RELATED TERMS: Remembering: Mnemotechne, Mnemonics and Memory; [Of] Grammatography; Exosomatisation
Design practices and designed artefacts may be understood in the context of the discussion of hypomnesis, the weakening of memory, and hypermnesis, the strengthening of memory or the making of an unusually poignant and accurate memory of the past. In Platonic language the relation between memory and technics are discussed in terms of anamnesis, hypomnesis and hypomnemata. The term hypomnemata, which derives from Plato, might also be translated as
‘inscriptions’. Hypomnemata may also be thought of as a writing of the self.
As Louis Armand and Arthur Bradley (2006) explain,
“In the Meno and other texts, Plato institutes a now infamous opposition between the Socratic “recollection” of the immortal soul, called ἀνάμνησις (anamnēsis), and the artificial or technical supplement to memory, called ὑπόμνησις (hypomnēsis). It is with this entirely unprecedented opposition that western metaphysics and, arguably, western philosophy more generally, comes into existence. To Plato’s way of thinking, thought is nothing other than the act of the immortal soul remembering itself once again.”
Jacques Derrida, for example, defined James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as hypermnesic machines that condense or quote a whole culture. By doing so, these all-encompassing books play dangerously with an unmoored historicism. They also modify our reading habits. As Rabate (2011) notes,
“Reading these texts we discover that we are being read by them, we have been read in advance by the author, traversed by Joyce’s encyclopedic culture. Stephen Dedalus spoke of Shakespeare as the father of his grandfather and his own grandson, presenting him as the paradigm of the self-generating artist.”
The question of hypomnesis is raised by Derrida in Of Grammatology and is developed subsequently by Bernard Stiegler (2006; 2020). Derrida (1976: 91) writes that,
“Now, it is precisely by pointing out, as we shall see, that the pharmakon of writing is good for hypomnesis (re-memoration, recollection, consignation) and not for the mneme (living, knowing memory) that Thamus, in the Phaedrus, condemns it as being of little worth.”
Derrida (1976: 110) continues,
“Whence the pharmakon’s two misdeeds: it dulls the memory, and if it is of any assistance at all, it is not for the mneme but for hypomnesis. Instead of quickening life in the original, “in person,” the pharmakon can at best only restore its monuments. It is a debilitating poison for memory, but a remedy or tonic for its external signs, its symptoms, with everything that this word can connote in Greek: an empirical, contingent, superficial event, generally a fall or collapse, distinguishing itself like an index from whatever it is pointing to.”
Thus, it could be argued analogously, substituting ‘design’ for ‘writing’ in Derrida’s text, that design, a mnemonic means, supplants good memory, spontaneous memory, and therefore signifies forgetfulness because it is a mediation and the departure of the ‘logos’ from itself.
“Writing, a mnemotechnic means, supplanting good memory, spontaneous memory, signifies forgetfulness. It is exactly what Plato said in the Phaedrus, comparing writing to speech as hypomnesis to mnémè, the auxilliary aide-mémoire to the living memory. Forgetfulness because it is a mediation and the departure of the logos from itself. Without writing, the latter would remain in itself. Writing is the dissimulation of the natural, primary, and immediate presence of sense to the soul within the logos.” (Derrida, 1976: 37)
Rather that simply ‘good’ memory or ‘bad’ memory, it may be preferable to acknowledge that there are different kinds of memory, for example, as distinguished by Stiegler (2020): species memory, ethnic memory and artificial memory. Design, initially artificial or artifactual in character, may open to species memory and ethnic memory as an element in the inscribing, encoding and interweaving of embodied, embedded, extended and enactive intelligence(s).
References
Armand, L. and Bradley, A. (eds) (2006) Technicity. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia.
Derrida, J. (1976) Of grammatology. Translated by G. C. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rabate, J.-M. (2011) ‘The Joyce of French Theory’, in Brown, R. (ed.) A Companion to James Joyce. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Stiegler, B. (2006) ‘Nanomutations, hypomnemata and grammatisation’, Ars Industrialis. Available at: https://arsindustrialis.org/node/2937 (Accessed: 16 October 2021).
Stiegler, B. (2020) ‘Elements for a general organology’, Derrida Today, 13(1), pp. 72–94. doi: 10.3366/DRT.2020.0220.
Incomplete ... 