This entry considers memory in the context of critical posthumanism, which might be perceived as the philosophical antidote to the more familiar transhumanist tendency that extends the humanist legacy by privileging the (white, masculine, heterosexual, Western) human subject as a universal category to be augmented, enhanced or transformed by means of various technologies. In this view, one becomes posthuman by transcending the ‘merely’ human by technological or other means. Critical posthumanism, by contrast, foregrounds epistemological questions stemming from a critique of humanism and the sentient, agential or affective forms that emerge in the wake of the human. The entry therefore embraces radically new ways of imagining the all-too-human faculty of memory in the absence of the human being as conventionally conceived.
Transhumanist deference to a technologically augmented and/or totally artificial memory must be measured against the idea of an always already technically supported ‘natural’ memory. Arguably, memory has always been posthuman because it has always had a non-human, technological or prosthetic dimension. This immediately complicates any hard-and-fast distinction between technology and the human, as it does with ‘nature’ and the human.
This suggests a distinction between a posthuman memory that identifies an aspect of the transformation of the human subject’s cognitive and emotional relation to time, and a posthuman-ist memory that addresses the status of memory after the human: after the time of the human, ‘our’ time, when ‘we’ are no longer here. But this existential distinction does not necessarily equate with the anthropomorphic distinction, as in the presence or absence of a face. ‘Posthuman memory’ is memory after the (disappearance of) the human, whereas ‘posthumanist memory’ is memory no longer understood in (purely) humanist terms. In other words, to take account of the future of memory in a posthumanist context is to acknowledge that while some of the more radical revaluations of subjectivity and species being require the representation of human-like bodies, faces or voices, there is another kind of memory that demands to be thought in a post-anthropomorphic context, challenging us to conceive of a nonhuman, radically other, agent of memory/remembering. The most urgent and consequential question that emerges here is the simplest and barest: who/what does the remembering, in the time of the posthuman?[1]
Remembering vs memory per se: hence, the age-old distinction between an agential subject and the persistent conceit of memory as some kind of virtual space, whether a specific compartment in the mind or the memory palaces of the ars memoriae.[2] This distinction is complicated, almost beyond recognition, in the age of the Anthropocene. What is memory’s role or value when the future is no longer certain, when there is no longer an open-ended temporal horizon but something more like a finite spatial expanse? I invoke posthumanist memory in this sense as an elegiac alternative to the louder dystopian or apocalyptic tone in current popular discourse; as a modality of mourning, in other words, for something – the humanist subject – whose time has run out. Accordingly this entry attends, through the lens of memory, to the transformation in human self-understanding in the digital era. Our thinking of the human and our sense of human identity is reshaped even as it is inflected by new technologies, on the one hand, and, on the other hand in an ironic feedback loop, by human-driven climate change that not only transforms the environment on which we depend but also the temporal horizon of collective human existence. More poetically, this entry acknowledges a global, elegiac, backward-looking sensibility, expressed in a range of cultural variations, whose basic register is a kind of ironically remorseful rearward gaze, away from an increasingly foreshortened future. As an alternative to futurity, in fact, such a posthumanist memory opens a perspective on time that is non-linear, recursive and open-ended.
The challenge is to measure the seemingly humanist nature of such an Epimethean elegiac affective response to living in the contemporary world against the properly critical revaluation of humanism that posthumanism implies. What could be more ‘human(ist)’, in other words, than the sentimental pseudo-mourning for a rapidly disappearing sense of what it means to be human? Such nostalgic attachment to vanishing foundations is itself symptomatic of everything that is problematic about a humanist understanding of memory, in whose absence it is very difficult to imagine a relationship to the past as a basis for understanding one’s situation in the present, let alone a new relation to possible futures. It is precisely the newly problematic status of the future that compels this posthumanist elegiac or backwards-looking tendency, setting it off from what came before.
