The Technical Mediation of Public Memory
August 25, 2020
The aim of this post is to pull together a few distinct threads that have been converging for me recently on the topics of media, authority and temporality. I’ll start where I mean to end—with a quote from Anthony Wilden, writing of George Orwell’s portrayal of the perils of mass media:
In Nineteen Eight-Four, published 1949, Orwell gave us what I think is best called the Media Rule. It reminds us that one of the greatest of television’s threats to personal and public sanity has to do with history.
In print and image, a book is a medium, message, and memory. And hundreds of movies of the past fifty years can still be seen through repertory theatres, film clubs, night school courses, and of course and especially through television and videocassette, by which the medium does great service. But television as television, television as the most subtle and powerful source of information, education, and ideology in history, is here today, gone tomorrow. Television is a medium that leaves behind no written record, no visible artefacts, no historical trace, no publicly available memory.
The Media Rule: Those who control the present control the past. Those who control the past control the future. (Wilden, 1987, pp. 62-63)
Since the mid 2000’s I’ve been a member of a forum called psymusic UK. This is the primary forum of the UK’s psychedelic trance community, a place where people trade info about free parties, share technical music production know-how, give feedback on each other’s tunes, argue about conspiracy theories and hallucinogens, and moan about how the scene is not as good as it used to be. When I first starting lurking the forum was vibrant, the virtual focal point of a real world community and hotbed of scene drama.
A few years later the rise of Facebook saw a mass emigration from the forum, with many of the discussions in the old subforums moving into specialist FB groups. At the time there were many who said this was bad news, for a sober technical reason: Facebook has no memory. Its timeline is unsearchable; content fades rapidly into an indeterminate past. Rather than conversations developing over time, their first acts repeat. Instead of collaborating on a public repository of technical knowledge, individuals compete for clout by racing to answer the same endlessly recurring questions. Even when people explicitly try to avoid these behaviours the platform mechanics don’t support much else, and systemically amplify the voices of bad apples.
What was curious was that no matter how many times this argument was made and understood, it did nothing to stem to the migration. Everyone seemed to agree that Facebook was an inferior medium, but somehow ended up there anyway. What has also been curious is that since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic there has a been a resurgence of forum activity. What this suggests to me is that appetite for the forum may have more to do with resources than preferences. It may be generally understood as the preferred community platform, all things being equal, but it comes at a cost in time and energy that may not be payable, once all things are considered. I would speculate that this cost is represented by the very same thing that makes it a good community platform, namely its capacity to retain a public memory. The exercise of this capacity demands a certain labour from its members, as it is ultimately they who are responsible for maintaining this memory bank. Engagement with this kind of platform therefore requires more effort than a platform like Facebook, precisely because it is a successful community platform.
The seduction of a platform like Facebook is that it provides many of the appearances of a community medium while absolving its users of the labour demanded by an actual community. This is the production of public memory, the labour of holding the new accountable to the old. In a medium that does not retain a memory these distinctions haze over, with the content space increasingly dominated by repetition and permutations of the familiar, a kind of free-floating sociality abstracted away from both the labour and the opportunity of concrete community.
While these points may well be understood by individuals, once economic constraint and time-pressure enters the picture it may make little difference. Facebook may end up being the rational preference, not because anyone wants it but because it is the least bad option available once constraints are taken into account. This is similar to the point that it can be often be expensive to be poor, a point placed in the mouth of Watch commander Vimes by Terry Pratchett in this snippet sent to me recently by a friend:
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots costs fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
If it is recognised that community requires social labour, and that the availability of this labour is squeezed by factors such as huge rents, precarious incomes, the capture of decision making energy by intrusive marketing, etc, then the suction of online services offering labour-cheap quasi-sociality starts to make sense. Facebook is the shitty pair of boots.
The failure of public memory was a central theme for Mark Fisher, who built on Fredric Jameson’s observation that the principle consequence of the reconfiguration of the cultural sphere around commodity exchange, characteristic of late capitalism, is dyschronia—a dysfunction in our collective ability to apply temporal concepts. This is theorised as a breach in the linearity of cultural time, a collapse of historicity which makes everything seem to coincide with everything else. To illustrate this Fisher pointed to the ubiquity of anachronism in 21st century culture, a prevalent bland retroism which doesn’t take inspiration from past eras so much as quote them as off-the-shelf aesthetics, each more or less interchangeable with all others. That 21st culture is so often little more than a hi-res repackaging of 20th century culture is thus explained as a kind of unmooring of cultural time from concrete world time. The cultural emblems of the past, “serenely liberated from the pressures of historical becoming, can now be periodically buffed up by new technology.” (Fisher, 2013, p. 11)
What exactly are the pressures of historical becoming? It seems to me that answering this question requires digging in a few places that Fisher himself did not place much emphasis. One of these concerns understanding the question of historical becoming as a question about intertemporal authority structures.1 Another concerns the mediation of such structures, and the role that technical platforms play in shaping and masking them. The contrast between forums and social media can illuminate both of these aspects, and help us to see that a key element of Jamesonian dyschronia is the migration of Human OS onto a machine with near infinite RAM but no hard drive—a migration which begins as a symptom of an underlying shift in cultural logic but quickly morphs into an amplifying cause as its effects are fed back into the process.
