Culture

Downton Abbey and Technology

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Tonight American audiences rekindle their fascination with Downton Abbey, the popular BBC series set in a stately English manor during the early twentieth century. It is a series that dramatizes the decline and dissolution of a world shorn apart by the violent winds of social change. In the series, the Great War, the women’s movement, socialism, and other contemporaneous developments chip away at the old order. But the opening scene of the pilot episode also strongly suggests that this older world is giving way to the forces of technological change. Consider the first two minutes:

The tapping of telegraph, the whistle of the locomotive, and the curves of power lines all feature prominently in these opening shots. And so too does the sinking of the Titanic, a near mythical case study in the dangers of technological hubris. Strikingly, the telegraph lines and the progress of the train are juxtaposed with idyllic country scenes. It is a filmic version of a prominent nineteenth century literary convention.

Consider the following passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journal. While enjoying the enchantments of the natural (and cultural) world around him, Hawthorne is startled:

“But, hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive — the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men, citizens, from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in a country village, men of business; in short of all unquietness; and no wonder that it gives such a startling shriek, since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumbrous peace.”

This passage is a point of departure for Leo Marx’s classic study of technology in the American literary tradition, The Machine in the Garden. Similar vignettes were a recurring feature in the literature of the nineteenth century. For Hawthorne, Emerson, and many of their contemporaries, the train whistle signaled the industrial machine’s disruption of a pastoral ideal in which human culture blended harmoniously with nature.

The opening scenes of Downton Abbey fit neatly within this genre. Of course, Hawthorne was writing about what were for him contemporary realities. We are far removed from the historical setting of Downton Abbey. For us the train whistle signals little more than a break in traffic and the telegraph is merely quaint. But I wonder whether the popularity of Downton Abbey stems, at least in part, from its evocation of the specter of disruptive technological change. It offers the anxieties of a safely distant age as a proxy for our own, and, perhaps, in doing so it also offers something like a cathartic experience for viewers.

Perhaps it merely traffics in nostalgia for an idyllic age, but I doubt it. We know from the outset that there is a snake in the garden. The train, the power lines, the Titanic — they are so many momento mori littering the scene. More likely we are like the Angel of History in Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s Angelus Novus:

“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

As the storm blows us onward we can’t help but glance back at the wreckage of the past piling up behind us … or some often romanticized, frequently commodified representation of it that may or may not bear any resemblance to historical realities.

Of course, it may just be the memes.

Suffering, Joy, and Incarnate Presence

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 7 Comments

“I have much to write you, but I do not want to do so with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face.” With this, John closed the third New Testament epistle that bears his name. The letter is nearly 1,900 years old, yet the sentiment is entirely recognizable. In fact, many of us have likely expressed similar sentiments; only for us it was more likely an electronic medium that we preferred to forego in favor of face to face communication. There are things better said in person; and, clearly, this is not an insight stumbled upon by digital-weary interlocutors of the 21st century.

Yet, John did pen his letter. There were things the medium would not convey well, but he said all that could be said with pen and ink. He recognized the limits of the medium and used it accordingly, but he did not disparage the medium for its limits. Pen and ink were no less authentic, no less real, nor were they deemed unnatural. They were simply inadequate given whatever it was that John wanted to communicate. For that, the fullness of embodied presence was deemed necessary. It was, I think, a practical application of a theological conviction which John had elsewhere memorably articulated.

In the first chapter of his Gospel, John wrote, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” It is a succinct statement of the doctrine of the incarnation, what Christians around the world celebrate at Christmas time. The work of God required the embodiment of divine presence. Words were not enough, and so the Word became flesh. He wept with those who mourned, he took the hand of those no others would touch, he broke bread and ate with outcasts, and he suffered. All of this required the fullness of embodied presence. John understood this, and it became a salient feature of his theology.

