remembering is most fully gathered in upon itself.
We need to explore the freedom of in-gathering more fully. Such freedom has three main components: collecting; keeping; and inwardizing by means of material and formal matrices. Taken together, these components serve to distinguish such freedom from any mere process of selection or what is traditionally termed “freedom of choice.” Or more precisely, the components incorporate freedom of choice into a more encompassing sphere of free action. Take, for example, that part of personal identity which we are accustomed to call “character.” We tend to consider a person’s character as a group of settled dispositions to act in certain ways, and we may think in this connection of the dictum “a man’s character is his fate.”15 This is to presume that character is somehow unchangeable or a matter of external compulsion. In fact, as both Aristotle and Freud point out, character is very much a matter of freedom—freedom of choice. Aristotle specifies that the reliable “habits” (hèxeis) on which character is based depend on particular choices made during the time when the habits were being formed.16 Freud, as we have seen, explicitly defines character as “a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes [which] contains the history of these object-choices.”17 What is left unacknowledged by both thinkers is the role of remembering in the transformation of mere “object-choices” into that “precipitate” or massive habituality we call personal character. This role is epitomized in the freedom of in-gathering, all of whose component parts are operative in the formation of character. There is, first of all, an activity of drawing together inasmuch as character condenses all of the determinate choices which have preceded it: it is, as it were, their summary statement. Precisely as it is unifying these choices, the gathering action of remembering also preserves them, keeps and guards them, as the ground of character. As specifically in-gathering, remembering takes prior choices (collected together as an amalgamated mass) into the self, where they are grouped by thematic content into formal matrices and connected in depth by the material matrix of one’s personal identity. Thanks to this complex assimilative process, we are able to say that “my character” has many facets (reflecting the many kinds of choices on which it is founded) and yet is fully consolidated (and thus is a constituent feature of my personal identity). Far from being fated, then, my character is altogether an expression of my free remembering in its in-gathering power.
Tempting as they may be to employ, models of subsumption (of matter under form, content under category) do not adequately delineate the basic activity of in-gathering. Whether these models are set forth in a Kantian or a Piagetian format—i.e., in terms of categories or schemes—they fail to capture the intricate, side-long, non-hierarchical movements that both allow and express freedom in remembering. The in-gathering of memory contests the presumption that there is some single concept (or scheme, thought, idea) under which remembered content must be subsumed. In their laterality, memorial matrices resist any such hierarchical ordering. As a particular matrix is itself always evolving and is never fully settled, nothing can be definitively subsumed under it, nor can it be simply subsumed under something else. Instead of such coming -under in a pre-established, top-down (or bottom-up) situation, there is a coming-in of memorial material, which radiates laterally and non-subsumptively within the remembering subject. As we have seen, there is a loose grouping into formal matrices; but the thematic content of these latter is not rigidly defined: “my college years,” “the times when I worked on the book,” “last year in Marienbad,” “that trip to Yosemite.” The members of each such aggregate may overlap one another; in any case they are not arranged in a vertical hierarchy of subsumption. They are not even subsumed under the material matrix of personal identity: I have termed this critical matrix “material” in order to indicate that it is ingredient within the formal matrices with which it is allied. Mineness is thus not an abstract universal but a concrete notion immanent within every memory I can rightfully claim as “mine.”
Just as we must resist the seductions of subsumption in any thorough consideration of in-gathering, so we must also resist the temptations of containment. The very word “in” arouses these temptations: recall Aristotle’s discussion of this word and its implications for a strict containership view of topos.18 Where the snug fit of the vessel could serve as an appropriate image for our discussion of the role of place in remembering, this fit is not applicable to all forms of memory. Nevertheless, the idea of strict containment dies hard. It is an idée fixe in contemporary information processing models of human memory. So as to fit the closely confining containers represented by parts of computers, incoming experiences must be tidily presented to begin with: hence their designation as “input” that is divisible into “bits” of information. Moreover, one form of determinacy begets another. For memory to be efficient, bits of information need to be “chunked” into mathematically determinable sets and then given “encoding specificity.”19 The language of “input,” “bit,” “chunk,” “encoding” bespeaks a situation in which to be in memory is necessarily to be snugly ensconced within predetermined limits and exact boundaries. No wonder that there is so much talk of “packaging” information in this self-contained machine model. Not to mention repackaging! As a leading psychological theorist states, “Our language is tremendously useful for repackaging material into a few chunks rich in information.”20 Useful this language may be—and it is increasingly tempting to employ it as computers become indispensable parts of our lives—yet we have to ask whether it does justice to the indirections of the ‘in’ of in-gathering. This ‘in’ resists being containerized—and thus quantified—as fiercely as it resists being subsumed under a category or a scheme. The same resistance applies to any effort to assimilate it to a neurological model of containment within brain cells.
