From the Will to Memory to the Right to Be Forgotten

A Paradigm Shift in the Culture of Remembering

Mihai Stelian RUSU
Babe-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca
Keywords: anthropology of memory, social memory, cultural studies, memory studies,
media studies, digital humanities, history of culture, digital remembering and
forgetting, technologies of memory
Abstract: The paper grapples with the cultural implications brought about by the right
to be forgotten ruled by the European Court of Justice in May 2014. The main
argument developed at length in this paper is that we are witnessing a momentous shift
in the order of social memory, from an old-age paradigm of anamnesis characterized
by a will to memory against the background set by a default of forgetting towards a
paradigm of public amnesia characterized by a quest for privacy against an everexpanding digital memory.
E-mail: [email protected]
*
The struggle for memory as a principle of the human condition
Pace Marx, the history of all hitherto existing society can be cast as the history of
human struggle against oblivion. This mnemonic principle the individual as well as
collective struggle against oblivion has been, until recently, the thrusting force
behind peoples strive for remembrance. It is our argument that we are witnessing the
advent of a prospective swift change in the traditional order of remembrance, from the
age-old will to memory towards an amnesic regime founded upon the right to be
forgotten. Sapping the old-age mnemonic principle (the immemorial will to memory
along with the battle for posterity against oblivion) are the newly devised laws
protecting the privacy rights of individuals against being swallowed, against their will,
by the ever increasing all-encompassing digital archive. The upcoming momentous
shift from a paradigm of anamnesis towards a culture of structural amnesia was already
set in motion by the recently established right to be forgotten legislation in the
European Union. In 2010, a Spanish citizen by the name of Mario Costeja Gonzlez
lodged to the national Data Protection Agency a complaint against the Spanish
newspaper La Vanguardia, which in 1998 published in its printed edition an
announcement regarding the forced sale of a property he owned arising from social
security debts. Because a copy of the newspapers printed edition was in the meantime
digitalized, querying his name in the Google search engine listed the link associating

This work was possible due to the financial support of the Sectorial Operational Program for
Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under
the project number POSDRU/159/1.5/S/132400 with the title Young successful researchers
professional development in an international and interdisciplinary environment.

384

his name to the announcement, although the forced sale had already been concluded
years before, making the information entirely irrelevant. Costeja requested the
newspaper to remove his personal data from the archive. The same request was made
of Google. The Spanish Court referred the case to the Court of Justice of the European
Union, which eventually, in its ruling of May 13, 2014 stipulated the right to be
forgotten, according to which individuals are entitled to request search engines to
remove links containing personal information about them, if the information is
inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive.1 Although the European Court
specified that the right to be forgotten is not absolute, depending on a case-to-case
assessment, it nonetheless tipped the scale in favour of individual privacy. As of April
6, 2015, Google has received 236,214 requests and has evaluated for removal a total
number of 856,378 URLs, out of which 41.4 % (300,765) were removed while 58.6 %
(424,964) were not.2 The numbers reveal that the movement grounded in the right to be
forgotten is gaining traction, as the phenomenon is reaching critical mass. Based on
these demographics, it is the premise of this study that this ruling has far wider
consequences that exceed the juridical realm, heralding a swift change in the culture of
memory.
A caveat lector should be in place. The study should not be taken as
providing a prophetic insight into the mysterious workings of the future, as the author
of these lines does not claim any oracular prowess for his part. With Karl Popper and
Konrad Lorenz, and again contra Marx, we do believe that the future is open. Although
predictable within a margin of error with the help of scientific analysis, the future is by
no chance completely foreseeable. Science in general and social sciences in particular
are in no way divinatory cognitive devices that can unravel the conundrum of the
future. After the demise of the great teleological social philosophies of the last couple
of centuries (Marxism, with its historical inevitability of Communism, being an
emphatic example of the intellectual bankruptcy of historical prophecies), social
sciences cannot afford to remain under the spell of prophetic divination. This being
said, we should hastily add that our study does not fall under the rubric of theoretical
foresight. We are only trying to make sense of the impact on the order of memory,
made by the new legislation ruling the right to be forgotten and how it changes the
consecrated workings of public remembering. If we dare step into the future with our
analysis, it is by mapping the tendencies that occur and transform the established
patterns, not by venturing prophecies of Tomorrow.
This study does not grapple with the legal entanglement created in the
aftermath of the European Court of Justices rule of the right to be forgotten. There is
already a growing plethora of journal pieces tackling the juridical conundrum posed by
the collision between the right to be forgotten and the right to personal privacy on the
1

Court of Justice of the European Union, Press Release No 70/14, Luxembourg, 13 May
2014, Judgment in Case C-131/12, Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Espaola de
Proteccin
de
Datos,
Mario
Costeja
Gonzlez,
http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014-05/cp140070en.pdf
(accessed
March 24, 2015).
2
Google Inc., Transparency Report, European Privacy Requests for Search Removals, April 6,
2015, http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/europeprivacy/?hl=en (accessed
April 6, 2015).

385

one hand, and public interests and public memory on the other.3 Deliberately eluding
the legal imbroglio, the study deals with the cultural implications brought about in the
order of memory by the ruling of the right to be forgotten.
The paradigm of cultural anamnesis the will to memory
Although it probably haunted human mind from its first glimmerings of consciousness,
the fear of death found one of its first explicit expressions in Aristotles statement that
death is the most fearful of all things.4 But the universal fear of death what we shall
call as the thanatic principle of human existence was the dreadful discovery of the
20th century. It was Sigmund Freud who posited that human life is played between the
two basic instincts, Eros the instinct of life, and Thanatos the instinct of death.
Another Viennese thinker, following Husserls phenomenological tradition rather than
Freuds psychoanalysis to set the groundwork for a Phenomenology of the Social
World,5 considered the fear of death as the fundamental anxiety of human existence. I
know that I shall die and I fear to die. This basic experience Alfred Schtz called the
fundamental anxiety the primordial springhead of which all other experiences
originate. From the fundamental anxiety spring the many interrelated systems of
hopes and fears, of wants and satisfactions, of chances and risks which incite man
within the natural attitude to attempt the mastery of the world, to overcome obstacles,
to draft projects, and to realize them.6 Following Schtz, we can argue that the master
project humans draft and strive to realize is none other than the immortality project.
While the psychoanalytic anthropologist Ernest Becker restated the thanatic principle
in an emphatic fashion, by arguing that the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the
human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity activity
designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way
that it is the final destiny for man.7 But the most audacious step in this direction
indeed, bordering on recklessness has been taken by Zygmunt Bauman, who makes
the knowledge of death (along with its subsequent fear and terror) the prime and only
fountain head of human culture. There would probably be no culture, says Bauman,
were human unaware of their mortality.8 Sprang from the terror of death, culture is

Jeffrey Rosen, The Right to Be Forgotten, Stanford Law Review online 64 (2012), 88; Omer
Tene and Jules Polonetsky, Privacy in the Age of Big Data: A Time for Big Decisions,
Stanford Law Review online 64 (2012), 63; Rolf H. Weber, The Right to Be Forgotten: More
than a Pandoras Box?, Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and ECommerce Law 2 (2011): 120130; Jeff Ausloos, The Right to be ForgottenWorth
Remembering?, Computer Law & Security Review 28 (2012): 143152.
4
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009),
III.6, 1115a, 49.
5
Alfred Schtz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Durham, NC: Northwestern
University Press, 1967).
6
Alfred Schtz, On Multiple Realities, in Collected Papers: The Problem of Social Reality.
Volume I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962): 207259, 228.
7
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973), xi.
8
Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1992), 31.