For my part, these thoughts have been passing in and out of mind inchoately and inarticulately since the Newtown shooting, and specifically as I thought about the responses to the shooting throughout our media environment. I was troubled by the urge to post some reaction to the shooting, but, initially, I don’t think I fully understood what troubled me. At first, it was the sense that I should say something, but I’ve come to believe that it was rather that I should say something.

Thinking about it as a matter of I saying something struck me as an unjustifiably self-indulgent. I still believe this to be part of the larger picture, but there was more. Thinking about it as a matter of I saying something pointed to the limitations of the media through which we have been accustomed to interacting with the world. As large as images loom on digital media, the word is still prominent. For the most part, if we are to interact with the world through digital media, we must use our words.

We know, however, that our words often fail us and prove inadequate in the face of the most profound human experiences, whether tragic, ecstatic, or sublime. And yet it is in those moments, perhaps especially in those moments, that we feel the need to exist (for lack of a better word), either to comfort or to share or to participate. But the medium best suited for doing so is the body, and it is the body that is, of necessity, abstracted from so much of our digital interaction with the world. With our bodies we may communicate without speaking. It is a communication by being and perhaps also doing, rather than by speaking.

Of course, embodied presence may seem, by comparison to its more disembodied counterparts, both less effectual and more fraught with risk. Embodied presence enjoys none of the amplification that technologies of communication afford. It cannot, after all, reach beyond the immediate place and time.  And it is vulnerable presence. Embodied presence involves us with others, often in unmanageable, messy ways that are uncomfortable and awkward. But that awkwardness is also a measure of the power latent in embodied presence.

Embodied presence also liberates us from the need to prematurely reach for rational explanation and solutions — for an answer. If I can only speak, then the use of words will require me to search for sense. Silence can contemplate the mysterious, the absurd, and the act of grace, but words must search for reasons and fixes. This is, in its proper time, not an entirely futile endeavor; but its time is usually not in the aftermath. In the aftermath of the tragic, when silence and “being with” and touch may be the only appropriate responses, then only embodied presence will do. Its consolations are irreducible. This, I think, is part of the meaning of the Incarnation: the embrace of the fullness of our humanity.

Words and the media that convey them, of course, have their place, and they are necessary and sometimes good and beautiful besides. But words are often incomplete, insufficient. We cannot content ourselves with being the “disincarnate users” of electronic media that McLuhan worried about, nor can we allow the assumptions and priorities of disincarnate media to constrain our understanding of what it means to be human in this world.

At the close of the second epistle that bears his name, John also wrote, “I have much to write to you, but I do not want to use paper and ink.” But in this case, he added one further clause. “Instead,” he continued, “I hope to visit you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete.” Joy completed. Whatever it might mean for our joy to be completed, it is a function of embodied presence with all of its attendant risks and limitations.

May your joy be complete.

Violence and Technology

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 29 Comments

There is this well known line from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus that reads, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” There is much wisdom in this, especially when one extends its meaning beyond what Wittgenstein intended (so far as I understand what he intended). We all know very well that words often fail us when we are confronted with unbearable sorrow or unmitigated joy. In the aftermath of the horror in Newtown, Connecticut, then, what could one say? Everything else seemed trivial.

I first heard of the shooting when I logged on to Twitter to post some frivolous comment, and, of course, I did not follow through. However, I then felt the need to post something — something appropriate, something with sufficient gravitas. But I asked myself why? Why should I feel the need to post anything? To what end? So that others may note that I responded to the tragedy with just the right measure of grace and seriousness? Or to self-righteously admonish others, implicitly of course, about their own failure to respond as I deemed appropriate?

When we become accustomed to living and thinking in public, the value of unseen action and unshared thoughts is eclipsed. “I should be silent,” a part of us may acknowledge, but then in response, a less circumspect voice within us wonders, “But how will anyone know that I am being silent? A hashtag perhaps, #silent?”

I felt just then, with particular force, the stunning degree of self-indulgence invited by social media. But then, of course, I had to reckon with the fact that the well of self-indulgence tapped by social media springs from no other source but myself.