The crucial question for our purposes is: what if memories are not neatly packageable and repackageable—at least not without losing what is essential to their very nature within the in-gathering person? And what if the inward movement they undergo in being in-gathered into the remembering subject is not comparable to entering a storage vault or “memory bank”? What if the interior of human memory is more like a laterally exfoliating labyrinth with numerous intentional threads connecting the in-gathered memories belonging to one formal matrix with memories in other formal matrices? And what if the same labyrinthine structure has, instead of a single “output,” many exits, many issuing avenues that give upon the same being-in-the-world from which the memories were initially gathered? If answers to these questions are affirmative, then not only container models of memory but the dualisms of self/other, self/site, and mind/body that subtend these models also fall under suspicion. The gathering-in is an active trespassing of, and a collecting across, the boundaries that separate the members of such dyads. As an expression of the freedom of the remembering subject, in-gathering cannot be understood as generating input for an internal archive of the mind, brain, or computer. Rather than being brought like captives into any such archive, memories are drawn into the many matrices of already funded experiences: into the ambience, indeed the circum-ambience, of other memories, co-existing with which they come to constitute a delicate web of relations not reducible to containerlike structures.
I am not proposing that we simply avert our gaze from models of memory based on computers. Much is to be learned from these models—much that is suggestive for a phenomenological approach such as I have been developing in this book. Just above I drew spontaneously on the idea of “files” as a way of understanding a formal matrix of in-gathering. More substantively, the notion of “information flow” evokes an inherent dynamism that is also at work in my concept of thick autonomy. I suspect that a more extensive treatment of the metaphorics of information processing would reveal other illuminating features of its models of human memory—much as we found the photograph as a prototype for recollection to possess its own positive potential.
It remains, however, that the computer, like the photograph, pushes human memory out of its natural shape. If the photograph (like the wax tablet of the Theatetus) leads remembering too far in the direction of sheer passivism (i.e., by privileging passively received impressions), the computer (akin to Plato’s metaphor of the aviary) conducts it to the opposite pole of activism. What else does “processing” connote but a continual reshaping of memories? Much the same is true of “rehearsal” and the incessant cycle of encoding, decoding, and recoding to which memories are said to be submitted. Moreover, just as the photograph offers a parody of the legitimate passivism that is an intrinsic feature of human remembering—namely, its embroilment in thick autonomy—so the computer caricatures the valid activism that belongs to the freedom we realize in remembering: above all, the freedom of in-gathering. In the end, both the photograph and the information processing machine fail to capture any significant sense of the freedom to be oneself. Each is utterly impersonal in operation—if not in origin or effect. Thus neither is capable of conveying what it is like to build up from fragmentary memories a truly personal identity, a quality of perduring mineness. Any identity they possess is imputed to them by the photographer or the programmer; it is not generated from within, ex hautou. A photograph or an item stored in a computer may certainly be regarded as strikingly memorylike. But I cannot coherently say of either that it is—that it counts legitimately as—“my memory.”
In-gathering is the basic action of a fully realized memorial freedom. It includes phases of fore-gathering—i.e., in anticipatory and exploratory movements—as well as after-gathering (e.g., consolidation and reflection). We remain at liberty during the circuitous process of in-gathering to change its course and content. At one pole of possibilities, we may yield to instreaming memories as they arrange themselves into convergent groupings without any concerted intervention from us: just this pole dominates the efforts of those who make exact reduplication an ideal (e.g., in the form of an eidetic or photographic memory). We have already found reasons—discussed in the last chapter—for questioning this ideal. At another pole, in-gathering becomes a willful, and even a forceful, effort to reshape a given matrix: this pole holds sway in the cult of computers, a cult which pretends that there are no abiding constraints on memorial freedom. These constraints—evident in such diverse phenomena as habitual body memories, a tenacious character structure, the length of time required for adequate working-through—preclude us from embracing an overzealous activism. They also warn us against any meliorism or progressivism in matters of memory. Despite the fact that the word “gather” has its Greek origin in agathon (good),21 the gathering of in-gathering need not accomplish any particular good, any manifestly beneficial aim or end. It can amount to amassment for its own sake, and on occasion it can breed trouble (as when in-gathered memories of emotions serve to detonate a buried anger). All that one can say for certain is that in the realm of remembering, in-gathering is continually going on.
Memory is indeed “the gathering of thought.” It is also the gathering of much else—of our personal history, our personal identity, ultimately of our lives themselves. If this is so, it is thanks very much to the intricate activities at work in the in-gathering by which we finally become ourselves. These activities weave veritable inseams into our lives—inseams that not only serve to connect disparate parts (some of which would never become contiguous save for the intermediation of memories) but that create together a fabric which is at once distinctive in format and expressive of many experiences. It is due to such interweaving that remembering becomes genuine re-membering, a re-gathering of these experiences in and through ingathering.
It is one thing to point to the general structure of freedom in remembering. It is quite another to detect this structure in actual operation. In this section I shall take a look at memorial freedom in concreto in three distinct regions of human experience.22 Despite their diversity, and setting aside many nuances of detail, these regions manifest the two main forms of free remembering in an instructively specific manner.
