Tao Dongfeng
| Tao Dongfeng, Professor of the School of Humanities, Guangzhou University
Originally published in China Reading News on November 18, 2020
I-memory与Me-memory
"I remember(I remember)...", these are the opening words of Günter Grasse's speech entitled "The Future of Memory" at the Goethe-Institut on October 2, 2000. Then he said, "Or, I'm reminded by something in front of me... The smell left behind by certain old letters... Notice the sudden grammatical change here: "I" goes from active to passive, with the subject "I" replaced by "something" and "I" becoming the object.
Psychology and psychotherapy carefully analyze I-Memory and relate it to the story. The hypothesis of therapy is that we are shaped by the stories we tell about ourselves. According to this hypothesis, identity construction is aided by stories that give order to unclassified autobiographicalmemory and open up the possibility of future perspectives. Autobiographical memories are not automatically structured in this way. In order to give a form to these unclassified memory stores, we must acquire our own distance from ourselves, taking a dialectical position and position. These autobiographical memories also have their social makeup: we must be in a position to re-inventory them, to tell ourselves or others about them.
Although psychologists and philosophers speak of many I-memories, they rarely talk about unconscious, unorganized me-memory. Günter Grass writes, "When we come to a place that we have experienced in the past, that has been destroyed in the past, and that now has a new name, memory suddenly catches us." He then described some of the old things in the places where he lived as a child, such as schools, streets, etc. Schools, streets, etc. are places of personal memory—collective or cultural places of memory as opposed to Nora's words. The place or object of memory is a more important trigger for me-memory, "the silent object promotes memory in us" (Glass).
Günter Glass, in 2005, put him at the forefront of postwar literature with his 1959 tin drum. DOMINIK SADOWSKI/AGENCJA GAZETA, VIA REUTERS
What kind of magic exists in these inconspicuous places and objects that they can suddenly move us so powerfully? The answer is that before they had such great power, we had thrown something into it. Seen in this way, the magical power of the memory of places and objects resembles the power of ancient symbola, which means: something with a securities value. At the time of the signing of the agreement, such securities were split in two, with each party holding half for future identification. Once the two parts are reunited, the validity of the contract and the identity of the two parties are affirmed.
From this analogy, we can argue that many of our autobiographical memories can be divided into two halves: one half remains with us (half of symbola) and the other half is externalized to places and objects (the other half of symbola). In a similar way and with many invisible cues, our bodies and sensations are connected to the external world. Me-memory [I(Binge)-memory] is activated the moment the inside and outside are connected. Places and objects are powerful triggers because they are somaticmemory. Of course, there are no keys, no maps, no consciousness and consciousness-controlled entrances to it. We can never control it from the outside, but it has a special sensation that suddenly enters our lines and joints. This is also the reason why it is not easy for us to enter this me-memory, because we cannot simply awaken the memories stored in it, but wait for them to come to us. In me-memory, memories are dormant, and they constitute an irregular, potentially back-up system that is unexpectedly activated by external stimuli. Once the stimulus meets disposition, the physical memory is activated and can be transformed from subconscious me-memory to conscious I-memory[I-memory].
Bergson writes that the characteristic of the person in action is to agilely mobilize all the memories associated with a particular situation in that situation. Consciousness controls memory. Nietzsche also idolized the people in action, who were artists of I-memory, while Proust, Grass, and others were artists of me-memory, who were familiar with the labyrinthine, tuber-like structure of pre-conscious memory. At the same time, these memories construct invisible networks with which our bodies can connect with the world of objects.
In this way, two distinct systems can be distinguished in autobiographical memory: I-memory and unorganized, cluttered, unorganized, subconscious me-memory based on conscious reconstruction work. The former is developed in interaction with others, while the latter is activated in interaction with places or objects/objects. These places and objects/objects act as triggers to complete the "half" emotional tendencies within us that are dormant, according to which they can be raised to the level of consciousness by retrospection and then assigned to I-memory. But by this time the nature of memory had changed. Me-memory is really nothing more than a resonant system, or a string of strings that can make sounds, and which one is hit and when, is actually not in our control, but is based on chance. But one premise seems to be that the forgotten, latent experience and its vividness are well protected. This transformation from me-memory to I-memory is the essential aspect of memory: from unconscious consciousness, from imagery to speech to the continuous encoding of written words. Unlike the kind of material protection that occurs in libraries and museums, living memories always occur in such a transformation process. We could even say that memory is to remember is to translate, and for this reason memory is always malleable.