There is only one other point that I want to consider. Within my online circles, many have sought to challenge the slogan “Guns don’t kill people,” and they have done so based on premises which I am generally inclined to support. I have myself associated the technological neutrality position with this slogan, and I have found it an inadequate position. Guns, like other technologies, yield a causal force independent of the particular uses to which they are put. They enter actively and with consequence into our perception and experience of the world. This, I continue to believe, is quite true.

Several months ago, in the wake of another tragic shooting, Evan Selinger wrote a well-considered piece on this very theme and I encourage you to read it: “The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun.”

Less effectively, in my view, but thoughtfully still, PJ Rey revisited Zeynep Tufekci’s appropriation of Aristotle’s categories of causality to frame the gun as the material cause of acts of violence. The argument here is also against technological neutrality, I’m just not entirely sure that Aristotle’s categories are fully understood by Rey or Tufekci (which is not to say that I fully understand them). The material cause is not “that without which,” but “that out of which.” But then again, I put Wittgenstein’s dictum to my own uses; I suppose Aristotle too can be used suggestively, if not rigorously. Maybe.

Thus far, I’ve been sympathetic to the claims advanced, but there is latent in these considerations (but not necessarily in the thinking of these authors) an opposite error that I’ve also seen expressed explicitly and forcefully. Last night, I caught the following comment on Twitter from Prof. Lance Strate. Strate is a respected media ecologist and I have in the past appreciated his insights and commentary. I was, however, stopped short by this tweet:

I want to make all the requisite acknowledgements here. It is a tweet, after all, and the medium is not conducive to nuance. Nor is one required to say everything one thinks about a matter whenever one speaks of that matter. And, in fairness to Strate, I also want to provide a link to his fuller discussion of the situation on his blog, “On Guns and More,” much of which I would agree with.

That said, “Surely the blame is also on him,” was my initial response to this tweet. Again, I want to read generously, particularly in a medium that is given to misunderstanding. I don’t know that Strate meant to recuse the shooter of all responsibility; in fact, I have to believe such was not the case. But this comment reminded me that in our efforts to critique the neutrality of technology position, we need to take care less we end up endorsing, in my view, more pernicious errors of judgment.

Thinking again about the manner in which a gun enters into our phenomenological experience, it is true to say that a gun wants to be shot. But this does not say everything there is to say; it doesn’t even say the most important and relevant things that could be said. Why is it, at times, not shot at all? Further, to say it wants to be shot is not yet to say what it will be shot at or why? We cannot dismiss the other forms of causality that come into play. If Aristotle is to be invoked, after all,  it should be acknowledged that he privileged final causation whenever possible.

Interestingly, in his illustration of the four causes –the making of a bronze statue — Aristotle did not take the craftsman to be the best example of an efficient cause. It was instead the knowledge the craftsman possessed that best illustrated the efficient cause. If we apply this analogously onto the present case, it suggests that knowledge of how to inflict violence is the efficient cause. And this reminds us, disturbingly, of what is latent in all of us.

It reminds me as well of some other well known lines, not from Wittgenstein this time, but from Solzhenitsyn: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Kyrie Eleison.

Living for the Moment in the Age of the Image

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 8 Comments

We live for the moment because the moment is what an image captures.

It’s not uncommon, I presume, to snap a picture again and again in the often vain attempt to get it just so. Getting it just so in such cases entails matching the image captured by the photograph to the image in our mind of what that moment should look like (and feel like).

Two questions follow.

First, where did that image in our mind come from? Likely from countless similar images we’ve seen on Facebook or Pinterest or Instagram or television or Norman Rockwell or whatever.

The other night, I stood in a near empty section of a big box store waiting, surrounded by aisles of Christmas decorations, enveloped in the projected sounds of Christmas music, and I thought to myself, if this were a movie, this is the scene in which the director would zoom further and further out, showing me standing there alone with would-be purchases in hand, and it would scream that tired-late-capitalist-suburban-ennui cliché.