Depth Psychology
Here I shall restrict consideration to the depth psychology of Freud and Jung and more especially to their conception of psychotherapy. Precisely as concerned with the depth of the psyche, they provide what information processing views of memory refuse to offer—a treatment of personal identity that is neither quantified nor containerized and that respects memorial freedom at every turn. To begin with, both psychologists attempt to promote on the part of their patients a distinctive freedom to be themselves. This is achieved, paradoxically, by encouraging them to get in touch with a prepersonal part of themselves, whether this be conceived as the repressed unconscious (Freud) or the collective unconscious (Jung). In both instances remembering leads the way, either in the form of the abreaction of a repressed trauma or as introverted libido. As do dreams, vividly experienced memories offer a via regia into the unconscious. Thanks to their sinuous subterranean status—their thick autonomy—they are able to guide patients downward beneath their encrusted ego defenses and their social personae to a realm where a re-enlivened sense of personhood becomes possible. In Freud’s language, it is a matter of delving beneath the reality-dominated demands of “secondary process” to make contact with the “primary process” of the unconscious. For Jung, it is a question of getting in touch with the archetypal basis of one’s personality: with one’s “paleopsyche.” Either way, one emerges from this nekyia or journey into the underworld with an enriched and strengthened self; and at every stage along the route, remembering is essential to the emergence. In being continually elicited and valorized in the course of therapy, this remembering restores otherwise forgotten or dissociated content to one’s personal identity, while at the same time it acts as a liberating force in its own right. “This is the use of memory: for liberation”—if Eliot’s line applies anywhere, it applies just here. Memory not only supports the freedom to be oneself; in depth-oriented psychotherapy it is the privileged means of attaining this freedom.
Memorial freedom in its other dominant form, that of in-gathering, is also prominently present in such psychotherapy. Consider merely the fact that in undergoing psychoanalysis of either sort a nuanced grasp of one’s life as a whole—its main directions and covert intentionalities—is a desideratum. In attaining this grasp, depth-therapeutic in-gathering is indispensable, for it enables the unification (or re-unification) of disparate memories: memories previously disunified by psychopathology, which has as one of its most acute effects the dispersal of the patient’s memorial life. As collected together in therapy—and as aided by conjoint efforts at reconstruction of the past on the part of analyst and patient alike—these memories are retrieved and retained as an invaluable “stock” on which subsequent therapeutic moves can draw. Not only discovering lost memories (or revaluing familiar ones) but keeping them continually available for further insight is basic to the therapeutic process. Even more crucial is the inwardizing that completes the cycle of in-gathering. After being rescued from the nether realm of the unconscious, therapeutically efficacious memories must be grafted back onto the conscious life of the afflicted self if this self is to be liberated from their oppressive spell as un-remembered. As with all inwardizing, there is a collocation of the regained memories in open-ended formal matrices and a rooting of them in the material matrix of personal identity. In the course of depth-psychological therapy one can observe at first-hand the ramiform matrix of memories as they extend through one’s life-history. “Free association” for Freud and “active imagination” for Jung rely expressly on this spontaneously non-subsumptive, non-vertical character of free remembering in its actively in-gathering action.
In quite direct and graphic ways, therefore, depth psychology in its very practice exhibits freedom in remembering. Or more exactly, it persistently inculcates this freedom in its subjects as an integral part of its therapeutic task. In a moment of candor, Freud once said that the aim of psychoanalysis is to restore to patients their “freedom to decide one way or the other.”23 But this freedom of choice is in turn made possible by the memorial freedom at work in the psychoanalytic process itself.
Art
Goethe wrote that “closely scrutinized, the productions of [artistic] genius are for the most part reminiscences.”24 If so, they embody that freedom in remembering which we have been tracing out. Leaving aside the place of memory for the spectator or critic of works of art—a momentous place indeed, considering that there could be no continuous perceiving of works of art, much less reflecting on them, without their accessibility in the memory of appreciators—let us focus on the artist, and more particularly on his or her creation of a style. When we say that the artist “struggles to find his style,” we are speaking of the very situation I have designated as eliciting the freedom to be oneself. Just as an individual realizes this freedom by attaining a coherent personal identity, so the artist actualizes the same freedom by creating an achieved style. But in so doing the artist must be prepared to go outside established ego boundaries, indeed to lose himself or herself in the non-personal or extra-personal. No less than in psychotherapy, the way to the self lies outside the self. The artist has to touch base with the unconscious—as both Freud and Jung liked to emphasize—but he or she must, in additon, connect with other artists, especially with those most admired figures in a given tradition. Thus Cézanne routinely copied revered predecessors in the Louvre, and Picasso’s works allude continually to classical Greek art and to Spanish Baroque painting. Each painter was extraordinarily inventive in attaining a style (in Picasso’s case, several of them), and yet each came to this achievement only through a profound immersion in the work of others. The immersion is evident even in their most “original” works—so that we remark the presence of Chardin and Poussin in Cézanne’s still lifes and figure studies, and of Velasquez in Picasso’s later paintings. As concerted and prolonged remembering leads to a more consolidated self-identity, so these two artists’ active remembering of their predecessors came to fruition in their mature styles: styles that established their lasting identity as painters.
Memorial in-gathering is at work in such instances as well. The creation of a style involves a deep-going collocation of all that one has seen and learned—and now remembers in a synoptic manner. Memory’s contractive power, first observed early in this book, is drawn upon in the constitution of a style, which condenses a vast array of an artist’s experiences over time, much as an emblem or monogram is a compressed expression of a larger totality. For this very reason, an artist’s style is able to bear memories—to hold them formally and materially in its own preserve. In its “stamp” and allure, style exhibits what I have called memory’s “reservative” capacity, its ability to hold its content within its own keeping.
