Chapter 3
A Body of Memory
« If you remember who you are, you are somebody » (Augustin)
Functionality of Memory
How past events survive, how and what we recollect of them is precisely the question. In Matter and Memory Henri Bergson explains that past events survive in two distinct forms: in motor mechanism, as an instinct and in independent recollections, as constructions. Recollection or recognition takes place in different forms, sometimes it can be automatic, within the circumstances, lying in the action itself or it can imply an effort of the mind seeking in the past the right answers, in order to apply them to the present situation. It is the subject, the body/mind, that functions as a boundary between the past, the future and the present action, in which our past is driving towards the future, and in which the present interaction feeds the motion towards the future. «And, consequently, those particular images, which I call cerebral mechanisms, terminate at each successive moment the series of my past representations, being the extreme prolongation of those representations into the present, their link with the real, that is, with action.»[1]
We need to confront ourselves with two different memories. A first one records under a form of memory-images, the events of our life, storing the past as a necessity of our own nature. Thanks to this memory the intelligent, or the intellectual recognition of perception takes place, and in this memory we take refuge every time that we need to recuperate a particular image. Every single perception is extended into an action and while the images gain their place and order in our memory, their presence will create our new dispositions toward action. «… one memory imagines, the other one repeats…»[2], perception translates into recollection that then re-transfers into perception.
In Cyberspace, the center is therefore where the elementary sensations originate: we receive sensations, impressions by the sense organs, such as by the 'real objects', but these objects are also subjected to intermediaries, to the influence of our memory of ‘real objects’. From the pure image we pass to the intermediate memory, or an image-memory, then by successive degrees the idea embodies itself in the particular image which is the ‘verbal one’. The question is now how stimulation from within Cyberspace can give birth to sensations. As memories become actual, they tend to bring within the body all the corresponding sensations.
The ‘virtual’ sensations, in order to become real, must push the body towards action, impressing upon it those movements and attitudes that represent the antecedents. Sensations, which usually precede our movements or our feedback, are accomplished by the body, and the progression by which virtual images realize themselves in us, is a series of stages in which images gradually obtain, from our body, useful actions or useful attitudes. The result is, through the words of Bergson: «The stimulation of the so-called sensory centers is the last stage: it is the prelude to a motor reaction, the beginning of an action in space. …. the virtual images evolve toward the virtual sensations and the virtual sensations towards real movements: this movement , in realizing itself , realizes both the sensation of which it might have been the natural continuation and the image which has tried to embody itself in the sensation.»[3]
When talking about ‘action in space’ related to memory a literary reference should come to mind: Marcel Proust and his Récherche du temp perdus. Through the madeleine, Proust not only remembers but also rethinks and recovers a past or lost emotion, and a past time and space. To experience the passage of time it is necessary to rise above it and to grasp both past and present simultaneously, in a moment of what Proust called pure time. But does pure time exist? Pure time is not time at all, it is perception in a moment of time and space, a juxtaposition of disparate images that are directly communicated to our sensibility.
At this stage we have to consider the ‘virtual states’ of Cyberspace more carefully, penetrating further into the internal mechanism of our physical actions, showing the progress of memory that tends to reconquer its position and influence in the present, by actualizing itself. In Cyberspace our memory should function like a creative work of art. When creating the collective moment, or the moment of recollection, we create art, since it is an attempt to create new meaning. It is from this meaning that we get our sense of security and it is in the value of these new meanings that our safety could be in danger in a new reality, as unknown as the one of Cyberspace.
Cyberspace on one level could be seen as another location where memory is externalized, like in books, in data banks. It could be seen as an amount of data, of materiality, language, symbols that are stored in ‘another’ brain. But Cyberspace is
more than that, it is more than a simple data bank, a storage or a retrivial system of data, it is a location where we can come alive through the data, through experience, and memory since we are not ‘collectors’ but creators of meaning.[4]
Memory Change
What is to question at this point is if our memory changes, if the perception and sensation of a past, lived moment vary in time or according to the present experience, and change us. An important processes, in order to understand our
memories and to remember past sensations, is the ‘awareness of forgetting’. The interaction between ‘memorizing’ and the ‘forgetting’ is the driving force that creates the process of recollection. Recollection is a creative process, it is an
activity of imagination, of sensation. For this specific reason memory, or the act of remembering, can be seen as an active process that shapes and molds itself without ever loosing its main focus: the body and the bodily feelings related to the moment of recollection. Remembrance could therefore be the technique of forgetting and recollecting at the same time when experiencing life in Cyberspace.