And even if I had felt as much, not simply thought that this was what the image suggested, but actually felt that ennui, would it have been because I was, in fact, an instance of the case, or would it have been because I had that pre-interpreted image in my head?

We’re Platonists, but our Ideas are not eternal, timeless Forms remembered from glimpses we caught of them in some preexistent state of our souls. Our Ideas, against which we seek to test the truthfulness and reality of our experience, are the Images that have become iconic commonplaces generated in the age of photography, film, and Madison Avenue, and now by social media on which we all play Don Draper to our own curated brand identity.

The second question, then, is this: Why are we so intent on getting that image just so?

Because it is what our dominant forms of remembering will receive. To be remembered is to appear, to be taken notice of, to be; so we desire deeply to remember and be remembered. So much so that we will transform the logic by which we make sense of our lives so that our lives may be subject to means of remembering.

In the age of stories, be they stories told by the rhapsode, the bard, or the novelist, what mattered was the whole, not the part. Individual scenes were subordinate to the logic of the whole plot. They gave one the sense that there was a beginning, middle, and end; and it was not until the end that the whole significance of the beginning and the middle could be perceived, much less understood.

In the age of images, this is reversed. In the image, the whole is instantaneously present. We crave that moment and the image that captures it, and so we pose and point and click and frame and click and click again and pose again, but naturally, and click.

Remember in Saving Private Ryan, how in the closing scene Ryan, played by Matt Damon, now far advanced in years, breaks down before the grave of Capt. Miller, Tom Hank’s character, and pleads with his uncomprehending wife to tell him that he has lived a good life — a life that, in the end, made sense of the sacrifice of those who died for him? We could care less about the good life taken whole and judged from the end, but, ah, we’d love to play a scene like that. It would work so well on Youtube, and it would feel just right, just then.

We are connoisseurs of the moments and scenes that the camera can frame, but we have little patience or taste for the satisfactions that arise not in the moment, but in deferred time, when, long after the moment has passed, it may finally be understood in light of some larger canvas. How, then, could we be expected to take notice of and live in light of some as of yet future whole. There is no memory to sustain such a project any longer. But there is memory enough and more to sustain the capture and storage and retrieval of the moment.

Recently, I suggested that Facebook might undermine the quest for the narrative unity of a life. This was naïve. It is not that Facebook undermines the quest for narrative unity, it is that Facebook makes such a quest implausible to begin with. Facebook — as a means of remembering, as our treasury of memory — receives the image, not the story. No one will write our story, and even if someone would, who would have the patience to listen to or read it.

If we will remember and be remembered, it will be by the image — and so we will live for the image, for the moment.

Social Media and the Arts of Memory

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 9 Comments

More than a year and half ago, I published two posts, in what was to be a series of three, framing social networking sites, Facebook in particular, within the arts of memory tradition. The third post, for a variety of now forgotten reasons, never appeared. Recent discussion regarding Facebook and memory prompted me to complete what had been left unfinished. Below you will find the complete essay including the text of those two earlier posts, lightly edited, along with the concluding section. 

memory theater (2)

Early in The Art of Memory, Frances Yates pauses to envision a “forgotten social habit” of antiquity.  She invites us to wonder,“Who is that man moving slowly in the lonely building, stopping at intervals with an intent face?”  That man, Yates tells us, is a “rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci.”  The rhetoric student would have been creating the architecture of a mental space into which they would then place vivid images imaginatively designed to recollect the themes or words of a prepared oration.  While delivering the oration, the rhetor would navigate the mental space coming upon each carefully placed image which triggered their memory accordingly.  This work of designing mental space and populating the space with striking images followed the prescriptions of the techniques of artificial memory widely practiced in classical antiquity.