What is perhaps most remarkable about artistic style is its combination of collective-cwm-preservative power with the singularity that marks it as an artist’s own style, allowing him or her to say: “This is my style.” The evolution of a style’s mineness, the artist’s most demanding struggle, is at one with the process of inwardizing. For the artist must bring in—bring into himself or herself—what he or she has absorbed from others, not to reflect it back (this would be mere “imitation”) but to enable it to become his or her own creation. In this way something personal and unique is created, and the artist feels redeemed via-à-vis other artists, whatever may be the “anxiety” of their influence.25 This accomplishment—which may end up taking a lifetime—involves the creative juxtaposition of material and formal matrices of memories in an evolving network that is truly labyrinthine in its complexity: hence the difficulty of tracing the precise evolution of a particular style. But the result is there for all to see. It is manifest in that recognizable Gestalt that we call Cézanne’s “proto-Cubism” or Picasso’s “analytic Cubism,” each of which is nevertheless quite distinct from the other. “Le style, c’est l’homme même” goes the French adage. Exactly. In finding his or her style, the artist finds himself or herself. In this convergence of findings, remembering in its two forms of freedom plays an indispensable role. No wonder that Mnemosyne was said by the Greeks to be the Mother of the Muses: she brings forth the style of works of art as surely as she ushers in the personal style of the human beings who create these works.
Philosophy
The alliance between memory and philosophy is intimate and longstanding. As Nietzsche remarks:
The most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. . . . Their thinking is, in fact, a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive household of the soul, out of which [philosophical] concepts grew originally: philosophy is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest order.26
Let us narrow our attention to the role of memory in philosophical method. My invocation of Plato’s doctrine of recollection has already introduced the topic. This doctrine shows considerable affinity with Freud’s view of memory. Much as abreactive recollection becomes possible only through dialogical confrontation in psychotherapy, philosophical recollection or anamnesis arises after a process of dialectical cross-examination (elenchus). And just as we reconnect in therapy with the pre-personal sphere of the unconscious, so in Platonic recollection we rediscover those sources of our knowledge that originate in a pre-existent state. Moreover, as in both depth psychology and art, here too we realize our memorial freedom to be ourselves most effectively by going out of ourselves in an essential detour. For Plato, this recapture of the self outside itself is sanctioned not only by his official theory of the soul’s pre-existence, but by the very grammar of the crucial phrase “ex hautou,” which we have seen to be central to his theory of recollection. Although the phrase is usually translated as “within oneself,” its literal meaning is “from out of (ex)/oneself ’;autou)” The activity of recollection, in which the method of dialectic culminates, occurs—as an activity— within (“from”) one’s current mortal self, and yet it aims at something transcendent to (“out of”) this same finite self: i.e., the Forms of Knowledge. Only insofar as transcendent and immanent directions coincide in the inquiring subject—arise “from out of” this subject—can we speak of the inquirer as gaining his or her identity as a knower. As with the personal identity of any given individual, such noetic identity is dependent on appropriate acts of remembrance.
In-gathering, the other form of memorial freedom, is also important in the pursuit of philosophical method. “Recollection,” traced from its root in recolligere and ultimately in legein, means to assemble and lay out an articulate account: hence Plato’s claim that learning qua recollection is a matter of assembling pertinent examples and picking out essential defining features. At play here is that component of in-gathering which we have already termed “collecting.” This component is also thematized by Husserl, who insists that his method of “free variation in imagination” has to include a survey of relevant and variant examples so that one can notice the “congruences” or overlaps between them. Husserl further stresses that these examples must be “retained in grasp”27—much as the interlocutors in a Platonic dialogue are enjoined by Socrates to keep in mind the course of their discussions. In both cases, eidetic insight is the ultimate objective, and such insight becomes possible only in and through the collective-cwm-retentive powers of memory.28
It is quite striking that Husserl classifies the objects of eidetic inquiry into “formal” and “material” essences. Such essences occupy corresponding formal and material regions, which are suggestively akin to the formal and material matrices that structure the activity of inwardizing in memory. As inhering in the depth of the personal subject, these matrices occupy a domain that Husserl would name “the transcendental ego” and Plato simply “the soul.” For both thinkers the purpose of philosophical method is to suspend the baneful effects of unexamined belief so as to make insight into essences possible. Whether the basic act conveying this insight is called “recollection” (as by Plato) or “reactivation” (Husserl),29 it arises through an intensive inwardizing, a soul-searching, “a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive household of the soul.”
In depth psychology, art, and philosophy we can thus observe a concurrence as to the concrete importance of freedom in remembering. Whether in the form of the freedom to be oneself—oneself as eidetic inquirer, or as depth-psychological self-knower, or as artist who creates a style—or by virtue of the freedom of in-gathering, the patient, the artist, and the philosopher alike come to a more sensitive self-awareness, a deepened sense of the thick autonomy of memory, thanks to the subtle workings and reworkings of their own free remembering.