As I wrote in 2010, “[t]here seems to be a general consensus … that memory has taken on a second-order quality; or rather (as with identity or ‘reality’ itself), an artificial or simulacral double has emerged and developed alongside an “authentic”, “natural” memory—indeed, for many people today, they are indistinguishable. […] [M]odern subjectivity is ‘ineluctably dependent on external mnemotechnical prostheses’. This does not produce so much as it attenuates what I call the de-ontologisation of memory; its grounding in social reality and its representations rather than subjective interiority. This is a collective, thoroughly artificial memory, constituted, legitimized and naturalized through and by means of primarily visual media, most significantly cinema; memory as representation in a perpetuation of a Euro-centric privileging of the visual over other faculties and senses.’[3] It is now clear to me that, in elaborating this notion of a second-order, ‘inauthentic’ modality of memory I was describing in other terms what might now be more accurately labelled a form of posthuman memory in what should be acknowledged as a thoroughly Western epistemological context.
As with the critical posthumanist enterprise in general, the subject – or subjectivity –underlies the question of posthuman memory. The subject as philosophical, psychoanalytic or political construct has been appropriated, adapted and re-contextualised, like any other aspect of discourse. It seems necessary to articulate this elegiac conception of the posthumanist subject of memory with a reading of memory as always already posthuman, because always already, originarily, technologically determined, prostheticised. The latter idea is adumbrated in Stefan Herbrechter’s ‘Posthumanism “Without” Technology, or How the Media Made Us Post/Human’” (2014). This connects with what Bernard Stiegler refers to as the always already technical nature of the human; its ‘originary technicity’,[4] in which ‘technological determinism’ and ‘futurism’ act together as an ‘integral part of posthumanist discourse’ (p. 3): ‘Technology and future in fact could be named as the key words, and arguably even the transcendental signifieds, of most posthumanisms’ (p. 3).
Stiegler’s ‘originary technicity’ puts N. Katherine Hayles’s famous line about how ‘we’ ‘have always been posthuman (1999) into deeper temporal perspective, pushing the human species’ constitutive entanglement with technology since the mid-20th century advent of cybernetics back to a pre-historical period. Our chronically posthuman nature manifests itself across various other discourses and disciplines: for instance, in Canadian media studies guru Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ (1964/1994),[5] or German memory scholar Astrid Erll’s ‘the medium is the memory’.[6] Memory, like the mass (and now digital) media, names a quantity that is both content and form, message and medium.[7] Memory is always already mediatised: ‘Whatever we know about the world, we know through media and in dependence on media. The images of the past which circulate in memory culture are thus not extrinsic to media. They are media constructs. This does not make them counterfeit or unreal; mediality represents instead the very condition for the emergence of cultural memory.’[8] Just as, for McLuhan, media are ‘extensions‘ of man’s [sic] physical and sensible capacities, for Erll, ‘[m]edia of memory … which can be understood [after McLuhan] as “extensions” of our organic memories, bring about consequences in that they shape cultural remembrance in accordance to their specific means and measures. In this sense, “the medium is the memory”.’[9]
Derrida’s later work on Freud affords a valuable perspective on the ongoing significance of the archive, the ultimate expression of collective memory as exteriorised technical-material structure. At once reaffirming and deconstructing the persistent metaphors, Derrida argues that the archive, as hypomnesic, mnemotechnical support, ‘will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of said memory. There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.’[10] In complicating the ‘distinction between mneme or anamnesis on the one hand, and hypomnema on the other’ (19; original emphasis), Derrida’s archive is a species of posthuman memory, whether individual or collective, by definition hypomnesic, returning us to Stiegler’s ‘Epimethean complex’, in which the prosthetically augmented self, with its interiorised exteriority, is what constitutes us as ‘human’.[11]
My reading of the human/posthuman question vis-à-vis technology is, on the one hand, another iteration of the ‘originary technicity’ framework, wherein the human is always already imbricated with technology, and therefore always already posthuman. On the other hand, given that this is a theory of memory, the transhumanist valorisation of the future, or ‘futurity,’ must, of necessity, give way before the past, or pastness, including the understanding of memory as the past made present.[12] In this critical posthumanist view, the past, via memory, acquires an increased weight and significance, in principle, even as the Internet and the digitally mediatised culture it supports militate against historical knowledge while tacitly encouraging a presentist worldview.[13]