What if, however, we updated Yates’ scene by setting it in the present?  The scene would be instantly recognizable as long as we equipped our imagined person with a cell phone.  The stopping at intervals and the intent face would correspond to any of the multiple uses to which an Internet-enabled smart phone may be put:  reading or sending a text message, downloading songs, taking or sending pictures and video, updating social media profiles, or finding directions with GPS, to name but a few.  What is striking is how often these activities would, like that of the ancient rhetor, involve the work of memory. Much of what cell phones are used for has very little to do with making a phone call, after all. Cell phones are more likely to be used to access the Internet, send a text message, take a picture, or film a video.  Given these capabilities cell phones have become prosthetic memory devices; to lose a cell phone would be to induce a state of partial amnesia.  Or, it may be better to say it might induce a fear of future amnesia since our ability to approach the present as a field of potential memories would be undermined.

Social networking sites (SNS) are of special interest because of how they explicitly trade in memory.  This leads Joanne Garde-Hansen to ask in “MyMemories?:  Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook,” “If memory and identity can be seen as coterminous and SNSs involve literally digitising ones’ self into being then what is at stake when memories and identities are practiced on Facebook?”

She goes on to add,

“It goes without saying that the allure of the site is in its drawing together in one place memory practices: creating photograph albums, sharing photographs, messaging, joining groups and alumni memberships, making ‘friends’ and staying in touch with family.”

It would be fair to acknowledge that SNS such as Facebook traffic in more than the allure of memory practices. Nonetheless, the production, maintenance, and retrieval of memory is integral to the practices deployed on social networks.

Following Jacques Derrida, Garde-Hansen considers Facebook as an instance of the archiving archive. Thus, she points out, the architecture of a SNS such as Facebook is not neutral with respect to the memories it archives.  As Derrida observed,

“… the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future.  The archivization produces as much as it records the event.”

Garde-Hansen also draws SNS into the tension between database and narrative addressed by Manovich in The Language of New Media.  In her view, the most significant aspect of Manovich’s analysis of new media for SNS is the comparison he draws between the visual organization of digital media interfaces and spatial montage.  “Manovich’s emphasis upon spatial narrative is,” according to Garde-Hansen, “extremely pertinent to thinking through the emergence of SNSs and how these sites remediate personal and collective memory.” Framed in this way, memory as spatial montage challenges “the rise and dominance of history,” the “power of the written word” to order the past temporally, and the “twentieth century’s emphasis upon the single, unadulterated image (think cinema).”

Derrida’s insight suggests that the sorts of memories we are able to archive with social media may already be directing our interactions in the present.  (For an insightful discussion of this point anchored on an analysis of faux-vintage photography see Nathan Jurgenson’s, “The Faux-Vintage Photo.”)  Drawing in Manovich’s database/narrative opposition further suggests that the visual/spatial mode of ordering memories on SNS potentially shifts how meaning is derived from memory and, consequently, how we understand the self.

Returning to the scene suggested by Yates we may also consider SNS such as Facebook as instances of new artificial memory spaces constructed to supplement and augment the natural memory.  In the artificial memory tradition we already see memory rendered spatially and visually in a manner that anticipates the representation and organization of memory on SNS.  Situating SNS within the long history of spatial and visual memory also affords us the opportunity to consider such sites in the context of a complex and rich tradition of philosophical reflection on the nature of memory.

What emerges is a history of memory practices that alternate between a Platonic focus on memory as the presence of an absence and an Aristotelian emphasis on memory as the record of the past.  There are several thematic threads that weave this story together including the opposition of internal memory to memory supported by inscription, the connection between memory and imagination, memory as the index of desire, the related tensions between space and time and databases and narratives, and the relationship of memory to identity.  Yet for all the complexity those themes introduce, we will begin with a story.

