Reading Ricoeur (4)

The Memory of the Now

The importance of narrative reappears in Ricoeur’s reading of Husserl’s primary (retention) and secondary memory (reproduction). Against Husserl, Ricoeur argues that the phenomenological epoché begins with a temporal structure, not a “pure flow” (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 31). We are confronted with an ambiguous intentionality. Objective time appears to already contain a history. “Pure flow” begins after the “origin of time.” Ricoeur observes: something, the object of intention, endures temporally. The question occurs: how is this thing retained before being recollected? The question is hampered, since what is being retained is immediately altered by the “ever new now” (Ibid., p. 32). Prima facie, the retention and then retrieval of the past would seem to depend on the temporal singularity of the event. If the event ends, it can nevertheless be retained so long as retention is in place. “Beginning constitutes an undeniable experience,” Ricoeur writes (Ibid., p.33). The beginning marks the possibility of retention, so “an investigation of historical knowledge” (Ibid.). Yet the now is not unambiguous. A “running-off” occurs in which, Husserl writes, “a new now is always entering on the scene, the now changes into a past; and as it does so the whole running-off continuity of pasts belonging to the preceding points moves ‘downwards’ uniformly into the depths of the past” (cited in Ibid., p. 34). Husserl presents us with a discontinuous continuity. The new now takes place where the preceding now was situated, entailing “a retention of retention” (Ibid.,). The (post)memory of memory brings us back to trauma. What runs-off is recalled as memory is either remembered or forced into a state of traumatic dormancy. Memory renews itself through being remembered. Concurrently, the autonomy of the memory of now loses its clarity.

Before Husserl, Hegel observed how, “Now is Night” (Hegel, 1977, p. 60). The Now becomes otherwise. The Now is preserved, but only now, as a negative. What takes place we when recall the Now, less even the memory of the Now? Is remembering the Now the means to temporally emplace it? If so, does emplacing the Now entail reducing it to the twilight-Now, neither day nor night, but the ambiguous temporal interval in-between? An uncanny zone in which double-intentionality is directed, drawn by both the Now of the past and that of the (non)present. Memory allies with the always deferred Now by being forced into the interval. There is thing which is thought of as being recollected. Yet the “new now” disrupts the past. As the attempt to recapture the previous now perpetuates the temporal “running-off,” the original now falls. The moment is not benign. As memory strives toward containment, the interval draws in, eroding the temporal distance between retention and recollection. A futureless past arises which loses its identity in the moment of being experienced.

“In dying,” Levinas writes in “Reality and its Shadow,” “the horizon of the future is given, but the future as a promise of a new present is refused; one is in the interval, forever an interval” (cited in Cazeaux, 2000, p. 125). Levinas terms the destruction of the temporal present, the meanwhile. It disrupts Bergson’s continuity and replaces it with an “empty interval,” whereby time fails to catch up with itself: “It is as though death were never dead enough, as though parallel with the duration of the living ran the eternal duration of the interval….it is the meanwhile, never finished, still enduring – something inhuman and monstrous” (Ibid.). If death is never dead enough, overlapping its own finitude, by inference, memory mirrors the unfulfillment of death by striving toward an impossible total recall. The striving exposes memory to manipulation. But does the absence of autonomy shatter the memory by ending it? Ricoeur notes Husserl’s term “imperceptibility, thereby suggesting the limited character of the temporal field as a field of visibility” (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 31). The equation between a finite temporality and visibility means that memory risks erasure as the temporal persistence undergoes “modification.”