386

an elaborate counter-mnemotechnic device to forget what they [i.e., humans] are aware
of [i.e., the inevitability of their own mortality].9
Just like there is a universal fear of death invariant in its terrorizing capacity
but a plethora of cultural responses,10 we posit a similarly universal dread of
oblivion. To the thanatic principle we counterpose a corresponding mnemonic
principle. As much as people find it difficult, if not plainly impossible, to accept that
biological death is the final destination of life, they equally cannot accept departing
from this world without leaving a trace on the basis of which they would be
remembered by their survivors. It is not an exaggeration to claim, as an axiom of
anthropological philosophy, that humans are beings in need of remembering and being
remembered. It is part of the human condition that people are both agents of
remembering (i.e., beings endowed with the faculty of remembering things and people
from the past) and strive towards becoming subjects of remembrance (i.e., beings
endowed with the longing of being remembered by others in the future). Seen in this
light, it does not appear as a far-fetched metaphorical rendition to say that in the
aftermath of physical death, sinking into social oblivion comes as a second, memorial,
death. These are the anthropological premises out of which we are drawing the
sociological conclusion that human communities have been anamnestic cultures, i.e.,
communities of memory engaged in a relentless struggle to save their precious past
from oblivion. Some of these anamnestic communities become so obsessed with
memory that they turn into memorial cultures, or even, with a funeral twist,
mausoleum cultures, such as ancient Egypt or imperial China of the Qing Dynasty.
The Pharaohs pyramids and the Eastern Qing tombs stand as monumental material
proofs and dazzling memorial sites of these mausoleum cultures. Until it was recently
challenged by the right to be forgotten, the mnemonic principle of human existence
stood at the heart of what we shall call the anamnestic paradigm of cultural existence.
Its main drive was the will to memory, the quest for being remembered as a way of
cheating physical death.
Extending the analogy, just as there is a variety of cultural ways of managing
the terror of death (more precisely, the terror of the awareness of the inevitability of
death), spanning from reactions as simple as fleeing from the sites of death, to intricate
elaborations of (mostly religious) cognitive systems for dealing with the phenomenon
of death and dying, there are also at least two main strategies of striving against
forgetfulness. Both human beings and human societies expressed their perpetual
struggle against oblivion along with their ceaseless quest for perfect mastery of their
memory in two general ways: the practical and the symbolic modes, which, along with
their internal ramifications, will become the focus of our attention.
1. The practical mode consisted in strivings for improving the blessed but fickle and
unreliable faculty of remembering, individual as well as collective. Either individually

Ibid.
Calvin Conzelus Moore and John B. Williamson, The Universal Fear of Death and the
Cultural Response, in Handbook of Death and Dying, ed. Clifton D. Bryant (Thousand Oaks:
Sage Publications, 2003), 313.
10

387

or collectively, people have always aspired to perfect their mnemonic capacities and to
gain mastery over memory.
1.1. At the individual level, the practical mode of saving time from oblivion aimed at
perfecting the specious human faculty to remember by various arts of memory. It
was the Greeks who came up with a promise to fulfil humankinds perennial dream for
a perfect memory with the invention, by the poet Simonides of Ceos, in the 5th century
B.C., of an ingenious system of remembering. Simonidess mnemotechnics originated
in the need of oral societies, foreign to writing and literacy, to enhance memory in the
lack of other mnemonic technologies such as writing so as to rescue knowledge from
the grasp of oblivion. It worked by anchoring knowledge in familiar or imagined
spaces, such as houses or palaces, in whose chambers the memory was to be carefully
organized and tagged with symbolic reminders. Respecting the principles of
mnemotechnics would allow one to use his memory as a vast but highly structured
depository of knowledge to be readily available to him as he was visiting, with the eye
of his mind, the treasure house of memory, the palace of his remembrances.11 From a
mnemotechnical device used in oral cultures to enhance remembering without any
external crutches for memory (such as writing), Simonidess invention was taken over
by the Roman world, where it was further developed, its principles were codified in
authoritative textbooks such as the anonymous tract on memory Rhetorica ad
Herennium12 (written around 82 B.C.), and transformed by respectable rhetors such as
Cicero and Quintilian into a revered ars memoriae. From the Roman world, itself the
inheritor of the Greek legacy, the art of memory transited, through the work of
Augustine, to the theological culture of mediaeval scholasticism. It continued to grasp
the imagination of Western thinkers, mesmerized as they were by its promise to master
the faltering faculty of memory, until the advent of print in the 16 th century, which
brought about a new technological regime of remembering based on printed books as
celluloid sites of memory, rendered the venerable art of memory practically obsolete. It
is suggestive to note down that, with the shift from a predominantly oral culture
towards a culture of (hand)writing from an auricular culture of oral communication
to a chirographic culture of hand-written exchanges a parallel shift has occurred from
the ars memoriae to ars dictaminis, the art of writing letters. The old oral Ciceronian
rhetoric of which the classical art of memory has been an integral part has given way to
11

Using a gender neutral language in discussions about the ancient Greek world as it should
be the case if we were discussing about contemporary topics and phenomena turns out to be
inappropriate. The reason for this is historical accuracy. It would be highly anachronistic to use
gender neutrality for an androcentric culture such as that of ancient Greek city-states, where
women were not receiving public education as they were excluded from the public affairs of
politics and relegated to the private space of the household. It is safe to assume that in this
manly dominated civilization, women were not practitioners of the art of memory.
12
Ad C. Herennium de Ratione Dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium) with an English translation
by Harry Caplan (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964). The books
highly authoritative status lay in its being for a long time wrongly attributed to Cicero.
Including Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas who incorporated the ancient art of memory
in the theological tradition by emphasizing the crucial role of memoria, along understanding
and foresight, in the cardinal virtue of Prudence wrote of Ad Herennium as Tulliuss
Second Rhetoric the first being Ciceros De Inventione.

388

the Bolognese hand-written Rhetorica Novissima.13 But until its demise in the 17th
century, ars memorandi will be further developed by Giulio Camillo and Giordano
Bruno. Camillos famous theatre of memory was a wooden construction built
according to the blueprint of the Vitruvian model of the classical theatre. Instead of a
public, the seats were given to images, underneath there were filing cabinets containing
written texts, by looking at which the rhetor would be able to articulate skilful
discourses on whatever topic. It made such a stir in the times that one contemporary
reported in disbelief to Erasmus that Camillos theatre of memory was designed with
the purpose of enabling whoever is admitted as spectator [] to discourse on any
subject no less fluently than Cicero.14 The tradition was enriched by Giordano Bruno,
its most occult practitioner, in whose person the art of memory intertwined with the
Hermetic tradition. If Simonides was the inventor of the art of memory, and Tullius
[Cicero] its teacher, Thomas Aquinas became something like its patron saint, sounds
the conclusion of Frances Yates.15 To extend the analogy, it can be said that Giulio
Camillo with his theatre of memory was its ingenious architect, while Giordano
Bruno with his mystical treatises was the hermetic Magus of Memory. 16 It seems that
the art of memory entered the flames of history along with its hermetic master, only to
be reborn from its own ashes, in the works of Gottfried Leibniz. The two millennia old
tradition of the art of memory finally succumbed under the growing tide of the
scientific method.
1.2. At the collective level, the practical mode of rescuing the past from the perils of
oblivion found its expression in the quest for improving the social memorys storing
capacity, by increasing the communitys powers of preserving the past. This was done
in two different ways.
1.2.1. First, it was driven by the development of technologies of memory such as
writing, printing, mass mediated communication, and finally, the World Wide Web
which freed thought and memory from its imprisonment in the cerebral technology of
the brain, whose storing capacity was overstrained soon after the invention of writing.
The invention of writing was not only a major cognitive revolution, triggering a radical
restructuring of the consciousness,17 but it also unleashed a cultural revolution
described by Georg Simmel in the terms of a tragedy of culture, by which the
German thinker described the radical asymmetry created in the relationship between
the human subject and its objectivized culture.18 The former, although the creator of the
latter, cannot cope with the fast-pace development of objective culture, whose
extraordinary rhythm of proliferation, speeded-up by innovative technologies of
memory, makes it impossible for the human mind to reabsorb it within her own
subjective culture. With the invention of writing, objective (i.e., externalized) culture
13

Frances Yates, Selected Works. Volume III. The Art of Memory (1966, New York and
London: Routledge, 1999), 57.
14
Ibid., 131132.
15
Ibid., 82.
16
Ibid., 307.
17
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word, 2nd edition (London
and New York: Routledge, 2002), 77.
18
Georg Simmel, On the Concept and the Tragedy of Culture, in The Conflict in Modern
Culture and Other Essays (1911, New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), 2746, 43.