The Origin of the Arts of Memory

Spatiality, images, and death have long been woven together in the complex history of remembering.  Each appears prominently in the founding myth of what Yates called the “art of memory” as it is recounted by Cicero in his De oratore. According to the story, the poet Simonides of Ceos was contracted by Scopas, a Thessalian nobleman, to compose a poem in his honor.  To the nobleman’s chagrin, Simonides devoted half of his oration to the praise of the gods Castor and Pollux.  Feeling himself cheated out of half of the honor, Scopas brusquely paid Simonides only half the agreed upon fee and told him to seek the rest from the twin gods.  Not long afterward that same evening, Simonides was summoned from the banqueting table by news that two young men were calling for him at the door.  Simonides sought the two callers, but found no one.  While he was out of the house, however, the roof caved in killing all of those gathered around the table including Scopas. As Yates puts it, “The invisible callers, Castor and Pollux, had handsomely paid for their share in the panegyric by drawing Simonides away from the banquet just before the crash.”

The bodies of the victims were so disfigured by the manner of death that they were rendered unidentifiable even by family and friends.  Simonides, however, found that he was able to recall where each person was seated around the table and in this way he identified each body.  This led Simonides to the realization that place and image were the keys to memory, and in this case, also a means of preserving identity through the calamity of death.  In Cicero’s words,

“[Simonides] inferred that persons desiring to train [their memory] must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.”

Cicero is one of three classical sources on the principles of artificial memory that evolved in the ancient world as a component of rhetorical training.  The other two sources are Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria and the anonymous Ad Herennium.  It is through the Ad Herennium, mistakenly attributed to Cicero, that the art of memory migrates into medieval culture where it is eventually assimilated into the field of ethics.  Cicero’s allusion to the wax-writing table, however, reminds us that discussion of memory in the ancient world was not limited to the rhetorical schools.  Memory as a block of wax upon which we make impressions is a metaphor attributed to Socrates in Plato’s Theaetetus where it appears as a gift of Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses:

“Imagine, then, for the sake of argument, that our minds contain a block of wax, which in this or that individual may be larger or smaller, and composed of wax that is comparatively pure or muddy, and harder in some, softer in others, and sometimes of just the right consistency.

Let us call it the gift of the Muses’ mother, Memory, and say that whenever we wish to remember something we see or hear or conceive in our own minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions or ideas and imprint them on it as we might stamp the impressions of a seal ring.  Whatever is so imprinted we remember and know so long as the image remains; whatever is rubbed out or has not succeeded in leaving an impression we have forgotten and do not know.”

Plato and Aristotle in Rafeal's "School of Athens"

The Platonic understanding of memory was grounded in an epistemology which located the ability to apprehend truth in an act of recollection.  Plato believed that the highest forms of knowledge were not derived from sense experience, but were first apprehended by the soul in a pre-existent state and remain imprinted deep in a person’s memory.  Truth consists in matching the sensible experience of physical reality to the imprint of eternal Forms or Ideas whose images or imprints reside in memory.  Consequently, the chief aim of education, and the highest calling of memory, is the remembering of these Ideas and this aim is principally attained through “dialectical enquiry,” a process, modeled by Plato’s dialogs, by which a student may arrive at a remembering of the Ideas.

At this point, we should notice that the anteriority, or “pastness,” of the knowledge in question is, strictly speaking, incidental.  What is important is the presence of the absent Idea or Form to be contemplated.  It is to evoke the presence of this absence that memory is deployed.  It is the presence of eternal Ideas that secures the apprehension of truth, goodness, or beauty in the present.  Locating the memory within the span of time past does not bear upon its value which rests in its being possessed as a model against which to measure experience.

By contrast, the principle aspect to note about Aristotle’s understanding of memory is that he distinguishes it from the imagination by noting its reference to the historical time.  While Plato’s focus on the image and its presence becomes “an obstacle to recognizing the specificity of the properly temporalizing function of memory,” according to Paul Riceour, in Aristotle’s “proud declaration” that “all memory is of the past” we find acknowledgement of that specificity.  In Aristotle’s account, memory is also, as it were, naturalized.  Along with his emphasis on memory being “of the past,” it is the past of sense experience that, for Aristotle, stocks memory.  Gone is Plato’s theory of the preexistence of the soul and memory as the deposit of knowledge of the Forms glimpsed in that preexistent state.

