PREFACE

through spiral upon spiral of the shell of memory that yet connects us. . . .

—H.D., “The Flowering of the Rod”

The fact is that we have almost no systematic knowledge about memory as it occurs in the course of ordinary life.

—Ulrich Neisser, Cognition and Reality

In the case of memory, we are always already in the thick of things. For this reason there can properly be no preface to remembering: no pre-facing the topic in a statement that would precede it and capture its essence or structure in advance. Memory itself is already in the advance position. Not only because remembering is at all times presupposed, but also because it is always at work: it is continually going on, often on several levels and in several ways at once. Although there are many moments of misremembering and of not successfully recollecting, there are few moments in which we are not steeped in memory; and this immersion includes each step we take, each thought we think, each word we utter. Indeed, every fiber of our bodies, every cell of our brains, holds memories—as does everything physical outside bodies and brains, even those inanimate objects that bear the marks of their past histories upon them in mute profusion. What is memory-laden exceeds the scope of the human: memory takes us into the environing world as well as into our individual lives.

To acknowledge such a massive pre-presence of memory is to acknowledge how irreducibly important remembering is. If we need to be convinced of how much memory matters to us, we have only to ponder the fate of someone deprived of its effective use. Consider, for instance, the case of the unfortunate “M.K.,” a high school teacher who at age forty-three was suddenly struck by an acute episode of encephalitis. Within hours, he lost access to almost all memories formed during the previous five years. Worse still, he had virtually no memory of anything that happened to him afterwards: since the onset of the illness, “he has learned a few names over the years, a few major events, and can get around the hospital.”1 This laconic summary, tragic in its very brevity, conveys the empty essence of a life rendered suddenly memoryless by a microscopic viral agent. Such a life is without aim or direction; it spins in the void of the forgotten, a void in which one cannot even be certain of one’s personal identity. Not only does it show that what most of us take for granted can be abolished with an incomprehensible rapidity; it also poses the problem of how anything that permeates our lives so deeply can be lost so irrevocably.

How much memory matters can also be seen in the quite different case of “S.,” a Russian mnemonist with an astonishing capacity to recall. When asked, as one of myriad tests, to repeat several stanzas of The Divine Comedy in Italian (a language he did not know) some fifteen years after having the stanzas read to him just once, he was able to recite them word for word and with perfect intonation. As A. R. Luria has observed, “the capacity of his memory had no distinct limits.”2 Envious as we might be of such a capacity, it is noteworthy that S. suffered greatly from it; so overburdened by it was he that he had to devise techniques for forgetting what he would otherwise irrepressibly remember, no matter how trivial it was: “This is too much,” he lamented, “each word calls up images; they collide with one another, and the result is chaos.”³ Where forgetting was M.K.’s curse, it was S.’s salvation. But in the end, it is not clear that S., with his gift, was any less oppressed than was M.K. in his afflicted state.

These two figures are limiting cases of what the rest of us, as more or less normal rememberers, experience. On the one hand, each of us has undergone moments or even entire periods of acute amnesia. Whether such amnesia is contingent and occasion-bound (e.g., failing to recall the name of a friend or, more drastically, the circumstances immediately preceding a concussion) or systematic and symptomatic (as in forgetting dreams or incidents from early childhood), it is embarrassing and discomfiting and sometimes even disabling. On the other hand, it is a fact that eight percent of elementary school children possess practically perfect eidetic recall.⁴ Moreover, many adults can recover deeply repressed memories in vivid detail even though they have never been recollected before; and, generally, our powers of hypermnesia (i.e., ultra-clear memory) are much more extensive than we usually suspect.⁵ Just as we have no difficulty in grasping the devastating consequences of M.K.’s memory loss, so we connect immediately with S.’s prodigious feats of memory through certain of our own inherent, if distinctly more modest, capacities.

Nevertheless, even if we do not find M.K. or S. utterly alien, most of the remembering that most of us do falls between the poles of hypomnesia and hypermnesia. Thus the question becomes: what can we say with confidence about our own remembering as it occurs spontaneously and on a daily basis? Short of total recall and yet beyond amnesic vacuity, how does human memory present itself? What basic forms does it assume? With what content is it concerned? How much is it a function of the human mind, how much of the human body? In short, what do we do when we remember?