Authenticity is a question
The above-mentioned transformation of memory raises the question of the authenticity or authenticity of memory, because the act of transformation or translation includes modification, change, delay and substitution. Something that keeps memories alive (on the one hand) is also a threat or danger from another point of view. In this regard, Christa Wolf expresses the most radical skepticism: "The way something is retooled is always different from the way it actually happened." Her doubts include an insurmountable gulf between experience and memory, impression and expression.
The following is discussed through the example of two different memories of Auschwitz.
Primmer Levy describes for us the tragic and astonishing picture of the Buna Monowitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945, the day before the arrival of the Soviet army. The camp leaders fled, taking 20,000 Jews with them. They were almost all slaughtered on the long journey. Those who remained in the camp were some of the dying sick, including Levi. In the freezing cold of minus 20 degrees, the infrastructure has been completely destroyed, and the people in the concentration camp are busy helping themselves. As soon as the war was over, Levy wrote about it all in "Is This a Man" as soon as he returned from the concentration camp. [1] It has become a sort of collective cultural memory for subsequent generations, whether descendants of victims or perpetrators.
Levi and his writings
Historian Reinhart Koselleck's autobiographical sketches of concentration camps were published in a daily newspaper 50 years after the end of the war. It belongs to a completely different type of living memory. For Koselek, a German soldier, the Day of liberation of the Jews was his day of imprisonment. He described how his group was handed over to the Russians by the Americans and how it followed the convoy of prisoners all the way east. Finally they came to Auschwitz. At this moment, the name Auschwitz meant nothing to Koselek. For the first time, German war prisoners heard russians say that millions of Jews had been gassed, and many of them did not believe it, believing it to be Russian propaganda. But Koselek didn't think so. He said he immediately believed the reports were true and was deeply shocked. His conviction stemmed from the fact that a prisoner in a former Polish concentration camp was assigned to look after German war prisoners and forced to do heavy physical work. He found a footstool in one place and held it menacingly in the air. But just as the footstool was about to fall on Koselerk's head, the camp prisoner suddenly stopped and said, "What am I doing when I break your head?" You poisoned millions of people. Koselek said: "I was very shocked to feel that what he said was true. Poison gas poisoning? Millions? These cannot be made up. ”
Koselek said: "There is an experience that flows into our bodies like fiery lava, and they are frozen there forever, cannot be moved, but can be recalled in perfect detail. There are not many experiences that can be transformed into authentic memories. If there are, then these memories are those experiences that are strongly based on the present. Breath, taste, sound, vivid vision, in short, all the landscapes of pleasure or sorrow, are directly reactivated without the need for conscious effort to recall. ”
Koselek was taken to Auschwitz as a prisoner of war rather than a Victim of the Nazis, and he had no first-hand experience of the crimes that took place there. He learned about this appalling place after the liberation of Auschwitz. Nevertheless, he developed a sensual presence of truth. His explanation proved the shocking effect of sudden knowledge of the truth about the Nazi holocaust.
In cases where neuropsychological research generally doubts the authenticity of memories, one might doubt Koselk's views on the authenticity of memories. But there is an exception to the newer theory, which is a finding that is contrary to recent research on the unreliability of memory, corresponding exactly to the type of memory described by Koselk. For memories that are authentic and immutable by subjective experience, psychologists invent a term called "flashbulb memory." Flash memories are characterized by extreme vivid intensity, and they preserve unexpected, unpredictable, and very realistic experiences. Flash memory is not only noticed for its primary and vividness, but is also described as a fairly long-lasting memory. Flash memory represents a specific form of autobiographical or episodic memory, and it consists of the following: When we hear an event happening, quickly remember who is there and who is doing what. The most common trigger for flash memories is a dramatic historical change that suddenly enters the consciousness of contemporary witnesses and has a direct impact on their lives. Particularly prone to such shocks are historical events that ushered in a new era, but at the same time had future-oriented implications for those who experienced them. For example, World War II, the assassination of Kennedy and 9/11 are all such events.
Trails and Paths: Two modes of memory
Koselek distinguishes unmediated memories (like hot volcanic rocks in the body) from those mediated by language. The former has a sense of presence and directness, while the latter is strengthened by repeated narration, and loses the sense of presence and directness in the process of telling, and there is no specific sense of presence and directness of the truth.
Although knowledge can be shared through language, the experience stored in the body and not mediated by language is still unintelligible and irreplaceable. They are at the level of direct presence. It is an extremely personal perception of the past, unique to one's experience, and therefore authentic.
