Tag Archives: memory

Remembering the Immemorial

A thought occurred to me recently which I think makes an interesting position for us. If we take Jeremiah 31:34 (also quoted in Hebrews 8:24) seriously and literally, then the ‘new covenant’ (which Christian theology says is the one created through the death and resurrection of Christ) means that sins are not just forgiven but they are erased from memory. This is especially the case in the Hebrews paraphrase/quotation (less so across translations of the original passage in Jeremiah). God promises to ‘remember their sins no more’. This is more than just forgetting or ignoring them; it is an active erasure from memory.

This story seem to be similar to the plot of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s an excellent film, but I’ll give a short summary of the plot for readers who have not seen it. The film begins with a couple (Joel, played by Jim Carrey, and Clementine, played by Kate Winslet) who has hit rock bottom in their relationship. Clementine undergoes a procedure by which her entire relationship with Joel is erased from her memory. When they cross each other and Joel discovers this, he enters a state of depression and undergoes the same procedure. The bulk of the film deals with the erasure of Joel’s memories (starting with the most recent). As the erasure goes further back in time, Joel begins to lament undergoing the process because he realises that their relationship was not as bad as he thought it was. In fact, he tries to keep hold of their shared memories. Yet he is unable to remember anything about their relationship (only a meeting place). If the film was darker (which I tend to prefer in these kind of plots; the ‘original ending’ of Butterfly Effect is similar), it would have ended here with the complete erasure of their memory. However, to give the film a ‘happy’ resolution, it ends with Joel and Clementine meeting each other and discovering that they once had a relationship together. Clementine warns that it could happen again, but both are willing to give it a try again. A ‘dark’ interpretation of this would see the ending as the endless cycle of happiness–>pain–>erasure–>renewal, but the ending is too open-ended to guarantee such reading.

However, God’s erasure of sins is not the same here. The sinner remembers all of it — and this marks the transformation of sins into guilt. It’s closer to 50 First Dates than toEternal Sunshine because one party remembers it all. What we have instead is a relationship in which the human sinner bears the burden of remembering the ‘bad’ details in the relationship while God has erased them from memory. The result of this is one of (at least) two possibilities: a sense of guilt in the sinner through which she must be always penitent for her misdeeds or a twisted sense of power in which the sinner can therefore abuse God without recourse. In either situation, the God-human relationship, when seen as a normal human relationship, is an abusive one. Perhaps the best way Christian theology can become relevant for people today is by disavowing that abuse and finding other ways of relating to God.

The Problem with Identity

I’m a big fan of Sci-Fi TV. One of my current favourites is the canceled-but-still-bleeding series Dollhouse. In one of the recent episodes (2×05), there was a good segment that reveals a lot about identity construction (OK, so I think the whole series has been playing with that). So, I posted that clip to YouTube for your viewing pleasure. Before getting to the video, I want to frame the scene (which will contain spoilers).

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Second Meditation on Time

This is part 2 of 3 in the Meditations on Time series

The past as such does not exist. It is not real. The past is the history of a memory; it is the excess of one’s experience of an event. It would be inaccurate to think of this a recollecting an immutable action (one that can only be interpreted in one way for all time) because as memory is the excess of one’s experience, the experience itself is of a virtual event (i.e. an event is always mediated prior to experience). The memory of the event is always a virtual history in which one remembers what one saw (again, a mediation!). We never have unmediated access to the event (or to the object of our relations) itself.

When one writes of past events (which is all what one can write of), one is actually organising and recollecting memory in the present. The act of remembering is a repetition of an unlived future, it is the consolidation of memories into one crystal moment of eternity. We can speak of major world events such as May ’68, 9/11, Pearl Harbor, etc; however, in doing so, we are contracting a multiplicity of memories and interpreting them through other memories (e.g. events that have occurred between ‘then’ and ‘now’) to create a singular, transitory excess of experience. These memories have been long forgotten as mediated memories — metaphors understood by analogy and, to borrow a term from web technologies, ‘tagged’. There is a reason why one’s life can ‘flash in front of’ one’s eyes, and this is because memory is always incomplete and fragmented. One’s entire life does not play back in its entirety when it ‘flashes in front of’ one’s eyes; it is contracted into one crystalised moment that is never repeated.

