Chapter Two: Memory in Theory: The Childhood Memories of John Locke (Persons, Parrots)

Locke’s Momentum

As we saw in Chapter 1, one of the achievements of Arendt’s and Benjamin’s critiques of history is to have drawn attention to the ways in which modern history effectively eliminates the dimension of human experience from its discursive structure. The question remains, though, as to how to situate the concept of experience with respect to this devaluation, especially given that one of the single most important innovations of modern philosophy was to have grounded knowledge in experience itself. In short: If modern history all but eliminates experience from its discourse, it is no less the case that the modern concept of experience is grounded in an elimination of history.

In this respect, the philosophy of John Locke is a case in point. In The Second Treatise of Government, Locke tries to preempt objections to his claim that existing political societies began as gatherings of men in the “state of nature.” The first of these objections involves the scant historical evidence that can be amassed in support of such a claim. Locke addresses the objection twice, first summarizing it as follows: “It is often asked as a mighty objection, where are, or ever were there any men in such a state of nature?”¹ and then, later in the treatise, “That there are no instances to be found in story [sic], of a company of men independent, and equal one amongst another, that met together, and in this way began and set up a government” (STG §100).

His preliminary impulse is simply to deny the objection outright: “It is plain,” he writes, “the world never was, nor ever will be, without numbers of men in that state” (STG §14). After making a few obscure references to “two men in the desert” of Peru, to the promises made between a European and an Indian in the woods of America and so on, Locke concludes on shaky ground: “I moreover affirm, that all men are naturally in that state” (STG §15).

His second response, while no different from the first in its conclusion, is substantially more interesting for its argumentation. In granting to his critics the difficulty of finding historical evidence to support the claim that associations of men in a state of nature ever existed, Locke takes the opportunity to muse over why this might be the case:

It is not at all to be wondered, that history gives us but a very little account of men, that lived together in the state of nature. . . . And if we may not suppose men ever to have been in the state of nature, because we hear not much of them in such a state, we may as well suppose the armies of Salmanasser or Xerxes were never children, because we hear little of them, till they were men, and imbodied in armies. . . . [F]or it is with common-wealths as with particular persons, they are commonly ignorant of their own births and infancies: and if they know any thing of their original, they are beholden for it, to the accidental records that others have kept of it. (STG §101)

As C. B. Macpherson argues in the introduction to Locke’s text, the “natural condition” of mankind that Locke develops cannot be grounded in history; as such, it is to be understood as a “logical abstraction” or deduction (xiii).

By dispensing with a consideration of history, Locke’s “state of nature” is certainly in good company. Both Hobbes’s “state of nature” and, even more so, that of Rousseau some sixty years after Locke’s were preoccupied with an origin that could be neither captured by history nor even discerned in it retrospectively. Concerning the latter, in what is perhaps one of the most famous statements of “On the Origins of Inequality,” Rousseau does not so much invoke the dustbin of history as he contends that all history, written hitherto, is a dustbin: “Let us therefore begin by putting aside all the facts, for they have no bearing on the question. . . . O man, whatever country you may be from, whatever your opinions may be, listen: here is your history, as I have thought to read it, not in the books of your fellowman, who are liars, but in nature, who never lies.”²

Locke’s bracketing of history is certainly less robust and rhetorically forceful than Rousseau’s, but what is nevertheless striking about it is that the “logical abstraction” on which it is said to rest is not very logical or abstract at all, or at least it is made demonstrably less so by the resource it makes of the natural phenomenon of aging and its accompanying memory loss. Of interest here is not so much the fact that Locke evades the question of history as how he offers an explanation of it: the benighted state of a commonwealth regarding the question of its own origin in the state of nature is analogous to, and thus ostensibly explained by, the physiological and mental experience of a single individual, in particular, through recourse to that individual’s loss of childhood and to the seemingly natural “fact” of his or her amnesia regarding that childhood.

In other words, to explain the lack of historical origin of men in a state of nature, Locke must resort to yet another ahistorical “natural man”: the latter’s forgetting its childhood appears to explain the lack of origin of the former. At one level, of course, the explanation is successful precisely to the extent that it explains nothing—it merely points to a lack of explanation or a “blank” and attempts to give it solid empirical grounding. At another level, the resource Locke makes here of “particular persons” and the experiences they undergo, those involving the physiological effects of aging—the transition from childhood to adulthood—and the memory loss that supposedly accompanies this transition, seem difficult to take at face value as phenomena with any real explanatory value. In fact, what is given here as the “explanation” of a lack of historicity simply begs the question of memory loss as such.

Like the “state of nature” whose lack of history it is called upon to explain, Locke’s “person” emerges with no discernible historical ground beneath its feet. Its emergence would, however, turn out to be “history-in-the-making”: The influence of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding—also published in 1690 and in which extensive treatment is given to those issues of personhood, identity, and memory that the Second Treatise only mentions in passing—was and continues to be far-reaching. Neil Wood attests to its momentum in his study of the politics of Locke’s empiricism with the following contention: “John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is one of our most widely read and influential philosophic masterpieces. Seldom has a book so shaped the mind of a culture . . . perhaps no single volume can so justifiably be called the intellectual foundation of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that ushered in the modern world of ideas.”³ Likewise Nicholas Jolley, in arguing for Locke’s particular relevance in the context of contemporary discussions of memory and identity, has also pointed to the text’s canonical status. “It is hardly an exaggeration,” he suggests, “to say that Locke invented the problem [of personal identity] in the form in which it is known today. The recent upsurge of interest in the topic is often clearly Lockean in inspiration; either explicitly or implicitly, many contemporary writers seek to remodel Locke’s basic program.” Furthermore, writes Jolley, “the project of analysing personal identity over time in terms of memory has attracted many philosophers, and even today Locke’s theory continues to be a source of inspiration.”⁴ Perhaps, though, it is Hans Aarsleff who has articulated this influence in the most compelling, if enigmatic, temporal terms: “the Essay” he writes, “has no other history than that which was its own future.”⁵

§

Despite the fact that Locke himself saw fit to invoke a failure of memory as constitutive of personhood in the Second Treatise on Government, the scholarly attention paid to the issue of memory in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding has generally been limited to the edifying role that memory plays in the constitution of persons. Paradigmatic in this respect is the reference we find to it in the section on “Of Identity and Diversity.” “To find wherein personal identity consists,” Locke writes, “we must consider what person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.”⁶

If Locke’s Essay does continue in large measure to ground current understandings of identity and memory, what seems most significant about the historicity of Locke’s Essay is precisely that it is not limited to the historical moment in which the text was written: In light of its continued relevance, it seems especially urgent to trace the ways in which Locke produces the unifying version of memory that has become the standard interpretation of his text.⁷ Reading “against the grain” of the text’s doctrine, one could, albeit in a preliminary way, emphasize that within the development of Locke’s argument concerning memory and identity, the staging of a triumphant self reflecting on its own fully accessible and remembered past is itself framed in the text as a recovery from a life-threatening form of self-alienation, embodied in and around the fundamental foreignness of memory.

That Locke’s doctrinal project can be called into question, however, certainly does not imply that it is emptied of all instruction. To the contrary, the ways in which memory, its failures, and its impossibilities are staged in The Essay, and the ways in which “voice” is recuperated in these failures, give a sense of what is at stake—perhaps even today—in testimonial or autobiographical claims to memory. In his goal to put a human face on memory, he highlights what is at stake every time we speak, as “persons,” in the guise of memory.

