Convergence and overwriting: Toward an interdisciplinary study of memory

Substitution

Much of this article will be devoted to the scientific notions of memory and forgetting which I want to explain from the position of cultural studies and by showing that these concepts of memory share foundational assumption with the mentioned structuralist theories. Suffice it here to note just most general contours of overwriting—forgetting as a substitution or “overwriting”—that underlines this notion of memory, by relating the concept to three landmark examples. One is literary, Toni Morrison’s (1987) “rememory,” used to capture a nonlinear time and the form in which past is present in the life of former slaves. The other two are theoretical sources from two extremes: Derrida’s (1990) notion of writing (developed together with the notion of a memory supplement) and Jonathan Schooler and Tonya Engstler-Schooler’s overshadowing, which is an experimental notion used to name how one type of memory (visual) can be used to block, or overshadow, another kind of memory (verbal) (1990). Common to the three is a way of thinking about the record not in the usual terms of content (its loss or presence), but rather in terms of processes that establish, or block, a memory, all suggesting a form of substitution or replacement (and not erasure).

Historically, this view of memory that foregrounds repetition is a successor to a structuralist claim like the one noted in Freud’s (1955b: 15) The Interpretation of Dreams that nothing in the mind is ever lost. ² The overshadowing and overwriting allow us now to hear Freud in a new way in terms of what Derrida would call a deferral of memory content, as a possibility that memory exists by being transformed again and again and that this continual transformation—this “managed access”—is the dominant mode of presence, this even in the case of traumatic memories that seem indelible and fixed.

With Steven Brown and Paula Reavey’s (2015) recent Vital Memory and Affect and their concept of “managed accessibility,” a way of thinking that focuses on supplementarity promises to become a new standard of research. Brown and Reavey (2015) write, for instance,

Adoptive parents typically try to support their children in resisting these chreods [traumatic memories from early childhood] by a selective reframing of the past that minimises or occludes problematic aspects. However, parents cannot risk erasing these details entirely, as they may be held accountable for doing so by the child in the future (for example, the child may wish, on becoming an adult, to contact a biological parent). Active forgetting here takes the form of what we might call, to modify the psychological definition slightly, the “managed accessibility” of memories. (p. 14)

Accessibility is managed by exploiting the possibility of substitution that, in post-structuralist terms, displaces the binary remembering/forgetting. Such substitution blurs the traditional categorical differences (in favor of accessibility, adaptability, reframing, etc.) and offers new ways for conceptualizing this distinction remembering/forgetting in particular as malleable and fluid. ³

The reader should bear in mind that when characterizing Brown and Reavey’s concepts as applying substitution, I am speaking as a cultural theorist, on the assumption that cultural theory defines the general framework for the study of memory and that it can readily use that framework to identify the provenance of “managed accessibility.”

If Brown and Reavey (2015) insist on the “expanded concept of memory that [they] believe will lead to an enhanced understanding of memory as a context-bound, fluid, ethical and affective practice” (p. xiv), I will not be able to confirm that what they suggest is sound. I can only suggest why it makes good theoretical sense to assume as they do: that remembering and forgetting are not opposites, why memory is a “context-bound, fluid, [and] ethical” practice, and so on. Deconstructing the traditional poles of research, demonstrating how traumatic memory becomes “interwoven with other kinds of memory” (Brown and Reavey, 2015: 3)—indeed, using metaphors like “interwoven” and “entangled”—makes sense not because, as Brown and Reavey indicate at one point, we post-moderns feel the need to balance forgetting and remembering, following Nietzsche (Brown and Reavey, 2015: 13). Instead, underlying ideas like Nietzsche’s revision of history (Nietzsche 1997) is a more general paradigm shift toward alternatives to traditional knowledge. We are moving away from qualities of unity, self-agreement, self-presence, its focus on erasure of content, linear concept of time, and so on, and toward what is in Derrida’s vocabulary a form of iterability or repetition, the undoing of the primacy of the original, understanding memory as context-dependent, a construct rather than a content or imprint, and so on. Identifying such philosophical framework is the difference that we cultural theorists can introduce into the study of memory with two goals in mind. The first goal is to help us understand what we mean by concepts we use, what they are, and what their history is. The second goal is perhaps more important since the framework can be used to chart new research. Concretely, cognitive science of memory can make even more use of the notion of substation than they are currently doing. The two would be in addition to helping scientists to understand how socially constructed or biased their approach to knowledge is, as Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar argue in their Laboratory Life (1985).

