I will, therefore, forget what I have written here. The beginning contains a trace of the thought process which led to its writing. It is currently absent from my memory. It – the “therefore” – calls back to something that has left an imprecise trace (“This (therefore) will not have been a book”[1]). I trust that it has done its job: it was and is no longer the way it was when it left what it had to. If it is significant, it may come back, or it may not. Its return may be experienced as a return or as a novelty. Each would be appropriate. Each spurs thought to venture into an untrodden path and bring something long intuited yet unarticulated into the realm of the sayable. Something takes shape through an unconscious buildup that unveils itself and is left alone.[2] It comes out of the imagery and the language – these are the author.
The invention of writing externalized our memories and birthed the cyborg. It made apparent that the sharp distinction between nature and the human is untenable. That writing functions as a pharmakon (φάρμακον) – as simultaneously cure and poison – is made clear in the Phaedrus,[3] but memory is itself a pharmakon: it overloads, it oversaturates. It can feel claustrophobic not to forget, to always and by necessity refer back to something already read/heard/seen/perceived. One wishes to escape fixed impressions – but escape to where? To silence, to solitude. But memory eats silence. And only in the haunting presence of silence and solitude “is there a chance of framing the rare, and even rarer, thing that might be worth saying.”[4]
To flesh out, one must start from incompleteness, and it is incompleteness that memory fights. A “poor” memory allows for generation, for organic filtering of an endless stream of pointless bits of language: the collection of what one remembers, harnesses itself on oneself, and leaves a trace is one’s readily available weapons arsenal. Forgetting is a salience filter. One may soon forget the details of even a well-written and compelling novel but recollect the experience it put one in. The coming and going of information can then be like a ladder to climb and immediately discard.
The collection of things that have etched themselves on the tablet of one’s memory (imperfectly, partially, sometimes erroneously) can paint a psychological portrait at least as good as any other.[5] Each part of the portrait evades one’s grasp. Being inside, one is incapable of seeing it in full and predicting what it may produce.
To forget is to leave a space for unveiling. A trace operates without externalization and interacts with other traces in an unplanned network. The entire network one cannot hope to seize except by “flashes, formulas, surprises of expression, scattered through the great stream of the Image-repertoire.”[6] The structure and contents of each person’s trace-network are unique. Hence, they emancipate from ‘originality’ concerns – concerns which always were, are, and will be a pointless hindrance to thought, an arbitrary limitation the recognition of the authority of which is intellectual auto-exploitation.
This text originates in such a matrix of traces – half-present, half-absent. Its contents are precisely the result of a poor and selective memory. A memory which, with no regard to conscious “decisions” and with a concern for aesthetics and personal significance, lets certain things linger, and others dissipate – a process which, as an integral part of what you’re currently reading, declares: I am proof of my own conclusion.
Notes
- Derrida, J. (1981). Dissemination. The Athlone Press. p. 3.
- Heidegger, M. (2008). Letters to His Wife: 1915-1970. Polity Press. p. 213.
- Plato. Phaedrus. 275a.
- Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972-1990. Columbia University Press. p. 129.
- Birkerts, S. (1994). The Gutenberg Elegies. Faber and Faber. p. 17.
- Barthes, R. (1990). A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Penguin Books. p. 59.
Tio Gabunia 