§

Early in Book 2 of The Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in the section “Of Retention,” Locke spells out the position of memory within his empirical system. Memory is subordinate to the perceptual activities of the mind (that is, one can perceive without the aid of the faculty of memory); yet for the more developed faculties of the understanding, it acts as a crucial foundation without which the mind would remained stalled at a stage of infancy. For the human understanding, he writes, memory “is necessary in the next degree to perception. It is of so great moment that, where it is wanting, all the rest of the faculties are in a great measure useless; and we in our thoughts, reasonings, and knowledge, could not proceed beyond present objects, were it not for the assistance of our memories” (Essay 2.10.7). Consistent with his critique of the doctrine of innate principles—a critique central to the development of his own doctrine of experience, one whose implications are as much social as they are philosophical, according to several of his later commentators⁸—Locke contends that memory follows on the heels of sense-experience, that in other words memory does not recall anything that does not have its origin in sense-perception. Locke writes that “to say a notion is imprinted on the mind, and yet at the same time to say that the mind is ignorant of it, and never yet took notice of it, is to make this impression nothing” (Essay 1.2.5), and some sections later, that “whatever idea comes into the mind is new, and not remembered; this consciousness of its having been in the mind before being that which distinguishes remembering from all other ways of thinking” (Essay 1.2.21).

As Leibniz would contend in his critique of Locke’s text, Locke’s work differs from his own to the extent that Locke’s “is closer to Aristotle’s and mine to Plato’s.”⁹ In relating Lockean empiricism to Aristotelian philosophy in this way, Leibniz is recalling the radical shift that Aristotle had inaugurated in relation to the metaphysics of Plato. Indeed, the presuppositions that Aristotle was able to articulate by virtue of this shift would be the very ones upon which Locke would later draw. However, as Leibniz also contends, both moderns differ “at many points from the teachings of both of these ancient writers” (48). Nowhere is this claim more compellingly demonstrated than in the difference between Locke and Aristotle on memory and, in particular, on the relation between memory and subject-constitution, or identity.

Aristotle’s short treatise On Memory yields his most comprehensive statements on the phenomenon of memory. In it, his dispute with his predecessor clearly comes into focus. “We must first consider the objects of memory,” Aristotle writes in the opening lines of the text, “a point on which mistakes are often made. Now to remember the future is not possible—that is an object of opinion or expectation. . . ; nor is there memory of the present, but only sense-perception. For by the latter we know not the future, nor the past, but the present only. But memory relates to what is past.”¹⁰

This position is in stark contrast to Plato’s, which characterizes sense perception as the ephemeral and all-too-seductive shadow of eternal and unchanging truths. As we saw in Chapter 1, the tensions between the pre-Socratic memory arts and philosophy arise out of two differing conceptions of memory, philosophical reminiscence for Plato being of what is eternally. By virtue of the ontological priority given to memory over sense-perception, Socrates advances the famous thesis that learning is, in truth, reminiscence.

Whereas for Aristotle memory is a capacity that both human beings and the more developed animal species possess, the faculty of reminiscence or recollection is restricted to humans. Memory, according to this schema, involves the mere retention of sense images, imprinted on the mind to varying degrees depending on the strength of the initial impression and on the receptivity of the imprinting surface.¹¹ Reminiscence, on the other hand, is the human ability to call up past images in a deliberate and conscious manner. The decisive point for our purposes is that reminiscence employs mental images that originate in sense-perception. On this point, Aristotle is insistent: “Recollection is not the recovery or acquisition of memory; since at the instant when one at first learns or experiences, he does not thereby recover a memory, inasmuch as none has preceded, nor does he acquire one ab initio. It is only at the instant when the aforesaid state or affection is implanted in the soul that memory exists, and therefore memory is not itself implanted concurrently with the continuous implantation of the sensory experience.”¹²Unlike for Plato, Aristotelian reminiscence does not recall a priori ideas, of which objects perceptible by the senses would be considered mere copies, but recalls images derived from sense experience. The scope of reminiscence, for Aristotle, is confined to the horizon of sense experience. The affinity between memory images and those produced by the imagination—and the potential slippage between the two—is rooted in the contention that they are both paler images derived from the perception of sensory objects.¹³

Although Aristotle’s and Locke’s theories of memory hold much common ground and although the former unquestionably instructs the latter, Locke nonetheless (as Leibniz suggests) departed in important ways from his ancient predecessor. One of the most significant of these departures, as Jeffrey Andrew Barash has pointed out, is Locke’s contention that not only are imagination and reminiscence dependent upon what is furnished by the senses as they are also in the Aristotelian system, but that so too is the intellect itself dependent upon sense-experience.¹⁴ In this, Locke’s conception of the intellect contrasts starkly with that of Aristotle, which experiences no change over time and which “is separable, impassable, unmixed, since it is in its essential nature activity . . . in the individual, potential knowledge is in time prior to actual knowledge, but absolutely it is not prior even in time. . . . When separated it is alone just what it is and this alone is immortal and eternal . . . and without this nothing thinks.”¹⁵For Aristotle, limiting the scope of recollection to the sphere of sense experience did not impair the intellect in its quest to make “intelligible the eternal structure of Being,”¹⁶ provided the (implausible) condition was met that it be detached from its present conditions or, as Aristotle puts it, “separated” from its particularity. For Locke, on the other hand, the human intellect is just as dependent on the experience of sense perception as are the imagination and reminiscence.¹⁷

In what is perhaps his most famous statement, Locke contends that all aspects of the human understanding are generated by experience. In “Of Ideas in General, and their Original,” Locke writes, “Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? To this I answer, in one word, from experience. In that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself” (Essay 2.1.2). As such, Lockean self-understanding is attained through experience rather than through intellectual or metaphysical insight into the substantive principle of the soul. All aspects of human understanding are located in empirical time and space and are, as such, accessible to the understanding by means of its own powers of self-observation. Such is the aim of the Essay, to comprehend the structure of the understanding as the product of nothing outside of its own purview; it is accessible to its own reasoning because it is itself reason. Locke’s stated goal is to “take a survey of our own understandings, examine our own powers, and see to what things they were adapted” (Essay 1.1.7). This method of self-examination has, for Locke, a regulatory function: It is about examining the boundaries between the known and the unknown, or between the “enlightened and dark parts of things,” so that “men would perhaps with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed Ignorance of the one, and employ their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction in the other” (Essay 1.1.7).

The prudence that this passage advocates for the exploration of the powers of the human understanding—to know the regions in which it is capable of exerting its own reasoning power and those in which it is not—belies a deeper and more enigmatic principle of the Enlightenment, that of the unboundedness of its own powers. The modesty of Locke’s stated aim notwithstanding, his flurry of philosophical humility about limits, boundaries, and acquiescence turns into an account of the vastness of the mind’s capabilities.¹⁸ In a moment of poetic inspiration worthy of Coleridge, Wordsworth or of the later Kant, Locke writes, “All those sublime thoughts, which tower above the clouds and reach as high as heaven itself, take their rise and footing here: in all that great extent wherein the mind wanders, in those remote speculations it may seem to be elevated with, it stirs not one jot beyond those ideas which sense or reflection have offered for its contemplation” (Essay 2.1.24). The implications of this shift—from the grounding of the self in the metaphysical realm to the ground provided by its own power of reason—are far-reaching. The claims made for the experience of the self are wholly provided “by the powers intrinsical and proper to itself.” The understanding is, for Locke, utterly self-grounding.

When the individual is conceived in terms of the events of his or her own experience, the scope of memory itself changes. In fact, in Chapter 27 of the Essay, memory is one of the key characteristics used to distinguish personal identity:

To find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking and intelligent being, that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places . . . For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that that makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things: in this alone consists personal identity, i.e., the sameness of a rational being. And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person. (Essay 2.27.9)

In jettisoning the principle of unity that the Greeks sought in Being beyond finite being, Locke seeks to recover a principle of unity in the experience of the finite self, experience that includes and is indeed defined by memory of experience over time. By bracketing physical constitution or biological structure, Locke affirms that self-consciousness is the defining feature of humanness. Continuity is the key to personhood; its vehicle, according to Locke, is consciousness itself: “Nothing but consciousness can unite remote existences into the same person” (Essay 2.27.23).