Reading Ricoeur (3)

Duration and Memory

Ricoeur’s analysis of Aristotle’s conception of memory makes clear the temporality which underpins recollection. Passive memory (evocation) and active recollection (recall/search) mark a central distinction which allows recollection to take place. Ricoeur is in a position to present a phenomenological sketch of memory, aided by the distinction between memory as intention and memories as intended (Ibid., p. 22). Memories are distinct. Because of this distinction, an assertion can be made: “the ‘thing’ remembered is plainly identified with a singular, unrepeatable event” (Ibid., p. 23). Yet memories risk losing their distinction if not placed under the category of pastness. Ricoeur is required to construct a typology of memory-things. We discover a familiar distinction between habit and memory, imported from Bergson. In a temporal context, habit loses its presence by being “unremarked as past” whereas with memory, “a reference is made to the anteriority of the prior acquisition (Ibid., pp.24-25). The distinction allows Ricoeur to measure the temporality of memory in terms of a “gradient of distantiation” (Ibid., p. 25). The gradient recalls the “double intentionality” which brought about the otherness of memory. Habit and memory, for Bergson, are opposed, each revealing a double aspect to personal identity. In Bergson’s analysis, the evaluative difference is unambiguous: “Perception is never mere contact of the mind with the object present; it is impregnated with memory-images which complete it as they interpret it” (Bergson, 1991, p. 133). The mediation of experience is broken by “spontaneous recollection [which is] perfect from the outset; time can add nothing to its image without disfiguring it; it retains its memory and place in date” (Bergson, 2004, p. 95).

Strangely, Ricoeur’s reading of Bergson does not consider duration. A notable omission in that duration opens up the question of narration and the activity of the imagination. The two forms of memory, habit memory and spontaneous recollection, take place in time. Yet each differs in their temporal attributes. Habit memory loses its temporality by becoming general to the present. Habit memory is “unmarked” because it is repetitive. Mere recollection, willed or unconscious, does not constitute an evocation of the past, despite the elevation of such memory to the “model of memory” (Bergson, 2004, p. 95). The mechanism of memory-as-habit means the total image of the past withdraws. Yet the withdrawal does not entail the annihilation of the memory image. The emplacement of memory renders it distinct. Unlike the impersonality of habit memory, which thus becomes atemporal by being homogenized as habit, spontaneous recollection recalls memories once thought destroyed. In their rebirth, particularity is intimately involved whereas habit “merely” organizes events into a temporal-linear structure which Bergson deems “artificial” (Ibid.).

The disruption between “normal consciousness” and the consciousness which evocates memory suddenly, instigates a difference in temporal forms. In Bergson’s shorter essay, “An Introduction to Metaphysics,” we discover a distinction between relative and absolute motion. Outside of the intentional object, movement is relative, whereas the involvement of interior consciousness renders movement absolute (Bergson, 1999, p. 21). The importance of the distinction becomes clear as Bergson aligns the absolute with intuition and the relative with the analytic (Ibid., p. 23). The working of the analytic mind is reductive, just as habit memory informs us of order and structure. Yet the reduction is not without consequence. By that analysis, a translation occurs in which the object is understood symbolically and, anticipating Wittgenstein, in terms of resemblances (Ibid., p. 24). In its purity, real time resists such abstraction together with the arbitrariness of de-compartmentalization. Bergson’s duality between symbolic time and duration (durée) mirror the duality between the structuring mode of habit memory and the seamless, overlapping aspect of spontaneous recollection. The evaluative distinction remains intact. In Time and Free Will, Bergson writes how

The interval of the durée exists only for us, and because of the mutual penetration of our conscious states; outside us one would find nothing but pure space, and thus simultaneities, of which one may not even say that they objectively succeed each other, as any succession is conceived of by comparing the present to the past (Bergson, 1950, p. 86).

