Memory and Appetite in the Era of Emotional Synchronization
Against the Community of Forgetfulness
Is it a coincidence that at the same time left wing street protestors were knocking down statues of historical figures that the US elected a dementia patient as the president? The president of what? I can’t remember. The ‘free’ world? Democracy? The end of point of Western enlightenment? Who knows? During Covid, my brain was zapped with fear pornography from both news outlets and enforced exposure (and enclosure) with already neurotic relatives, that I’m still recovering from an atrophy of memory muscles. This makes sense, after all. Fear overrides composure—and composure is often what memory is conditioned on. Without the ability to remember to do something, catastrophe can ensue. In battle, remember to not leave your post. In surgery, remember which section to remove and which to leave in there. Men with romantic partners who also happen to be identical twins likely have the best memory of all. When danger rears its head, memory takes on a different form to ordinary peace-time life.
The constant repetitive messaging of public health services during pandemics reinforces this fact. We needed to remember to wash our hands, keep distances and so on. Not because we are bad people and need to be told off, rather, because peace time allows for memory lapses in ways which crisis time, does not. The funny thing— which I will try to elucidate—is that the manner of crisis response that the modern world engages in, seems to paradoxically be a form of memory loss; perhaps this was why during a time of constant repetitive public health messaging designed around reminding, that the 2020 period saw a dementia patient take the white house, street protestors were destroying historical monuments (memory) with no apparent ideological justification for doing so—and not to mention the fact that we tolerated about two years of being lied to on a continuous basis, too forgetful to even recall what point was made by one of our leaders last month, which they have now already contradicted. The last two years have been exemplars in political memory loss.
This phenomenon goes far beyond mere censorship or loss of record to bare historical facts. It seems to be a deeply phenomenological issue in which the cause and effect of actions are being nullified. For example, smoking E-cigarettes allows one to smoke without the health scare which reminds one of their bad habit. Technological advances in contraception have nullified the reminder of bad erotic decisions (like diseases or unwanted pregnancies). The replacement of chemical drugs which can harm the user’s body with digital hits of dopamine through social media addictions, is a transition which sees technology out pace the bad habits of humans for the end of freeing them from ever having to form good habits. It’s not just labour that gets automated with technology. It is also the need to understand what actions have what consequences and then act accordingly to some basic moral principle, in accordance to this reality.
If your actions no longer have consequences—at least ones that are able to become apparent to you—then why would these habits ever need to be thought about. What gets lost here is the self-transformative power of humans which enables them to overcome their conditions through awareness of the impact of those conditions. Awareness that smoking was killing people, that radiation causes cancer, that you should be selective with who you wish to procreate with, or all that you cherish in life could be put at risk. The reason it’s good for a child to get hurt when they grab a thorn bush by its stem is because they learn something about the nature of thorn bushes (and themselves). Not anymore! Just erase the connection between cause and effect and we can consume and produce until our hearts are content; all now freed from the pesky phenomena of consequences.
Far more than just historical fact is being erased in the culture of revisionist cancel culture—but also the reality of our actions. Virilio called this phase of techno-scientific modernity, philofolly. ‘'a love of what was repressed as radically unimaginable, whereby the insane nature of our acts would not only stop consciously worrying us, but would thrill us and captivate us'. Roughly speaking, any ability to cognate the relationship between events and activity becomes impenetrable. We wander blindly, walking into sharp objects that we ourselves have built. Progress becomes a (really titillating)boobie-trap, rather than a grounding of knowledge.
Referring back to the militant dementia of the first year of the 2020s—those angsty pyromaniacs with their targets set on Abraham Lincoln statues and 17th century sculptures, cared nothing about racism—nor were they an expression of radical politics—but rather just an expression of an enforced memory loss where the reference point of yesterday, must be dissolved. Lost citizens with amnesia, after all, are better consumers (and test subjects for medical and social experimentation) than ones capable of that thing which memory allows for : learning!
Emotional Synchronicity
Much of Virilio’s work centres on the relationship between catastrophes and public emotion. We moved from the age of standardized opinion to the era of synchronized emotion, as he so often asserts. (likely somewhere during the ‘end of history’ and turn of the millennium). The bourgeois era relied far more on rote learning in order to both standardize thought for the sake of public conformity—but also to exercise memory. Good memory as a precondition for good learning—good learning as a precondition for good citizenry, we could say.
The techno-capitalist era of this century is rather one where therapeutic conformity is the base line for efficient public functioning. Our emotions are managed by erasing the contradiction and conflicts which the experiences of last week might stir up. This was especially evident in the #metoo years where we were told to ‘believe all women’. Why? Because the factual reality of events and bad decisions made by fame hungry young actresses (and some actors), which led to feelings of shame and unfulfillment, was too much of a comprehensible story to be said out loud.