So far as present consciousness includes the past experiences of an individual, so far extends the identity of that person: “For as far as any intelligent being can repeat 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 as 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” (Essay 2.27.10). Personal selfhood is constituted not only by the immediate transparency of the self to itself—that is, in the present—but also by a reflection of consciousness on past thoughts, actions, and experiences. Insofar as a person can claim a set of past experiences as their own by testifying to the sameness of the consciousness that had such experiences and that ”remembers” them, such consistency over time itself attests to personal identity; it is “the same self now as it was then, and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done” (Essay 2.27.9).

The influence these formulations have exerted over the centuries is matched only by the criticism they have met, beginning with Joseph Butler’s famous objection. He charges that the theory involves Locke in an inescapable circularity: “One should really think it self-evident,” he writes, “that Consciousness of personal Identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal Identity.”¹⁹ In other words, conscious memory cannot possibly serve as the basis for one’s identity, because if I remember visiting the Eiffel Tower, then what I remember is that I visited the Eiffel Tower. Of course, Butler’s objection raises the issue of the argument’s circularity in order to highlight the primacy and the anteriority of identity over and above its experience. According to Butler’s criticism, if the self can be said to bear witness to its own experience in the form of memory, then it follows that the self must precede—both logically and temporally—all experience. What Butler is, in effect, calling into question is the finite status that Locke grants to the self, grounded entirely in its own experience. This is, of course, meant to deal a blow to Locke’s entire project but only, it should be stressed, as Butler and many critics after him have construed it.²⁰

The theory also met with another charge, first developed by Thomas Reid and similar in many respects to Butler’s, that memory cannot serve as a necessary condition for personal identity because memory is always flawed, partial, or even selective. For Reid, we would be hard-pressed to grant—as he suggests Locke demands that we do—that experiences and events that the self is unable to remember form no part whatsoever of their identity.²¹

One could come to Locke’s defense by arguing that his notion of memory amounts to an ability in principle and not necessarily in fact—that his theory of memory is, precisely, memory in theory—but one would still have to admit that many of the paradoxes and aporias of memory that Locke’s critics raise are ones that can be gleaned from the pages of Locke’s own text; indeed, Locke himself had already addressed some of those difficulties, albeit in oblique or even at times hyperbolic fashion, in the Essay. This indicates two things: firstly, that Locke was far more aware of the difficulties raised by his formulations than many of his critics are willing to admit and secondly, that these dilemmas already form an important, even integral, aspect of Locke’s own exposition of the problem of the finitude of human identity. To do justice to Locke, then, one must do more than simply reveal the holes in the theory, for those holes are themselves part of the theory. Rather, one must seek to understand his version of personal identity both in terms of the fiction of self-enclosure that it inaugurates—and one in which we all, as Locke’s unwitting heirs, participate to some extent—and in terms of how that self-enclosure generates its own openings, ruptures, nicks, and tears, precisely when the Lockean self is called upon to testify to itself in the form of memory and when Locke is forced to concede memory’s irreducibly social and linguistic dimensions. For in the end, what is at stake for Locke’s project of self-attestation and for the aporias, paradoxes, and circularities that it may generate is the possibility of testifying to the finitude of the self, in the absence of a notion of immortality or of a persisting substance.

With this in mind, let us return to Locke’s argument. The admittedly problematic formulations with which we left off perhaps help to clarify a contention made earlier in “Of Identity and Diversity,” which is that, as concerns the identity of finite intelligences, the specific time and place of their coming into existence—that is, their birth—determines their identity. In fact, placed in the context of Locke’s relentless critique of innatist principles, it could be suggested that knowledge of one’s own origin takes on an inordinately important role in the theorization of personal identity as that which is determined by nothing outside of its own purview. Locke writes, “for we never finding, nor conceiving it possible, that two things of the same kind should exist in the same place at the same time, we rightly conclude that whatever exists anywhere at any time excludes all of the same kind” (Essay 2.27.1), that “one thing cannot have two beginnings of existence, nor two things one beginning” (Essay 2.27.1), and that “finite spirits having had each its determinate time and place of beginning to exist, the relation to that time and place will always determine to each of them its identity, as long as it exists” (Essay 2.27.2).

The contention that identity is determined by its temporal and spatial origin suggests that a finite notion of personal identity depends upon its having a memory of its origin and that this origin is one to which the self can attest in the form of testimonial knowledge about itself. What is registered here is nothing less than the control of the understanding over all of its previous moments, as well as the means to its expression: a kind of totalized self-attestation that, as the understanding’s means of expression, constitutes the most decisive proof of its finitude.

At the end of the section, however, the subjective dominion so confidently articulated in the earlier sections is expressed in somewhat more uncertain terms. The hesitation of the argument that insists on the appropriation of the past for the self is expressed in the form of the self on trial:

Person, as I take it, is the name for this self. Wherever a man finds what he calls himself, there, I think another may say is the same person. It is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit, and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness and misery. This personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness, whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to itself past actions, just upon the same ground and for the same reason as it does in the present. (Essay 2.27.26, emphasis added)

In keeping with the appeals Locke regularly makes to common sense and realism, immediately after having contended that selfhood is grounded in the accessibility of its past (including the event of the self’s own origin), he tempers that claim by submitting it to procedures of external verification. That testimony is insufficient on its own and must, by virtue of the potential of its own errancy, be attested to by another suggests that the self may not be as uniquely determined by consciousness of its past as Locke himself may have preferred. In other words, what had been elaborated in the earlier sections as an exercise in hermetic self-observation here becomes subject to the demand that another attest to the self through the figure of person. As Locke suggests in no uncertain terms, “person” is a figure of and for sociality. Insofar as he “must find what he calls himself,” “person” is less a legalized nomenclature for self-assured sovereignty than it instantiates the insecure figure of relation.

We should, of course, take care not to gloss over the multiple tensions that this form of testimony poses for Locke’s explication of selfhood. For although Locke insists on the ability of the understanding to know itself through consciousness of all its previous moments and ultimately to reign supreme over them, both the terminology of “finding oneself” and the introduction of the third-person witness suggest that this knowing is flawed; namely, it is vulnerable to falsification. Furthermore, because testimony occupies the shady area between subjective constitution and objective verification, it instantiates a rift to be overcome, that between knowing or telling and being. For, if personal memory is what is most proper to and constitutive of the individual’s identity, as Locke has suggested, then recourse to the witnessing function of a third party seems to violate the very conditions upon which identity is constituted. Put otherwise, what is said to be most proper to and constitutive of the individual also seems to be what most needs substantiation by another.

This structure of self-testimony gives some sense of what is at stake for Locke in his discussion of identity and memory. In the first instance, it tells us that the reconciliation of the past with the present of the individual does not take place within a sealed chamber of self-knowledge—that is, that the autobiography of personhood has a more or less explicit social function and that its substantial existence is to be found outside of the self. Secondly, it tells us that the relation of the self to the events of its own past is enabled by its capacity for expression—the ability to speak, to call oneself self—as the means by which one can attest to actions and events as one’s own.

These two imperatives—the social context of personal memory and the verbal ability to appropriate the past as one’s own property—converge in the event of calling oneself “self”: “Everyone is to himself that which he calls self. . . . For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that that makes everyone to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity” (Essay 2.27.9).

Although Locke repeatedly insists on the role of consciousness in the singularly human ability to experience sameness over time, what is highlighted in this passage (and others like it) is that the self’s finite singularity—that is, its experience and its consciousness of temporal duration over time—is itself experienced not through consciousness or even thought but through narration and voice. However foundational a position Locke would like to maintain for consciousness and the experience that it reflects upon, the ability to pay verbal testimony seems to be the basic condition through which memory comes to be a cornerstone of personal identity. Identity is the stabilized experience of oneself, not as it is experienced in a moment of pure and unfettered self-observation; rather, identity is stabilized through language—namely, through the act of calling oneself “self” before the scrutiny of others. The voice, then, quite independent of consciousness’s claim to preside over it, becomes not only the means by which actions and experiences in the past are unified, but also the means by which the subject guarantees the singularity—however qualified, mitigated or mediated by language—of its identity.