In clarifying the concept of forgetting for the field of cultural studies, I will refer to only three scientific articles—the three responses to Connerton: Matthew Hugh Erdelyi’s (2008) “Forgetting and Remembering in Psychology: Commentary on Paul Connerton’s ‘Seven Types of Forgetting,’” Jefferson A. Singer and Martin A. Conway’s (2008) “Should We Forget Forgetting?”; and Ineke Wessel and Michelle L. Moulds’ (2008) “How Many Types of Forgetting? Comments on Connerton,” all published in the same, third, issue of Memory Studies in 2008. The three are sufficient for my purpose in that they adequately represent various strands of contemporary scientific discourse, including cognitive and experimental psychology, and taken together represent a basic, common scientific understanding that can be shared not only by the sciences but also by theorists of cultural memory. In addition—because updating cultural studies of memory implies a possibility of a common understanding shared by cultural theory and science—I will review the conditions for the convergence from the standpoint of cultural theory. The three articles are then also interesting for us because they explicitly support the idea of convergence and address Connerton from a vantage point that assumes the possibility of an agreement in memory studies.

This shared understanding or convergence, as I will claim, is based on the assumption that contemporary cognitive theory and psychology have the same scientific threshold as does the structuralist theory developed by Lévi-Strauss and Lacan as an update of Freud, which is, however, not shared by Connerton and his kind of cultural studies of memory. Common to structuralism and cognitive science, for instance, is that relations (not entities) are a source of meaning; that boundaries between discrete processes and entities (remembering/forgetting, individual/collective) can be drawn only provisionally and only for specific, narrowly defined contexts; that there is no such thing as an absolute erasure or absence (or absolute presence); that recreation and replacement are chief signifying as well as mental processes; and so on. In respect to the two, Connerton’s strand of cultural studies appears as an unreformed Freudianism—a Freudianism that does not recognize the role of process and relations but rather focuses on the content of memory, on erasure, and on their moral significance in a way antithetical to basic structuralist assumptions about substitution, such as those named above.

This claim that there is a basic agreement between contemporary cognitive theory and psychology, on one hand, and, on the other hand, structuralism and post-structuralism implies that convergence is, actually, a done deal. It is only that a certain kind of cultural studies has to be updated in order to de-emphasize the binary opposition between remembering and forgetting, content, morality, and a narrowly understood political importance so that the new state of the interdisciplinary field of memory studies can generally be recognized. Based on such a convergence, the study of forgetting can perhaps become a model for interdisciplinary inquiry—at least for subjects with a similar cultural-cognitive-chemical status—acknowledging memory’s multiple statuses but also the common threshold in approaches to it. The study could offer, among other things, some understanding of what and how particular disciplines can contribute to the understanding of memory, with, roughly speaking, cultural theory focusing on the framework and cultural (political, moral, historical) significance of memory, and experimental and cognitive psychology filling in the details about the memory processes by testing the correctness of theoretical assumptions.

Defining convergence

I will come to explaining Connerton’s types only after addressing the responses to his article. I am doing this to first show that cultural theory, and specifically post-structuralism, and cognitive science do not have two different and distinct theories of memory but share the same basic assumptions about what memory and forgetting are. Only against this shared understanding can we properly evaluate Connerton’s article. For the time being, I will assume reader’s general familiarity if not explicitly with Connerton’s article, then with the common idea that forgetting is an omission of a given content—the seven types of forgetting being in fact seven kinds of omission – which is the view on forgetting that I will be critical of because it no longer has enough scientific precision.

I begin with Connerton’s first responder, Matthew Hugh Erdelyi, who was a professor of psychology at Brooklyn College to define convergence, a way of bringing together the cultural theory, psychology, and experimental science of memory. Erdelyi (2008) is the author of two books whose titles testify to his Freudian approach, Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Cognitive Psychology and The Recovery of Unconscious Memories: Hypermnesia and Reminiscence, and is the closest to Connerton’s discourse from among the authors that I cover here. In his article published in Memory Studies Erdelyi makes his case for convergence by assuming,

that as the stimuli have become more complex (moving from non-sense syllables and lists of words to stories and real-life events, as found, for example, in clinical and forensic settings), memory theory in psychology becomes increasingly constructivist and motivational, and converges in significant respects with historical-sociological formulations of forgetting, such as Connerton’s. (p. 274)

In the same vein, he demonstrates the existing similarities on the subject of memory between psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology, which are normally seen as opposing discourses. He points, specifically, to researchers such as F. C. Bartlett (1932) and P. B. Ballard (1913) on one hand and Freud on the other, who already share the basic understanding that memory is unreliable construction, a result of elaboration, and not a dependable imprint that a “reality” leaves on the mind. Erdelyi (2008) also shows some key common insights about the ways memory functions; for instance, that “Bartlettian distortions and Freudian distortions are the same but for motive (the need for conceptual meaning in the case of Bartlett and the need, in addition, for emotionally tolerable meaning in the case of Freud)” (p. 276).