Koselek
Koselek actually distinguishes between two methods of storing memories: body and language. Memory is stabilized differently in two ways: trace and pathway. Samuel Butler has noticed this distinction: we remember best what we do least often and what we do most often: the former attracts us through novelty, and the latter is remembered by us through familiarity. The former is the trail — a one-off impression ; the latter is the path — moving repeatedly in the same place. Physical memory is stored through the intensity of sensory impressions, while memory stored in language is stored through continuous repetition. [2]
Perceptual memory (not mediated by language) is based on stimulus intensity, while memory encoded through words is based not on the body, but on the social form of communication. We are able to recall many of our own memories, in large part because we have the opportunity to talk about them. This storytelling (narrative) represents a carefully coded act: turning experience into a story. "Careful coding is a critical and perhaps essential component of our ability to remember events in the past through vivid, rich detail. If we don't implement careful coding, we will be left with very poor memories. [3] The only problem is that the more often we talk about something, the less we remember the experience itself, the more we remember the words used to describe it. This means that what is not repeated will be lost. Wolff's novel reads, "This was seven years ago, another period in life. If he hadn't saved it through words, his memory of it would have long since vanished. With the help of words, he can recall it at any time. [4] This recounted memory loses "the perceptual presence of truth", but this does not mean that the memory encoded by words is "false".
Koseleck's distinction between sensual-body-based memory (trace) and language-based memory (pathway) can correspond to the distinction between passive me-memory and more active I-memory. Perceptual memories are reactivated, do not require subjective conscious effort, and are stored in perceptual impressions more directly and realistically than those stored through the mediation of word repetition. They are also linked to two different theories of memory: retention theory and (re)construction theory. Preservation points to the persistent physical trace of memory, which remains unchanged for a long time; (re)construction points to the idea that memory can only be stabilized by reproduction, and therefore it always appears in new and sometimes different ways.
Neuroscience since the 1980s has fiercely challenged the idea of memory as a passive "container" in favor of an activity, a highly malleable and therefore unreliable activity. But this view is not new. This raises the question: Are we the bearers of memories buried in us once and for all, or are we always writing memories in new ways? Are consciousness and memory mutually exclusive, as Freud said? Or is consciousness included in the act of memory?
In fact, this problem is a false problem, and memory is both conscious and unconscious.
In testimonies based on subjective memory, repeated assurances of authenticity often play a large role. One of the most important arguments for authenticity is the emphasis on the significant separation of figurative memory from verbal memory. Proust, for example, emphasized that his memory was based on the sensual impression of places outside of language or resurfacing through unconscious stimuli. Of course, he partially captured these memories through language and thereby made them communicative. But such "translations" do not necessarily occur. Many of them are still under the level of language or consciousness, that is, outside of communication. Proust said: "Our arms and thighs are filled with dormant memories"[5], they are not caught, but tenaciously exist and awakened by consciousness. He compares the mysterious presence of this embodied past to the negatives of the photograph: it seems that there is nothing, but the image can be developed.
The metaphor of photographs plays a large role in the debate about the authenticity of memory. Psychologist Carl Gustav Carus says that when he writes his memories, he finds that all he has preserved is a clear, unique sensual image of the past, and that there are no thoughts in the earliest memories. In his mode, memory passes through the funnel of language.
The metaphor of involuntary physical memory, which follows the trail pattern of memory rather than the path pattern, is linked to at least one claim about subjective truthfulness— if not objective authenticity. The world cannot be automatically imprinted into the human psyche–like the shutter release of a camera. In memory, triggering the shutter is the emotion that makes up the core element of emotional memory.
Recent research has questioned the binary opposition between the "inscribed" model and the "canalized pathway" in favor of a synthetic model.
Memory and imagination
Alan Baddeley said: "It's a very common experience to know an event but not capture it. My wife and I must have visited the small town of A-City, but we can't remember it, but I have some vivid and vivid impressions of it. I have a hard time distinguishing between what I remember that are things that belong to my actual experience and which ones that come from what I saw by chance while reading or watching TV. ”[6]
This shows that it is very difficult to distinguish between memories about one's own experiences and obtaining memories through other channels. Forgetting occurs in this case not through the materialization of memory, but through the involvement of another memory (information from non-personal experience). In this case, this other memory is a mental image—an image inspired by messages conveyed to us through various cultural media. It can be so vivid that as far as it can be inseparable from our own physical memories. So how do we distinguish between physical and non-physical memories from other sources? There is really no clear boundary between the two at all. Non-physically experiential memory is called "metaphorical memory"—as if standing in front of mental imagery (at a distance), while physically experiential intuitive impressions/mental images are "metonymic memory"—as if overwhelmed by mental imagery.