One thing Locke fails to explore in his discussion of the voice of the “person” is the resonance that the term has with its own origin in the Latin term persona or “mask.”²² This omission is not especially surprising given that Locke appeared never to show any interest in etymology;²³ however, the Oxford English Dictionary explicitly suggests that the term “person” in the seventeenth century not only carried all the Lockean connotations of a “self-conscious or rational being” but that it also hearkened to its roots in similitude, dissimulation, and indeed, dramatic representation.²⁴ In this regard, “person” denotes “a part played in a drama or in real life,” “an individual . . . regarded as having rights or duties before the Law,” and “in the character of, representing.” If the definition of personhood implies its own integrity and accountability in a judicial realm—if it is, as Locke contends, a “forensic” term—it also implies that in order to pay testimony, one must assume a mask in order to play a part in a certain kind of social drama. In certain respects, that “personhood” implies this potential duplicity, that it can also be a mask, a ruse, a means of disguise, and importantly, a fiction through which one could assume the guise of another, makes sense of Locke’s concluding recourse to the certainty of divine justice. When at the end of the section, Locke highlights divine justice as the dissolution of the rift between subjective knowledge and objective truth, he is only further emphasizing the aporias inherent to human testimony.²⁵

The threat of counterfeit testimony, as well as the unpropitious rift between consciousness and voice that makes possible such a threat, provides one way of thinking about the mask of “personhood” and the subtle anxieties that inhabit Locke’s discussion of it. That “personhood” can be a mask and that it can act as a disguise suggests, on the one hand, that what lies beneath this persona is a true self, one that can “find itself” adequate to all its moments, and one that is able to represent the true empirical origins of its memories. Locke’s text testifies to this possibility in the form of “false memories,” and of various forms and degrees of amnesia that might otherwise impair the adequation of all moments in the past with present consciousness (Essay 2.27.13–14).

On the other hand, the mask of personhood itself conceals another possibility, one even more devastating than the possibility of an improper or false persona. It is one that suggests the mask’s absolute necessity; the mask does not hide a more authentic or “proper” (one of Locke’s favorite words) variant of “personhood” but more precisely, it hides the fact that it hides nothing proper to the person—that is, that person, as a mask, does not hide an otherwise sound relation of consciousness to its past which might be subject to various kinds of distortions but that an impropriety is involved even in the most intimate and faithful of testimonials.

Lest this argument itself be taken as unduly importing what is foreign to Locke’s assured system of self-representation and of imposing a certain problem where there is none, let us examine two moments in Locke’s argument where this anxiety comes more clearly into focus. The first is found in “Of Identity and Diversity” when Locke attempts to delineate the boundaries between species, but ends up entwining his argument together with the telling of an incredible fable; the second occurs in his theory of language. In both cases, we are confronted with what could be construed as the human’s double: the anticlimactic, perhaps even banal, exemplarity of the parrot.

In attempting to construe the definitive boundaries that separate species, Locke seeks recourse to the definition of “man” and takes note of the ways in which the idea “man” is related to the sound of the word “man.” According to Locke, such a relation—between the idea and the word—is sufficient to suggest that whatever “man” means, its definition is closely related to its bodily form and as such, excludes all other animal forms:

And, whatever is talked of other definitions, ingenuous observation puts it past doubt that the idea in our minds of which the sound man in our mouths is the sign, is nothing else but of an animal of such a certain form: since I think I may be confident, that whoever should see a creature of his own shape or make, though it had no more reason all its life than a cat or a parrot, would call him still a man; or whoever should hear a cat or a parrot discourse, reason, and philosophize, would call or think it nothing but a cat or a parrot; and say, the one was a dull irrational man, and the other a very intelligent rational parrot (Essay 2.27.8).

According to this rather crude attempt at species taxonomy, the idea of man corresponds not to an entity that has reason and the ability to engage in discourse, but to one that has a certain bodily structure: “For I presume it is not the idea of a thinking or rational being alone that makes the idea of a man in most people’s sense, but of a body so and so shaped, joined to it; and if that be the idea of a man, the same successive body not shifted all at once must, as well as the same immaterial spirit, go to the making of the same man” (Essay 2.27.8).

In order to substantiate the claim about the irreducibility of human corporeality for the idea of “man,” Locke recounts a rather strange and anomalous narrative, one presumably drawn from his extensive library of travel literature.²⁶ The story is an anomaly not only because it departs so radically from the tenor of the argument,²⁷ but also because it seems to pose a pretty serious challenge to it: By recounting a narrative about a talking parrot, Locke himself begins to resemble the discoursing parrot that he so playfully invokes to make his point. He attempts to illustrate the point with the verbatim citation of a story, one so strange and fantastical that he must somehow disown its authority even as he affirms it. “I have taken care,” Locke begins, “that the reader should have the story at large in the author’s own words” (Essay 2.27.8).²⁸

The author of the story, described by Locke as “an author of great note,” is motivated by the same keenness of curiosity as Locke: “I [not Locke but Locke’s author, the unnamed Sir William Temple] had a mind to know from his (Prince Maurice’s) own mouth, the account of a common but much credited story, that I had heard so often from many others of an old parrot he had in Brazil during his government there, that spoke, and asked and answered common questions like a reasonable creature” (Essay 2.27.8). Locke’s incredulity is registered in his explicit citation of the story, done presumably so as to distance himself from the claim to truth contained in the testimony. Like Locke, “the author of great note,” we are told, who had heard so many particulars of the story, “by people hard to be discredited,” took it upon himself to visit one “Prince Maurice” in Brazil in order to have the story verified. Also like Locke, the author’s skepticism is expressed by the desire to hear the story at first-hand, “from prince Maurice’s own mouth.”

Prince Maurice, or so Locke’s author claims, “had heard of such an old parrot when he came to Brazil; and though he believed nothing of it and ’twas a good way off, yet he had so much curiosity as to send for it.” Having the parrot in his company, he begins to ask it questions. To the astonishment of its audience, the parrot responds to the questions in a coherent and concise manner:

They ask’d it what he thought that Man was? pointing at the Prince. It answer’d, Some general or other. When they brought it close to him, he ask’d it, D’où venez vous? It answered, De Marinnan. The prince: À qui êtes-vous? The parrot: À un Portugais. Prince: Que fais-tu là? Parrot: Je garde les poules. The Prince laugh’d and said: Vous gardez les poules? The parrot answered, Oui, moi, et je sais bien faire; and made the Chuck four or five times that people use to make to chickens when they call them. (Essay 2.27.8)

As if the relay effect of this story and the appropriation and disappropriation of voices (through to the parrot’s mimicry of chickens) that takes place within it were not enough to problematize the voice as the proper medium of subjective consciousness, the explicit act of translation also figures prominently in the remainder of the story. For the bird, we are informed, speaks “Brazilian” while Maurice does not (he gave the account to Temple in French). To ensure the value of the testimony, Maurice solicits the help of two translators, one a Dutchman who speaks “Brazilian,” the other a Brazilian who speaks Dutch. Having heard the parrot’s testimony, the two are isolated from one another and are made to quote the bird, “both of them agreed in telling him just the same thing that the parrot said.”

Not Locke himself, but Locke’s author, having validated the story of the bird-on-trial in Maurice’s own words, who had also had the story validated, not by his own experience per se, but by the verbatim translation—another form of telephony—offered by two others, concludes his narration as follows: “I could not but tell this odd story, because it is so much out of the way, and from the first hand, and what may pass for a good one; for I dare say this Prince at least believed himself in all he told me, having ever passed for a very honest and pious man . . . it is not perhaps amiss to relieve or enliven a busy scene sometimes with such digressions whether to the purpose or no.”