Implied in this comparison between psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology is a sense of convergence that shows these two different approaches agreeing with one another in such a way that each respects the protocols of its discipline while affirming substantially the same notion from its distinct position. Such convergence, then, is not coincidence (the way that a simultaneous discovery can be) or overlap (identifying a shared subject or field), or even identity (resulting in the same notion), but a meeting of discourses on independently elaborated basic claims, agreeing on a threshold of knowledge. The threshold connotes parallelism, each discourse maintaining its autonomy, sharing basic insights into memory, which then, precisely because of their separateness, open the possibility for a common theory of memory based on the common assumption present in both that memory is an unreliable process open to manipulation and, specifically, substitutions.

Standing in the way of such a convergence, Erdelyi suggests, is not the difference between cultural theory and cognitive science, as we might expect, but rather the procedures of experimental science, because, as Erdelyi (2008) notes, experimental science does not normally interpret real-life situations (as other disciplines do), but artificially constructed conditions in the laboratory. In conclusion, he goes on to propose what can happen after the experimental limitations are overcome:

There is every scientific reason to strive for the creation of a comprehensive approach to memory—and therefore to forgetting and remembering—that covers the gamut of physical and psychological realities we are bound to experience in the real world and that, also, avails itself of the more precise techniques of the laboratory. A comprehensive theoretical approach that transcends artificial disciplinary boundaries has the potential of yielding a General Systems Theory formulation of memory that functions at multiple levels of living systems. (p. 277)

Connerton’s article thus serves Erdelyi’s argument only as an occasion to begin a general dis- cussion about the field of memory research and explain the already shared ground (between psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology) in a way that would affirm an already existing common theory.

As an aside, I should note that research led by Brian Nosek at the University of Virginia that failed to reproduce some landmark psychological experiments lends support to Erdelyi’s criticism (Nosek et al. 2015) in that it provides additional evidence why it is necessary to make a fundamental revision not only of particular experiments but also of the experimental method as such. ⁴ This line of thinking has, in fact, gained wider momentum recently in research into the so-called “publication bias” that explicitly calls for examining yet another aspect of experimental science, namely, the bias in journals toward positive data (Nissen, 2016). Research like Nosek and Erdelyi’s represents a distinctly post-structuralist intervention, a turn toward the instruments, interpretations, even science as an institution, and how these—and their basic assumptions, their biases—determine the outcome of experiments. As such, these are—to a cultural theorist’s eyes—obvious examples of a convergence between science and post-structuralism that concern the most philosophical level of science and interrogate how the framework dictates the construction of knowledge and how it predetermines our findings. A similar line of inquiry was a necessity for quantum physics some time ago and is now becoming a more widely accepted standard, a new threshold if you will, for experimental sciences. Paradoxically, it is the cultural theory that has fallen behind in questioning its procedures. As of yet, there are no sustained attempts to examine the peer review process, and in particular how the double-blind standard is used, though the quality of published articles and the ideological uniformity of professional journals indicate a dire need.

Forgetting as replacement

Jefferson A. Singer, the lead author of the next article, titled “Should We Forget Forgetting?” is the Faulk Foundation Professor of Psychology at Connecticut College. He specializes in personality, autobiographical memory, and clinical psychology. Martin A. Conway, the second author, is a professor of psychology at City University London. He specializes in autobiographical and self-memory. Like Singer, Conway is also an experimental scientist.

The goal of “Should We Forget Forgetting?” is to evaluate Connerton’s seven types from a perspective the authors identify as cognitive psychology. In particular, Singer and Conway (2008) want to measure Connerton’s nomenclature against “emotion, meaning and goal relevance” (p. 279). Their theory suggests that these three contextual aspects of memory determine the memorial process.