Ricoeur, in Memory, History, Forgetting, begins his consideration of the heritage of Greek reflections on memory with the following observation:

“Socratic philosophy bequeathed to us two rival and complementary topoi on this subject, one Platonic, the other Aristotelian.  The first, centered on the theme of the eikōn [image], speaks of the present representation of an absent thing; it argues implicitly for enclosing the problematic of memory within that of imagination.  The second, centered on the theme of the representation of a thing formerly perceived, acquired, or learned, argues for including the problematic of the image within that of remembering.”

As he goes on to note, from these two framings of the problematic of memory “we can never completely extricate ourselves.”

Reflecting for just a moment on the nature of our own memories it is not difficult to see why this might be the case.  If we remember our mother, for example, we may do so either by contemplating some idealized image of her in our mind’s eye or else by recollecting a moment from our shared past.  In both cases we may be said to be remembering our mother, but the memories differ along the Platonic/Aristotelian divide suggested by Ricoeur.  In the former case I remember her in a way that seeks her presence without reference to time past; in the latter, I remember her in a way that situates her chronologically in the past.

What we find as we pursue the artificial memory tradition through the medieval period into the Renaissance is a persistent distancing of memory from narrative and toward presence.  In its various manifestations it becomes an art seeking the presence of the divine, of virtue, or of esoteric knowledge mediated through images in a space that can be apprehended at a glance.

“One of the most striking manifestations of the Renaissance use of the art,” Yates explains, “is the Memory Theater of Giulio Camillo … based (so he believes) on archetypes of reality on which depend secondary images covering the whole realm of nature and of man.” Camillo, mostly forgotten in our age, was in his time a celebrity that attracted the attention of notable contemporaries including the King of France and Erasmus.  It is in fact, from the hand of Erasmus’ secretary that we have the most complete record of Camillo’s memory theater.

This manifestation of the artificial memory, however, also included Hermetic and Cabalistic elements.  Yates, in fact, describes Camillo’s lifetime work as an effort to the blend the Hermetic-Cabalist tradition founded by Pico della Mirandola with the classical art of memory.  Camillo also links these esoteric traditions to the recently revived currents of Neoplatonism so that his memory theater would “represent the eternal order of truth.”

Camillo’s theater was a physical object large enough for two people to enter into in order to see the drawn image of a theater used to organize the whole range of human knowledge. Gone from Camillo’s theater is the space that at least implied a certain temporality, or at least sequentiality as it was navigated.  Now the space itself is a fixed image that is immediately and simultaneously present to user.  Temporality is overthrown by presence.  Again Ricoeur:  “The revenge of the Platonic, and especially Neoplatonic, reminiscence over the Aristotelian psychology of memory and recollection is complete, but at the price of the transformation of reasoned speculation into mystagogy.”

Memory, Databases, Narrative

Where memory is conceived in Aristotelian fashion as principally defined by its reference to a past in time, it shares a natural affinity with narrative.  “Narrative is,” as Katherine Hayles has put it, “a temporal technology.” Where memory is divorced from temporality in Platonic fashion, narrative seems to fade from view.  To represent memories visually is to render them present, but it may also mean abstracting them from their place in the narratives we tell about our lives.  The artificial memory techniques, detached from temporality as they were, may be understood on the model of the database that, in Manovich’s analysis, is the “natural enemy of narrative.”

The architecture of the mental space in the artificial memory tradition functions similarly to an interface that allows for multiple arrangements of the images which are so many icons representing various types of data points.  Like a database, what the artificial memory facilitated was principally random access and retrieval.  As Manovich goes on to note, “a database can support narrative, but there is nothing in the logic of the medium itself that would foster its generation.”  Likewise with the artificial memory; it could support a narrative, but it does not necessarily generate one.