Let us grant that the freedom we realize in remembering is considerable—or at least much more considerable than mechanistic or physiological models, including those that take information-processing as a paradigm, might permit. Does this mean that the more remembering we can do—the more items we recall—the freer we are? Not at all. Recall the poignant plight of “S,” whose life was enormously overburdened by the mere fact that he remembered too many things. In any event, the two forms of freedom under discussion in this chapter have little if anything to do with the sheer amount, or even the accuracy, of information retained by the remembering subject. (This realization suggests that the ideals of flawless retention and unlimited storage—both of which guide the design of computers—are misleading as applied in any rigorous way to human memory.)
If memorial freedom is not to be assessed quantitatively, is it the case that remembering is (in Aristotle’s phrase) “up to us when we wish”?30 It is not clear that this is true even of imagining—which is what Aristotle is characterizing in this phrase—and it is certainly not true of remembering. As we witness so dramatically in the instance of Proustian “involuntary memory” as well as in many quotidian cases of obsessively returning memories, much remembering arises without our wishing or willing it. And, by the same token, much remembering fails to arise precisely when we want it to: “what is her name?” we ask ourselves in stupefaction as we encounter someone we know very well, racking our brain to discover the name. The mere existence of amnesias of many sorts, with or without an organic basis, forbids us to assert that remembering is an activity whose course we can confidently control, or even predict. But if remembering is by no means entirely within our control, it is also not wholly outside our control either—something merely mechanical, a sheer process of biological determinism. We, individual rememberers and co-rememberers, are part of the process, contributing to it vitally albeit often in a tacit manner. What remains in memory remains up to us—if not precisely when we wish or as we wish, nevertheless as belonging to the realm of our own freedom to remember.
But now we must confront remembering’s wnfreedom, which is just as pressing a matter as its freedom. The idea of thick autonomy developed in the last chapter already pointed in this direction. In its positive modes, thick autonomy conveys the concrete freedom of the rememberer, the critical difference that free remembering can make in his or her memorial life. But just as “thick,” as a matter of thorough immersion, such autonomy also reminds us that most remembering is not up to the remembering subject when he or she wishes. So much does remembering embroil us in experiences and structures over which we do not retain effective control that it would be more accurate in many instances to say merely that “remembering is going on” rather than that “I choose to remember.” The going-on is the primary phenomenon, not the willed actions of the rememberer; and this ongoing remembering is happening, always, in the thick of things—sometimes most of all when it seems most irrelevant (e.g., when a spontaneously appearing memory image reveals a seemingly senseless preoccupation with its specific content).
Another way of stating this is to say that memories impose themselves upon us. They demand respect. They demand respect not only as stemming from the past but as clarifying and influencing the present, and as shadowing forth a possible future. We are certainly free to in-gather them in various ways and to interrelate them with differing degrees of intensity and involvement. But this freedom does not alter the fundamental fact that we are not—and should not expect to be—masters of the memory game. Only in mnemonics, thanks to its formal and manipulative aspects, is anything like mastery approached; but our ambivalence toward even the most remarkable mnemonists is reflected in the epithet “memory freak.” It is as if their manifest mastery of remembering were freakish or monstrous: too much of a monstration, too little of substance.31 We are thereby admonished to admit to the inherent limitations of our memorial powers. The sheer ability to recall facts and figures, even whole experiences, is not a fair gauge of the genuine prowess of remembering and fails altogether to capture the density of its autonomy. Once more, accuracy and quantity regarded as ideal parameters fall short of the mark; they do not give the true dimensions of the phenomenon.
But unfreedom connotes more than lack of control or mastery. It also signifies sheer repetition—blind, meaningless reinstatement of the selfsame. “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.” This familiar proverb distills the essence of the situation. Failure to remember involves unfreedom in the precise form of being “condemned to repeat” a given circumstance rather than understanding it or creatively varying it. It is therefore not surprising to learn that Freud contrasts remembering and repeating in his description of the unfree, symptomatic “acting out” of the psychoanalytic patient: “The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he repeats it.”32 If the therapeutic goal of psychoanalysis is “to fill in gaps in memory,”33 this goal is adopted in order to overcome the unfreedom of impulsively or compulsively repetitive actions. And if Freud himself came to abandon the explicit aim of abreactive recollecting—which is a matter of replay ultimately modeled on visual re-enactment—and to replace it with the much more diffuse co-remembering effected in transference, it was because he realized that such recollection is itself merely repetitive in its operation. The true telos of remembering, of a remembering that liberates us from the future as well as from the past, cannot be achieved by any form of strictly “secondary” memory, not even that which embodies exact replication.34
Freud’s position on this matter brings with it another crucial lesson: we come to the freedom of remembering only from the unfreedom of repetition. For everyone, and not only the patient, is in the same predicament when it comes to early childhood memories. Not remembering these self-formative memories (thanks to “infantile amnesia”),35 we act them out as adolescents and adults, repeating their inherent patterns endlessly and thoughtlessly. Only as finally remembering them—which is not tantamount to recollecting them—do we become free from them and thus free for the future as well: free for what we shall have been for what we are in the process of becoming.