Singer and Conway (2008) define two distinct positions, one they call the “cultural study of memory,” which is employed in Connerton’s article, and their own “current memory research in cognitive psychology” (p. 279). But the authors do not go on to make the distinction between individual and cultural, or collective, memory common to an older kind of cognitive theory that uses the distinction to separate science from cultural theory (see Barnier et al., 2008), with the cognitive theory said to be focusing on the individual and the cultural theory focusing on collective phenomena. Instead, Singer and Conway oppose Connerton’s overemphasis on the individual when, for instance, he situates his first kind of forgetting regarding how a person can oppose a forgetting imposed by the state, as in Milan Kundera’s (1984) famous novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Unlike Connerton, Singer and Conway accept the possibility that memory is—as we would say in cultural theory—an ideological product, which itself connotes a complex exchange between the individual and the collective that is not evident in any of the Connerton’s types of forgetting.

Most of Singer and Conway’s article is, then, devoted to explaining why Connerton’s “type” fails to meet the definition of a type at all, and why we may want to stop using the term forgetting (as well as thinking in types) altogether, because it is not precise enough for scientific purposes.

Singer and Conway’s critique of Connerton’s forgetting starts with what cultural theory would call a gesture—putting the term forgetting in quotation marks to signal that it can only be used provisionally. The term covers at least two different cases, the availability and the accessibility of specific content which, the authors remind us, we should know from the 1966 work of Tulving and Pearlstone (Tulving and Pearlstone 1966). Their critique continues as a basic lesson in the cognitive psychology of memory.

Singer and Conway’s brief review also shows the gap that separates Connerton’s cultural theory from cognitive science, suggesting its exact proportions (over half a century of research) and depth (non-specific terms like forgetting and remembering no longer having scientific value).

The critique culminates in the affirmation that forgetting is a function of the “goal-directed and verbal dominated neo-cortical system” (Singer and Conway, 2008: 280). That is, Singer and Conway put forward a view that memory processes are determined by an immediate, narrowly understood context where memory is created—the neocortex where higher functions of the brain take place, such as sensory perception, conscious thought, language, and so on—and not by what happens to the content (erased, repressed, etc.) as is the case in Connerton’s theory. In this, they share—contrary to what Scott Timcke (2013) suggests in his article (“Is All Reification Forgetting?”)—a basic assumption of post–Lacanian critical theory of the kind we find in works by Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, and so on, where the focus is on the way signifying processes work together with one another. This Freudian theory that constitutes the ground of research in ideology is different from the Freudian (1962) theory that Connerton relies on in two respects. First, in respect to the mentioned content of memory as it was presented in the early seduction theory (“The Etiology of Hysteria,” Freud 1962) and in later works like The Moses of Michelangelo (Freud 1914) which had disproportionate impact on certain strands of cultural studies but whose approach of psychoanalyzing authors was discarded by Lacan, and later in Lacanian work. ⁵ And second, the difference concerns the understanding of the organization of the brain that is no longer thought as having specific centers like Ego, Super-Ego, and the Id, but an entirely different topology, as a network of intersecting functions represented in Lacan’s Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. The theory of ideology shares with Singer and Conway’s understanding of forgetting the crucial insight that forgetting cannot be understood as such but only in interrelation with other higher (signifying) functions and its effects on the whole.

The implication most important for our purposes is that because remembering and forgetting are not unified and independent phenomena but rather related processes, the general theory must account for this relationality. So, Singer and Conway propose a theory of accessibility (of memory) that follows from Tomkins’ work (Tomkins 1971). With it comes a more precise taxonomy for memorial processes that identifies how certain content is (or is not) accessed, and not how, by what political means, certain content is erased, as in Connerton’s article.

Here is an example of the sort of revision of Connerton’s argument that Singer and Conway have in mind. When, they write, “capitalism markets and advertises new products to make current products less desirable, it is not asking us to forget or lose awareness of the old” as Connerton asserts. Rather, Singer and Conway (2008) propose, capitalism is “asking us to replace our desire for the current with a desire for the new” (p. 283). Again, as in much post-structuralist theory on the supplement, the emphasis here moves from the absence of the previous content to the more nuanced understanding that the relationship between new and old is dynamic, with the new supplementing the old rather than deleting or otherwise damaging it. Singer and Conway’s explanation allows us to see, among other things, why the advertising strategy in the example is so effective, because it does not ask us to renounce previous desires or to erase them, but rather to reorient what in Lacanian theory, is called the drive toward an ever-new object, which is a process that is much less oppressive and requires much less effort on the part of the desiring subject.