Locke uses this story to illustrate that the parrot, no matter how reasonable and eloquent, is nevertheless not a man and so does not disturb the boundaries that separate man and animal.²⁹ However, the story has a far greater impact on the Essay’s contentions regarding narration and identity than Locke officially grants to it. Indeed, one senses a certain amount of disingenuousness in the reluctance to acknowledge the story’s most distinguishing and perhaps most disturbing feature: that the parrot seems to possess a narrative authority as sound as that of the humans who are called upon to attest to the story’s truth. For, quite apart from the visible differences between parrots and humans, the fact that parrots are speaking machines poses an almost continuous threat to the humanness that Locke attempts to stabilize.

From the moment the storyteller—who is first Locke, then his author, then the prince, and finally the parrot’s translators—appears in the guise of a witness and narrates the events as a faithful imitation, another witness is required to establish the reliability of the first and then another and another and so on, until we are caught in an infinite regress. The trustworthiness of the story can only be guaranteed by the narrator, yet the narrator can only be verified by a mimetic authority—that is, quotations of quotations of quotations—that can in no way be guaranteed or stopped. That the story is ostensibly about a parrot who can speak and who has both memory and a sense of humor belies an even more outlandish possibility: that the parrot in the story is merely one instance of a more all-encompassing parrot-logic governing the story. This regress of narrative authority suggests that mimesis is not enough to guarantee the truthfulness of the narrated, empirical, and so supposedly historical event and that furthermore, narrative authority attains its truthfulness only through the mimetic authority that cannot, in a story that is mimetically told as a historical occurrence, be guaranteed or stabilized.³⁰

The circularity of this fable-telling—a story whose mimetic truth cannot be verified except through its endless retelling, which itself cannot be authorized except by the rigor of its mimetic repetition—itself repeats itself, less surprisingly this time in Locke’s section on language. In keeping with Paul de Man’s contention that examples used to illustrate logical arguments have a “distressing way of lingering on with a life of their own,”³¹ it is here that we again meet the parrot as that which “speaks out of control”; that is, it speaks without any sort of grounding in consciousness that would provide a modicum of stability. This time, however, it is not the parrot that so convincingly imitates man but rather man that displays the qualities of the parrot.

After having generated a theory of the origin of ideas in Section Two of the Essay, Locke states the unavoidable necessity of meditating upon language. “Upon a nearer approach,” he writes, “I find that there is so close a connexion [sic] between ideas and words, and our abstract ideas and general words have so constant a relation one to another, that it is impossible to speak clearly and distinctly of our knowledge . . . without considering first the nature, use and signification of language” (Essay 2.33.19). From the outset, Locke frames the discussion in anthropocentric terms. Language is, in other words, God’s gift to man.

However, no sooner has Locke made this assertion than he is confronted with the burden of having to exclude animals from the domain of language. Not surprisingly, his example is again that of the parrot: “But this,” he quickly adds, “was not enough to produce language; for parrots, and several other birds, will be taught to make articulate sounds distinct enough, which yet by no means are capable of language” (Essay 2.33.19). In order to make good on this claim and to distinguish what is proper to human language, Locke raises the issue of the connection between ideas and words:

Thus we may conceive how words, which were by nature so well adapted to that purpose, come to be made use of by men as the signs of their ideas; not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea. The use, then of words, is to be sensible marks of ideas; and the ideas they stand for are their proper and immediate signification. (Essay 3.2.1)

The relation between words and ideas is such that words give external shape to ideas residing in the mind and so allow for communication among men to take place. Words are “the marks of the ideas of the speaker” (Essay 3.2.2), ideas that are “invisible and hidden from others,” which “of themselves, can[not] be made to appear.” Although Locke repeatedly comes back to the relation of words to the entombed world of ideas, his focus is not on how one might set about defining such a relation but instead focuses on how the sociality of language might be derived in light of the possibility, given its arbitrary system of signification, of its unruly multiplication. That words “signify . . . by a perfect arbitrary imposition,” and that, “every man has so inviolable a liberty to make words stand for what ideas he please, that no one hath the power to make others have the same ideas in their minds that he has, when they use the same words that he does” (Essay 3.2.8), does not, for Locke, alter the propensity of reasonable men to partake in a realm of shared ideas when they speak.³²

The realm of shared ideas is the hidden source for words, a source whose only access is itself provided by language. After having contended that words are the external marks of the (internal) ideas of the speaker, Locke then attempts to account for the possibility of communication, one that is, for him, based on the a priori condition that words used in speech reflect (although they are not essentially related) a shared realm of ideas. That words mirror ideas will alone provide the stable difference between man—the entity within which, as de Man reminds us, “the proper, which is a linguistic notion, and essence, which exists independently of linguistic mediation are said to converge” (EM 40)—and all other animals that have the capacity to speak.

In attempting to ground this contention in what appears to be a logical argument, Locke writes, “That then which words are the marks of are the ideas of the speaker; nor can anyone apply them as marks, immediately, to anything else but the ideas that he himself hath; for this would be to make them signs of his own conceptions, and yet apply them to other ideas; which would be to make them signs and not signs of his ideas at the same time, and so in effect to have no signification at all” (Essay 3.2.2). How, one might be tempted to ask, is such a formulation possible, given that it both suggests what one cannot do (in the logical sense of necessity), and then immediately admit to the possibility of what it forecloses? However one might read this passage, one thing is clear: The formulation is less a logical form of argument than it is one that obliquely admits the possibility of that which it has just foreclosed.

In any case, however possible it may or may not be to speak with no signification at all, the good sense of communal understanding prevails. To speak “otherwise,” to have words be “signs and not-signs” at the same time would, Locke adamantly suggests, elicit nothing but verbal nonsense. Animals that are capable of forming sensible speech through the use of a vocal apparatus are thus excluded from the realm of language, as are various other kinds of babble: “Words being voluntary signs, they cannot be voluntary signs imposed by him on things he knows not. That would be to make them signs of nothing, sounds without signification” (Essay 3.2.2).

As undesirable as the proliferation of speech unanchored from consciousness or of words without corresponding ideas is, Locke cannot stop himself from considering it, a kind of preoccupation that alerts us to the possibility that there may be more to this senseless babble than Locke would care to admit. In the closing remarks to the section, he is led once again to consider the parrot. This time, however, it is not a question of disassociating human speech from that of the parrot; it is, rather, a reluctant admission of the parrot’s ubiquity within the realm of human speech. Locke writes,

Yet, because by familiar use from our cradles we come to learn certain articulate sounds very perfectly and have them readily on our tongues, and always at hand in our memories, but yet are not always careful to examine or settle their significations perfectly, it often happens that men, even when they would apply themselves to an attentive consideration, do set their thoughts more on words than things. Nay, because words are many of them learned before the ideas are known for which they stand: therefore some, not only children but men, speak several words no otherwise than parrots do, only because they have learned them, and have been accustomed to those sounds. (Essay 3.2.7, emphasis in original)

Having begun by limiting the “mindless” abuse of words to the domain of children, talking parrots, and a few men, Locke is forced to admit that this abuse is capable of reaching unsettlingly global proportions.

Indeed, he ends his investigation on “Of the Abuse of Words” by pinpointing its most general—and most insidious, because “less observed”—application. The target of his attack this time though is the very guardian of ideas himself, indeed the very thinker of consciousness: the philosopher-intellectual. “This abuse taking words upon trust,” Locke contends, “has nowhere spread so far, nor with so ill effects, as amongst men of letters. The multiplication and obstinacy of disputes, which have so laid waste the intellectual world, is owing to nothing more than to this ill use of words” (Essay 2.10.22, emphasis added).³³ In other words, the very domain in which one would expect a modicum of clarity regarding the relation of words to ideas is the domain where one would do well to expect the worst. Using words without accompanying meaning, Locke says in no uncertain terms, “has nowhere spread so far” as in intellectual disputes. In fact, the “great variety of opinions in the volumes and variety of controversies the world is distracted with” can be attributed wholly to the fact that they “speak different languages” (Essay 2.10.22). The remedy for this proliferation of speech without the guardianship of ideas is deceptively clear: “I am apt to imagine that when any of them, quitting terms, think upon things, and know what they think, they think all the same” (Essay 2.10.22).