Such a liberating movement from unfreedom to freedom by means of the right remembering is by no means confined to what happens in psychoanalysis. The same movement is at play in the domain of artistic creation. The artist, too, must free himself from merely repeating others (and even himself) if he is to forge a style that is genuinely his own; his task is no less one of liberating himself from the burden of an inadequately remembered past so as not simply to repeat it. The accomplishment of this task is not guaranteed by recourse to the exact recollections of art history: repainting the relevant past, experiencing it in body memory and commemorating it as Cézanne and Picasso did, is a much more veridical way of remembering it, of being true to it, than recollecting dates or revisualizing forms. In philosophy as well, we can trace out much the same trajectory from unfreedom in repeating to freedom in remembering. What Plato would term doxa or “everyday belief” and Husserl the “natural attitude” refers to the situation in which we merely repeat the opinions of others instead of thinking things out for ourselves. To move beyond this situation—which is as universal as infantile amnesia—requires the right kind of remembering, one which cannot be reduced to secondary memory. Doxic repetition gives way to noetic or eidetic insight when the free thinking necessary for such insight is made possible by free remembering.
The burden of repetition does not, however, pass easily from our shoulders—as Freud and Jung, Cézanne and Picasso, Plato and Husserl would all hasten to remind us. Even after we have made the liberating movements just outlined, this burden remains in our lives. It does so in the form of forgetting, which is at once the most pervasive and the most insidious kind of memorial unfreedom. Not only can many modes of repetitive behavior themselves be understood as types of forgetting—of “amnesia” in its literal meaning of “not-remembering,” the privation of memory36—but our ordinary lives are riddled with the vacuities, the pockets as well as the long stretches, of oblivion. Perhaps such oblivion is, in Kundera’s phrase, “the heaviest of burdens.” But, as is suggested by the conception of forgetting as a matter of “gaps in memory,” it may also betoken “the lightness of being.” How can this be? How are we to understand a paradoxical situation in which forgetting is at once light and heavy, a blessing and a curse?
To resolve the paradox, it is not sufficient to recall the blissfully oblivious state of the bovine being with whose description by Nietzsche the Introduction to this book opened. The beast who forgets to answer that he always forgets what he was going to say—who is thus locked into double oblivion—may be quite happy in his own manner. But he singularly lacks the possibility of gaining that happiness which stems from free remembering, a remembering that triumphs over oblivion itself. The answer to the paradox is not to recommend forgetfulness, much less narcotization. Nevertheless, Nietzsche may be right when he comments that “life in any true sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness.”37 Indeed, as we know, Nietzsche advocates an active forgetfulness to be set over against an overactive remembering: hypomnesia rather than hypermnesia. If forgetting results in the lightening of the burden of our existence, then it may certainly be a good thing: the lightness of being may be (again in Kunderas word) “unbearable,” but it can disburden this existence in important ways. From this point of view, it would be remembering that is the heavy matter, the activity that “crushes us.”38 By the same token, however, this heaviest activity is “simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment”39—a fulfillment to which the beast cannot even begin to aspire.
A response to the paradox I have posed thus emerges. Perhaps forgetting and remembering are equiprimordial in human experience; both are valuable, both are required. If so, the unfreedom of forgetting is not to be regretted vis-à-vis the freedom of remembering. Each is essential to human existence.
To value forgetting instead of vilifying it is to recognize that the forgetting of many details of daily life is not only practically useful—in order to become less distracted or preoccupied—but, in fact, necessary to our well-being, a basis for being-in-the-world. Far from being a matter for regret or something merely to overcome, forgetting may be salutary in itself. Indeed, it can be a condition for remembering:
It is this ‘mass of the forgotten’, it is the forgotten [itself] which seems to be the first intuition of the past, to constitute the essential basic material upon which memory comes to embroider the remembrances of isolated events. Forgetting is thus not simply memory failure. It appears to us now in its positive value. . . . From this point of view, the vision that everything is destined to be forgotten seems much more natural, much more appeasing, than the fact that it can be reproduced again as an isolated event.40
If these claims of Minkowski’s are true, we might even be tempted to speak of a freedom to forget that is the analogue of the freedom to remember. However possible or desirable such a freedom to forget may be, it is nonetheless severely curtailed at critical points. No more than we can remember everything—except precisely in a freakish condition such as that from which “S” so acutely suffered—are we able to forget everything. Unless we are subject to the extreme amnesia of amentia, Korsakoff syndrome, or chronic temporal lobe epilepsy,41 we cannot forget certain devastating experiences such as the death of a parent or a friend, or battle scenes in Vietnam. The same is true of exhilarating experiences: the first moment of falling in love, the birth of a child, the publication of a book impose themselves upon our remembrance.
On the other hand, the incursion of unwilled and uncontrolled forgetting into remembering serves to delimit the latter in drastic ways. Whether it assumes the comparatively benign (but highly frustrating) form of our being unable to remember a proper name or the much more momentous form of losing contact with whole tracts of our remembered past as a result of a stroke (which can lead to the undermining of our personal identity), such involuntary forgetting—especially in its more monstrous displays—acts to remind us of our contingency and frailty as rememberers. No wonder that so many models of remembering attempt to underwrite its efficiency and reliability by demonstrating the rigor of the stages through which the formation of a single memory must presumably pass. Indeed, the recourse of many memory theorists to notions such as cognitive “levels of processing” or neural memory-traces can be seen as part of a determined effort to shore up (and to defend against) the faulty workings of memory, its liability to error and breakdown, the ever-present possibility of falling into temporary or even permanent oblivion. Considered in this light, forgetting is indeed a condition of remembering: its constant specter inspires the neurologist (as well as the idealist) to a vision of perfect retention. As Minkowski admonishes, however, it is far from certain that we should ever wish to achieve an error-free memorial life. Not only is erring always likely to occur; it is itself something actively to be desired. Physiological models—abetted by computer paradigms—project a state which it is doubtful we would wish to attain once we consider the consequences of having an infallible memory: for “S” it was a continual curse.