389

greatly outgrows the cognitive power of the human mind. Simmel calls it the tragedy
of culture, but it is more a tragedy of the human memory, which, biologically limited
as it is, cannot keep pace with the exponentially growing volume of objective culture.
Already Plato, noticing the steady accumulation of the objectivized, material culture
set in motion by the introduction of writing, viciously condemned the new cultural
technology of writing for its damaging effects on the powers of human memory. In his
dialogue with Phaedrus,19 Platos Socrates blasted writing as an inhuman, alien
technology that, although presented as a potion for memory and for wisdom, it
would in fact introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it. It is not a
potion for remembering, but for reminding. Externalizing the mind into artificial
memory, writing is actually weakening the power of remembrance. Despite Platos
lamentations over the harmful effect of writing on the human faculty of remembering,
the new technology has had tremendous effects on enlarging collective memory of
human societies, now able to keep textual records of their past.
About the history and power of writing, Henri-Jean Martin wrote a book
praised by the Annalist Pierre Chaunu as one of the greatest history books ever
written.20 The encomiastic appraisal is not just the outcome of collegial courtesy.
Martin takes the reader through the fascinating (hi)story of writing, tracing not only its
appearance and evolution, but also highlighting how writing as an orthotic device
for the brain21 has shaped human mind and profoundly changed human society. It
was the pragmatic need to remember that prompted in the direction that eventually
leads to the invention of writing as a new technology of memory. In societies such as
the Sumerian and Akkadian ones, writing developed above all in response to the new
needs of an essentially economic sort and in an epoch in which increased wealth, the
concentration of wealth, and accelerated exchanges made it necessary to keep
accounts.22 But this practical, economic incentive was not enough. What was needed
was a coherent societal matrix, a proper form of collective life conducive to the
appearance of writing. Scholars, including Martin, have long been arguing that there
are some social, economic, cultural, and political pre-requisites for the technology of
writing to make its way into collective life. Based on historical case studies of cultures
and societies located predominantly in the Near East, scholars have been able to link
writing to a series of other structural elements (such as fixed residence, agrarianism,
political centralization, central administration, etc.). Thanks to the Standard CrossCultural Sample (SCCS) database, it is now possible to test this theoretical model
against empirical reality at a cross-cultural level. SCCS comprises codified data
(variables) for a collection of 186 pre-industrial cultures from around the world,
compiled from the works of the anthropologists and ethnographers who have
painstakingly described different parts of these societies cultural systems and social
organization. In an effort to measure the cultural complexity of different indeed,
19

Plato, Phaedrus, in Complete works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis and Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), Stephanus numbers 274278.
20
Pierre Chaunu, Foreword, in Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), xiv.
21
Ibid.
22
Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1995), 13.

390

idiographic cultures, George P. Murdock and Caterina Provost have compiled for this
purpose ten scales of five points each. These are: Scale 1. Writing and Records,
ranging from 0 to 4, where 0 signifies that writing, records, and mnemonic devices in
any form are lacking or unreported, while 4 means that the society has an indigenous
system of true writing and possesses records of at least modest significance.23 Scale 2.
Fixity of Residence, ranging from fully nomadic life (0) to a pattern of permanent and
sedentary settlements (4). Scale 3. Agriculture, by which societies were coded with
values ranging from 0, where agriculture is not practiced, to 4, in those cases where
agriculture is the main contributor to the societys food supply and it is employed with
intensive techniques (irrigation, ploughing, artificial fertilization). Scale 4.
Urbanization, measured by the average population of local communities, ranging from
0 where it is less than 100 people to 4 where it is more than 1.000. Scale 5.
Technological Specialization, in terms of which the value 0 was designated to societies
in which the complexity and specialization of technological crafts were minimal (such
as those where metalworking, loom weaving, and pottery making were absent), while
with 4 were scored societies which possessed all of these technologies and crafts, along
with an advanced division of labour among specialists. Scale 6. Land Transport,
ranging from societies in which goods and materials are transported on land
exclusively by human carriers (0), to societies which possess motorized land transport
(4). Scale 7. Money, according to which societies where classified along a continuum
ranging from 0, in cases of societies practicing barter economy without any recognized
medium of exchange, to 4, in cases of societies using paper money economies. Scale 8.
Density of Population, ranging from scarcely populated societies with less than one
person per square mile (0) to densely populated societies with more than 100 persons
per square mile. Scale 9. Level of Political Integration, ranging from stateless,
politically de-centralized societies (0) to highly structured state societies with
centralized administration and multiple administrative layers (4). Finally, Scale 10.
Social Stratification, ranging from essentially egalitarian, classless societies (0) to
societies presenting complex patterns of social stratification with three or more distinct
strata. The correlation matrix reveals the high degree of interdependence of all these
ten different, but highly entangled, phenomena. Writing and Records is highly
correlated with all the other variables, suggesting that in order for the cultural
technology of writing to appear in a social community, that community needs to be
socially, politically, and economically fit for receiving it. To be sure, correlation
does not allow for making causal inferences, but the tight correlations between these
phenomena allow us to conclude that writing and recordkeeping appear in a specific
societal nexus, i.e., in an urbanized agrarian society practicing intense forms of land
use, which has an articulated land transportation system supporting business
transactions within a money economy, within a politically integrated society, whose
dense population is nonetheless highly stratified in terms of social status and economic
wealth.

23

George P. Murdock and Caterina Provost, Measurement of Cultural Complexity, Ethnology

12 (1973): 379392, 379.

391

Table 1. The correlation matrix between the ten scales in 186 societies
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)
(1) Writing and Records
1
(2) Fixity of Residence
.247* 1
(3) Agriculture
.343* .782* 1
(4) Urbanization
.422* .450* .509* 1
(5)Technological Specialization .490* .406* .548* .435* 1
(6) Land Transport
.627* .076 .233* .397* .469* 1
(7) Money
.530* .412* .356* .375* .417* .409* 1
(8) Density of Population
.362* .707* .638* .560* .468* .211* .557* 1
(9) Political Integration
.575* .415* .512* .481* .568* .421* .527* .570* 1
(10) Social Stratification
.621* .437* .433* .489* .579* .475* .470* .500* .719*
*. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
Source: personal calculations based on Standard Cross-Cultural Sample database
As it is explicit in the variables name, Writing and Records, a technology of
memory writing goes hand in hand with a systematic practice of memory
recordkeeping and with a full-blown institution of memory the archive. This is
revealed by data drawn from the same SCCS database, which shows that once a culture
has adopted writing, it tends to keep written records that will add to that societys
stockpile of mnemonic devices and non-written records.
Table 2. Writing and recordkeeping in 186 societies
Type of mnemonic technology
Frequency
Oral tradition
73
Mnemonic devices
49
Non-written records
21
True writing but no written records
12
True writing with written records
31
Total
186
Source: Standard Cross-Cultural Sample database

Percent
(%)
39.2
26.3
11.3
6.5
16.7
100

The results show that out of the 186 societies indexed by the SCCS database,
143 (76.9%) are either non-literate or proto-literate, meaning that they do not possess
true writing, i.e., a phonetic system of writing. Foreign to the cultural technology of
writing, these societies resort to oral, artefactual, or pictorial means to preserve their
knowledge. The rest of 43 cultures are literate societies, out of which 12 possess
writing but have not accumulated significant written records. This would have been a
counter-evidence to our already defended idea that recordkeeping tends to follow
writing, had it not been for the other 31 societies that have developed archives so as to
store their knowledge in written records. And thus we arrive at the second way of the
practical mode societies use to conserve their memories the institutions of memory.
1.2.2. The invention of technologies of memories sets the ground for developing
institutions of memory, such as the archive, the library, the museum, and other

392

cultural institutions whose purpose is to save and conserve the past from being effaced
from the public consciousness either materially or the knowledge of it. Societies can
never become Funesian communities the collective personification of Jorge Luis
Borgess Funes the Memorious, the man whose prodigious memory was like a
garbage heap, retaining everything without an effort, without applying any filter of
selection but they have always tried to remember their past. Their urge to memorize
is explainable by the practical, indeed survival, value of culture culture being
understood here from a pragmatic angle, not only as an historically transmitted pattern
of meanings embodied in symbols [] by means of which men communicate,
perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life,24 but also as
system of distinctive means by which human communities manage to successfully
adapt to their environment (natural and social alike). The patterns of meaning and
symbols making up the cultural systems are nonetheless tools used for regulating the
societys relationship with the natural environment, its relationship with Otherness
(other human societies), and also its internal structure of relations (self-regulation).
Cultures are thus adaptive mechanisms that have a group survival value, while
collective remembering is instrumental in accomplishing its goal. An invariant feature
indeed, an anthropological constant that has characterized human societies across
cultural lines, geographical boundaries, and historical times, says Adrian Cunningham,
has been an instinct for collective cultural self-preservation.25 Since time
immemorial, people fought to somehow save their cultural heritage from obliteration.
While this instinct took many forms, ranging from passing knowledge from one
generation to the other by storytelling, rituals, dance, music, and art all of them
performative institutions of memory , it has found its most efficient institutional
embodiment in the archive. In 1963, the Italian archaeologist Paolo Matthiae
accomplished the feat of dating the time immemorial. He has discovered the ancient
Syrian city of Ebla, and with it, the now famous Ebla archive more than 20.000 clay
tablets written in Sumerian cuneiform dating back 4.500 years. Mistaken by many
specialists as the worlds oldest library,26 the Eblaite clay tablets are in fact the
worlds oldest archive, since its informational content was made up of four classes of
data, concerning i) the states internal and external affairs (administration of the city,
organization of the state, diplomatic relationships with other city-states), ii) agricultural
business, iii) trade records, and, only a feeble part concerned iv) written materials on
education and science, and still fewer literary texts.27 Given the four and a half
millennia of certified existence, it should come as no surprise that archivists praise

24

Clifford Geertz, Religion as a Cultural System, in The Interpretation of Culture (New

York: Basic Books, 1973), 87125, 89.
25
Adrian Cunningham, Archival institutions, in Archives. Recorkeeping in Society, eds. Sue
McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed and Frank Upward (Wagga Wagga, New South
Wales: Centre for Information Studies, 1995), 2150, 21.
26
Hans H. Wellisch, Ebla: The Worlds Oldest Library, The Journal of Library History
(1974-1987), 16 (1981), 488500.
27
Tomas Lidman, Libraries and Archives. A Comparative Study (Oxford Cambridge New
Delhi: Chandos Publishing, 2012), 89.