When exploring and discovering Cyberspace we might want to adjust, to gradually acquire the right habits, the sedimentation of the appropriate habitudes, we might need our ‘habituation’ to grow, and all of these actions are a matter of memory, and in particular of a body memory. It is in remembering the body that we get back into ‘place’, our own space and we are able to perceive and sense, or acquire a new alternative reality. When we are brought into Cyberspace we find ourselves imagining new possibilities that our body might not have experienced before, coming to live in an altered corporeal ‘comportment’.
Does this use of memory mean that we must settle within physical interiority in order to connect with Cyberspace, to experience it and remember it? Is re-placing a pattern of re-minding? The intimacy of Cyberspace can be found in the knowledge and memory of the body. There is a certain presence of perceptual data which prompts the perceiver to put into play a certain association, or call up a certain memory. This is why the perceptual data of Cyberspace can not be meaningless, if it was it could never have any power to evoke other meanings.
If we accept the idea that we have sensations, we commit ourselves to the view that all experience is sensation. Knowledge itself becomes no more than the anticipation of impressions, and is itself constituted of such inexpressible impressions. But the problem now is in questioning the idea that the simple recollection, even of meaningless sensations, can render similar sensations meaningful. Rather, it now becomes a matter of describing the way in which a meaningful present experience has access to a past that ‘envelopes’ it, that makes it felt, lived, sensed, used, that makes it physical. It is precisely this relationship between the past and the present that needs to be re-examined. It is following Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that past should to be described as a ‘horizon’ or ‘atmosphere’ or ‘field’, instead of a collection of discrete impressions or qualities. Maybe the solution is to reject the theoretical reconstruction of such evidence in terms of impressions, that are considered to be the constituents of experience. Even if general an individual can not not think resting on the prejudice of the objective world by describing phenomena, we should try to consider a more phenomenological approach, where experience should be ‘the ultimate court of appeal’, where somehow thought is aware of itself, it is awakened to its own prejudice and to an appreciation of perception of ourselves in Cyberspace, as the first access to things and the foundation of all knowledge.
In Cyberspace we carry our past with us insofar as its structure has become sedimented in our ‘new’ or ‘habitual’ body. There is thus an organic expression which is part of our human condition and which constitutes so to speak an ‘inborn complex’. In Cyberspace the ‘organic repression/elimination’ of our biological body occurs. Our body rooted in biological existence could be felt as somehow precarious, but we must fight the feeling of precariousness by repressing the organism and highlighting our memories of the past as collections of ideas and images. Such phenomena can reawaken us in the digital environment to the actual character of the past and thus to an appreciation of the role of our body in being-in-the-world or for-the-world. Since memory and its emotions can bring about the phenomenon of our body, it is evident that the user of Cyberspace is experiencing ‘another present’ rather that merely recollecting it or having an idea or image of it.
On the Survival of the Images
We are therefore a body of memory that functions in Cyberspace. When thus recovering or recollecting the imagery in front of us, we call up our memory, our past history, we become conscious of an act that some how will ‘replaces’ ourselves; a serious work of adjustment is made . But recollection still remains virtual ,we prepare ourselves, and from the virtual stage it passes into an actual stage and as we go on we tends to 're-live’ the perception remaining attached to the past by its deepest roots.
New sensations and new images that is the combination in Cyberspace. Recollections go through the process of becoming actual in the digital environment and tend to live in the image that they are set in; the memory of the sensation is the sensation itself in its state of becoming, when the progression of memory materializes. Memory passing in our body/mind and becoming actual is a natural process since memory-images are already in part a sensation.
The interrelation between memory and perception is more than a consequence of an association, more than an accident in the history of philosophy. Its roots lie deep in the nature of the object of external perception. We tend to consider perception as an ‘instruction for use’. We find between perception and memory a difference of degree, perception is supposed to set us back into the past, in order for the body/mind in present to understand, perceive, and live. «My present then is both sensation and movement; ….and the movement is linked with the sensation ... prolong[ing] the action. Whence I conclude that my present consists in a joint system of sensations and movements. My present is, in its essence, sensori-motor.»[5] This is what Bergson believed our present to be, a consciousness of our body. The body is the center of action, it represents the location of impressions, and once we receive them we will transform them into accomplished movements. This is the actual state of our becoming as a body that grows, as the body of memory. In Cyberspace we need, or have the necessity to materialize memory, to embody it in a sensation, memory has no power if it remains without utility, such as without an attachment to the present.