Remembering: A Phenomenological Study attempts to answer such questions as these by taking a resolutely descriptive look at memory as it arises in diverse commonplace settings. In these settings we rarely attend to what we are doing when we remember; we just let it happen (or fail to happen). How can we begin to notice what we so much take for granted—except precisely when we hear of extraordinary cases such as those of M.K. and S.? This book undertakes to help us notice what has gone unnoticed or been noticed only marginally. In this respect the book is a work in phenomenology, an enterprise devoted to discerning and thematizing that which is indistinct or overlooked in everyday experience.

Remembering represents a sequel to my earlier study of imagination.6 But there is a critical difference between the two inquiries, which are otherwise closely affiliated. This difference follows directly from the multifarious incursions of memory into the life-world of the rememberer. These inroads are such as to resist complete capture in the structure of intentionality, which served as a guiding thread in Imagining. In remembering, there is an unresolvable “restance”⁷—resistance as well as remainder—which calls for a different approach. Intentional analysis remains valid for much of ordinary recollection (e.g., in visualized scenes), and I devote chapters 3 and 4 to the exploration of remembering insofar as it can be construed on the model of the mind’s intentionality. But once we realize how forcefully many phenomena of memory take us out of mind conceived as a container of ideas and representations, we can no longer rest content with intentionality as a leitmotif.⁸ That is why in Part Two I consider various “mnemonic modes”—i.e., recognizing, reminiscing, and reminding—each of which can be seen as contesting the self-enclosing character of strictly intentionalist paradigms. In Part Three I depart still further from the narrow basis established in Part One; I do so by describing body memory, place memory, and commemoration. In spite of their central position in human experience, these latter have been curiously neglected in previous accounts of memory. Their description leads me to discuss memory’s “thick autonomy” in Part Four: an autonomy which is to be contrasted with the equally characteristic “thin autonomy” of imagination.

A descriptive account of remembering will help us to recognize that we remember in multiple ways: that the past need not come packaged in the prescribed format of representational recollections. To fail to remember in this format is not tantamount to failing to remember altogether. When one memorial channel to the past becomes closed off, others often open up—indeed, are often already on hand and fully operative. I may not retain a lucid mental image of an acrimonious quarrel with a certain friend—I may have successfully repressed it—and yet the same scene may be lingering in an inarticulate but nonetheless powerful body memory. The point is not that there is a meaningful alternative in every case: the sad circumstance of M.K. warns us of dire limits. But plural modes of access to the remembered past are far more plentiful than philosophers and psychologists have managed to ascertain.⁹

Remembering returns us to the very world lost sight of in the language of representations and of neural traces. Indeed, remembering reminds us that we have never left the life-world in the first place, that we are always within it, and that memory is itself the main life-line to it. For memory takes us into things—into the Sachen selbst which Husserl proclaimed to be the proper objects of phenomenological investigation. In remembering, we come back to the things that matter.

But memory is not just something that sustains a status quo ante within human experience. It also makes a critical difference to this experience. The situation is such that remembering transforms one kind of experience into another: in being remembered, an experience becomes a different kind of experience. It becomes “a memory,” with all that this entails, not merely of the consistent, the enduring, the reliable, but also of the fragile, the errant, the confabulated. Each memory is unique; none is simple repetition or revival. The way that the past is relived in memory assures that it will be transfigured in subtle and significant ways.

If this is indeed the case—if memory matters in our experience by making a difference in the form our experience itself takes—then a detailed description of remembering is called for. Such a description will not only aid us in distinguishing remembering from kindred phenomena of imagining and perceiving, feeling and thinking; it will also lead us to realize that it was always misguided to propose that remembering could be regarded as a mere offshoot of mind or brain, fated to repeat what has already happened elsewhere. Remembering is itself essential to what is happening, part of every action, here as well as elsewhere: “remembrance is always now.”10 It is also, thanks to its transformative force in the here and now, then and there. Not only is nothing human alien to memory; nothing in the world, including the world itself, is not memorial in nature or in status. And if this is so, it follows that “whatever we know exists in proportion to the memories we possess.”¹¹ Thus far reaches remembering: it stretches as far as we can know.