Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 13:52:56 -0800 (PST)
From: Paul Bryant <levi_bryant-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: RE: Deleuzian Repetition


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Hi Greg.

<<Could it be that, alongside memory, you are missing the forgetting of 
forgetting? Forget 
memory or past for a moment. Or, that is, as Massumi notes (footnotes 
literally), eventually Deleuze goes from Bergson and toward Blanchot on 
these matters (p.170 of his User's Guide). Not so much a pure past as a 
pure outside. Blanchot's Awaiting Oblivion, for example, is Proust turned 
inside-out and upside-down, emptied out. Not a search for lost time, but 
time lost (or, perhaps at least tipped on its side, turned sidereal?) in its 
awaiting (another way to show how the present passes, and coincides 
with itself even as it splits in past and future directions).>>

Although I'm hesitant to collapse the forgetting of forgetting with the notion of the outside, I think you make a great point here.  It may be that some of my problems arise from conflating memory-images which are actualizations of the pure past, with the pure past as such.  "Phenomenologically" the paradox of the pure past is that it is all there at once without being present for consciousness.  It is only when I go searching for the past that it begins to actualize itself and announce itself to me, otherwise the past works silently in my experience, creating a sort of mirage in which I take that which is past as being present.  I take it that this is exactly what the forgetting of forgetting means.  If we look at simple empirical forgetting (not to be confused with transcendental or the forgetting of forgetting) it will be seen that the act of forgetting always involves a certain sort of intentionality (Meno's Paradox).  When I say that I've forgetten something (say where I put my keys) I'm aware that I placed those keys somewhere, without knowing where I placed them.  The intentionality involved in empirical forgetting boths knows and does not know.  With the forgetting of forgetting or transcendental forgetting things are more radical in that intentionality isn't involved at all (which is why it is a form of passive rather than active synthesis) and because the past preserves itself in itself...  It requires no act on my part for the past to preserve itself, but rather I find the past always already there when I go about the activity of remembering.

I think part of the problem I'm encountering involves overcoming representational notions of memory or the idea that memory is a "less lively" representation of a previous event.  The traditional and empiricist notion of memory as a simple copy of an event exactly as it occured renders it impossible to see how the actualization of memory could be in any way creative.  However recent studies in cognitive psychology (cf. Schacter's fascinating book _Searching for Memory_) seem to show that memory pertains much more to meaning than to copying.  Here elaborative encoding is a case and point.  It's been found that people are better able to retain a memory of events and information by elaborating these events in some sort of story-line or context of familiarity than through rote memorization.  Now, this is still a naturalist conception of memory insofar as it locates memory in the brain, rather than as Deleuze and Bergson claim in a dimension all its own, but I think this example demonstrates nicely how memory is constructive rather than simply reconstructive...  This meshes nicely with the creative process Proust must have gone through in creating the world of Combray as well.  The actualization of memory from the pure past seems to involve the formation of all sorts of inferences and relations that turn the memory into an authentic creation (this, of course, will depend on the degree to which the memory is elaborated or explicated).

 Paul



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Hi Greg.

<<Could it be that, alongside memory, you are missing the forgetting of
forgetting? Forget
memory or past for a moment. Or, that is, as Massumi notes (footnotes
literally), eventually Deleuze goes from Bergson and toward Blanchot on
these matters (p.170 of his User's Guide). Not so much a pure past as a
pure outside. Blanchot's Awaiting Oblivion, for example, is Proust turned
inside-out and upside-down, emptied out. Not a search for lost time, but
time lost (or, perhaps at least tipped on its side, turned sidereal?) in its
awaiting (another way to show how the present passes, and coincides
with itself even as it splits in past and future directions).>>

Although I'm hesitant to collapse the forgetting of forgetting with the notion of the outside, I think you make a great point here.  It may be that some of my problems arise from conflating memory-images which are actualizations of the pure past, with the pure past as such.  "Phenomenologically" the paradox of the pure past is that it is all there at once without being present for consciousness.  It is only when I go searching for the past that it begins to actualize itself and announce itself to me, otherwise the past works silently in my experience, creating a sort of mirage in which I take that which is past as being present.  I take it that this is exactly what the forgetting of forgetting means.  If we look at simple empirical forgetting (not to be confused with transcendental or the forgetting of forgetting) it will be seen that the act of forgetting always involves a certain sort of intentionality (Meno's Paradox).  When I say that I've forgetten something (say where I put my keys) I'm aware that I placed those keys somewhere, without knowing where I placed them.  The intentionality involved in empirical forgetting boths knows and does not know.  With the forgetting of forgetting or transcendental forgetting things are more radical in that intentionality isn't involved at all (which is why it is a form of passive rather than active synthesis) and because the past preserves itself in itself...  It requires no act on my part for the past to preserve itself, but rather I find the past always already there when I go about the activity of remembering.

I think part of the problem I'm encountering involves overcoming representational notions of memory or the idea that memory is a "less lively" representation of a previous event.  The traditional and empiricist notion of memory as a simple copy of an event exactly as it occured renders it impossible to see how the actualization of memory could be in any way creative.  However recent studies in cognitive psychology (cf. Schacter's fascinating book _Searching for Memory_) seem to show that memory pertains much more to meaning than to copying.  Here elaborative encoding is a case and point.  It's been found that people are better able to retain a memory of events and information by elaborating these events in some sort of story-line or context of familiarity than through rote memorization.  Now, this is still a naturalist conception of memory insofar as it locates memory in the brain, rather than as Deleuze and Bergson claim in a dimension all its own, but I think this example demonstrates nicely how memory is constructive rather than simply reconstructive...  This meshes nicely with the creative process Proust must have gone through in creating the world of Combray as well.  The actualization of memory from the pure past seems to involve the formation of all sorts of inferences and relations that turn the memory into an authentic creation (this, of course, will depend on the degree to which the memory is elaborated or explicated).

 Paul