Our body is part of our representation, in Cyberspace it is itself an image a special image which persists and which constitutes at every moment a section of the universal becoming. At that stage it becomes the place of passage of the movements, received and thrown back, it is a link between the things which act upon us and the things upon which we act: it is a sensory phenomena.
The body of memory or the bodily memory as Bergson calls it, is a system of sensory-motors that are organized by habit, it becomes a quasi-instantaneous memory to which the true memory of the past serves as base. On the one hand, the memory of our body offers to the sensory-motor mechanisms all the recollections capable of guiding them in their task and of giving to the motor reaction the direction suggested by the lesson of experience. It is also true that the sensorial-motor apparatus gives memories the means of taking a body, of materializing themselves in the body, of becoming present. The theory could be that the body/mind, through the memory of the body, is the intermediary between sensations, perceptions and movement, directing memory towards the ‘real’ and binding it to the present. It is in this way that the body/mind located in Cyberspace contributes to useful recollections.
In considering the role of the body in Cyberspace, in the body like anywhere else everything is an image. The relationship between the images represent movement among the images, the body receives movement and in part it chooses the right one. Images change according to the variations of the body, inspired by projects of action.
What has just been described can be seen as the objective, or the materiality of Cyberspace, such as the ensemble of images that are related to possible actions, and these precise images and actions determine the body in the digital environment, reminding us that perception is not just a matter of cerebral stimulation and
reaction but it has to do with conscience that reflects on the activity of the body/mind. It is memory that unites the consciousness of our conscious with the images, making perception subjective.
The Momentum of Memory
The body implaced in Cyberspace, placed between new objects and signs, functions as a conductor , the conductor of movements, transmitting the movements to certain mechanisms depending if the action is a reflex or a chosen, voluntary action. Our body/mind occupies the center of Cyberspace and we are one among the surrounding, among the images that constitute the location of Cyberspace. The things that surround us also act upon us, and our actions and reactions are based upon the number and the various natures of the apparatus, of the environment which experience has set up with it. For this reason, being the body the ‘motor of ingenious plan’ it can store up the action of the past and it is precisely in this way that the past images are preserved.
Memory is the key word when the body comes alive in Cyberspace. Memory supports and makes ‘the being happen’ it makes it ‘be here’. Memory is a vehicle of the ‘here’, its carrier, it is the necessary and sufficient condition of ‘being’. In Memory, the multiplicity of layers constitute the ongoing aura, an atmosphere which surrounds us. We are a body of memory, it is me, it is physical, and it determines the locus of my life. Leibniz in the Monadology, Item # 26 states that : «Memory provides the soul with a sort of consistency which imitates reason but has to be distinguished from it. ...animals... are brought by the representation of [the] memory to expect what has been associated with [the] perception in the past, and are moved to feelings similar to those they had then....»[6] and again in Item # 28: «...the succession of their perceptions is brought about by the principle of memory....»[7]
On a further level we can say that each perception contains numerous layers of memory and memory makes up its ‘subjective side’ making it conscious. Our actual representation of matter is a selection performed by the brain according to the needs of the body. Mind/Memory in Cyberspace can be considered an organ of selection, of recollections that is never destroyed, that manipulates the resources of the past according to the practical need of the body. Memory transforms the perception of the body it helps it condense sensible intuition and participate in the creation of us. «...perception consists therefore in condensing long periods of an existence, infinitely diluted in a few differentiated moments of an intense life, and thus in recapitulating a very long story.»[8]
Human perception in the digital environment provokes a sensible intuition; our conscience is on top of all memory and the images issued from the interaction with Cyberspace are received as a continuity of our nature, as interior movements of our cognition.
The body/mind ceases the materiality of Cyberspace with a different rhythm of perception and awareness. Memory comes into the game with the pace of an oniric experience, contracting the moments of materiality and transforming them in order to balance the pace of our awareness and of our understanding of Cyberspace. Conscience in this environment is the master of its own continuity thanks to memory. The activity that takes place through memory is simple, and it balances the pace of our awareness and of our understanding of Cyberspace. Conscience in this environment is the master of its own continuity, of tension of the body/mind, tension that can be related to all possible actions, imaginary, virtual as much as ‘real ones’.
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[1] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. 78-79.
[2] Ibid. 82.
[3] Ibid. 130.
[4] Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. «As meaning, the signifier already postulates a reading, I grasp it through my eyes, it has a sensory reality (unlike the linguistic signifier, which is purely mental), there is a richness in it... The meaning is already complete, it postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions.» 117.
[5] Ibid. 138.
[6] Leibniz. Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays. 152.
[7] Ibid. 152
[8] Ibid. 233.