Against Memory

IT WAS A THOUSAND YEARS AGO TODAY

According to the mockumentary "Beatles 3000", the band comprised of John Lennon, Paul McKenzie, Greg Hutchinson and Scottie Pippen had a high moment in their career when they won the Superbowl at Shea Stadium. The humour here lies in the right blend of absurdity and plausibility. You can almost reverse-engineer how such a mistake could have been made by this fictional team of researchers a thousand years removed from their subject. The Beatles did famously play live at Shea Stadium at the height of beatlemania. Sports events and music concerts shared the same venues and attracted comparable levels of popular attention. According to an ongoing media narrative, Ringo Starr's role was perhaps unfairly seen as secondary to his more celebrated colleagues', much like Scottie Pippen in the 1990s Chicago Bulls basketball team. Greg Hutchinson, also a sports personality, is a filtered-through-dyslexia George Harrison. And so on. It's because faulty memory is so relatable that this works as a joke. The confusion produced by misremembering the past is as obvious as the consequences of stepping on the wrong end of a rake.

Sigmund Freud's biggest contribution to our understanding of ourselves probably is proposing that this piecing-together of remembered past events into the cohesive whole that we call memory is not at all random, that it's in fact quite purposeful and very telling of ourselves. What this would mean in the Beatles 3000 universe is that there would be an emotional motivation for The Beatles story to sustain such distortions. I propose the whole alien frog emperor situation as a likely traumatic event that would justify the need for such an all-encompassing narrative of victory. The monster was fed records, which presents an emotional background of humiliation that would make a victorious retelling of The Beatles' importance so tempting.

Dreams are a transparent product of this storytelling compulsion that makes truth secondary, like as if your mind prioritized you never going a single moment without it. Consider a dream in which you committed a shameful act like, say, a crime of some sort. The police are about to burst through your door and you wake up during that climactic peak, as people normally do. There's a first moment of relief when you realize that you were sleeping in your bed and that the police is not at your door. It takes another moment for you to realize that the crime that made the police come to your door to begin with also belongs to the dream narrative. In the brief span of time between those two moments you are awake and in your mind you are a criminal. You start to consider ways of managing your situation, of not getting caught by the police or turning yourself in and so on. It's only when elements of reality start to prove themselves incompatible with events from the dream that your dream memory collapses and, for example, you realize that you were at work the day before and not out robbing or murdering. But what if the dream wasn't that implausible and found enough of a coherence with your life to avoid scrutiny? Can you, for example, tell with absolute certainty which of your early childhood memories you constructed from other people's accounts and which you actually experienced yourself? The past is always dreamed even if it really happened. Any anthropologist or historian will be able to tell you about countless other comically outrageous ideas that were believed to be the truth for some time precisely because they were so convenient. Just google “Piltdown Man”.

Memory is a present story built from past facts, not a past story built from facts from its own present. Its contemporary use is what justifies how it's remembered. Memory is less of a sterile storage facility and more of a corrupt bureaucracy: the right bribe will get it to issue any document. You turn a blind eye to the obscurity of its motivations because you need the base-level tasks it performs, without which you simply could not function. One moment your memory is helping you to find your house keys by allowing you to picture yourself putting them down somewhere the night before, the next moment it's making you remember all the times you misplaced them, making you question your most basic adult-human skills. The unreliability and circumstantial convenience of the stories we tell ourselves and other people is always a bitter realization, if nothing else because our notion of who we are requires them, regardless of their veracity, like the distant mountains in the painted background of old western movies.

 

 

GALVANIZATION

 

Gentrification provides palpable examples of these dreamed pasts in almost any urban area in the world. The rehabilitation of a city district or even a single street in a village always involves a re-telling of the past in which you can find its present convenience. For example, in the former fishing village now turned sea-side tourist trap restaurants benefit from the association with two irreconcilable features - fishing activity and recreational spaces near the sea - by creating a dreamed past where they blended seamlessly. The idea that you will eat a freshly-caught fish, just brought in by a fisherman, bumping into you on his way out of the restaurant exactly as you are coming in, is a dream. Even if some details of the fantasy may match reality, the location of the restaurant, the nautical motifs in the decoration, the taxidermied fishes on the walls, the black and white pictures of fishermen and boats, a name referencing something traditional and/or local, all are meant to preserve a consonance with a dream that, unlike the criminal one, has convenience going for it. So do the old industrial warehouses that now house startups where nothing is produced, the former working class slum whose more historically concerned inhabitants are the affluent imports, the traditional shopping street flooded by branches of multinationals or the graffiti murals commissioned by the municipality. Gentrification is different from renovation precisely in how it carefully preserves a façade of the past by neglecting - and sometimes actively destroying - the very conditions that created it. Regardless of how much of an improvement it pragmatically brings, the gentrified neighborhood is the spacial equivalent to a carefully edited film being presented as reality.