Although Locke’s aim here is to highlight the use of words without ideas as a linguistic abuse that causes conflict and disagreement, and to generate a sense of how one might overcome its Babel-like effects, the logic of the argument inadvertently returns us to the undecidability exemplified in the episode of the parrot. For, the separation of ideas from words implies that humans use words to communicate their ideas: hence, it would only be through language that a consensus could ever be reached or a disagreement raised. But since language substitutes for ideas, how could one ever be sure of the authority of a statement, much less give one’s consent to it, given that a consensus could only ever happen in language?

In contrast to Plato’s elaboration of speech in the Phaedrus as that which never leaves its rightful owner, Locke’s discussion of “voice” renders explicit the threat of repetition, of appropriation of that which is improper, of mimicry, and of mechanical imitation. The impropriety of this machine-like speaking, one that fails to reflect a consciousness that is at one with all its previous moments, is threatening precisely because of its capacity for verisimilitude: that is to say, it is threatening, not only because in it, voice fails to reflect ideas located in the mind by being more concentrated on words than ideas, but that such speech appears to reflect ideas, and that there is no way to distinguish between an agreement between words and ideas and the mere appearance of such an agreement.

As such, Locke’s discussion of the proper use of language opens itself up not to the stabilization of language in terms of the ideas that it signifies but rather to the possibility of even more linguistic abuse. This applies not only to parrots, children, and childlike adults but also to those endowed with the greatest philosophical and narrative authority. Indeed, it applies even to those who have no intention to deceive: “Even those who apply themselves to a careful consideration” are, according to Locke, not immune from its effects. Language, read thus, is not so much a tool to communicate ideas as it is the very embodiment of impostership. What is more (and worse), one can be an impostor without having any idea of it at all.

What Locke has developed in these sections on language calls into question the claims that the text makes with regard to its own authority. In the development of the argument, Locke distinguishes his argument from the contaminating effects of what he diagnoses. That is to say, the argument is predicated upon the notion that the abuse of language is distinct, and distinguishable from the terms in which he formulates his argument and his diagnosis. How, though, can we ever be sure of escaping this distressing linguistic predicament, especially given that the language in which we elaborate on such abusive instances is also caught within linguistic and rhetorical structures, ones within which the predicament appears in the first instance? In other words, how are we to read these sections on voice and authority with respect to the larger philosophical claims in the Essay regarding the origin of ideas?

One could, with good reason, suggest that the Essay secures a philosophical authority for itself—in light of the radical problematization of authority and the potential for linguistic nonsense that it possesses—by attempting to ground the origin of ideas in an empirical event: what Locke calls “experience.” After all, the whole treatise is framed by a desire to rid philosophy of much of the verbal nonsense around the innatist claim that ideas are present in—and, for Plato, forgotten by—the individual at birth. For Locke, even if the argument regarding innatist principles were “drawn from universal consent,” such would not be sufficient to prove them innate (1.2.3). Rather, Locke suggests that an examination of the origin of ideas—one not shored up “with props and buttresses, leaning on borrowed or begged foundations” (1.4.26)—will serve to dispel much of the consent around innatism, given that, “one may perceive how, by degrees, afterwards, ideas come into the minds [of children], and that they get no more nor no other, than what experience and the observation of things that come in their way, furnish them with: which might be enough to satisfy us that they are not original characters stamped on the mind” (Essay 1.4.2).

In calling into question the claims made by innatism, Locke may be attempting to avoid the problematic exemplified by the fiction of the parrot; that is, in grounding the origin of ideas in empirical events (the experience of childhood and the development of the child into an adult), he may perhaps be attempting to bypass the narrative spiral that ensues from taking a quasi-fictional account, one whose origin is absent and unlocatable—in this case, innatism—to be empirically verifiable and true.

Empiricism attempts to find a way out of the predicament of absent and unrepresentable origins by asserting that all ideas are acquired through experience. “I know it is a received doctrine,” writes Locke, “that men have native ideas, and original characters stamped upon their mind in their very first being. . . . [the critique of this position] will be much more easily admitted when I have shown whence the understanding may get all the ideas it has, and by what ways and degrees they may come into the mind; for which I shall appeal to everyone’s own observation and experience” (Essay 2.1.1). The appeal of empiricism is first and foremost that it brings the origins of human knowledge—a self-constituting knowledge and one that constitutes the world—out of the ungrounded realms of myth and fiction and into the purview of man’s own analytic capacity given to him by what is most properly his: the experience of his own life.³⁴

As such, one burden of Locke’s treatise is to give voice to these origins and moreover, to ground the constitution of “man” in a beginning that is as representable as an historical event might be. This quasi-historical dimension of the origin is thus extremely important both to the structure of the text as a whole and to the itinerary of “personhood” contained within it. For if Locke’s “person” is determined through the appropriation of its origin through the faculty of memory, Locke’s own preoccupation with origins suggests that the Essay itself attempts to perform an act of memory, one that not only grounds the origin of ideas in the two sources of experience, “sensation” and “reflection,” but that also attempts to bring this origin of the understanding to consciousness in an appropriating act of memory. The account that Locke gives of these systemic origins and the role that memory plays within that account has a particularly important role to play in our understanding of memory’s role in self-attestation and, in particular, to that which Locke’s “person” attests when it speaks in the name of memory.

§

The confirmation in “Of Identity and Diversity” of memory as both the ground of the self and, more tenuously, as the self’s most intimate possession is treated with more explicit ambiguity in the earlier sections of the treatise where Locke attempts to establish the main tenets of empirical philosophy. There, memory is conceived as a problem. By reading these two seemingly incompatible sections together—memory as a structural element of empirical philosophy along with the notion of memory as identity’s most decisive and vivifying factor—we can gauge the ways in which the tensions of the role of memory in the constitution of identity play themselves out.

The experience of childhood and the relation of adult to child play central roles in the description of the role of memory within the system of empiricism that Locke is undertaking to develop. In fact, one could say that his abiding interest in childhood—both here and in other writings³⁵—frames the discussion of the constitution of identity through memory by referring once again to the constitutive feature of childhood as both the origin of adulthood and human sociality and as the origin of ideas.

Although explicit reference to childhood is wanting in the descriptions of memory that inform personal identity in the Essay, this absence is conspicuous given that the entire framework of memory that Locke had developed in the earlier section “Of Ideas in General, and Their Original” (hereafter abbreviated as “Of Ideas”) revolves around the proofs that he provides regarding the experience of childhood and in particular, regarding the relation of adult memory to childhood experience. In fact, its absence in the section that deals with identity, given its centrality for the earlier formulations, should alert us to a sense of its importance, however oblique. In “Of Ideas,” the observation of childhood is the point of departure from which the experiential modes of “sensation” and “reflection,” and the means by which ideas are brought to the understanding, attain clarity.

“He that attentively considers the state of a child,” Locke writes in his ongoing attack on innatism, “at his first coming into the world will have little reason to think him stored with plenty of ideas, that are to be the matter of his future knowledge” (Essay 2.1.6). That the mind of the child is a “white page, void of all characters” offers Locke the opportunity to analyze the origin of certain sensate ideas, using his own powers of observation. In calling to account for the origins of “sensation” in experience, Locke observes that children are “usually employed and diverted in looking abroad.” This preoccupation with sensation, Locke suggests, is a perfectly natural phenomenon, one that “whether care be taken about it or no,” affects “all that are born into the world, being surrounded with bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them, variety of ideas, are imprinted on the minds of children” (Essay 2.1.6).