Despite its intrinsic importance and its undeniably salutary effects, the fact of forgetting underscores the inherent imperfection of our operative memory. From the stand-point of this memory, forgetting is indeed a matter of unfreedom. To be forgetful beyond the reach of any available act of remembering—and beyond the aid of any serviceable technological device—is to come up against a foreclosure upon our freedom as rememberers. This freedom cannot be assimilated to the limitless freedom of a Kantian noumenal self—or to the ethereal freedom of imagining, which is limitless in a quite different sense. Nor can it be reduced to the “secondary autonomy” of the ego as conceived in post-Freudian ego psychology. As memory moves us beyond mind, it also moves us beyond any such ego and its techniques of adaptation-to and control-of the immediate environment. The massive presence of forgetting in our lives shows decisively that we are not egological masters in our own memorial houses, much less in the many mansions that memory enables us to inhabit. If in imagining there is considerable assurance of self-incurred success, in remembering there is no comparable assurance: the titular author of such success, the ego, here becomes buried in the thick mass of the forgotten as well as surpassed in the realm of the remembered. In both respects, the ego is itself mastered, out-remembered.
Where does this leave us as rememberers? Not altogether in submission to the unfreedom introduced by forgetting, and thus merely cast adrift in the vicissitudes of the memorial life. If we cannot be said to make our own memories—if we cannot remember endlessly or flawlessly any more than we can remember pointlessly—this does not make us into mere pawns in a vast and indifferent memory game. Let us say instead that we are made of our memories: that our psyche, our body, our life with others, our place in the world, is memorial through and through. To be made of memories is to be made of something that mind alone cannot fabricate nor its representations contain. It is also to be composed in a way that machine design, however ingenious, is unlikely ever to match—especially when the machines are themselves dependent upon our own unconditionally necessary neurons, and upon our equally necessary conscious intentions, for their conception, design, and use.
But now, after reclaiming remembering for the individual human subject—after showing memories to be genuinely mine, whatever threats are posed by forgetting—we must return memory to the world. The need to undertake such a return first became evident in Parts Two and Three of this book. It re-emerged in the present chapter when we discovered that the freedom to be ourselves as rememberers requires that we leave ourselves—ourselves as egological, self-centered subjects—in order to find ourselves. Another way of putting this is to say that, in being made of our memories (rather than being their makers), we are also beyond ourselves in our own memories. Instead of sucking us into a tight container of the mind or the brain, memories take us continually outside ourselves; and they do so in the very midst of the enactment of their own distinctive in-gathering action.
How is this possible? We may take a final clue from Heidegger. In Being and Time he discusses “being-in” (In-Sein) as a mode of existing in the world that cannot be construed as being situated within mind or brain and their representational contents. Just as the circumambient world cannot be adequately mirrored in such contents, so we do not have to climb out of them in order to reach the world:
When Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximally encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always ‘outside’ alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered . . . even in perceiving, retaining, and preserving, the Dasein which knows remains outside.42.
The remembered past also remains outside—outside the confinement of “the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness.”43 Memories, making us, refuse to be cabined, cribbed, and confined in the manner described by most theories of memory from Cartesianism to cognitive psychology, where “progress” in the latter consists mainly in introducing one type of containment (that offered by the computer) in place of another (that provided by the mind or brain). And making us as they do, these same memories take us out of ourselves and into the world; or more exactly, they show us that we have always already been there—and precisely in and through remembering itself.
Think of it: memory not in brain or mind but in the world, and thus in the things that belong to the world such as lived bodies, places, and other people. Indeed, there is no reason not to suppose that even mute material things, inanimate as well as animate, can be thoroughly memorial in status: they, too, can embody memories and are not limited to evoking them. So can machines, not excluding information processing machines once they are divested of their pretension to model human memory itself. Any thing— anything in the world, even the frailest footprint—can become memorial: can become a bearer of memories with as much right as a monument built to stand forever. The fact is that memory is more a colander than a container, more porous than enframing. Its final freedom of in-gathering is a freedom of letting the world in through its many subtle pores (and this in many fashions) only in order to allow us to realize how richly we already in-habit the world uAthout. Ramifying through such being-in-the-world, tying together its diverse facets in incomparably multiple ways, remembering deflates the ambitions of sheer activism just as it undermines the purposes of a resigned passivism. For the world that memory makes known to us in terms of the world’s own “things”—its constituents or elements conceived as forms of “subdued being, non-thetic being”44—serves to undercut any such divisive dualism as the active/passive dyad itself exemplifies. As memory moves us beyond mind, it moves us before the dualisms that mind itself begets in its incessant cogitations, whether these dualisms be those of the active and the passive, mind and body, mind and brain, self and other, ego and reality . . . or of memory and perception, memory and imagination, memory and thought. The thick autonomy of remembering ensures that the mutual emeshment of these otherwise disparate items is thorough and deep—as thorough and deep as our involvement in our own being-in-the-world.