A consequence of living in a social arrangement that exclusively favors profit during a time of widespread access to raw information about people is that memory becomes a goldmine and, as more of our lives acquire a digital front, it's only likely to become increasingly so. Storing and managing information about people's lives is the biggest business in the world at the time of writing. Like any other commodity, memory becomes quantifiable, tradable and - what's more important right now - ubiquitous. Your experience of the present is not only contrasted with almost the whole of human knowledge and culture, to which you have permanent access almost everywhere, but also to the curation of that record that the Web 2.0 explosion enabled. For example, you not only have access to the whole of 1980s music but, perhaps more importantly, you also have access to a lot of different people's competing conceptions of what 1980s music is and to music that sounds so much like the 1980s' that it becomes complicated to argue that it shouldn't be bundled with the one made in that decade. It's very easy to mistake all these, specially within the boundaries of plausibility.

There's a gentrified narrative everywhere, to a point in which the future and the present have been pushed out of dominant discourses in almost every field or are, at least, met with profound cynicism or paradoxically considered artificial. Almost all of the most significant economic ventures of the last years are somewhat concerned with accessing and curating that record of the past, from music streaming services to better cameras on better phones, making it even more easily available and editable. Political discourse proposes bringing back different elements of the past to make more palatable a situation that's universally deemed undesirable, inevitable and unchangeable. Popular art feels stuck in nostalgia and reference, either due to intentional displays of reverence for past works or simply because the easy access to all existing art makes it hard for any given work to elude a preexisting framing of some sort. Sampling, intertextuality, pastiche, reboots, remakes, sequels and prequels feel like a capitulation even when they revisit more than they fetishize. The first album is always the best one.

Revisionism has always been a prevalent angle in advertising but futuristic utopias of efficiency are all but gone from marketing. Shampoos are not tweaked to scientific dandruff-fighting perfection anymore, they are now made from natural ingredients that nurture your hair. Any semblance of an industrial mode of production is vigorously scrubbed off of every product, but the proposed regression also has a personal dimension. If you were to believe advertisers, neither Taylorism nor adulthood ever happened. Natural, home made, traditional, artisanal, organic, hand crafted, carefully selected, vintage, authentic and other proxies for the past now trump any futurism in the rock-paper-scissors of marketing discourse. Sometimes companies go as far as telling their own story for advertising purposes, to prove that they too have a coveted past for you to partake in. Since-insert-year establishment dates are proudly displayed. The dreamed past is the marketing. Like a nude model, the black and white pictures of workers performing some menial task can be used to sell underwear, potato chips or cars. Detergent particles laser-blasting stains to oblivion is not any more tasteful or honest, but there was a shift in aspirations that the marketing discourse documents, regardless of if it helped shape it. With the algorithms' ability to adapt that aspirational discourse to your individual traits, the difference between appealing to- and straightforward manipulating your idea of your own past becomes very blurred. Are you absolutely sure you remember playing all those games now available in that new vintage gaming console?

There's plenty of industries dedicated to retrospective editing of your body's history alone. Tanning beds, gyms, tattoo parlors, countless natural cosmetic practices, plastic surgery, all operate under the logic that you can give your body a narrative freed from sinful indulgences like sloth and gluttony. The conflation between youth and beauty is one of the first and most obvious examples of how convenient nostalgia is for capitalism and probably the quintessential self-inflicted gentrification. Granted, rejuvenation fantasies are not new nor exclusive to our social organization, but the interchangeability between the past that happened and the one that's convenient right now has never before been so obvious. Remaining young becomes the tautological appeal of staying within the gravitational pull of a consumer culture that has no discourse beyond retrospection. Narratives are regarded as more desirable if acquired than if lived, like in the case of bodybuilding versus hard physical labour. A tattoo sleeve is only desirable if you bribed your arm into testifying for that narrative, not if you were actually involved in organized crime. The self-produced memory that ageing entails is an inconvenience under permanent attack, like a commitment that you don't accept because it prevents you from being free for any other commitments, which you also won't accept for the same reason.