393

themselves as being the second oldest profession in human history.28 And the first
respectable one, we should hastily add.
Since this first known archival institutionalization of memory, which gave an
enduring institutional form to human societies instinct for collective cultural selfpreservation, or, to put it differently, to their impulse to save their cultural legacies,29
the archive has become a permanent solution to the problem of forgetfulness. From the
presumably first Eblaite archive four and a half millennia ago until present day,
archival records have never ceased to accumulate. An unbroken tradition of archiving
the present to form the collective memory of the future connects the archival inaugural
of Ebla to the present digital archives. The media and formats used to store data in the
archive have passed through successive material revolutions from the Eblaite and
Babylonian clay tablets, to the Egyptian papyri and the Greek and Roman wood blocks
and parchments, to paper, punch cards, and computer servers but the archival
solution to the problem of oblivion remained essentially the same.30 Archives have
been kept by all human civilizations throughout history, but not only as heritage
institutions, as they have also functioned as institutions of political power. It should not
be forgotten, as Jacques Derrida is so keen to remind us, that the institution of the
archive is a political power house. Power is engrained not only in its social functioning,
as we shall shortly detail, but is written deep into its etymology. Arkheion the Greek
word for the storehouse where the official records of the state are being kept does not
yet explicitly reveal its power substance. But if we dig deeper, if we uncover its basic
etymological strata, we come across arkh, meaning power, authority, itself rooted in
arkh to command, to rule. There is no political power without control of the
archive, if not of memory, says Derrida.31 This is not the only reckless claim coming
from the French master of deconstruction, in whose repertoire of controversial
assertions the notoriously celebrated and simultaneously contested assertion that there
is nothing outside text (il ny a pas de hors-texte) ranks supreme. In comparison to the
il ny a pas de hors-texte sentence, the claim that there is no political power without the
archive, although an extravagant claim itself, seems to be closer to reality. All the more
so as the first archive, discovered at Ebla by the Italian archaeologist Paolo Matthiae,
has been identified as dating from 2.500 B.C., thus being more than 4.500 years old.
Even with this venerable age of the archival institution as an appendix of political
power, it is still a very plausible hypothesis that political power predates the archive.
Derridas statement, although forcefully revealing the power-connection between
political domination and the archive, must be taken with sceptical reservations, as it is
historically inaccurate. Political power is possible without the archive as it is clearly
the case in oral societies so that the archive is not the institutional fountainhead of
political power. It is just the other way around. To consolidate their power, political
elites founded archives as tools of domination through knowledge. The archive is
therefore the paradigmatic power/knowledge institution of memory. The power stakes
28

Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern
Memory, Archival Science 2 (2002): 119, 2.
29
James M. OToole, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American
Archivists, 1990), 13.
30
Ibid., 28.
31
Derrida, Archive Fever, 4, s.n. 1.

394

embedded in the archive from its very institutional inception millennia ago were all the
more revealed with the advent of the modern state. Archives existed, of course, before
the 16th century, but they were rudimentary and scattered collections of royal records.
It was not until the Renaissance, with its process of state centralization, that the archive
was re-established as a modern institution of power/knowledge. The forces that led to
this outcome were derived from the centralizing states need to form a central structure
of administrating the population, in order to better raise taxes and control their
subjects. The first central state archive was established in 1543 by the orders of Charles
of Spain. Other European monarchies followed suit. France established its national
archives by royal decree in 1569, Sweden in 1618, and Denmark in 1665. 32 The
construction of central state archives that started in the 16th century can be perceived as
an integral part of the new politics of governmentality, by which Western European
states perfected the administrative art of governing population. One lasting effect of the
French Revolution was to turn central state archives into National Archives. In the Age
of Nationalism, whose overture was the French Revolution of 1789, further amplified
by the Romantic movement, it has become a national imperative to preserve the
nations past. While the old scattered records of the Ancient regime documenting the
old privileges, properties, and social relations were destroyed in the midst of the
revolutionary thrust to break away from the monarchic past, the new Republican power
founded its own National Archive as soon as 1794 to form the basis of a new
republican order of memory. Like in so many other aspects, the French Revolution
undeniably marked a milestone in the entangled relationship between political power,
civil society, and the institution of the archive. Its effects were threefold: first, it
introduced the notion of centralized national archives, epitomized in the project of the
Archives nationales. Created in the midst of the revolutionary turmoil (August 7,
1790), it was definitively established as the central unified state-archives by the Law of
7 Messidor Year II (June 25, 1794) according to the new revolutionary calendar and
chronology, which set its chronogenetic year I in 1789. Until this unification act, prerevolutionary archives were characterized by a high degree of decentralization, as they
were scattered in multiple depository places. For instance, in 1770 only in Paris there
were 405 archival repositories. Besides the capital, in the whole of France there were
about 5.700 archives (out of which 1.780 were seigneurial archives, while 1.700 were
monastic repositories). The census that gathered these data may have omitted many
other private and religious archives, which makes it probable, according to the 19 th
century historian Jean-Marie-Joseph-Arthur Giry, that without exaggeration, [we can]
place at over 10.000 the number of archives in France at the end of the Ancient
Rgime.33 The establishment of the national archives as the unified recordkeeping
institution was only one of the great feats of the Revolution regarding the archives. The
second came as a change of heart, as the now republican state realized and fully
assumed the responsibility for taking care and preserving for present use and posterity

32

Lidman, Libraries and Archives, 2226.

Judith M. Panitch, Liberty, Equality, Posterity?: Some Archival Lessons from the Case of
the French Revolution, in American Archival Studies: Readings in Theory and Practice, ed.
Randall C. Jimerson (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2000), 101122, 110, s.n. 32.
33

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the documentary heritage of the past.34 But this sensibility towards the past along with
its accompanying sense of responsibility for conserving built up slowly in the
revolutionary consciousness. It first erupted by unleashing a furious will to destroy the
legacy of the old French monarchy. The destructive frenzy reached its peak by 1793,
until when the infuriated masses, along with more systematically organized state
actions, stormed into the records and tore them apart as legal remnants of the hated
feudal social organization. Bonfires were lit across the country, confining to the flames
the records bearing the stamp of servitude.35 But after this archival purge
symbolically purified and set the republican present free from the hated old regime of
monarchic servitude, the conservative instinct of cultural preservation kicked in. The
destructive rage of revolutionary vandalism that originally prevailed eventually
exhausted its thrust, and gave way to a conservative stance towards the past. As the
historian Michel Delon has aptly said, The Revolution is contained entirely in this
alternation between brutal elimination of the past and its sublimation as testament.36 If
this is a just synthetic appraisal of the French Revolution in its entirety, it is all the
more correct when applying specifically to its relationship to the past mediated by the
institution of the archives. This radical transition from brutal elimination of the past to
its sublimation as testament was facilitated by a similarly radical semantic shift in the
public understanding of the archive. The pre-revolutionary understanding of the
archive can be grasped by reading the entry on archives in Diderot and dAlemberts
famous Encyclopdie (175172), the pinnacle of enlightened thought: Archives is the
term used for those old titles or charters which contain the rights, pretensions,
privileges, and prerogatives of a house, a town, or a kingdom. 37 It was based on this
legalistic definition of the archives as the depository of aristocratic privileges that a
public hatred erupted during the first years of the Revolution as an expression of the
revolutionary vandalism wanting to break free from the past. The semantic shift
involved the transition from the understanding of archives as the statutes of tyrants
and as documentary monuments of peoples servitude, to understanding the archives of
the nation as documenting the civil rights and preserving the memory of the
Revolution. The third major consequential effect the French Revolution has had on the
archival institution was its opening up to the public. The principle of public access to
the national archive was ruled by Article 37 of the Messidor decree (Law of 7
Messidor, year II), which stipulated that Every citizen may demand in all the
depositories, on the established days and times, communication of the pieces that they
contain, free of charge but with the appropriate surveillance precautions.38 For the
first time in archival history, archives were opened to the public. Citizens of the
34

Ernst Posner, Some Aspects of Archival Development since the French Revolution, The
American Archivist 3 (1940): 159172, 161.
35
Panitch, Liberty, Equality, Posterity?, 113.
36
C.f. Ibid., 102103.
37
Ibid., 104.
38
Krzysztof Pomian, The Archives: From the Trsor des Chartes to the CARAN, in
Rethinking France: Les Lieux de Mmoire, Volume 4: Histories and Memories, eds. Pierre
Nora and David P. Jordan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 27100, 48. A
much more lapidary translation is provided by Posner, Some aspects of archival development,
162.