Singer and Conway also suggest that memory requires a more complex process than an erasure—a process that includes a thorough, emotional or affective, transformation, and not only removal of specific information as Connerton seems to think. As one memory is replaced with another, we are “making less accessible the emotional appeal of what we have and replacing it with passion for what we have yet to acquire” (Singer and Conway, 2008: 283, emphasis added). Capitalism hence alters the mind-set such that consumers no longer focus on particular objects (the old, the new) but on their own satisfaction, which perfectly agrees with the Lacanian understanding that the goal of capitalism is to command satisfaction and open an endless chain of dis/satisfaction and substitutions. Slavoj Žižek (1989) has written about this phenomenon, using, perhaps most memorably, Coca-Cola as an example (p. 96).

This revision of Connerton’s assertion leads Singer and Conway to identify the principle of their disagreement with Connerton. They write, “[f]rom a cognitive standpoint, we see again not a shift in the memory itself, but in its route of accessibility through affect and meaning” (Singer and Conway, 2008: 283). That is, once again, memory is not determined by its content, present, or absent, but by the networks and processes, emotional as well as cognitive, that lead to the creation of a new mind-set. A subject desiring a specific thing becomes a subject of desire—a subject, that is, defined by desire and a subject that does not exist without the desire.

In making their criticism, Singer and Conway suggest a theory that replaces memory as defined by what it is about (capitalism makes us forget the past) with a functional view that focuses on the processes, contexts, and affect that determine what specific information is and how it is available (capitalism does not make us forget a past, it intervenes, via desire, and substitutes one signifier with a better looking one, making an intervention in the way the subject is constituted).

On this reading, the theory Singer and Conway propose is not just a scientific correction of Connerton’s notion of forgetting but also a post-structuralist revision: no longer a theory of meaning, defined by loss or omission, but a theory of interpretation defined by an ideological, Imaginary and Symbolic, process that offers seemingly endless choices. It is also a theory of memory (and forgetting) as a replacement as it is, further, a theory of the subject. In short, capitalism produces a new subject, not new memories.

Wessel and Moulds

Inneke Wessel and Michelle L. Moulds’ article “How Many Types of Forgetting?” also shows not only what a scientific understanding of forgetting is but also how it agrees with post-structuralist cultural theory.

Wessel and Moulds (2008) explicitly call for a convergence which for them means the development of “a common language, to enable meaningful, productive cross-disciplinary dialogue” (p. 288). ⁶ Note, for instance, the use of the term structure in the following quotation, used by this “experimental psychopathology” in the very same way it was by structuralist theory:

On the one hand, there are short-term records of ongoing experience, which have a sensory-perceptual quality (i.e. episodic memories). [. . .] [T]hese episodic memories are transient and contain the specific details of events as they are perceived while they unfold. On the other hand, there is a structure that contains abstracted information in a more durable form (i.e. autobiographical memory knowledge base). These abstracted memories may be of general categories of events (e.g. “the times I go shopping”) or about longer periods in one’s life (e.g. “when I was in college”). (Wessel and Moulds, 2008: 290)

In the basic work of structuralist anthropology, Lévi-Strauss’ (1969) The Elementary Structures of Kinship, structure denotes the blueprint or formula based on which kinship is organized in many different cultures and historical periods. Abstract memory is much like these forms of kinship, present through many episodic memories. Consequently, it is not at all hard to understand why Wessel and Moulds propose that we should shift our attention away from Connerton’s types of forgetting, which are all examples of episodic memory, and toward the underlying forms and processes that make memory and forgetting possible.

There is further convergence in what is perhaps the most useful remark for our discussion. Wessel and Moulds (2008) propose the following general principle:

By and large, we agree [with Connerton] that forgetting is not unitary in that there may be many and varied motivations for an individual, a generation or a nation to forget particular events, details or facts. Despite this variety, however, it seems to us that the seven types of forgetting might all be understood in terms of one general principle (i.e. striving for coherence) within a structural collectivistic memory system. (p. 292)

That is, forgetting may be manifested in diverse phenomena, but when we focus on the underlying structures, it appears that all these instances correspond to a specific general paradigm in thinking about memory, which is to facilitate cohesion and thus improve the work of the mind.