It's tempting to praise this liberalized access to self-reinvention in a first moment but, from the perspective of the solarium user, tanned skin doesn't equate to the indulgence of sunny vacations anymore. A solarium promises to substitute everything about sunbathing but it still needs you to want to sunbathe. And, as affordable as it may be to most people who really want to do it, the mediation is not gone like the root of the word "liberalization" implies, it just changed hands. This liberalization process - where money replaces a complex set of factors as the sole gatekeeper of a desired circumstance - frequently relies on a double bind logic that lies at the core of gentrification. Why would you acquire something that is desirable precisely because you couldn't acquire it? The magnitude to which one would want the trophy for winning a game one can cheat at is the extent of one's fetishism. Like with any other perversion, a morally grounded critique of gentrification already suffers from the reductionist perspective of its object. In fact, just like the loved one's underwear provides just a sliver of the spectrum of pleasure that a relationship of intimacy could provide, gentrification also reduces the desirability of a situation to its marketable aspects. It's a constrained experience, not an expansive one. In both cases, what's missing in depth is compensated by an expansion of surface. In the case of gentrification, a vague suspicion of inauthenticity is being constantly drowned in this bubbling nostalgia stew that capitalism cooks our culture into. However aspirational the palm tree-filled posters in the tanning bed parlor may be, the beach needs to keep being pushed back under the pavement.

The gentrified past is tacitly accepted much like what in pro wrestling is called "keyfabe". Although events in that universe are known to be performative, its existence relies on being compelling enough to prevent the ontological question from ever arising. Wrestlers never break keyfabe and behave as if they were fighters with intense rivalries and ambitions, not performers in a scripted narrative, and are treated likewise, even by ordinary journalists outside of wrestling-dedicated media. There is absolutely no fighting in this fighting spectacle. Much like with the deployment of good-guy-vs-bad-guy plots, the ontology-busting power of the gentrified narrative relies on preserving a generic nature that as many people as possible can relate to. At a point that anyone who lived in a highly gentrified city can recognize, there is nothing else besides the tropes that bear a passing resemblance to what they try to evoke and the whole structure that carries out the efforts of preserving it and profiting from it. One of Lisbon's most popular night life streets was famous for the brothels that served the fishermen and dock workers of decades past. There's not one single brothel left today but there's also not one single bar that doesn't allude to this past in some shape or form. The reference completely replaces what it references. The beach is occupied by a highly advanced printing workshop that produces extremely realistic posters of beaches to be hung in solarium parlors.

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SOCIETY

A meritocratic discourse about memory speaks volumes about these commodified pasts. The right time to invest in cryptocurrencies or to wear the in-fashion shoes is always back when it was plausible-but-impossible that you were paying attention. The sales are about to end. You live in a permanent too-late moment. Now all that's left are the bread crumbs from the banquet you just missed and the suspicion that another one is happening right now and you're missing that one too. It's all your fault. It's as much your fault that you've never been to Paris as it's your fault that you overslept and missed your bus to work. The infamous FOMO, acronym for "fear of missing out", is of the same nature as the suburbanite obsession with the private lives of others: both are harbored by the self-perceived losers of some meritocracy olympics. If you can cheat why aren't you winning?

Meritocracy has always been the metaphysical patine for those in power to justify the state of affairs that benefits them and the past has always been a source of social legitimization for the parvenu, to well-documented comedic proportions. A gentrified dreamed past, however, is not one that the passage of time yields, on the contrary, it's one made possible through the onthology-busting power of capitalism. 1970s fashion simply becomes fashion and wearing it will place you in a social hierarchy, not in time. It will make you part of a group of people who have access to a range of products and the knowledge of how to use them. The symbolic value of this time equates to a rating on an index much like the stock market, where 1970s fashion is deemed more valuable than, say, 1940s fashion or asian influences or the color green. There is no duration in this time.

Therefore, as a means of social legitimization, a dreamed past is not inexorable like, for example, a birthright claim to nobility, or a reward for bloodline perseverance. It's paradoxically intended to seem as prestigious but also very much accessible through the same mechanisms that regulate access to any other market economy product: money.

The idea that its distribution is somewhat fair and rewarding of virtuous behaviors is also part of the keyfabe. As obvious as it may be that this faith mostly benefits the priests who preach it, this idea that Good is rewarded and Evil is punished is compelling to the point of obscuring the fact that it has no bearing at all in people's lived reality. Because these are the means by which you acquire your narratives about yourself, you are stuck with the memories that you deserve. This is the corollary of a pervasive discourse that also posits that you attract what you wish for or that you can accomplish anything if you want it hard enough - a pile of bullshanti that would be laughable if it wasn't so pernicious.

The absurd cruelty by which you are somehow deserving of your past requires the philosophy of absolute individual causation of capitalism - as in Margaret Thatcher's “there's no such thing as society” logic - to make any sense. With the decline of real-time human interaction in favor of a correspondence between curated iterations of ourselves, this taxidermy of experience seems aspirationally more alive because it has been gradually crowding out the present. The commodity appeal of emerging technologies like augmented reality and artificial intelligence lies precisely in their promise to scrub the messy and ungroomed present out of the mundane experience of the world. Even the simplest headphones promise to shut out the sound of what's happening around you and data plans promise to turn any location you may find yourself in into mere background noise to your curated narratives.