Remembering goes on and we go on with it; we could not go on without it even if we do not make it or control it; crucial contributors to it and continuing cpllaborators in its company, we act to return remembering to the world. For it is in the world that memories are begotten, and it is in the world that they find their natural destiny. To acknowledge this is to decenter and de-individuate remembering as we usually think of it—namely, as the possession of individual selves—and it is to consider that things, not just representations of things, may be thoroughly steeped in memory.
We can only conclude that memory is co-extensive with world. “Everything,” as Piaget says, “participates in memory.”45 Nothing is not memorial in some manner; everything belongs to some matrix of memory, even if it is a matrix which is remote from human concerns and interests. It might even be that things can remember us as much as we remember them. Perhaps they even remember themselves: “I did not have to remember these things; they have remembered themselves all these years.”46 Black Elk’s words resonate with the possible cosmological implications of a more capacious view of memory, a view which refuses constriction to the human sphere. Could it be that “the hold is held” by things as much as by minds—and by places as much as by brains or machines? Is it possible that remembering goes on, in some fashion, in things and places as well as among human beings? If so, it goes on in such intricate and indirect ways that we hesitate even to think of it as a matter of memory. But how else are we to understand the way in which trees in a grove reflect each other’s presence in their patterns of growing, or the way that marks left on boulders indicate receding glaciers? It requires a semiologically attuned observer to interpret such patterns or marks as express memorials of earlier events. Human beings are adept at just such discernment, though perhaps not as uniquely capable of it as was once thought. Yet neither the fact of such sensitivity to memorially suggestive signs, nor the fact that humankind continually engages in remembering, gives to human beings any ultimately privileged position in the realm of memory. Privileged as articulate participants in the process of their own remembering and as acute explorers of its structure, they are nonetheless not entitled to assume that their own remembering conveys the essence of every kind of remembering. If memory in some significant sense is truly to be found in things and their implacement in the world, we cannot presume that an exclusive—or even the most inclusive—paradigm of all memory is provided by the remembering which is characteristic for the human species alone.
One must nonetheless begin somewhere—and best of all with what one knows most intimately. Thus the present study began without embarrassment by scrutinizing a miscellaneous set of casual memories experienced by the author. These all-too-human memories were themselves remembered as a starting point. Their immediate analysis into eidetic traits and intentional structures exemplified yet another finitude—not just that of authorial subjectivity but that of the constraints of phenomenological method. The extension of this analysis into mnemonic modes that do not fit the pattern of intentionality with the exactitude achievable in the traditionally favored case of recollection represented a step away from the inherent limitations of mentalism as this has been practised from Descartes through Husserl. When such decidedly extra-mental phenomena as body and place memories, along with forms of commemoration, were taken up in what Plato might term a “third wave”47 of consideration the compass of memory was broadened still more: neither the human mind, nor even the individual rememberer in his or her self-identical being, could any longer claim to be the unique vehicle of memories. Instead, remembering can be said to be going on between the embodied human rememberer and the place he or she is in as well as with the others he or she is in the presence of.
Thanks to our ruminations on thick autonomy, we should be prepared to take a final step in this de-subjectification of memory. That which has been regarded since the seventeenth century as unambiguously outside the human subject—and consequently as capturable only in the mind regarded as the “mirror of nature,” including memory as a main mirror of the external world—is to be understood as altogether continuous with this subject. As immersed in the world, human beings are as much ‘outside’ as ‘inside’. If this is so, the world and its elemental things are themselves matters of memory: not simply there to be entrapped and pictured in recollections, but there as distinctively memorable on their own and from the beginning. What had seemed to be ineluctably dependent on human mentation—and, by extension, on human brains and human-designed machines—turns out to have its own autonomy, densely enacted and yet diaphanously exhibited. Memorial power resides as much in the things of the world as in ourselves or our inventions. The autonomy of remembering goes on not only inside human beings, nor even only between such beings and the world’s things, but outside in the midst of things themselves—those very Sachen selbst that Husserl had posited as the ultimate objects of phenomenological method.
“To be is to participate”: this formula of Lévy-Bruhl’s48 is to be remembered a last time. If to be is to participate, and if everything participates in memory—inanimate things as well as their human percipients—this can only mean that everything is memorial through and through. As in the case of commemoration (that most encompassing form of human remembering), the key is provided by the notion of participation. Memory not only registers modes of participation between animate and inanimate things, minds and bodies, selves and others, persons and places; it also contributes its own re-enlivening capacities to the festival of cosmic participation. Its very porousness, its open-endedness and ongoingness, its ability to bond deeply across remotenesses of time and space, its own virtual dimension—all of these help to make memory a powerful participatory force in the world. Or more exactly: as the world. Just as everything participates in memory, so memory participates in everything: every last thing. In so doing, it draws the world together, re-membering it and endowing it with a connectiveness and a significance it would otherwise lack—or rather, without which it would not be what it is or as it is.