In defining the organizing principle of memory in this fashion, Wessel and Moulds are following the structuralist way of thinking. They are also, curiously, defining a notion equivalent to Martin Heidegger’s (1968) Gedächtnis or “memory as the gathering of thought”. In What is Called Thinking, Heidegger understands that the primary role of memory is gathering, providing a center, a heart, which is Heidegger’s way of naming an organizing principle. Gedächtnis provides cohesion in that it orients thinking, giving it ethical direction (Hiedegger makes a pun on thinking/thanking), content, and emotion, which thinking can then decenter, redirect, and reorganize. Again, this is similar to Wessel and Moulds’ proposition quoted above that what is forgotten follows a principle of cohesion. The similarity between the two concepts does not make Wessel and Moulds into Heideggerians. It merely testifies to the fact that these experimental psychologists share with Heidegger the same basic assumptions—a threshold of knowledge, a paradigm—about memory, as, in Heidegger’s terms, a gathering of thought.

Perhaps most importantly, Wessel and Moulds identify memory’s chief function as ideological—ideology being that which provides the “collectivistic” coherence at both the conscious and the unconscious levels. Coherence here does not refer to the cohesion between particular memories or episodes which are many and varied and may, or may not, relate to one another. Rather, coherence is what makes better functioning possible. It is provided by the deep structure that functions as a common language or ground and is the medium in and through which we can understand particular, or in Lacan’s terms Imaginary, instances. The structure also makes it possible to have a unified theory of episodic or fragmentary phenomena that need not form a type in Connerton’s sense. Hence, very different individual episodes can represent the same ideology and very similar episodes, or types can present opposing ideologies. The ideology of “collectivistic” memory is also the ideology of a unified subject that seeks to keep both the “I” and the “We” a coherent, well-functioning unit.

The similarity, or shared threshold, is not limited to cognitive and post-structuralist theories; we find the same basic explanation of memory’s function also in recent neurological evolutionary theory, which stresses that memory’s primary role is adaptive (Wimber et al., 2015)—adaptation, ideology, and coherence being parallel notions identified by three different disciplines (neurology, cultural theory, and cognitive psychology) to express the same basic understanding that memory’s primary purpose is to provide continuity. Memory, in other words, is the glue that can be adapted to many different ends.

After the above explanation of what constitutes a threshold for a unified theory of forgetting, I can also explain why I disagree with Scott Timcke’s reading of Connerton’s article, which defends Connerton by alleging that his critics did not understand the political importance of his types. As I think I have demonstrated, they did understand this very well, but in a way that is categorically different from how Connerton understands politics, which he treats as an art of manipulation. The individual/collective distinction that organizes Timcke’s defense of Connerton is not an operative division at all where memory processes are concerned, and that is the chief objection made by Connerton’s scientific critics. Whereas Timcke (2013) understands the responses to be “committed to radical methodological individualism; hence their axiomatic investigative principles blind them to the politically situated nature of memory” (p. 376), the scientists assume the primacy of what in post-structuralist terms is called ideology over the individual, which itself explains how an individual represents or repeats collective, often unconscious, assumptions. The critics thus shift the emphasis from the erased content (which is what individuals usually notice) to the processes and relations through which the reconciliation between and within “me” and “us” is accomplished and maintained. As I have suggested already, the individual/collective is also no longer a dividing line between scientific and cultural approaches, as it was until recently, since scientists (at least the leading scholars mentioned here) readily accept memory’s ideological, that is collectivistic, role as primary.

Connerton

I want now to return to Connerton’s (2008) “Seven Types of Forgetting” to cover what I haven’t thus far and explicitly round out a critique of his approach to memory.

The goal of Connerton’s (2008) article is “to disentangle the different types of acts that cluster together under the single term ‘to forget’” (p. 59). He does this to counter the commonly held view that “remembering and commemorating is usually a virtue and that forgetting is necessarily a failing” (p. 59). But, as he attempts to make his contribution, he repeats another basic assumption about forgetting that he happens to share with the scholars of cultural memory whose narrow views he is trying to criticize. Connerton, too, holds that forgetting is a negative process by which a presence is made less present or entirely absent. And so, while in his approach forgetting is rescued from being a failing, it is still defined in terms of what it does to a presence (it erases or omits). The result is that the seven types of forgetting can be more precisely described as types of omission of a prior presence.

Six of the seven types are explicitly identified as omissions, most containing a synonym for it in their name: repressive erasure, structural amnesia, forgetting as planned obsolescence, forgetting as humiliated silence, forgetting as annulment, and prescriptive forgetting.