The collapse of a public sphere where people have unmediated access to each other's experience compromises that notion of truth that, among other things, allows you to determine that your crime took place in a dream. A meritocratic framing is convenient because of the way it dumps its shortcomings in people's individual here-and-now present and thusly furthers the collapse of that public sphere. In the loneliness of the dressing room, the designer's inability to cater to your waist size becomes your inability to fit in the pants that everyone is buying.

A grave political problem arises from the concentration of power that some agents have garnered by undemocratically inserting themselves into a position where they mediate large swathes of our lives, even if they only mean to provide a service of sorts. Digitalization's binary extremes of invisible or grotesque infiltrated people's life to such an extent and with such speed that the very problematization of this takeover already happens within its own framework, employs its language and proposes dreamed-past solutions. Frustrated with the rat-race? Based on your late-night search of flight prices to exotic destinations, an algorithm suggests that you look at a list of the 10 most awesome off-the-grid houses, interrupted by banner ads for hiking shoes from a shoe store close to you. These hard-edged textures of hyperbole and unnoticeability that constitute digital reality are inevitable when massive amounts of data need to be dealt with in a commercially successful manner. The problem is that the only way out of this highly exploitable dependency on curation is to question the very fabric of experience as it's presented to us. Is there still a way for to you know for sure if you truly want those hiking shoes? Probably not and it probably doesn't really matter anymore. At a point that I'm not absolutely sure we haven't already reached, our attempts at having unmediated experiences with each other may be as discouraged by the time, cost and effort involved as cooking a healthy meal at home: a quaint and privileged indulgence. Matchmaking apps are on the brink of becoming a more common way of meeting romantic partners than through mutual acquaintances. Everything must be swept either right or left. Ambiguity is treated as procrastination. 

 

 

AGAINST MEMORY

 

What concerns me the most is a dereliction of the present. Experience has no value until it finds its place in the index of memory, but I find the morality of the process' commercial nature less concerning than its result. If the present, like the suburbs of a heavily gentrified city, is deemed unworthy of the conservation efforts that the past is showered with, the passage of time feels like decay, everyday-life like an embarrassment and progress like a mistake. Outside the perimeter of a Disneyland of pasts, there's only a sprawl of experiences so alike that they're almost liquid in their dull sameness: bullshit jobs, train stations, supermarkets, parking spots, deadlines for utility bills, frozen food, all remain unaddressed. The present feels like the childhood experience of waking up in the middle of the night while everyone else sleeps and wandering around the dark colorless replica of where your life usually takes place. We need some light on the ghetto sidewalk, we're tired of stumbling in the dark. The techno-utopia of early internet relied on a promise of digitalization of this experience-sharing that, to this day, still constitutes the bait of commercial endeavors eerily monikered “sharing economy”. What was initially designed to help people exchange knowledge is now used to zero-rate your food delivery runner further into poverty while you eat alone. How did that happen?

I propose that you always write against memory. You write as way to save experience from the machinations of remembering. What a shopping list and a poem have in common is a plot against the normal workings of the human mind. You want to sabotage your impulse to buy things you don't need as much as you want a counter-argument just in case you come to believe that a particular person or event didn't really sway you that much. You write to rescue yourself from the savage circumstance constantly parading in the main street of your mind, rendering you increasingly pliable to its tyranny. Maybe because your mind ages just like your body does, or maybe due to sunk-cost fallacy, you find it increasingly hard to push back against this endless fanfare, to the point of praising your captor, either through nostalgia or through believing that age inherently brings wisdom. As I age myself, I see loved ones, worthy of my admiration, falling prey to this self-comforting nonsense and wonder to what extent I may notice if and when I will be doing exactly the same once I find my preferred brand of past. Whatever force acted against them doesn't have a better adversary in me. Revisionism is admittedly not a concern of the young but a certain measure of youth is needed to denounce it and I feel myself standing in a focal point of sorts. Maybe writing can save the present, maybe it can bring the mundane downtown, like a graffiti tag in the wall of time. I came to feel that this is of the utmost urgency for me.

I'm not sure of how public these words will be as I write them or what shape will take the grouping of texts of which this one is a first. Maybe these words just make one infinitesimal bit worst the very problems that they complain about - there's certainly no demand for one more voice producing more noise - but if there's something foundational that I would like to say to you, the person who read this far - the other that the publication gesture implies - is that you - you - are the destination of what I believe to be my best step.