This preconscious sensation yields no memory of itself. That children do not remember their first impressions is explained by their undeveloped ability for reflection; that is, they do not yet have the ability to retain images and to reflect upon them—the true mark, for Locke, of an enlightened “person.” At this stage sensation predominates, even before “the memory begins to keep a register of time and order” (Essay 2.1.6); this preconscious sensation is the foundation upon which the later-developed reflection on images already stored in the mind is built. Locke describes this constitutional amnesia in terms dictated by his ensuing discussion of memory in the treatise: “Though [sensations] pass there continually, yet, like floating visions, they make not deep impressions enough to leave in the mind clear, distinct, lasting ideas, till the understanding turns inward upon itself, reflects on its own operations, and makes them the object of its own contemplation” (Essay 1.2.8). Childhood, then, is the developmental stage at which the inability to store images in the mind corresponds to an overload of sensory stimuli. In time, these sensory stimuli will, the text confidently suggests, become the source of material for the mind’s own reflection on its contents. This process of reflection is the desired outcome of human development: It will provide the groundwork for memory and for the ability of the self to reflect on the images stored as its own. “Men then come to be furnished with fewer or more simple ideas from without, according as the objects they converse with afford greater or less variety” (2.1.7).

Recently, critics have noted that the transition in question—from sensation of that which is external to reflection on that which is stored within—is not so much rigorously explicated as it is dramatically staged. From early childhood, wherein “light and colours are busy at hand everywhere, when the eye is but open; sounds and some tangible qualities fail not to solicit their proper senses, and force an entrance to the mind” (Essay 2.1.6) to the stage of developing memory, where the mind “comes by degrees to know the persons it daily converses with and distinguishes them from strangers” (Essay 2.1.21), the mind of sensation is likened to a vault or to a chamber hall, one that, by virtue of the door of the “open eye” or the solicited senses, admits entry to and domesticates foreigners.

Following the work of Ernest Tuveson, Cathy Caruth has commented at length on the importance of the rhetorical and fictional aspects of Locke’s treatise. Concerning the passages just quoted, Caruth suggests that at the stage of sensation, “what seems at first a straightforward observation of sensory mechanisms becomes more like an anxious story of a precariously governed state,” that it operates “on principles less like a ‘natural philosophy’ than a literary text,” and that what is narrated in Locke’s text is “an anxiety-ridden story in which the empirical world solicits or seduces and then forces itself upon an unsuspecting mind.”³⁶

Far from suggesting that Locke’s text is merely fictional, Caruth ascribes a certain necessity to Locke’s use of rhetorical figures at the stage of sensation. At the stage of sensation, the empirical world represents an almost constant threat to the mind; through the sheer magnitude of its intrusion, it overwhelms the mind and does not allow for memory to take a register of events. As such, the period of sheer sensation is literally a blind spot in the past for the adult who attempts to contemplate it in herself; it has no more empirical status in her memory than if it had never happened. Reflection in the adult seems, then, to be founded on the radical forgetfulness of the period of sensation, one that Locke himself cannot remember so must figuratively derive under the pretence of observing children—that is, by speculating on childhood—in the empirical world.

For Locke, the period of childhood corresponds to a period of sensory overload that, because of its excessive or overwhelming nature, leaves very few mental traces in the constitution of the individual. That childhood is so conceived, that is, as a period in the life of an individual that has trauma-like effects, suggests that the “child” is less an empirically verifiable entity—its status cannot, according to the terms of Locke’s own argument, be empirically verified much less experienced—than it is a figure in the text, one whose characteristics and “experiences” tell a tale of foundations. That these “experiences” of the overwhelming period of sensation are not experiences strictly speaking, and that they can never be experienced firsthand suggests that the terms of the narration of one’s self does not so much consist in a remembering of the experience of an origin as it does in a recovery from the origin that one could only ever “experience” as a blank.

Inasmuch as the nonexperience of this child threatens the development of Locke’s system, it is little wonder that he attempts to put the child-figure of his empiricism safely behind him, just as he does the child that develops into an adult and of whose status the adult has little or no recollection. Thus, the goal of the section is to submit the differences between childhood amnesia (sensation and the threat of the empirical world) and adulthood memory (reflection and the mind as a self-enclosed region) to a teleology.³⁷ This narrative of human development tells of a triumphant overcoming of sensation to the contemplative world of reflection and self-inspection, an overcoming by means of which the understanding can reflect on its own contents without the looming threat of unwanted or unanticipated visitors. If the empirical validity of childhood—dictated, in the text, by the narration of the blind acceptance, insofar as the child’s eye is too wide-open, of all sensations of the external world—allows Locke to explain childhood as the origin of the human understanding, its unavoidably figural status attests to a threat of oblivion that governs the course of the understanding’s development of its reflective powers. The submission of his own descriptions to the reassurance offered by the historical development of the individual is just his attempt to recover from the threat posed by the blind origin.

The general anxiety informing this recovery is suggested by the text’s subsequent trajectory. The more feverishly Locke attempts to rid himself of the specter of childhood and to relegate the unruly event of sensation safely to the past,³⁸ the more adamantly it seems to assert itself in the lives of adults. Reflection—the sober and controlled domain of adulthood—comes late for children, Locke asserts, because they are busy with the external world. The ability to contemplate comes later; it must wait “till they come to be of riper years, and some scarce ever at all” (Essay 2.1.8, emphasis added). If the ability to contemplate the regions of the mind is itself the domain of the adult, adulthood is however no guarantee: “Some,” he admits, “have not any clear or perfect ideas of the greatest part of them all their lives” (Essay 2.2.8).

It is unlikely that Locke would include the empiricist in this category of childlike adulthood, given especially that the task that he has set for himself is to define the broad reach of the human understanding in purely empirical terms. Indeed, given the aims of the Essay, one would expect Locke’s own reflection on reflection to exemplify the self contemplating the self in a hermetically sealed environment. However, in the less triumphant and less self-assured aspects of his discussion of memory, his own doctrine resembles just such an instance of the childlike adult, one who in attempting to observe the contents of the mind, cannot quite make out what he sees.

In the section “Of Retention,” Locke submits memory to his survey and begins by more or less predictably defining memory as the “storehouse of our ideas,” a mainstay of Aristotelian discourse on memory. Because the narrow mind of man is incapable of holding many ideas in mind at once, Locke further explains, “it was necessary to have a repository, to lay up those ideas which, at another time, it might have use of” (Essay 2.10.2). Despite the certainty of the deposits that are made, Locke expresses a palpable anxiety about the security of the investment. Indeed, despite the strength of his own contentions, Locke seems compelled to attest to memory’s most ubiquitous nature: “But, our ideas being nothing but actual perceptions in the mind, which cease to be anything when there is no perception of them, this laying up of our ideas in the repository of the memory signifies no more but this, that the mind has a power in many cases to revive perceptions which it has once had, . . . in this sense it is that our ideas are said to be in our memories when indeed they are actually nowhere” (Essay 2.10.2). Memory serves as a repository for ideas, ideas that have ceased to be anything; it is a storehouse whose stores are nothing, stored nowhere. Strictly speaking, then, memory houses nothing and is nowhere. This atopical quality of memory presents problems for Locke from which he quickly, if spuriously, recovers: The mind, he contends in the same paragraph, “has a power in many cases to revive perceptions it has once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has had them before” (Essay 2.10.2, emphasis in original).

Locke’s doctrinal explanation of memory and in particular his attempt to distinguish memory from perception are undermined by the peculiar force of his own description. Unsurprisingly, he describes the weakness of memory as an episodic or accidental weakness of the memory of individuals and not as a weakness of the empiricism that is called to account for it. Memories though, particularly those of childhood, are encrypted alternatively as monuments, as “cautions for the future” (Essay 2.10.3) and as tombs (Essay 2.10.5), all of which suggest that the human understanding houses not the products of its own lively powers, but the dead to be revivified.