In the seventh type—forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity—forgetting is the omission that precedes the formation of identity and constitutes a cause for a future organization.

Connerton thus perpetuates a way of thinking common in the cultural studies of forgetting—we find it, for instance, in the seminal collection of poems titled Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forché (1993). It is an ideology that prefers presence over absence and is in general aimed at undoing or preventing forgetting, or using forgetting as a negation to make a moral or political point. Connerton may indeed show that forgetting is not necessarily a failing or a failure, but he still maintains that it matters first because it is a form of erasure, often morally corrupt and politically unacceptable.

Negations are what they are only in a relative sense, depending on the system that defines the assessment tools and expectations. Connerton has to employ a preset system of values—again, a presence—in order even to detect that there is forgetting. The most readily available such system is, of course, morality, which provides the connections between, and the common ground for, all seven types of forgetting, which then become types of moral issues associated with certain attempts at erasure.

This dependence on the moral theory itself suggests that in the cultural studies represented by Connerton’s “Seven Types of Forgetting,” there is no theory of forgetting; there is, instead, a moral theory of what is (or is not) left out. His underlying attitude is one of moral outrage, and his first goal is not a close understanding of forgetting but making a point about unacceptable omissions.

I call it a moral theory, and not a political or ethical theory, since Connerton’s article says nothing about the structural importance of ideology or relations to alterity, which political theory and an ethical theory would have to include. Indeed, discussion of ideology and alterity (or otherness) does not appear in his article in any form. Perhaps a different title like “Seven Types of Omission” would be more suitable for the essay, demonstrating kinds of exclusions (intentional or not) that can have cultural and moral importance.

The most recent example of the same approach to forgetting can be found in Douwe Draaisma’s (2015) Forgetting. The project is most unfortunate since it claims to sum up the latest work on the subject and yet fails to include the concept of forgetting as replacement, which is the direction that the science of forgetting—as we have seen in the previous discussion—has been exploring for at least a decade, assuming that substitution is the underlying process behind forms of negation. Draaisma’s goal, similar to Connerton’s, is to complicate an understanding of forgetting as a failure, and so he focuses on the more complex case of forgetting in remembering (a negation in and through what is retained). He thus makes his case for a wider understanding of forgetting only to reiterate another commonly held misconception, as he argues that forgetting in remembering takes place as a negation (of some content) or as an omission through selection (of, again, some content) and does not tackle the underlying process of substitution that is present in both negation and selection.

Draaisma’s shortcoming is perhaps most obvious in the way he treats “cryptomnesia” or hidden memory—when a forgotten memory returns but is not recognized as memory and can lead to “unconscious plagiarism.” Draaisma does not notice that “cryptomnesia” is a form of replacement and treats it as a variant concoction of forgetting (as omission) and remembering, explaining it as what happens when you “mix just enough forgetting with remembering at just the right moment, such that the memory concerned does not disappear but is no longer recognized as a memory” (Draaisma, 2015: 7). Neither the process of substitution nor the replacement play any part in the theoretical apparatus employed in his book, which is perhaps too heavy on anecdotes. So, once again, work offers a theory of omission that is supposed to pass as a theory of forgetting.

We can go on. There are many examples of cultural studies works on omission that see forgetting as a negation. But perhaps it is more important to sum up the difference between a theory of forgetting as negation and omission and a theory of substitution. In addition to what we have said above, from the standpoint of post-structuralist cultural theory, the two are different in how they understand meaning and interpretation. Connerton focuses on the result of the process and on the significance of the information that is forgotten, which itself is indexed against the full presence of specific data that was previously available. The approach’s orientation is toward the past, and the value of particular memories, the meaning, and importance of their omission are all decided by a comparison to an earlier now-moment. The forgotten is, then, seen only in respect to how it contributes to a specific, predetermined context (and not how it shapes or reorganizes or even destabilizes a context we want to impose on it). And finally for our discussion here, for this understanding there is a more or less independent agency—a “me”—that does the remembering and forgetting so much so that, as in Draaisma’s book, authors think of forgetting as an art or a skill. It is something we can potentially master (and not something that can redefine the subject).