These issues are taken up in a recent entry in this Genealogy: ‘Critical Memory Studies for the Posthuman Age’. As it shows, contemporary theories of memory continue to be haunted by Plato’s designation of writing vis-à-vis speech (as presence of logos) in the Phaedrus as ‘hypomnesis to mnémè, the auxiliary aide-mémoire to the living memory’.[14] This memory is not viewed as adjunct or ancillary to some empirical, ‘living’ memory as a cognitive function, however, which is after all a component of that thing, mind, which is unsusceptible to this type of inquiry except as ‘translated’ into textual form, always already represented, mediatised. This means that the contemporary transmediation of memory highlighted by the entry is ‘merely’ the contemporary instantiation of a centuries-old process. What is new or different, as the authors assert, is the simultaneous backward/forward looking’ perspective – at once hopeful as well as elegiac, Promethean as well as Epimethean – made possible in a 20th-century setting defined by a modernist author like Proust, whose concept of ‘involuntary memory’, as in the famous madeleine episode in Swann’s Way (1913),[15] continues to be the touchstone for creative approaches to the narrative exploitation of memory in various media. The example the entry provides, Jorge Semprun’s The Long Voyage (1963), is a formally experimental memoir of the author’s experience of the French Resistance, arrest and internment. A kind of Holocaust novel, The Long Voyage remediates Proust, investing artistically captured ‘involuntary memory’ with political-historical significance. While focused on the protagonist’s interiority on the level of narration, Semprun’s novel opens Proust’s modernist emphasis on the individual subject of memory to a more inclusive transindividual experience of living through a historical moment in which our understanding of what it means to be ‘human’ is permanently transformed, and not necessarily for the better. ‘Memory’ in this context is shorthand for the creative expression of such new posthumanist subjectivities, and what the entry calls ‘new forms of witnessing in the “post-testimonial era”’. The emphasis on texts, objects, spaces and constructed situations of intentional ‘rememoration’ represents a significant step in the posthumanisation of memory in the most ethical sense. At the same time, the view of an always already mediatised memory – remediation as ‘rememoration’ – runs counter to the general drift of contemporary memory theory, focused on the embodied present-tense agential subject. This shift aligns with the concomitant one in Holocaust studies, away from a privileging of individual and collective memory grounded in lived experience and toward an expanded recognition that even such seemingly authentic memorial-testimonial bearing-witness is itself always already determined by the medium in which it is captured, preserved and, hopefully, passed on.
As the Holocaust limit-case attests, the position of the witness may be the best example of the subject of posthumanist memory, embodying a radical hope for the future of the human. In this witness-subject – exemplified, differently, in the female and Indigenous subject, the historically subaltern non-subject, subjected, objectified, oppressed by the patriarchy, or colonialism, or other forces of capitalist-humanist modernity – Promethean foresight confronts what I call, after Stiegler, the Epimethean elegiac.[16] This emphasis on second-order, epigonal subjectivities aligns with the Genealogy authors’ emphasis on the ‘intermedial interconnectedness’ of ‘different testimonial modalities ultimately not reducible to the actual former victims’ human agency yet (re)constructing a work of memory endowed with powerful testimonial value’. As time passes, the past dilates, the future narrows, and the value of rememorative remediation, of fictional but ‘authentic’ representations of history, and of reconstructed lived experience, increases.
[1] I thank Stefan Herbrechter for this formulation.
[2] See Russell J. A. Kilbourn, Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 32–33.
[3] Kilbourn 2010, p. 5. See also Frances Yates, “The Three Latin Sources for the Classical Art of Memory,” The Art of
Memory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 1–26); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994: 383–84).
[4] Stefan Herbrechter, ‘Posthumanism “Without” Technology, or How the Media Made Us Post/Human” (2014: 9); see Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 4.
[5] Freud anticipates McLuhan by several decades; see for instance ‘A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad’ (1925), in which he identifies ‘the forms of auxiliary apparatus which we have invented for the improvement or intensification of our sensory functions’ (Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (6th edn), Vol. 19, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1973), p. 430.
[6] Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
[7] Erll, p. 114.
[8] Erll, p. 114; my emphasis.
[9] Erll, p. 115; my emphasis.
[10] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 11, (emphasis in original).
[11] Stiegler, 152–3.
[12] See Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
[13] See Herbrechter, p. 9.
[14] Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul De Man, trans. Cecille Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 37.
[15] Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Vintage, 1996).
[16] Contemporary cinematic examples of this genre (the Epimethean elegiac) include: Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016); A Ghost Story (David Lowery 2017); Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino, 2010); One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, 2019).