Remember Me. Davide Sisto
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along with photographs, and even a whole house. The house represents ‘a deposit, that exists both physically and within us, of memories that are still shared’, it is ‘the final bulwark of a time painstakingly removed […] from the unrelenting progression of loss, from the painful dissipation of living worlds’.3 Morris follows this rule: if you leave me, I’ll erase you.
Theodore Twombly in cinematic fiction, and Desmond Morris in real life, share the same fate: the end of the world in its totality, to borrow a famous expression from Jacques Derrida. Both the end of a sentimental relationship and the death of a loved one suddenly erase the physical presence to which we are bound, along with everything that had been shared both materially and emotionally up until that moment. Twombly and Morris suddenly find themselves at the starting point of their own lives, as if every experience up to that moment had been erased. The only thing posing any opposition to the end of the world in its totality is the spectral presence of the person who is no longer physically there, the transparent copy that proliferates in material and mental memories, remaining alive and kicking in their scattered remains. That copy, which according to Umberto Eco is relied upon by every human being who, aware of both their physical (‘I’m going to die sooner or later’) and mental weakness (‘I’m sorry that I’m going to have to die’), finds proof of that soul’s survival in the memory that remains of it.4 In other words, both the death of a loved one and the end of a loving relationship determine the passage from identity to the images of identity that transform the absent into a collector’s item, the bulwark against the memory’s fragility at which one can direct their own enduring regrets.
The inevitable disconnect between the disappearance of the physical presence and the force of the spectral presence usually generates profound emotional unrest in the person left behind. The bitter knowledge of the end of the whole world is continually invoked by the eternal excess of its shadows and images, which make thoughts and objects that were once shared the exclusive inheritance of the person who is suffering. This is why, in cases where the grief is particularly unbearable, it can be useful to remember Samantha’s suggestion: to view the past as a story we have told ourselves, breaking its suffocating bond with the present. Ghosts are kept at a safe distance, as per the approach taken by Desmond Morris, to avoid us becoming their prisoners, like Theodore Twombly. As Thomas Hobbes teaches us, if we set aside the passing of time, we have no way of distinguishing memory from imagination.5 And, as Bertolt Brecht confirms, ‘without the forgetfulness of night which washes away all traces’, we would never find the strength to get up in the morning.6
Morris, however, has to reckon with a greater problem than Twombly: he is obliged to walk the fine line between his own sacrosanct need to forget and his dead wife’s equally legitimate desire to be remembered.
So what happens when the past becomes a story that we not only tell ourselves but also our followers, recording it on social media profiles and online more generally?
If, traditionally, the house is the archetype of hybrid memory, filled as it is with the past in various areas of the domestic space and thus becoming an extreme stronghold of a time removed from the urgent rhythm of loss, our second home today is the online realm. To inhabit, Walter Benjamin explained, means ‘to leave impressions’. This is confirmed by the invention of ‘an abundance of covers and protectors, liners and cases […] on which the traces of objects of everyday use are imprinted’.7 In those countless online rooms, we are constantly recording, accumulating and preserving these marks in excessive quantities, creating digital deposits of our memories and delegating our own faltering memories to artificial tools. In comparison with the first house, the internet’s front door is always ajar, if not wide open. Sharing has become one of its defining imperatives. As Kevin Kelly writes, it is also ‘the world’s largest copy machine’ because it is continually updating, ‘[copying] every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it’.8 It copies our own psycho-physical presence, dematerializing it. It detaches myriad digital I’s from the biological I physically present in only one location in the offline world, creating digital presences that wander (more neurotic than carefree) throughout all possible places in the web, leaving indelible marks through an unbridled multiplication of their personal and social identities. Human beings, historical constructs whose contingency depends on continuous and ongoing technological progress, have learned how to develop more ‘informational souls’. Reciprocally connected within the Infosphere, these souls occupy spaces in which there is no distinction between natural individuals and artificial agents. They reveal, therefore, a brand new virtue with regard to ‘spiritual’ souls, that of satisfying in equal measure the ‘two figures obsessed by immortality’ referred to by Elias Canetti: both the one that wants infinite continuity with time, and the one that instead wishes to return periodically.9 As we find in inter-disciplinary studies on Digital Death,10 these technological spectres help our digital I’s attain that eternal life denied their biological twin, who remains exposed to the whim of the Grim Reaper.
It follows that, unlike those objects held within domestic walls, for the most part private, unique and rare specimens (physical in the broad sense) that facilitate the choice taken by Desmond Morris, the data accumulated in digital deposits (written messages, photographic images, audiovisual recordings, and so on) are difficult to erase. The fact that these data are shared not only obviously means they are not private, but also means they enjoy the gift of ubiquity and can be multiplied infinitely. Some are shared voluntarily (in posts left on social media profiles), some are shared unwittingly (every trace a user leaves on a device while online), some are shared by third parties (the problematic habit common to parents of posting photographs of their underage children, usually on Facebook). It can all exist autonomously and in an indeterminate number of copies, occupying the internal space of an equally unknown quantity of electronic devices and online locations. Each of these devices and locations in turn represents a privileged point of 24/7 access to digital memories. The distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ has now become superfluous in comparison with historical eras in which, in the absence of digital technology, the house acted as the custodian of private memories, clearly marking the boundary between inside and outside.
So, while it is relatively easy to ‘empty’ material deposits once mourning has taken place, placing a protective barrier between the world that has come to an end and the world that must now be built, it is much more difficult (if not impossible) to do the same thing with digital deposits. Like the ‘invisible cascade of skin cells’11 that we leave in the streets of our cities, the collection of data, digital footprints and information recorded online that is constantly photocopied and to which we delegate our memories with increasing frequency, makes those ghosts that assail Twombly’s mind at night increasingly pervasive and permanent, and render Morris’ attempts to chase them out entirely in vain.
Today’s world seems struck by an epidemic of memory that provides the past with the opportunity to free itself from the present’s control. As it slowly becomes autonomous as an objective reality in its own right, the past overlaps with the present, imposing itself from one moment to the next. As a consequence, it is liberated from the spectrality attributed by those who, until now, have always thought of it as either nothing more than a story we tell ourselves or a mere simulation produced by the mind. And it is preparing to subvert the very rules that govern the way in which we remember and forget.
Facebook and Looking Back: #10YearChallenge, On This Day, Memories
Mark Zuckerberg, the man most responsible for the recent multiplication of our informational souls, was the first person to recognize the radical shift taking place in the way we remember and forget. Taking the positive aspects, he ignores Samantha’s advice and chooses to favour total recall over oblivion. As Kenneth Goldsmith writes, ‘Our archiving impulse arises as a way to ward off the chaos of overabundance.’12 Zuckerberg takes this on board, transforming Facebook from the most popular social network in the world to a technological memory chest, a gigantic digital archive capable of: (1) conserving data shared by its users over the years, constantly recreating and reshaping the relationship between the past and the present;