Excerpts from Norman Klein's The History of Forgetting
“There are clear signs that both critical theory and cultural studies have generated what amounts to a new category of literature (as yet unnamed). What names there are sound a bit early in the cycle right now, clearly not what this “genre”? might be called ten years from now: docu-novels, “mockumentaries”, false autobiographies, public autobiography, “faction:” phonebooks or chat lines as variations of personal essay: public autobiography: “witnessing” as Dick Hebdige describes in his new work of the nineties (the structure of his books, along with his advice, were an influence on this project): historiographic metafiction. (p 7)
“In order to remember, something must be forgotten: second, The place where memories are stored has no boundaries. In other words, forgetting is a twin: its tandem effect is best called “simultaneous distraction, the instant when one memory defoliates another. This fuzzy double – one devouring the other – presumably inhibits learning. (p 13)
A Docufable is a brief essay in a fictive voice that captures, through distraction, the instant when a memory is being erased. ….
“Selective forgetting is a literary tool for describing a social imaginary: how fictions are built into facts, while in turn erasing facts into fictions. I call this literary device “distraction”, to remind myself that no matter how fancy my urban research, this is merely a story about how one person decides to forget- voluntarily or involuntarily.” (p 16)
“The first Western writing on the paradox of distraction is usually credited to the Greeks, and afterward to Roman systems for building memory (mnemonics). Both Plato and Aristotle imagined memory as a waxen substance inside the soul, easily inscribed but just as easily effaced, particularly if the wax were thick or muddy. Some degree of effacement (forgetting) was, as many systems repeat thereafter, inescapable. For example, aporia, the inability to know how or where to begin, was considered a symptom of effacement (oblivion), to be resisted through mnemonic discipline. “Artificial Memory” protected against this sort of loss, but not as easily. Remembering was arduous. It required imaginaries as solid as an aqueduct. From the Romans through the Renaissance, students were trained to fight aporia through “memory theaters,” a spatial imaginary that kept knowledge from drifting into oblivion. “ (p 302)
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