396

republic could now have access to the records three days a week, 9 hours per day
from 9 A.M. to 2 P.M., and from 5 P.M. to 9 P.M. respectively.39
The tides of nationalism that later overflowed with the coming of Romanticism
were first raised by the Napoleonic conquest of Europe in which a significant role was
played by the Napoleonic sack of European state archives. Huge quantities of records
(along with art collections) were taken from all over Europe to the newly constructed
archives building in Paris, in order to give material concreteness to the utopian dream
of centralizing not all the records of the country (a task already underway since the
Revolution) but all the records of the continent. This sack of state archives contributed
to the formation of the nationalist reaction throughout Europe, greatly fuelled by
Romanticism which thought of the archives as treasure houses of collective memory of
nations. They needed to be protected from acts of vandalism similar to the Napoleonic
sack since, as sources of historical memory, archives are the fountainhead of national
identity. The glorification of a monumental national past that started with the romantic
historiography could not have been achieved without the textual bricks deposited in the
archival masonry. The monumental past of the nation could not have been written
without the documentary monuments of the archives. It was against this political and
cultural background Napoleonic conquest of Europe, rising tides of nationalism, new
romantic sensibilities that more and more public records suddenly acquired the
dignity of national monuments.40 The French model of the National Archives was
soon adopted throughout Europe, as other states started to establish their own similar
institutions of memory. Realizing the identity potential of the archives, European states
founded similar institutions, directly inspired by the French blueprint: Finland in 1816,
Norway one year later in 1817, Belgium, England and the Netherlands during the
1830s. Since then, the archive has become a crucial and all-important institution of
national memory, as it is now inconceivable to imagine a successful political project of
nation-state building without being rooted in the institutional backbone of the archive.
With the rise of totalitarian regimes, the twentieth century has shown once
again the intrinsic link connecting political power and the archive. One of the main
institutional pillars and efficient means of social and political domination was the
Secret Police, which compiled vast quantities of records as an output of their
surveillance of the population. The huge materials forming the archives of the former
Secret Police inherited by the post-totalitarian states in the aftermath of the 1989
revolutions are still posing a great challenge to the political power-holders of today,
who are reluctant, as in the case of Romania, to open up the secret archives of the
Securitate.
The mnemonic infrastructure made up of heritage institutions set up to
preserve the memory of the past came into being once the library, and, much later, the
museum joined the archive, which has always been the central institution of memory.
The library, as an institution of preserving knowledge, came into being not earlier than
1.000 B.C., when the great scribalization of wisdom occurred as oral traditions that
have survived from time immemorial by being transmitted from generation to

39
40

Panitch, 111.
Posner, 166.

397

generation by word of mouth started to be written down.41 The establishment of the

library is part and parcel of this process of textualizing oral traditions that was made
possible by what Merlin Donald has called the exographic revolution unleashed by
the invention of writing.42 Just like its twin-institution of memory the archive the
library has continually existed throughout human history, but only after the print
revolution and the religious Reform of the 15th and 16th centuries did it start to pose a
thorny problem for political authority. Until these momentous events, given the feeble
percent of the literate population and the consequent small amount of written texts,
libraries could be easily controlled by the authorities of the day. But with the
bibliographical explosion brought about by Gutenbergs invention, combined with the
Reforms struggle to literate people so as to read the Bible themselves, books became a
dangerous thing. It is against this background that state powers introduced the
institution of legal deposit, a measure that set the foundation for the future
establishment of national libraries. The first legal deposit law was issued in France, in
1537, when Francis I ruled that one copy of every book published throughout the
kingdom should be submitted to the Royal Library in order to receive legal
authorization. Although the memory function was not absent the law justifies its
introduction by its intention to preserve for posterity the written memory of the nation
it has to be conceded that the ratio prima for its ruling was nonetheless the states
efforts to control the flow of ideas.43 The legal deposit law was soon copied by states
throughout Europe, with the Habsburg monarchy first introducing it tentatively in
1579, only to definitively issue it in 1624. England (1662), Spain (1712), Poland
(1747), Portugal (1796) and the Netherlands (1798) followed suit, establishing their
national libraries upon the basis of the legal deposit law. It was in these newly
established national libraries that the entire written memory of the nations would be
stored and protected from the damages of time. Seen in this light as a form of
censorship, legal deposit sheds light on the way in which political power made its way
in the heart of the institution of the library, just as it did with the archive. But unlike the
archive, which has only recently become the subject of democratic reform, as the
archive was called upon to transform itself from a state-apparatus devised to perpetuate
the power of the rulers into an accountable institution of democratic government, the
librarys link to power was contested as early as the age of enlightenment. So libraries
have an ambiguous relationship with power, as they have a dual nature: at the same
time when states were tightening their control over knowledge by ruling the legal
deposit law, the ideology of Enlightenment gave public libraries unprecedented
importance in its project of human emancipation. Within the enlightenments
philosophy of salvation through knowledge an opposite of the religious soteriology
of salvation through belief libraries were seen as cognitive temples and were placed,
accordingly, in the centrepiece of the emancipatory endeavours. It was during the age
41

Karel van der Toorn, Why Wisdom Became a Secret: On Wisdom as a Written Genre, in
Wisdom Literature in Mesopotamia and Israel, ed. Richard J. Clifford (Atlanta: Society of
Biblical Literature, 2007), 2129, 26; Lidman, Libraries and Archives, 7, 18.
42
Merlin Donald, The Exographic Revolution: Neuropsychological Sequelae, in Cognitive
Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind, eds. Colin Renfrew and Lambros
Malafouris (Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs, 2010), 7179.
43
Lidman, Libraries and Archives, 2627.

398

of enlightenment that les philosophes imagined the library as a perfect cognitive

heterotopia, as an institution containing the entire knowledge of humanity.
Heterotopias, as Michel Foucault defined them, are spaces in which fragments that can
be found within the outside culture are brought together, where they are simultaneously
displayed, but just as they are jointly represented, they are at one and the same time
[] challenged and overturned.44
The museum, the third and latest addition to form the institutional triptych of
modernitys mnemonic infrastructure, shares many of its features with the archive and
the library. Including, to be sure, their intrinsic links to political power. In the
museums case, etymology leads our enquiry on a wrong track, as it is semantically
misleading, since it can wrongly suggest that the museum is an ancient institution of
memory. The Greek mouseion means the seat of the Muses and it designated the
place of contemplation where scholars where gathering together to conduct their
intellectual businesses under the protection of the Muses. It is in this sense, as an
institution of contemplation, that the Mouseion at Alexandria which contained the
notorious Library of Alexandria has functioned from the 3rd century B.C. until its
final destruction sometime during the 4th century A.D. Another heterotopical project,
just like the archive and the library, the public museum appeared in the late 18 th
century out of the cabinets of curiosities of the previous ages. The first to open its
doors to the public to a narrowly defined notion of public, we should mention,
limited to the upper classes was the Ashmolean Museum set up in Oxford (1683) to
house the cabinet of curiosities the University recently received from Elias Ashmole.
In 1743, Vatican authorities opened its art and archaeological collections to the public
by setting up the Capitoline Museums. Soon to follow were the British Museum (1753)
and, shortly after the French Revolution, the Muse du Louvre (1792). The sparks that
would ignite the still ongoing museum revolution were produced in the 18 th
century,45 when private collections turned into public exhibitions. With the spread of
the European model based on these museal inaugurals all across the world, 19th
century was the century of the museum. It was during the long nineteenth century that
the world experienced the first museum boom, as the museum building has been
integrated as a crucial part of the process of state-building and national identity
formation.46 Along with the archive and the library, the public museum was the
expression of what could be called, according to Foucault, as modernitys heterotopian
cognitive ambition, that is to say, the idea of accumulating everything, [] of
creating a sort of universal archive, the desire to enclose all times, all eras, forms and
styles within a single place, the concept of making all times into one place, and yet a
place that is outside time, inaccessible to the wear and tear of the years, according to a

44

Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, in Rethinking Architecture: A

Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 330336,
332.
45
Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod, and Sheila Watson, eds., Museum Revolutions. How
Musesums Change and Are Changed (New York: Routledge, 2007).
46
Geoffrey Lewis, Encyclopdia Britannica Online, s. v. history of museums,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/398827/history-of-museums (accessed March 24,
2015).