Outside of consciousness, pure space in which a division between now and then, and before and after, would be absent. The spatialization of time, as an interval, expands to place too – the place of time and memory. The categories of before and after contain their own limitations in which things, temporal or otherwise, find themselves in place. Pure space, so far a homogenized idea, becomes place through temporal engagement. “The room in which I am now writing these words,” explains Edward Casey “is such a bipartite place. Its forepart is oriented toward the dormer windows out of which I look as I write; its rearward portion lies around and behind me. The epicenters established by these fore and aft regions lend to this room a characteristic dynamism that is lacking in a merely homogenous space” (Casey, 1993, p. 12). Out of this experience of place, an interesting tension occurs: if temporality is an activity of the engaged mind which recollects experience, then does Bergson’s “pure space” strive to undermine place by calling for a return to undifferentiated temporality? If we can evade this return to space, then consciousness experiences its “double intentionality.” In Aristotle’s description, place is “prior to all things” (Ibid., p. 13). Thus, space becomes place as it becomes an object of intention. The question of losing space might prove elusive, since space has already been taken up by place before being lost. Remembering place which has since vanished, we find a reconfiguration of altered place which occupies a half-way house between space and place. The dynamic is exemplified in the return to forgotten place. Alongside this dialectical relationship between space and place, the former does not wholly withdraw. Such a dormancy of space structures the “double intentionality” of consciousness in recall. Two discontinuous selves exist in the present, each deferring the other while simultaneously presenting opposed temporal planes. The struggle between modes of time and memory underlines the importance narrative plays in the construction of history.

Ricoeur’s second set of divisions is between evocation and search, a distinction borrowed from Bergson (cf. Bergson, 2004. p. 93). Evocation is sudden and unexpected (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 26). The search for memory, on the other hand, supposes (Platonically) that we are already familiar with the object recollected. Searching understood as “nothing but recollection” (81d). Its remembrance is thus uncanny, a moment crystallized in Meno where the reemergence of innate knowledge prefigures an encounter with homely unfamiliarity, so producing a “dream-like quality” (85d) which has yet to emplaced within a narrative.

Reading Ricoeur (2)

Traces of Memory

What results from Ricoeur’s analysis of Plato’s study of the eikōn¸ a study which demonstrates the mutability of memory, is the transition from semeia to what is now termed “trace.” Ricoeur makes a useful three-fold division between traces. Firstly, the traces of the historians work, written before being archived. The historians work is mediated in time. Ricoeur’s second trace counters this passivity by, “resulting from the shock of an event that can be said to be striking, marking” (Ricoeur, p. 14). Undergoing experience suggests being able to testify to that experience. The damage done to a building in war creates a ruin. Since the ruin falls from its original unity, either by purposeful destruction or natural erosion, a new impression is made which recalls the history of an event from the time of the building’s decline. The inscription of an event establishes a normative foundation for memory. The event has happened. Again, we are confronted with an opposition between the constructions of written discourse and its alignment with what has been inscribed (Ibid., p. 14). Yet in-between experience and recollection, the question arises of what happens to the event in the absence of being recalled? The final trace is a neurological one, a “substratum” in which experience connects with “the material imprints in the brain” (Ibid., p. 15). The third of Ricoeur’s division’s compounds the question of temporal-dormancy in the event. The relationship between the “preservation-storage and the perseverance of the initial affectation” is not unified (Ibid.).