In his brief discussion of the artificial memory, Ricoeur forcefully makes a similar point:  “spatialization obliterates temporalization … the notion of place has chased away the mark of the past which had characterized memory since Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia.  Memory no longer consists in recalling the past but in actualizing what has been learned and stored away in mental space.”

In response to Manovich, Hayles sought to articulate a more symbiotic relationship between narratives and databases:  “No longer singular, narratives remain the necessary others to database’s ontology, the perspectives that invest the formal logic of database operations with human meanings and that gesture toward the unknown hovering beyond the brink of what can be classified and enumerated.” Hayles offers an instructive reframing of the opposition between narrative and database.  However, drawing artificial memory into the database/narrative polarity suggests that memories stored in databases may not be seeking narratives at all.  While meaning can be secured by the deployment of narratives that bring order to the disorder of lived experience, the desire for meaning is not the only desire that memory answers to. Memory also desires presence.

Coming back to social networking sites, we might say then personal memories, of the sort archived by Facebook, yield presence rather than the sort of meaning that arises from narratives. Not unlike the mental constructs of the arts of memory, Facebook operates on the model of the database and the spatial montage. Like the artificial memory, it may sustain a narrative, but it does not necessarily generate one.  Facebook backgrounds the narrative coherence of memory grounded in past experience in favor of the immediacy of spatially and visually mediated presence. We do well, however, not to frame this opposition too starkly. The introduction of Facebook’s Timeline interface may be seen as a tilt in the direction of Aristotelian memory and narrative. Nonetheless, memory, when anchored to spatially arranged databases of images, more readily answers to the desire for the immediacy of presence rather than the temporally inflected logic of narrative.

It may be helpful to consider Facebook alongside the diary, another form of externalized memory. The material form of the diary encourages a narrative posture toward experience. Writing already requires the narrativizing of one’s experience and the diary’s form elicits the sequential ordering of these narratives and suggests an anticipation of closure. Visual databases of memory, whether mental, analog, or digital, may invite commentary and explication, but not a linear narrative of one’s experience.

Conclusion

Returning to the story of Simonides, we remember that the artificial memory tradition had its roots in the trauma of death. In the face of great loss we may very well seek the consolations of a narrative that attempts to meaningfully frame our experience. But we may also seek to recover the presence of what is now absent.

In “A Photograph,” the poet, Czeslaw Milosz, observed:

“Few tasks more difficult
Than to write a treatise
On a man who looks
At an old photograph.

Why he does it
Is incomprehensible
And his feelings
Cannot be explained.

Seemingly it’s simple:
She was his love.
But here precisely
Questions begin.”

Then, toward the end of the poem, Milosz writes,

“And, inconceivable,
He addressed her,
Perfectly certain
That she hears him:

‘O maiden of the Lord,
Promised to me,
With whom I was to have
At least twelve children,

‘Obtain for me the grace
Of your strong faith.
We living are too weak
Without your assistance.

You are for me now
The mystery of time
i.e., of a person
Changing and the same,

Who runs in the garden
Fragrant after the rain
With a ribbon in your hair
And lives in the beyond.

You see how I try
To reach with words
What matters most
And how I fail.

Though perhaps this moment
When you are so close
Is precisely your help
And an act of forgiveness.’”

There is something about the image, the photograph — remember Barthes’ mother — that evokes the consolations of memory as presence. Life consists of countless separations and losses; in such instances we may also seek similar consolation. We know we will be parted and we know the present is ephemeral, so we build our archives of memories to later avail ourselves of the presence they offer.

According to Ivan Illich, “What anthropologists distinguish as ‘cultures’ the historian of mental spaces might distinguish as different ‘memories.’” What historians of media have classified as oral, literate, print, and electronic cultures were distinguished largely along the lines of what could be remembered, how, and by whom. It would be presumptuous to say that the same will be true of digital culture, but it would be surprising if such were not the case. We do well then to consider how digital media shapes our remembering, both what it allows us to remember and what it encourages us to remember.