Notes on Techno-Religion

I was involved in an ESF-sponsored workshop on technology and religion this past week. While the discussion focused on communicative technologies and media, we did drift at times beyond that. Here are some scribbles and notes of mine from the various sessions.

Mediation

Our first session started with Birgit Meyer and Bengt Kristensson Uggla. Conceiving of media as something external to religion makes questions regarding the intersection of the two unanswerable. However, if media is seen as being embedded within religion, these issues are transformed into understandable practices. Media, then, is able to mediate religious thoughts and beliefs. In this way, media become sacralised so that mediation is made immanent and the gap between and believer and the transcendent is significantly reduced. This immediacy, mitigated through semiotic ideology, denies media as media and leads to its being externalised. It may be a good idea to think of theology as a theory of mediation. Lastly, technology makes globalisation immediately local (again, mediation).

Identity

The second session was led by Siegfried Zielinski and Jan-Olav Henriksen (sorry, this one is in Norwegian). One important thing to keep in mind is that media as a generalised concept did not arise until the mid-20th century (i.e. the last 50-60 years). Communicative technologies existed prior to that (obviously), but these were particulars. Today’s globalisation is seeing the harmonisation and unification of media so that the different technologies appear seamless. Electricity has become the ‘soul’ of ‘new media’, animating it as a machine. Machines always reduce complexity and mediate between two objects. It used to be that we humans had to believe in machines in order for them to work (i.e. by turning a switch, etc); but now machines have returned the favour by believing in us to animate them (e.g. interactive games, television, etc). On the other hand, religion provides a chain of memory–however fragmented and disjointed it may be. This is mediated by technology. However, technology can create a sensory excess that creates a feeling of divine presence without that chain of memory. In other words, technology has made it possible for one to participate in a religious community without ‘really’ participating in that community (e.g. Yoga videos in YouTube that provide simple instruction without the ‘full Yoga experience’). As Zielinski noted,  one is ‘always the same, never myself’ (his own reversal of the Calvin Klein tag line ‘Always myself, never the same’).

Secularisation

The third session was presented by Ola Sigurdson, Jayne Svenungsson, and Lieven Boeve. It is quite clear that religion isn’t ‘returning’ because it never left in the first place. The ‘privatisation’ of religion has led to a loss of body and particularity as religion loses its institutional form (c.f. Olivier Roy’s Globalised Islam). This ‘private religion’ turns religion into a fetish. In fact, this new ‘personalised’ religion has transformed religious pilgrimages such that the relics now go to the people instead of the people going to the relics. Technology isn’t showing us a ‘post-secular’ world (as in a ‘return of religion’) but rather a transformation of religion in the public space, particularly in the cases of extremist religious groups which have found new solidarity and strength in the techno-globalised world.

Revolutions

The fourth session was led by Caroline Vander Stichele, Ward Blanton, and Edmund Arens. Echoing the sentiment of the first session of technology being closely tied to religion, this session dealt with looking at religious revolutions based on technological revolutions. One example is that of Yoga in the West as a practice originally separated from its Hindu roots. However, it has become its own consumer-driven religion in which one can get meditative tranquility instantly. Another example, is Augustine’s discussion of the divine postal network (e.g. messenger angels, etc) in relation to his understanding of the Roman Empire’s postal network. Religion needs to be addressed as a communicative practice of memory and narrative. The danger of a consumer-driven religion is, as I mentioned above, the kind of (private) participation without (public) participation. Religion must occur in both the public and the private sphere.

Subjectivity

The final session was led by Arne Grøn and Anne Kull. Subjectivity is the key notion to formulate the problems above (between religion and society) as it gets directly at the concept of identity construction both in relation to the world and the self. In expressing oneself, one exteriorises oneself and bridges the divide between the public and private spheres. Public life is only possibile if it acknowledges a private life as well. Religion, as a public activity, is a meta-sphere of visibility of publicised figures (i.e. private individuals). However, one should be wary to use the term ‘virtual’ in describing religion in the new media (e.g. online churches) because in one very real sense, all churches are ‘virtual’ as they represent the ‘real’ church in a locality. There must be a hermeneutics of subjectivity as it is implied by a phenomenological ontology (a la Heidegger).