In contrast, in a post-structuralist understanding, memory is the structure that adjusts the subject to provide a provisional cohesion and unity with a goal of more optimal functioning. This functioning itself, again and again, repositions the subject and prepares the person and the collective for future memory. The understanding is well represented in Brown and Reavey’s notion of “managed accessibility,” which assumes—somewhat along the lines of Freud’s (1955a: 80) untranslatable phrase Wo Es war, soll Ich warden (New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis)—that the meaning of memory is open to future changes whose goal is to rearticulate the past and show what has happened in a different light so that at a later moment the subject will experience what was once traumatic in a new way. This with a proviso that managed accessibility is not to be understood as taking place in one critical event staged in a psychologist’s office but a process that is going on in the mind, in some fashion, all the time.

Connerton comes closest to post-structuralism in his last, seventh type of forgetting when he speaks of the effect of forgetting on future identity. His examples include post–Second World War Germany, for which he suggests the following:

We should perhaps view the reconstruction of [German] cities as something over and beyond the achievement of an economic miracle. It meant the literal covering over, the physical effacement, of all these visible signs of emotional destruction. In this sense, the German people after 1945 can be seen to have been engaged not only in replacing one destroyed material fabric with a new one, but as engaged in the wholesale process of covering up their most recent past, the signs of their wounds; their economic miracle, in other words, was a form of forgetting, an ef-facement of grievous memory traces. (Connerton, 2008: 68)

But even this kind of forgetting is a form of wound one suffers, as becomes obvious from the term Connerton uses for it, calling it “humiliated silence.” Forgetting is, once again, presented as damage (in respect to the self) whose significance can be best determined in moral terms like shame.

For post-structuralist theory, the German trauma noted by Connerton would be understood as no truer than the “miracle” narrative. Indeed, the two accounts enhance one another, trauma because of a miracle AND miracle because of a trauma, as a form of working through it. The point of such an explanation would be that there is neither definitive forgetting nor a simple miracle and that the two narratives—trauma/miracle—can in the case of Germany (but not universally, in other contexts) supplement as well as complement one another. Such a view would, further, help explain why Germany has gone further than other major Second World War powers—specifically, Japan (atrocities against the Chinese and Koreans) and the United States (slavery, genocide of Native Americans)—in acknowledging its past crimes and offering some form of restitution, such as its reparations to the state of Israel Germany signed in 1952, despite their similar economic success (Barkan 2000).

Conclusion

As I hope to have demonstrated in this article, the study of forgetting has an interesting future since it seems that two of the most promising strands of memory studies—post-structuralism and experimental and cognitive psychology—share common assumptions. They are both—when seen from a Lévi-Straussian or Lacanian perspective—successors to Freud, whom they interpret freely and creatively, taking the structure, supplementarity, and futurity of memory as defining characteristics. Supplementarity—or the notion that an original is only an effect, not a source or a cause—could be among the categories we can use in developing our contemporary decentralized views on memory. In adding it to their conceptual apparatus (already informed by context, relationality, fluid boundaries, etc.), a cognitive scientist could perhaps make an additional step in the deconstruction of their classical approach—a step that would logically follow their current trajectory since it already seems implied. For instance, Brown and Reavey’s (2015: 2) notion of “irreversibility” with which their Vital Memory opens could be further developed with an additional assumption that even irreversible memory is a result of continuous layering and repetition—a result, in Derridean vocabulary, of inscription and supplementation. The memory that we commonly call indelible and life-defining—vital in Brown and Reavey’s sense—is not unchangeable in the sense in which a diamond kept in a box is because it does not change at the rate we can readily record. Rather, the post-structuralist theory would suggest that vital memory is unchangeable in a very different sense: because it is reinstated as central to an individual’s experience over and over and over again. It is reaffirmed as the sources of the context that determines the meaning of other memories and, indeed, who that individual is.

Vital memory is, in other words, unchangeable because of the structural role in identity creation, and not because of any of its specific qualities or content (omission, etc.). That repetition may seem “literally” the same as it does to Cathy Caruth (1996) in her seminal cultural study on traumatic memory, titled Unclaimed Experience, but it is a repetition of—or a simulation of—sameness, and not a presence that is repeated identically. Because it is indelible in this latter sense, traumatic memory can be worked through, and access to it can be managed, improving subject’s well-being.

In providing the above explanations—in linking cognitive science to a structuralist theory and showing how cultural theory can improve its understanding of forgetting—I hope to have shown what the common, interdisciplinary ground for research on memory consists of; what the preconditions for the cultural study of memory to become scientifically relevant are; and how cultural study of memory can provide useful explanations of specific theoretical concepts that would in some way aid cognitive research.