399

plan of almost perpetual and unlimited accumulation within an irremovable place. 47

What particularizes the museum from its institutional counterparts with whom it shares
the memory function of conserving the past is its exhibiting function, that of publicly
displaying the past. It is in this context that we can speak of the politics of
museological display, as history museums have always been, until the coming of
postmodern times, the showcase of the nation-states glorious past.
Taking a preliminary stock of our argument up to this point, we have advanced
the idea that just as the terror of death is a if not the fundamental anxiety of human
condition, we can plead the case for the existence of a terror of oblivion ingrained both
in the human psyche and in the collective culture. Human existence through history
which we read as being a history of individual and collective struggle against oblivion
expresses a continual craving for remembering and being remembered. We have
detailed how this ardent will for memory manifested itself in (1) the practical mode
of taming oblivion and gaining mastery over memory as occurring both at (1.1.) the
individual level through the means of the classical art of memory, and at (1.2.) the
collective level, either through the development of (1.2.1.) technologies of memory
such as writing, print, and the internet, or through establishing (1.2.2.) institutions of
memory such as the archive, the library, and the museum. It is now the right time to
move on to the second mode of the human quest of surviving oblivion, (2) the symbolic
one.
2. The symbolic mode of struggling against oblivion takes the form of the quest for
memorial eternity guaranteed by the achievement of symbolic immortality. Robert Jay
Lifton, to which the credits for coining the term must be given, insightfully perceived
the human aspiration to live forever as a fundamental longing of humankind.48 Along
with fellow Eric Olson, Lifton has distinguished between five modes by which people
have denied the finality of death and could thus gain a sense of symbolic immortality.
First, death can be transcended through biological immortality, simply by procreating
and continue to live through ones offsprings. As Lifton and Olson rightly point out,
this bid for immortality through children is never purely biological, this being the
reason why it should be better named as biosocial immortality, as in most societies
paternity is often a social affair, where social fatherhood can be more important than
the biological one. The second way in which people can achieve a sense of symbolic
eternity is the creative mode. By crafting works of art, devising scientific theories,
writing books and other creative activities of this sort, their authors can survive death
through (and in) their creations. The third mode of symbolic eternity is the theological
immortality, the religiously promised afterlife as a reward of living a good life. An
anthropological survey of cultures revealed that 98% of the cultures indexed by the
Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) have a conception of afterlife.49 SCCS
contains anthropological data on a sample of 186 cultures from all across the world,
47

Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 334335.

Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson, Symbolic Immortality, in Death, Mourning, and Burial:
A Cross-Cultural Reader, ed. Antonius C.G.M. Robben (Oxford: Blackwell): 3239, 32.
49
Brooks B. Hull and Frederik Bold, Hell, Religion and Cultural Change, Journal of
Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), 150 (1994): 447464. The subsequent
percentages are taken from Hull and Bolds paper.
48

400

organized on coded variables that allow for statistical analysis. Only in 2% of the
cultures for which there is available data, there is no notion of afterlife. The other 98
percent of them vary in terms of the complexity of the afterlife. 18% of the cultures
have what could be called as an egalitarian static post-mortem monist conception of
the afterlife, as they believe afterlife to be simple, tantamount to sleep, and the same
for everyone. 30% of them have a more sensuous variant of the previous one, since
they believe that afterlife comes in a single form, either as pleasant or an unpleasant
one, the same for everyone. It could be named as the egalitarian sensual monist
conception of afterlife. 29% of the cultures forming the sample could be described as
expressing a symmetrical egalitarian post-mortem dualism, as they imagine the
afterlife to have two alternatives such as heaven and hell or perhaps even conceive
of a trialistic model of the afterlife heaven and hell buffered by the interstitial space
of the purgatory. The remaining 21% have a rather complex idea of the afterlife, with
more than two final destinations to be reached by passing through multiple stages.
Their high degree of conceptual complexity makes them worthy of bearing the name of
inegalitarian or stratified post-mortem pluralism, as people are getting personalized
rewards or punishments in their afterlife so as to correspond to their worldly
behaviours. What can be concluded from this data is not only that the belief in the
afterlife is a cultural (quasi)universal but also that in fifty percent (50%) of the cultures
included in the SCCS a somewhat elaborate degree of conceptual refinement can be
observed. Our own inquiry in the Human Area Files database revealed that out of the
290 pre-industrial cultures from all over the world, 270 (93%) have eschatological
doctrines, i.e., conceptions of the survival (and possible career) of the soul after death;
notions about ghosts, spectres, apparitions, and phantoms; duration of afterlife; belief
in immortality; ideas of transmigration and reincarnation; conception of the survival of
the body (e.g., resurrection).50 If we narrow the scope of our analysis, but give it more
methodological rigor, by using the Probability Sample Files (PSF), 58 cultures out of
60 (97%) have some sorts of eschatological beliefs.51 These results are fully consistent
with Hull and Bolds findings. The fourth mode of transcending death is achieved
through continuity with nature. If theological immortality conquers death by spiritual
survival, natural immortality promises material survival, but accomplished by the
disintegration of the flesh in the eternally enduring nature. It is captured in the biblical
saying, for dust you are and to dust you will return (Genesis, 3, 19). Lifton and Olson
mention a fifth mode of symbolic immortality which they call as experiential
transcendence. In contrast to all the previous modes, this one is a lived subjective
experience of transcending time. While all other modes are promising immortality as a
future outcome (through children, in the afterlife, through reuniting with nature), this
mode is achieving symbolic immortality in the present hic et nunc by arresting the
passing of time. Its archetypical expression is the ecstatic experience facilitated by a

50

Human Area Files, eHRAF World Cultures online database, Eschatology, Subject
description, OCM code 775.
51
Probability Sample Files is a representative stratified random sample of 60 cultures selected
from the universe of 290 cases indexed by the Human Files Area database.

401

range of catalysts such as dance and music, war and sport, artistic creation or
intellectual contemplation, orgiastic love or even childbirth, drugs and alcohol.52
Although there are many modes of achieving a sense of symbolic immortality,
not all of them guarantee what we will call memorial eternity. Biological immortality
through passing your genes to your children can ensure memorial eternity only if it is
accompanied by a cult of ancestors, and only in those societies where biological
mother and fatherhood are coterminal with socially designated parenthood.
Theological immortality with its transcendence of death in the afterlife ensures
memorial eternity only to the saints and martyrs who sacrificed their lives for Christ.
For the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,53 and it is only they that the
mnemonic community of faith and practice which is the Church will remember in its
liturgical commemorations. As for the fourth and fifth modes return to the dust to
reunite with nature and the illusion of present immortality obtained through the means
of experiential transcendence they provide no guarantee what so ever for achieving
memorial eternity. It is only the creative mode of symbolic immortality that is directly
and intrinsically connected to memory, as the authors of the valued creations (artistic,
literary, scientific, etc.) survived not only through their artefacts, but also in the
collective memory. We propose, as a more inclusive category containing Lifton and
Olsons creative mode, the heroic road to symbolic immortality. We posit heroism of
which the creative type is only a subspecies to be the memorial mode of symbolic
immortality. What we are thus proposing is the outlines of a theory of heroism as the
gateway to eternal immortality in the collective memory, be it either the national
memory in the case of military and political heroes, the cultural memory in the case of
artistic and intellectual heroes, or the religious memory in the case of martyred heroes.
Ernest Beckers reflection on death and humans reactions to overcome death
set out the framework on which the terror management theory (TMT) has been
erected. The central theoretical premise of TMT is that the awareness of death and the
fear that comes along with the consciousness of its inevitability are fundamental to
human existence. This awareness of the inevitability of death in an animal
instinctively programmed for self-preservation and continued existence created the
potential for paralyzing terror, a problem that needed to be resolved if our species was
to remain a viable contender for survival on a planet fraught with danger, say TMTs
advocates.54 Humans solved this dreadful problem posed by the terror of death by
creating culture, i.e., a world of meaning whose crucial role was to assuage the
fundamental anxiety deep-seated in the human psyche by the inevitability of mortality.
Cultural worldviews are thus anxiety buffers devised to alleviate the terror of death
by creating a world of meaning imbued with standards of value whose observance
promises the transcendence of death either by conferring literal immortality through
afterlife, or by providing symbolic immortality achieved through the survival of the
self in larger-than-the-self-entities such as the tribe or the nation or in their collective
52

Lifton and Olson, Symbolic Immortality, 37.