The point about authority structures, or the relationship between temporality and normativity, has recently been impressed on me from two directions: the later Wittgenstein’s comments on rule-following, which I have written about previously, and an argument attributed to Hegel and his chapter on Sense-Certainty (Hegel, 2018, pp. 60-68), which I have encountered primarily through Robert Brandom’s reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Brandom, 2019).
Hegel’s main concern in this chapter was to discredit the empiricist claim that sensuous experience can provide a foundation for knowledge, i.e. that there is a category of experientially given truths from which all other truths can be inferred. This claim is usually cashed out via the idea that it should be possible to give a pure description of how things appear which takes on no ontological commitments concerning how they actually are. This mines the intuition that “seeming” is a minimal kind of knowing that precludes the possibility of being wrong (just as “trying” is a minimal kind of doing that precludes the possibility of failure). Hegel challenges this intuition by arguing that any cognitive move that fixes the content of an appearance implicitly deploys a conceptual apparatus that presupposes a reality behind it.
Hegel’s line of thought considers the most minimal such move imaginable: the kind of bare noticing represented linguistically by demonstrative pronouns such as this, now, and here. A demonstrative used alone does no more than pick out a particular determination of present experience. Hegel’s critique is that to make sense of even this noncommittal “picking out” it must already be the case that it be possible to refer back later to whatever is picked out. If it wasn’t, then it could not be said that we are doing anything at all when we use a demonstrative. Thus Hegel claims that deixis—the capacity to pick out a determination of the present—depends on anaphora—the capacity to recollectively reference a determination picked out in prior experience. For Hegel the implicit presupposition of an anaphoric apparatus implies a commitment to precisely the ontological depth denied by the empiricist, since what he takes us to mean by an “object” is just that which tracks incompatibilities across time—that which holds present experience accountable to past experience, thereby (and only thereby) endowing it with determinate content (Brandom, 2019, pp. 124-130).
For the purposes of the present discussion, what is important about this is the dependence relation between the content of the present and an apparatus of temporal retention. Returning to Facebook, let us imagine that someone has—for the umpteenth time—posted a question about what EQ settings they should be using to get their kick drum to sit right with the bassline. Any longtime group members will know that this question has been answered many times before, and will probably say so sarcastically. But the act of saying so cannot carry any meaningful authority, since Facebook does not make it easy to either find or link to the relevant prior thread in that context. As far as the public discourse of the group is concerned, it might as well not have happened. The inability to fix reference to past content means that the question “is this the same request for advice?” ceases in practice to have a publicly determinable answer, even though every individual in the group knows that it does and it is.
Perhaps a better example with which to make this point is one which, while I have not seen explicit links made with Jameson’s and Fisher’s concerns, is clearly closely related to them: the situation widely known as “post-truth”. This situation can be seen as a certain crisis of authority, namely of the authority historically granted to media and state institutions to provide canonical narratives of events. The concept of “narrative” contains the temporal dimension of this structure, the authority of institutions entailing a corresponding responsibility to frame events in a manner which renders them consistent with framings of past events and the motives of relevant actors. The increased capture of these institutions by private interests has undermined the trust placed in them to provide narrative consistency. This failure of trust pans out through multiple small suspected insincerities, such as when journalists are seen as sharing economic interests with the politicians they are supposed to be holding accountable, or sensational portrayals of dramatic events crowd out higher-impact but less eye-catching, slowly evolving news stories. The failure of trust in institutions represents a de facto failure of the public memory they were supposed to be safeguarding, experienced consequently—according to the Hegelian logic glossed by Brandom as the presupposition of anaphora by deixis—as a seepage of determination from the present. When the past commands no public authority over the present, global actors are free at any given moment to reinterpret past events and commitments to align with their present interests.
The Media Rule: Those who control the present control the past. Those who control the past control the future.
Without a retentional framework, the technical structures we use to communicate are inherently incapable of holding the content of the present to the tribunal of the past. Control of the present in this situation becomes a matter of taking up space within the medium, of the combinatorial flicker of rapidly generated content within familiar frames. Mark Fisher described this as the reduction of all memory to formal memory—the memory possessed by Jason Bourne, the amnesiac spy turned provocateur who, unable to base present decision making on a memory of the past, is nevertheless equipped with a set of reflexes and hardwired methodologies for navigating the apparently senseless and ahistorical circumstances he finds himself in (Fisher, 2009, p. 64). In culture and in the news media, the rational unity of content is replaced by an aesthetic unity of form: narrative coherence with brand consistency. Power in such a medium is a matter of proficiency in the techniques of framing, not in the production of valuable content (since the capacity to publicly stabilise value is the very thing that has departed).
References
- Brandom, R. (2019). A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Harvard University Press.
- Fisher, M. (2013). Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books.
- Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.
- Hegel, G. W. F. H. (2018). The Phenomenology of Spirit (T. Pinkard, Tran.). Cambridge.
- Wilden, A. (1987). The Rules are No Game: The Strategy of Communication. Routledge.
Notes
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The point about authority structures is made implicitly by Fisher in his discussion of the big Other and defence of paternalism in Capitalist Realism, but whose links with his analysis of temporality are not made explicit. ↩