Instead, the reaction was to emotionally blackmail anyone who tried to remember yesterday. Of course, those like Harvey Weinstein are undoubtedly exploitative. However, the excessive moralizing over ordinary people’s minor discrepancies showed memory loss was the motivation behind the constant reporting on these Hollywood scandals. For many people living lives which are incomprehensibly different to that of famous Hollywood actresses and producers, they were told that, while at the time, their memory of a slightly inappropriate remark or action at a college party or workplace was brushed off easily—now in the hindsight of dementia patients, we have decided that this was in fact a crime against humanity. Any emotional durability you displayed at the time was in fact your atavistic bigotry or victim tolerance, on full display.
While the bourgeois formation of an ethical subject was based on building upon memory and experience, the 21st century model based on emotional conformity is a morality based on memory loss. You must mistrust your experiences of yesterday. If your experience of yesterday contradicts the tenants of the propaganda of today— you must’ve been under some spell at the time, so we are told.
The potential consequences for how the legal system can function under such conditions of emotional extortion and delusion, was simply ignored by our intelligentsia class. The law based on empirical evidence of guilt became suspect, not so much for the sake of women, but rather for the sake of universal memory loss. Emotional conformity requires us to forget—and that was supposed to also include the good memory of citizens which the legal system requires to function.
One reason liberal societies are falling apart is that they treat violent aggression as something which has to be punished at all costs, while they treat lying as if impolite. The enlightenment taught us that lying is synonymous with misinformation ( a false fact). Yet, lying also expresses itself through forgetting about the truth. When somebody lies about somebody else in a liberal society, the truth is never asserted, we are expected to just 'forget' about the lie.
Yet, in order to sustain this state of mass forgetfullness, it’s not so easy to just create a world deprived of truth (an injustice). Justice is never totally gone. It always exists in potentiality. In order to sustain a world of nihilistic dementia patients, we also need scape goats, and enforced episodes of memory loss. If your neighbour lies about you and this lie destroys your life, your neighbour will not be punished, just dismissed. In this sense justice for the injured party who has already endured the material consequences of the lie, never gets justice. The lie may be forgotten, but what is harder to forget is the liar. But, out of prudish fear of the kinds of conflicts which were common in older societies that actually took honour and justice seriously, we insist to just forget (about the lie). In this sense, for liberalism, justice is simply memory loss.
Is this tenant of liberal conflict management not Assange’ greatest crime. We all knew since Vietnam and Hiroshima that the US military was a brutal and corrupt organization. Assange didn’t expose the truth, he reminded us of it.
Nietzsche’s Blind Spot
This is all simply an extension of the paradoxical manner in which emotional memory operates within modern propaganda systems. I recently saw a sign on a London bus alluding to the terrorist attacks referred to as 7/7. It was strangely asking us to remember the event; memorializing it into public memory. It seems we are only allowed to remember when it has the end of provoking fear, and therefore breaking our composure—and so, causes forgetfulness, itself. When taken on the scale of public information projects (activism, health campaigns or security awareness propaganda), it all stems from the logic of this: We must constantly remember to be scared. Remember to be scared, so that you can remember to forget.
As much as I admire most of the works of Nietzsche, he was somewhat misguided in one regard. Those familiar with his work Genealogy of Morals will know that one of the key themes he tackles is the manner in which morality formed in the Pagan-Christian spiritual turn. The birth of ressentiment was the psycho-political driving force behind this turn. Ressentiment is often roughly described as a sort of rage which remains repressed and therefore latent. All the kindness of priests is underwritten with the fantasy of aggression, which a belief in a simplistic duality of eternal bliss vs eternal damnation, facilitates. Priests don’t just forget about those who ‘caused’ them harm because they have great memories bound by the energy and purpose of spitefulness!
Priests kept their egotism and their vengefulness inside, and did not express it outside as the warrior classes did. Nietzsche’s great contribution is often unnoticed. Rather than a simple conservative dismissal of historical losers, Nietzsche is constantly analysing the psychological basis for physiological suffering. Those resentful priests were cursed with stomach problems and chronic ailments like headaches, body pain, and all sorts of other vague maladies. In this sense Nietzsche understood our metaphysical ideals as deeply physiological; not as reductions to biology, but things which get expressed through the body. Our beliefs are as somatic as they are metaphysical. In this sense he is proven right today when the propaganda models for this century surpass the standardization of abstract opinion and move into a deeper bodily zone of feeling and impulse, of which pharmacology has taken up the managerial rule over.
This is also not to mention the vast pharmacological infrastructure which has cropped up to sustain the psycho-somatic functioning of (well lets face it) deeply unwell modern people. Truth (if Nietzsche would agree on such a term), is as much in the body as the mind. Even more so, memory lies in the body. A need for vengeance, for example, cannot be rationalized away. It remains in the body, revealing itself through physiological suffering. Today’s world seems to prove him right— and this is likely why the pedagogical and rational standards of bourgeois values have been thrown aside for pharmacological and technical emotional management models.(for example mass use of psychotropics and mass addiction to instant entertainment)
What Nietzsche did not foresee, however, was the danger of this repressed subject’s opposite: the expressionistic and indulgent consumer who cannot hold onto his feelings for long enough get a grasp of them. There is an implicit desire to forget, which stems from this critique of the ‘ascetic ideal’ embodied in the priest. ‘If only we could just immediately express—always—wouldn’t the world be free of this sickening force?’, we could ask. The question of memory complicates this.