In his description of the inscribed quality of memory, Locke’s tone takes a deeply lugubrious turn as if to remind his readers of the fragility of what is stored there. “There seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas, even of those which are struck deepest,” he admits, “the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen. . . . [I]nsome it retains the characters drawn on it like marble, in others like freestone, and in others little better than sand . . . we oftentimes find a disease quite strip the mind of all its ideas, and the flames of a fever in a few days calcine all those images to dust and confusion, which seemed to be as lasting as if engraved in marble” (Essay 2.10.5). Even marble, that most durable and permanent of engraving surfaces, is not immune to erosion and defacement. Old age and disease accelerate this process of defacement, a process that results in the complete erasure of what is inscribed upon the tomb of the mind. Again, we find ourselves confronted with the enigma of childhood: “Thus the ideas as well as children of our youth often die before us; and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching: where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away. The pictures drawn in our minds are laid in fading colours, and if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear” (Essay 2.10.5). The strange and morbid analogy offered here suggests that memories are like children, children subject to an early death. Once again, as in the famous case study immediately preceding this passage of the child who, in going blind, fails to retain the memory of color, Locke’s reflection on memory circles around the subject of childhood, highlighting the ways in which it could be cut off—or cut short—from adulthood by the loss of vision or, even more decisively, by the loss of life.

In one sense, one could read these descriptions as a set of melancholy reflections on the progressive loss of memory that accompanies aging. However, if we follow the figure of the child from its association with sensation and with the overwhelming intrusion of the empirical world to its present incarnation as an abiding feature of the reflective mind, then we are forced to reconsider the claims that the text has made with respect to human development. In relation to that teleological development from childhood to adulthood, what Locke articulates here suggests that the phenomenon of forgotten childhood can no longer be explained, and ultimately overcome, using the physiological and “empirical” fact of development into adulthood. For we are now told that the child, which is a figure for the foreboding possibility of amnesia and the threat posed by that amnesia to self-enclosed reflection, persistently abides in the adult mind; even more horrifically, it is a dead child that keeps silent and that, as corpse, inhabits its most proper tomb.

To what property does the “child,” read as both the ostensibly empirical source of human identity and as that which poses its most deadly threat, owe its excessive figurative power? It is significant here, I think, to invoke what might seem to be the most obvious characteristic of the child: its speechlessness. According to the Oxford English Dictionary “infant” is derived from the Latin term infans, which means “unable to speak.”³⁹ It also passes into the juridical realm as the terminus technicus of “child” as that which is unable to exercise sovereign power over itself. It is in light of this speechlessness that the child is given a voice in Locke’s text, in the form of the Essay’s own philosophical authority. At one level, we might be tempted to say that the subject emerges in language—namely, in a verbal act that mourns the child that dies before it. The supposed anteriority of the child’s death opens up the possibility for the child to be made present in the form of an unsubstantiated memory, speaking in a voice that is not and could never be proper to it. As such, if we are to interpret this structure as one in which the reflection constitutive of adulthood can only be established on the condition of living with the death of this child, then the task of reflection to establish a solid and stable identity—one that has all the moments of its own development within its reach—involves not so much giving consciousness or observation the full breadth of its own reach as it does the awakening of the dead and the giving of voice to that which is, so to speak, born (and dies) silent.

This interpretation, as well-founded as it is, fails in two respects: firstly, it requires that we turn the language of memory and, indeed, language in general, into a property or tool of the self; and secondly, it overlooks the double syntax of before—that is, “before” as the straightforward temporal index of “previously,” “in the past,” or “prior to” as well as the more speculative preposition of “demanding the attention of,” “in the presence of,” “ahead of” or “in front of.” The difficulty of choosing between these two modes of before is, I think, central to working out the stakes of Locke’s somber description of testimony, beyond the fiction it undoubtedly also inaugurates that the self’s identity is given by a past that is wholly accessible to it. At odds with that fiction is the sense in which the phrase “the children of our youth often die before us” articulates a structure of testimony wherein the past and future—both dictated by before—are no longer rigorously distinguishable.⁴⁰

If we do attempt to read the “before” of the phrase, “ideas as well as children of our youth die before us” in terms of this undecidability, what are we to make of its futurity? Indeed, a nagging suspicion remains concerning the remnants of the future contained in this passage, replete as it is with effaced tombs, dying children, and fading ideas. The sense notwithstanding that the figure of the child is, if nothing else, an incredibly vivid image of the future, how could such a morbid set of descriptions—ones revolving around a dead child—possibly serve as orientation toward the future?

It is, I think, in light of “before” as “in front of” that a more complex temporal dimension is brought to bear on the representation of experience in Locke’s narrative of the self, beyond its itinerary of a quasi-historical narrative that incorporates experience, the silence of which is overcome by the narratives we generate about it. Though only barely articulated, Locke’s formulation nonetheless does gesture toward a more speculative temporal structure wherein the self is literally confronted by the silent past—the past stands before it, in front or in advance of it—as its own future. So, far from simply giving itself over to the confident memorial discourse of the self, Locke’s self does attest to its own finitude but in an entirely unexpected sense. In fact, the latter part of the phrase in question—“and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching”—all but confirms this dimension of futurity in Locke’s description, when the self “experiences” its own finitude in the past to the precise extent that it cannot possibly be incorporated into the self’s narrative and so must be relegated to the future. For finitude as such could never be known or experienced, for the deceptively simple reason that one can never experience one’s own death, much less narrate it. As a strange kind of memento mori, then, the Lockean past does not simply disappear nor is it fully represented in the subject’s narrative of itself; it simply abides, silently, as a reminder of the self’s own unnarratable and, for that reason, ungraspable, future.

Indeed, in saying that the subject bears witness to that which is most silent and so most resistant to its appropriation through voice, it does not seem especially compelling to speak of a proxy. For the silent one—at one point, the “child”; at another, “sensation”—has no voice, no “story” to tell, one that could be otherwise transmitted, told to or by others. Locke’s Essay tells us, then, if not exactly in the way it intended, that whoever bears testimony to their own past experiences does so by facing a certain resistance, a resistance those experiences put up to speaking. To be sure, the idea that it is difficult, if not impossible, to ground the self on the stories it tells of its own experience is to provoke the potentially endless displacement of narrative authority that we saw at work in Locke’s story of the parrot. But this need not generate the sense that testimony is in need of moral improvement or of a more sober policing of its boundaries, as has been suggested.⁴¹ Rather, it is precisely by virtue of this difficulty, as well as the inexhaustibility of past experience implied by it, that the before of the past is able to retain any futurity—and the “I” any sense of its own finitude—at all.

In brief, many of the difficulties and tensions of Lockean testimony to finite experience are borne on this before: it both inaugurates the impulse to generate narratives of the past in order to keep it safely before—that is, behind—us and, at the same time, it also generates a sense of how fragile the narrative authority is that might keep it there. As such, the truth contained in these passages is poorly served if it is thought to reside in how they procure a sense of the self’s certitude by virtue of its making the past “speak.” To the contrary: those past experiences retain their force by not remaining past, by not being fully narrated or articulated in a narrative of self. In Locke, then, the problem of narrating infancy stands for the difficulties of stabilizing experience in narrative form: “the children of our youth” dying before us both provokes the impulse to narrate at the same time as it marks it out as a potentially difficult and indeed, as an endless task. And it is in such moments of narrative insecurity that the past remains before us—that is, behind and in front of us, in and as the indeterminate and as yet unarticulated future.

In the next two chapters, we will have occasion to examine what is quite possibly modernity’s fullest account of memory as a speculative relation to the past in Hegel’s philosophy. For now though, we can at least point to the following: That if versions of Locke’s legacy are to continue to provide the ground for personal and communal identities in the form of claims to subject-memory, what some of the less clearly articulated aspects of the Essay suggest is that to bear witness to past experience as the source for a positive and stabilized identity is, paradoxically perhaps, to invoke a foreignness that will not be incorporated or domesticated within the logic of a biographical narrative. To live in and with such an aporia is perhaps one of the things we should hear in Locke’s discussion of testimony and experience; that to invoke testimony as the means by which the self can be definitely stabilized through its own memory is a great fiction, greater even than that of our uncanny resemblance to the talking parrot.