After Freud, the work done to memory by the unconscious in the absence of a conscious engagement is said to rupture the origin of the event. The rupture anticipates the consequence trauma, which we will mention in passing, has on temporality. Dominick LaCapra has written how, “trauma brings about a lapse or rupture in memory that breaks continuity with the past, thereby placing identity in question to the point of shattering it” (LaCapra, 1998, p. 9). Epistemologically, delayed grief (nachträglich) threatens to undermine the work of salvaging continuity between the dormancy of the event and its recollection by way of the memory trace. Because of this rupture, all three of Ricoeur’s divisions fall prey to contestation. The work of the historian depends on the “postmemory” of the recognized past (Hirsch, 2002). As the belatedness of grief suppresses the emergence of memory, history enters an impasse. The enforcement of the trace, Ricoeur’s second division, also experiences a distorting temporal influence on memory, strengthened by trauma. The remains of the past, as Freud noted, are not preserved, even by ruins which suffer at the hand of time and destruction. In the landscape of memory, untouched ruins are replaced by “later restorations made after fires or destruction (Freud, 2001, p. 70). In the alteration of the built environment, memory becomes incongruous, constituted by converted fragments of the past alongside original remnants. Recalling the classical model of the ars memoriae¸ we find Edward Casey more assured of the bond between memory and place, “the laying down of memory traces,” he writes, “creates lasting psychical localities comparable in durability to towns or regions” (Casey, 1987, p. 372). In his discussion of nostalgia, Casey’s remark counter the fragmentedness of memory and instead invoke an impression of the past which recalls Johannes Hofer’s original understanding of nostalgia as “a continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibers of the middle brain in which the impressed traces of the idea of the Fatherland still cling” (Hofer, 1934, p. 45). Seen in this light, Casey’s comment on the continuity of memory traces is surprising. Whereas the reconstruction of spatial traces is carried out by restoring space to its remembered configuration, temporal restoration proves ineffective if memory traces become discontinuous. The time of memory is non-time. Notably, Freud’s analogical study of the landscape makes a division between the preservation of mental properties, but “only on condition that the organ of the mind has remained intact that its tissues have not been damaged by trauma or inflammation (Ibid., p. 71). The suggestion, by inference, that the past is preserved in the absence of trauma, consistent with Freudian psychoanalysis, depends on the unity of temporal identity, a unity which warrants suspicion. Turning to the neurological trace, “today”, writes Ricoeur, “it is no longer possible…to avoid the problem of the relations between the cerebral imprint and the experienced impression” (Ricoeur, p. 15).

Temporality and memory become central in Ricoeur’s consideration of Aristotle as the question of “the ‘thing’ remembered” is raised (Ibid.). “But memory is of the past,” comes Aristotle’s answer. “Declarative memory” is the term Ricoeur applies to the temporality of the passing thing between now and then (Ibid., p. 16). Experience which has become memory means it has entered into a temporal category of pastness. A memory is a movement of time which is distinguished temporally from the present. The reconsideration of memory and imagination after the relationship between memory and time is logical, not least because temporality anticipates the problem regarding the imaginative aspect of narration. With the imagination, the aporia concerning the presence of absence reappears. Aristotle reconfigures Plato’s tupos-soul relation by linking the body to the soul. The connection allows Ricoeur to pose the first of his structuring questions: of what are there memories? Recollection, so far phenomenologically directed toward an object, becomes uncertain as doubt surrounds the question of what that object is. The affection of memory, its tupos, differs from the eikōn. However, being able to ascertain a casual relationship between the two aspects does not entail identifying which is the object of memory. Such a relationship would be, nonetheless, contentious. Where experience(less even history) ends and memory begins proves ambiguous, since the relationship can also be interchanged. Yet the passive affection of memory already creates its own active (narratological) form through recollection. As such, its absence is not a question, since the affection had never begun before recollection. Returning to the supposed reality of the thing remembered, a different problem arises: “how, while perceiving the impression, could we remember the absent thing that we are not at present perceiving?” (Ibid., pp. 16-17). Phenomenologically, consciousness is excluding in Ricoeur’s analysis, it suggests a single intentionality. What becomes present loses its status as absent, so other. The inclusion of otherness, which Ricoeur adopts from Plato, is already contained, however, in the “notion of inscription,” which points to the thing itself and the representation of something else (Ibid., p. 17). What this means is that is that a remembered image has a “double intentionality” (Ibid.). The image is created and recollected simultaneously, so referential to the other elsewhere.

Reading Ricoeur (1)

Memory and Imagination

An aporia, traceable to Plato, underpins Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting. The aporia is sufficiently mystifying to provide the impetus for a “phenomenology of memory, the epistemology of history, and the hermeneutics of the historical condition” (Ricoeur, 2004, p. xvi). Ricoeur states the problem: “What is there to say of the enigma of an image, of an eikōn – to speak with Plato and Aristotle – that offers itself as the presence of an absent thing stamped with the seal of the anterior?” (Ibid.). Structuring this aporia, Ricoeur asks two questions: “Of what are there memories? Whose memories is it” (Ibid., p. 3).