Think about the idea of an ascetic-ideal which represses impulse by way of an overactive memory of harm or grievance. While disingenuous aggression is certainly less noble than transparent and honourable challenge(certainly and very much less noble)—the danger becomes a world of those who are so readily reactive to every stimulant that they lose total control; and then start demanding the total cmnd/cntrl mechanisms of health and safety cults which then manage dissatisfaction and ideological conflict through memory loss.
Our modern ‘hedonist’ is beyond piety. He is absolutely expressionistic, self obsessed and neurotic at the same time. Did we not see this paradox in the ‘liberation’ of disabilities, of which Covid-obsessed hypochondriacs embodied with their neurosis dressed up in the aesthetics of civil rights liberation? How ‘bravely’ their self-interested hypochondria was on display! A contradiction which went unnoticed. The demand of the newly empowered hypochondriacs of the health and safety complex is based on the value of people reacting immediately to anything such as fear, instantly and without discipline. This is supposedly ‘liberating’ for them.
The consequences of the immediate constant release of energy, is that it assumes that the releasing subject is releasing and not just preforming. Most of our ‘expression’ is simply another performative form of repression; the emotional pornography of our time. Taking my favourite example of Zizek’s observation that we are always supplementing our consumption with indulgences: for example paying a bit extra for a Star Bucks coffee to give to a charity, just to appease our guilt, so that we can consume more efficiently instead of sitting around on that inner conflict and thinking about what could really be done about it—if anything. This shows that immediate release of that conflicted energy (in this case guilt) can be easily co-opted by mechanisms which manage emotion for the vulgar sake of emotional conformity and economic efficiency.
Mark Fischer can be called up here, too. His use of hauntology could be seen as the demand to ‘let go’ of the past so that we can create a future anew. We are haunted, but we ‘should’ just forget about these ghosts and indulge in the sublime forgetfulness of progress, we are told. Is this sublime state of forgetfulness really what it’s cracked up to be? Is it so easy (or noble) to just forget? Or is this wish to do so simply a state of nihilism under a different guise?
The love of memory loss for sake of emotional conformity and peace (good grounds for commercial activity) means that many complex human behaviours have been cast into the sin bin of the ‘pathological’ or the ‘irrational’ of which memory is the key component. For example, ascetic self denial might be seen as superstitious or repressive, yet this constant willingness to discomfort and privation, could easily be a manner of heroic recalling; recalling God or recalling, reminding ourselves of a lack of justice here and now.
The nation usually forms its need for memory of itself as a form of recognition of its own potential freedom. This is often in the light of regular bouts of domination by a larger force. In the Iliad—the furthest thing from the repressed weaklings Nietzsche depicts in GOM—even Achilles must ‘digest his cholos’. Cholos being a word for a sort of deep bodily rage. When Agamemnon takes Bresies from him, his impulse to kill him is negotiated with by Athena who requests restraint. She is there, not to manipulate Achilles on behalf of Agamemnon, or convince him his passivity is a virtue. Rather, her divine appearance is there to remind him of his greatness which exceeds the reactive feelings of the moment. This long term direction which the energy of his rage is pulling him towards, is of course, his fate. His Rage takes on a higher form, not be so easily expressed at the cheaper moment of a grievance with Agememnon’s selfishness. In other words, Fate is not just impulsive anger towards tragedy. It is also the necessary restraint in patience of the right moment.
In summary, there is a deep connection between the notion of a last man, societies that prioritise appetitive desires (consumerism) and memory. One which we are likely only beginning to realize we must tackle with. The institutional rot we see today can be reflected in this issue, also.
The total degradation of learning institutions like universities has come about as a result of memory loss(who’s job it is to keep records and continuously teach (remind) us of a history of literature, culture, philosophy, social sciences and so on.) These intuitions have become credentializing services for the professional class, and so have become so destructive because it leaves a void in the duty of memory, open and unrecognized. The cancellation and removal of texts which may ‘offend’ (i.e remind) us, is simply the disavowal of this duty for the sake of cheap rotations of industry recruitment.
Social media also rests on the cowardice of appetitive memory loss. Paradoxically, everything is forgotten, changing to ever fluttering fads and current ‘events’ streams, which passes out the last like a melting snowman in March. ‘All that is solid melts into air’, Marx once said. It’s not just money that poses as this air, but dopamine hits and infotainment, also; all designed to keep a record for the sake of surveillance or fear, yet erase memory by way of your ability to learn, or to seek justice.