Mental imagery is characterized by sensuality, imagination and fragmentation, in addition to which he adds the physicalization, i.e., the direct physical contact form of the recalled scene. Vivid imagination and our physical memory are not clearly distinguished in our memories, they are often mixed and hybridized. Subjective recollection intersects with objective knowledge from reading, etc., and the recollection of what one has personally experienced is always supported, transformed or suppressed by what is already known. Our memories do not exist in a vacuum. Recollection and mental imagery always interact in our memories, and our memories are always linked to external texts and imagery provided by media and cultural archives.
There can be no general answer to the question of how real memory is. From the perspective of brain science research, there is no basis for talking about authenticity. Brain scientist Wolf Spinger once said that memory is "a fabrication of data support." Memory essentially tends to adapt itself to changing circumstances, rather than pointing to accurate recordings. Brain science research proves that every reactivation of a memory trail is a new, inevitable rewriting of an original experience.
But we must not be skeptics, but a critical attitude of questioning and differentiation. Memory is reinforced by clear perception, the power of emotion, the depth of experience, and its expression through language, "the content of memory is largely subordinate to changes in its use." [7] Comparing memory to photographs is misleading and untrue. Memory is not an accurately recorded machine (like a camera), and the constant rewriting and adaptation of our memories can be more readily available than retouching, filtering out accidental and disruptive factors from the photograph, retouching, intensifying, and amplifying what comes into focus. Just as the official censorship mechanism of the propaganda department of a totalitarian state functions in relation to the national self-image, an intrinsic censorship mechanism also functions in relation to one's self-image and one's own history.
Overall, our memories are imprecise, variable, and in principle we cannot rely on details. When we get information from external sources about something we want to remember, we often experience this unreliability. For most of our memories, there is no external evidence, but when there is another kind of memory, or even evidence from historical sources competing with our memory, we are directly confronted with the weakness of our memory. And memory is open to interpretation. Since our memories do not preserve coherent sequences and always grasp those fragments that we use to construct our selves, retrospective narratives can change at different stages of a lifetime.
If we asked a group of people how many planes were involved in the "9/11 incident," the answer would be diverse. The person who said 2 had in mind the explosion of the Twin Towers; the person who answered 3 added the Pentagon; and the person who answered 4 remembered the plane that exploded in Pennsylvania. These media-mediated memories are different, but to doubt their authenticity or to think that they are false goes too far.
Often, memory is not used to detect reality, because we neither possess nor require documentary evidence to prove subjective experience. They are unquestionable in the first place and self-legalizing. Memory is often irrelevant, and in the context of a social situation, the meaning of a great story is more important than its factuality. Within the framework of autobiographical retrospective, experience is necessarily reinterpreted and brought into new contexts that support the associated self-image. Undoubtedly, memory does not exist in isolation in the brain, but is rooted in social space and the objective world, and this root gives it additional support, as well as the possibility of correction. At the same time, the question of truth is placed on another level.
For the most part, our memories reliably process and respond to the incredible demands that everyday life imposes on them, and questions of truth are only disputed in institutional contexts, such as testimony in court trials or statements by moral witnesses, where prominent claims of truthual or biographicaltruth are raised. Therefore, valuing the reliability of our memories does not mean that, as individuals or members of society, we can simply suspend the truth question of memory and no longer be responsible for it. Therefore, we need to continue to make our memory stand up to scrutiny, reinforcing it with words of self-questioning.
（本文编译自Aleida Ass-mann:ShadowofTrauma:Memory and the Politics ofPostwar Identity, Tran by Sarah Clift.Fordham University Press, 2016.p.97-113.）
exegesis:
[1] If This Is a Man is Levy's first major autobiographical work, also known as Survivalin Auschwitz. Compile the note
[2] Samuel Butler：Life and Habit(London:J.Cape,1924),cited in On Collective Memory,By Maurice Halbwachs, trans.,ed. Lewis.Coser(Chicago:UniversityofChicagoPress,1992)80
[3] DanielSchacter,SearchingforMemory:The Brain, the Mind and thePast(NewYork:BasicBooks,1997),46
[4] Christa Wolf, No Place onEarth,trans. JanvanHeurck(NewYork:Farrar,1983),81
[5] Marcel Proust, In Search of LostTime, vol. 6,Time Regained,trans. Andreas Mayor TerenceKilmartin(New York: RandomHouse,1993)，275
[6] Alan Baddeley：Your Memory:AUser’sGuide(NewYork:Firefly,2000),62
[7] Hans J. Markowwitsch and HaraldWelzer, TheDevelopmentofAutobiographicalMemory(Sus?sex:PsychologyPress,2009)
Related Reading:
Tao Dongfeng: The Anti-Heroic Wuhan Story Written by a Hero – From the Poetry of Weak Water Yin to the Literature of Witness
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