Anamnesis to Amnesia: The Trajectory of Memory

In philosophy, anamnesis is a concept in Plato's epistemological and psychological theory that he develops in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo, and alludes to in his Phaedrus. It is the idea that humans possess knowledge from past incarnations and that learning consists of rediscovering that knowledge within us. The concept is framed thus: knowledge is actually in the soul from eternity, but each time the soul is incarnated its knowledge is forgotten in the trauma of birth. What one perceives to be learning, then, is actually the recovery of what one has forgotten (once it has been brought back it is true belief, to be turned into genuine knowledge by understanding).

Other philosophers have since drawn from Plato in developing their own accounts of these ancient philosophical dialogues; foremost among them, Jacques Derrida in 'Plato's Pharmacy'. In that essay, he uses the notion of the pharmakon (remedy OR poison), to which Socrates compares the written texts of the Phaedrus, as that which produces a flickering and disorienting play in conceptual/ philosophical oppositions: remedy/ poison, good/ bad, true/ false, positive/ negative, interior/ exterior. Socrates in the Phaedrus tries to counteract the pharmakon of 'writing' with his most effective medicine - the living word of knowledge (see also Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History Forgetting, pp. 144-5). According to Derrida, the pharmakon of writing itself cannot be reduced to the series of oppositional concepts that it precedes and produces. As an alternative to static oppositions, he proposes dynamic compositions: the process called differance. He writes:

'Memory is finite by nature. Plato recognizes this by attributing life to it. As in the case of all living organisms, he assigns it, as we have seen, certain limits. A limitless memory would in any event be not memory but infinite self-presence. Memory always therefore already needs signs in order to recall the nonpresent, with which it is necessarily in relation. The movement of dialectics bears witness to this. Memory is thus contaminated by its first substitute: hypomnēsis. But what Plato dreams of is a memory with no sign. That is, with no supplement [another word for trace]. A mnēmē with no hypomnēsis, no pharmakon' (p. 439).

In a similar, vein but in relation to the concept of the Archive (see 'Archive Fever'), Derrida observes:

'As the death drive is also, according to the most striking words of Freud himself, an aggression and a destruction (Destruktion) drive, it not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mneme or anamnesis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mneme or to anamnesis, that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnema, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum, because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, 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 the 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. Let us never forget this Greek distinction between mneme or anamnesis on the one hand, and hypomnema on the other. The archive is hypomnesic. And let us note in passing a decisive paradox to which we will not have the time to return, but which undoubtedly conditions the whole of these remarks: if there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression, then we must also remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death drive. And thus from destruction. Consequence: right on what permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than what exposes to destruction, in truth what menaces with destruction introducing, a priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument. Into the 'by heart' itself. The archive always works, and a priori, against itself'. 

In his essay 'Anamnesis and Hypomnesis: Plato as the First Thinker of the Proletarianisation', Bernard Stiegler develops Derrida's insights regardng anamnesis and hypomnesis, although his terminology is different. Where Derrida discusses the pharmakon nature of writing in the broad sense (encompassing technicity), Stiegler uses the term 'technics'. Extracts from the essay include:

'For all that it is clear that what Socrates describes in Phaedrus, to wit that the exteriorisation of memory is a loss of memory and of knowledge, is experienced today in our daily lives, in all the aspects of our existences, and, more and more often, in the feeling of our powerlessness, if not of our impotence – at the exact moment when the extraordinary mnesic power of digital networks make us all the more sensible to the immensity of human memory, which seems to have become infinitely reactivatable and accessible.This seeming paradox means that the question of hypomnesis is a political question, and the stakes of a combat: a combat for a politics of memory, and more precisely, for the constitution of sustainable hypomnesic milieux. The exteriorisation of memory and of knowledge, once it has reached the hyperindustrial stage, is at once that which furthers their limitless impact, and that which can implement their control – control by the cognitive and cultural industries of these control societies' [...]

'Human archaeology and paleontology offer a way of responding to the Platonic opposition of anamnesis and hypomnesis, with a theory of memory posing that technicity is constitutive of life as ex-sistence, that is, as desire and as knowledge' [...]

'Unlike the literal synthesis, where the writer and the reader coded and decoded the orthothetic recording, and where every reader was potentially a writer, which constituted a set-up of hypomnesis and anamnesis, with analog equipment, machines do the coding and decoding, and this is what allows for industrialisation, that is, for the separation of producers and consumers' [...]

'Techno-logical forms of knowledge, objectified in the form of equipment and apparatuses, also and especially engender a loss of knowledge at the very moment one begins speaking of ‘knowledge societies’ and ‘knowledge industries'.

This last quote shares affinities with Ricoeur's recognition that, 'what is peculiar to a history of memory is the history of the modes of its transmission' (see Transfer). With regard to the digital medium, much of the recent commentary around knowledge and memory is framed in terms of cultural amnesia. Less the interplay between anamnesis and hypomnesis, the interest is in the advent of a new accelerated temporality that amounts to a loss of memory. Some of these views are summarised below (see also Wolfgang Ernst):

'Using Google is a self-absorbing action, rather than an outward and reflexive process. It is not a search of the World Wide Web, but construction of an Individual Narrow Portal. It is addictively riveting to see how an identity is constructed through Google' (Tara Brabazon, xix-xx).

'What Amazon and many other companies began to do in the late 1990s was build up a giant world of the past on their computer servers. A historical universe that is constantly mined to find new ways of giving back to you today what you liked yesterday - with variations. Interestingly, one of the first people to criticise these kind of 'ecommender systems' for their unintended effect on society was Patti Maes who had invented RINGO. She said that the inevitable effect is to narrow and simplify your experience - leading people to get stuck in a static, ever-narrowing version of themselves (Adam Curtis).

'The technical-industrial transformation of a world (that) forces upon its inhabitants ever briefer intervals of time in which to gather new experiences and adapt to changes induced at an ever-increasing pace' (Koselleck, p.3).

'The museum fetish (itself) transcends exchange value. It seems to carry with it something like an anamnestic dimension, a kind of memory value. The more mumified an object is, the more intense its ability to yield experience, a sense of the authentic. No matter how fragile or dim the relation between museum object and the reality it documents may be [...], as object it carries a register of reality which even the live television broadcast cannot match' (Huyssen, p. 33).

'The gaze at the museal object may provide a sense of its opaque and impenetrable materiality as well as an anamnestic space within which the the transitoriness and differentiality of human cultures can be grasped. Via the activity of memory, set in motion and nurtured by the contemporary museum in its broadest and most amorphous sense, the museal gaze expands over the ever shrinking space of the (real) present in a culture of amnesia, planned obsolescence and ever more synchronic and timeless information flows, the hyperspace of the coming age of information highways' (Huyssen, p. 34).