To withdraw an absence from the past only to place it in the present means constructing an image of history. The phenomenology of memory thus establishes a bond with the imagination in which both are “placed under the sign of the association of ideas” (Ibid., p. 5). Yet the bond is not unequivocal. Since the imagination has a lineage of epistemological uncertainty, memory strives toward recollected experience, so redeeming itself from the “unreal.” Indeed, the eidetic temporality of memory and the imagination provide a thread of continuity which is divisive and unifying simultaneously. Edward Casey writes that, “just as imagination takes us forward into the realm of the purely possible – into what might be – so memory brings us back into the domain of the actual and the already elapsed: to what has been (Casey, 1993, pp. xvi-xvii).

The tension between memory and imagination suggests its own resolution, since memory depends on an image to be placed. Memory, neither placeless nor imageless, instead presupposes itself be an act of image-making yet not derivate of the imagination. “We have nothing better,” Ricoeur writes, “than memory to guarantee that something has taken place before we call to mind a memory of it” (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 7). The problematic between memory and imagination becomes Ricoeur’s point of departure and allows him to negotiate between a Platonic and Aristotelian account of memory and imagination.

The tacit devaluation of memory is already established in Plato’s sophist’s dialogues in that eikōn is fused with the unreal and future-located quality of phantasma. A further problem arises for Ricoeur: “the problematic of the eikōn…from the outset associated with the imprint, the tupos, through the metaphor of the slab of wax, error being assimilated either to an erasing of marks, semeia, or to a mistake akin to that of someone placing his feet in the wrong footprints” (Ibid., p. 8). The tupos of memory means its print or figure. The relationship between tupos and eikōn is a temporal one. Tupos figures the original image of the eikōn. The erasure of the semeia (sign) entails that memory is undermined by being exposed to forgetting. Ricoeur’s analysis clarifies the temporal and epistemological contingency of memory. As semeia and eikōn fail to reconcile, memory falters. Recollected is a manipulated image of the past.

The epistemological distance, temporal or spatial, between the object of recollection and the act of remembering, a problem stressed as trauma intercedes in remembering, is crystallized with a question Socrates asks in the Theaetetus: “If a man has once come to know a certain thing, and continues to preserve the memory of it, is it possible that, at the moment when he remembers it, he doesn’t know this thing that he is remembering?” (163d). The act of preserving memory risks altering it, since preservation requires an effort to salvages memory from forgetfulness. Thus, keeping memory intact already suggests its fall from original unity. The watchfulness over the past a measure of memory’s mutability. Ricoeur’s response to the question is reluctantly to suggest “the category of similarity,” whereby a Socratic “phenomenology of mistakes” is employed until semeia and eikōn fall into place (Ricoeur, pp. 8-9). “Whatever is impressed upon the wax,” Socrates explains, “we remember and know so long as the image [eidōlon] remains in the wax; whatever is obliterated or can be impressed, we forget and do not know” (191d). The impasse between experience in the present, perpetually incomplete, and our recollection of that experience, now temporally over, implies an epistemological gulf resolved only when past and present converge.

The epistemological uncertainty of memory, between knowledge experienced and knowledge recollected, reappears in the Sophist where the intermediate criterion restoring previous knowledge through resemblance is mirrored in the form of imitation. Rendering images imitative is “the art of likeness-making” (234c). The criterion of good art, hence good memory, is prefigured in the final book of Plato’s The Republic where the epistemological denigration of representation (“removed from the throne of truth”) leads to its ethical prohibition, “unless [audiences are] inoculated against them by knowing their real nature” (595d-597c). Such a logic of epistemic gradients relies upon the notion of a fixed original, which for Plato, is consistent with metaphysical realism. In the Sophist, this binary understanding of representation encounters a division made between eikastic imitation, which depends on the correct proportion, and fantastic imitation, which alters the image in accordance with our epistemic distance (235d-236c).