Quintus
Septimus
Florens
Tertullian,
Apologeticum,
Chapter
L.13,
http://www.tertullian.org/works/apologeticum.htm (accessed March 24, 2015).
54
Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski, Terror Management Theory of
Self-Esteem and Cultural Worldviews: Empirical Assessments and Conceptual Refinement,
Advances in Social Psychology 29 (1997): 61139, 64.
53

402

memory. Becker himself has argued compellingly that societies provide cultural hero
systems that promote within their members ideals of heroic feats (which, in extremis,
can take the form of heroic martyrdom) as a strategy that allows them, individually as
well as a collective entity, to conquer death and to achieve symbolic immortality.
Individually, the heroic life (and death) is also a path to redemption, enabling the hero
to secure his or her memorial eternity in the groups collective memory. Each society,
irrespective of its particularity, is structurally a symbolic system of action, a structure
of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behaviour, designed to serve as a vehicle
for earthly heroism, argues Becker.55 Every society is thus a cultural hero-system
disseminating a culture of earthly heroism for its members as ways of overcoming not
only the terror of the meaninglessness of life, but also the terror of the meaninglessness
of death and, supremely important for our argument, of gaining a sense of symbolic
immortality by inscribing their selves, through heroic feats, in the collective memory.
The problem with this heroic route for memorial salvation is that the recognition of the
heroic status is an extremely selective affair. Every member of society is urged to be a
hero, but only an extreme minority can ever receive heroic recognition along with
memorial eternity. As we shall point out in the succeeding section, heroic memory is a
hieratic form of remembering. Only a handful of heroes can be remembered in the
historical memory, making heroism a highly inefficient strategy for achieving
memorial eternity.
Hieratic and demotic forms of remembering the canon and the archive
Heroic action propels its subject into one of the three types of canonical memory:
religious, national (political and/or military memory of the ethnic group), or cultural.
Religious, national, and cultural memories can be conceived of as forming the triptych
of canonical memory. Either as a martyr of the Church, as a soldier dying on the altar
of the country, or as an artist or intellectual dedicating his/her entire life to a cultural
cause the subject of heroic action gains his/her symbolic afterlife and memorial
eternity in the canonical memory of his/her survivors. Despite the differences that
particularize religious memory from national and cultural memories, they share
nonetheless a fundamental common denominator. They are all canonical memory
systems, whose most characteristic features are their supremely elitist nature along with
their extremely exclusivist and selective criteria of inclusion. These features determine
the class of objects deemed worthy of remembering (be them prophets and saints,
military heroes and political visionaries, or artistic masters and intellectual prodigies)
to be strictly limited. It lies within the nature of the heroic act i.e., its exceptional
character when judged against the ordinary or average norms of everyday life that all
symbolic afterlives achieved by way of heroism belong to the canonical type of
collective memory. Not only religious memory but national and cultural memories as
well are hieratic memories par excellence, surrounded by an aura of sacredness that
keeps them apart from the rest of the mundane objects that go unremembered. Their
selectivity and exclusivity are built-in features of canonical memories. When canonical
memory, regularly restricted to heroic elites, happens to relax its criteria of inclusion
and open its doors to the masses, it includes them but deprives them of their personal
55

Becker, The Denial of Death, 4.

403

and nominal identities. Such is the case with the Cult of the Unknown Soldier a
demotic element inserted in the hieratic memory of the elected few to be remembered.
Since time immemorial, political (and starting with the 19th century national) memory
has been largely synonymous with dynastic memory a Carlylesque memory of the
Great Men of History, in whose selective company access was granted only to a
handful of ordinary people (without aristocratic pedigree and blue blood running
through their veins) who conquered their spot in the political memory with their
extraordinarily heroic feats of arms (e.g., The Maid of Orlans Joan of Arc). Demotic
national memory as epitomized in the Cult of the Unknown Soldier is by definition
anonymous memory. The narrowness of the canonical memory can be explained by
pointing out both the extraordinary nature of the heroic act, which by this very feature
limits the candidates to be included into the canonical memory, and the inherent limits
of human capacities of ritual remembering.
The canonicity of the canonical memory explains its fundamentally dual
nature: on the one hand, it is precisely the secret behind its success, but on the other
hand, it is precisely its extremely elitist criteria of inclusion that fail to do general
justice to humans universal fear of being forgotten. Remembering a canon of martyrs
(be them for Christ, the Homeland, or for Knowledge) through rituals of
commemoration such as the cult of saints in the Catholic Church ensures the cultural
persistence and generational transmission of those few memory-objects through time,
but it also leaves aside great many other non-canonized persons. The archive, by
contrast, is a demotic, all-inclusive institution of memory. In sharp contradistinction to
the canonical types of memory, the archive is indiscriminately welcoming. Despite this
all-inclusiveness and openness, the archive is nonetheless paradoxically forgetful.
With a metaphorical license, archives can be seen, in a necropolis light, as the
graveyards of memory, the burial sites of textualized remembrances. Resurrection is
possible, but it will need a miracle to happen. Most often, the miracle embodies the
flesh of a historian. Working as an archive gravedigger, the historian can bring people
to life from the burial of the past. We have here the Lazarus effect of the historical
research, symbolically rising from the dead long forgotten people. Paradigmatic in this
regard is the case of Menocchio, the 16th century miller trialled, imprisoned, and
eventually burned at the stake by the Inquisition for his heretical beliefs, who was the
hero of Carlo Ginzburgs masterful book, The Cheese and the Worms.56 Physically
blasted by the flames of the Church, he was nonetheless symbolically placed in the
textual coffin of the Inquisitions records, as his beliefs however distorted by the
inquisitorial procedures of interrogation were saved from oblivion in the shelter of
the archive. People live in memory, but they do not live in archives. Living memory
the canon is kept alive precisely by continual remembering practices, be they
pragmatic usage such as it happens in cases of argumentum ab auctoritate, or pious
reverence as it is the case with the worship of the classics. Whereas the archive is the
locus of dead memory, still memory, virtually saveable from the irreclaimable effect of
oblivion, but mummified memory, pending for a miraculous rising to post-corporal life.
But we should add hastily to polish this funeral metaphor that by mummified
56

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

404

memory with which we are describing archival memory we are referring to the plaster
bodies of Pompeii (mummified by accident), rather than to the deliberately embalmed
bodies of the Pharaohs of Egypt mummified by design. The latter belongs to the
canon rather than to the archive, as true mummification, i.e., the complete treatment
of eviscerating and embalming the body, which could be afforded only by the upper
classes. Conversely, mummification by accident, as it happened in Pompeii, is a
democratic process, resembling to the modus operandi of the archive. The contrast
between the archive and the canon can be further sharpened by falling back upon yet
another necropolis metaphor. Taking a step further on this metaphorical path, it could
be argued that the canon is the site of reliquiae, revered with awe by a community of
worshipers, while the archive is the graveyard. The archive is therefore in-betwixt
memory and oblivion, frozen as it is between resisting to putrefaction into oblivion and
awaiting to be revered as halidom by the still living. Set against this metaphorical
background, it should not come as a surprise that in his most cryptic novel, All the
Names, Jos Saramago describes the Central Registry and the General Cemetery as
twin institutions, as the former can be thought of as a confluent of the latter, at the
same time as the latter is but an appendix of the former.57 The repository not of bones
and rotten flash, but of people made out of paper and ink, the archive is the celluloid
catacombs of humankind. Paper cadavers, as Kirsten Weld names the people
catalogued in the states archives.58
With the digitalization of memory, and especially with the advent of the everexpanding virtual archive of the internet, a decisive technological shift has occurred in
human endeavours to store its experiences. There are, of course, lines of continuity
with the classical celluloid archive. Digital archives are, without a doubt, expanding to
a level never before reached by the storing capacity of archival institutions.
Eliminating the physical document by converting it in virtual file or even recording it
directly as such , the spatial limitation of classical archives is thus overcome. But
digital archives also bring ruptures. Among the most significant of these is the fact that
people, while continuing to be registered and their actions recorded in digital and/or
classical archival institutions by state agencies, can now make their own way into
memory. Since the internet archive with its digital memory is an open-ended project
continuously shaped not by officially sanctioned procedures of the classical archive
(record creation, use, cataloguing, disposition, appraisal, etc.) but by a quasi-anarchic
process as a result of unregulated interactions between users, ordinary individuals can
now inscribe themselves into the digital memory through their online actions.
A paradigmatic shift in the culture of memory the default of remembering and
the right to be forgotten
We have argued so far that the will to memory and the struggle against oblivion is part
and parcel of human condition. Building on this basic anthropological premise, we
have detailed the means by which humans have tried to gain mastery over memory, be
them practical modes (such as devising arts of memory and developing technologies
57

Jos Saramago, All the Names (London: Harvill, 1999).

Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers. The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2014).
58

405

and institutions of memory) or symbolic modes of ensuring an afterlife and thus

memorial eternity in the communitys collective memory. We have shown that
although the canonical types of memory are the best ways of achieving this sense of
symbolic immortality in the successors remembrances, the entrance in these hieratic
memory systems is conditioned by the mnemonic policy of heroic acts, which makes
them highly selective. Therefore, canonical memory fails to redeem humanity from
oblivion, but only the chosen few. The archive, a demotic institution of memory,
promises to save from oblivion not only the heroes, but also the masses. While partially
delivering this promise, we have shown that archives can also be seen as graveyards of
memory. Digital memory, instead, can fulfil humankinds old dream of gaining perfect
mastery over memory. Before the digital age of memory brought about by the internet
revolution, humans have always struggled against the notorious shortage of space
available to their remembrances (individual as well as collective). Storing everything in
the mind or in the external memory-systems devised for capturing human experiences
was a utopian aspiration. But with the coming of the digital age, it is now
technologically possible. But here comes the great paradox: with the right to be
forgotten ruled by the European Court of Justice, digital memory is being humanized.
What we are witnessing is the anthropomorphisation of digital memory. The
paradoxical nature of this process lies in the fact that digital memory which is now
technologically capable of storing virtually everything, of recording practically all
human experiences, and of being a flawless and complete archive is shaped by
judicial policies to model the imperfect, fallible workings of human memory. Oblivion,
which is a structural feature of the imperfect human memory, is introduced into the
virtually perfect remembering system of the digital memory.
Once ruled by the European Court of Justice, the right to be forgotten has been
established as the formal judicial framework for a new paradigm of public
remembering in the digital age of memory. But this formal aspect is accompanied and
was preceded by informal communication practices that are already exercising, in
private exchanges, the right to be forgotten. Starting with 2011, a new class of
communication apps and software made its way into the digital scene. Cries for
reintroducing forgetting in the digital realm of quasi-perfect memory by ingraining an
expiration date into digital information were already made by 2009, in books such as
Viktor Mayer-Schnbergers Delete praising the vanishing virtue of forgetting in the
advent of digital age.59 Responding to calls to reset the balance between forgetting and
remembering starkly disturbed in favour of the latter and simultaneously with users
increased needs to privacy and informational protection, the ephemeral messaging
movement was launched by applications such as Snapchat, which introduced the notion
of self-destructive messages a very radical solution to Mayer-Schnbergers proposal
of setting an expiration date to digital information. Users can send texts, photos, and
video recordings which are programmed to be deleted by default seconds after they
were viewed by their recipients. The life expectancy60 set by the expiration date
imprinted in the meta-information of the digital data is no longer than 1 to 10 seconds,
59

Viktor Mayer-Schnberger, Delete. The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 171.
60
Ibid., 174.

406

making digital exchanges virtually as ephemeral as oral communication. Supremely

important is that messages will be deleted not only from the users storages, but also
from the companys servers. In the summer of 2014, Snapchat was said to have more
than 100 million monthly active users, only to double its users half a year later, nearing
200 million snappers by January, 2015.61 Its usage numbers also grew exponentially. If
in February 2013 60 million ephemeral messages were sent each day, by May 2014 the
number reached 700 million.62 In parallel to the aforementioned anthropomorphisation
of memory, what we are witnessing is also a digital recreation of oral culture, as
ephemerality is reinstalled as the principle of digitally mediated oral communication.
Writing the great technological divider between orality and literacy is not
eliminated from interpersonal communication. But what gets removed is the
fundamental characteristic of writing, that is to say, its objective, externalized,
durability. The Horacean dictum of Verba volant, the principle of ephemerality so
characteristic of oral cultures, echoes the new principle of ephemerality of orally
simulated digitalized cultures, which is not anymore Scripta manent, but Scripta
volant. Self-effacing texts, deleted by default these are the new principles of textual
communication starting to govern postmodern digitized society.
How can we make sense of these momentous shifts in the culture of memory?
The legal right to be forgotten, along with the informal communication praxis of
ephemeral messaging, signal the coming of a paradigmatic shift in the order of
memory. It can be described as the transition from the will to public memory to the
private quest for public oblivion. The driving force behind this swift shift is the everincreasing societal capacity to remember which threatens to abolish any right to
privacy that individuals might claim for themselves in the face of the rising tide of
technological power to store ever more information on their preferences, actions, and
identities. As shown compellingly by Mayer-Schnberger, one major consequence of
the digital revolution consisted in toppling the venerable balance between memory and
oblivion, between remembering and forgetting. For millennia, as we have shown in the
first part of this paper, humans were at pains to secure their memories from oblivion,
supporting extreme psychological, societal, and financial costs for this purpose. In the
classical age of memory, remembering was an expensive and tedious effort, therefore
people were obliged to resort to extremely selective criteria in choosing what to
confine to the vaults of their memory. In this classical age of memory, forgetting was
the norm while remembering was something exceptional, founding pre-digital societies
on a default of forgetting.63 This is no longer the case, as digital technology has
61

Douglas Macmillan and Evelyn M. Rusli, Snapchat Is Said to Have More Than 100 Million
Monthly Active Users, The Wall Street Journal, Aug 26, 2014, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/
2014/08/26/snapchat-said-to-have-more-than-100-million-monthly-active-users
(accessed
March 24, 2015); Alyson Shontell, Snapchat Is A Lot Bigger Than People Realize And It
Could Be Nearing 200 Million Active Users, Business Insider, Jan 3, 2015,
http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchats-monthly-active-users-may-be-nearing-200-million2014-12 (accessed March 24, 2015).
62
Alyson Shontell, 5 Months After Turning Down Billions, Snapchats Growth Is Still
Exploding With 700 Million Photos Shared Per Day, Business Insider, May 2, 2014,
http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-growth-2014-5?IR=T (accessed March 24, 2015).
63
Mayer-Schnberger, Delete, 13.

407

changed the default of forgetting into a default of remembering. For the first time in
human history, remembering is cheaper than forgetting, in both financial and
psychological terms. The technological cause and prerequisite of this dramatic
turnabout was the force of digitization, which made cheap storage, easy retrieval, and
global reach possible.64 The outcome of this process was the making of a transparent
society65 endowed with a never-before power of remembering and saving public and
private data in its digital memory stored in server farms. In parabolic terms, the
transparent society brought about by the digital memory revolution is a Zamyatinesque
transparency, as in his dystopian city of glass in which every movement and action is
under permanent surveillance by the watchful eye of the authority.66 Changing the
terminology, but keeping the dystopian theme, it can be argued that the quasi-perfect
and permanent digital memory transforms society into a mnemonic chronotopial cyber
panopticon. By mnemonic panopticism the first component of the term we are
advancing we refer to a society in which the societal capacity to remember through
digital memory makes its subject behave as if everything they have ever done can be
publicly remembered. Mnemonic panopticism is, without a doubt, a disciplinary
mechanism, encouraging people to self-censorship and to think twice before taking
action in the digital realm.67 The term chronotopial panopticon is meant to express
the fact that the all-encompassing digital memory is not only making information
easily accessible to a global audience abolishing thus geographical constraints (i.e.,
spatial panopticon), but it also denies the temporal dimension by making information
timely, however old and outdated. This mnemonic chronotopial panopticon is
simultaneously and necessarily a cyber panopticon, since this degree of mnemonic
surveillance spread across space and time could not have been possible without the
technology of digital remembering. Needless to say, privacy has been swept away
under the tidal wave of digitalization. Cries for limiting the invasion of individual
privacy have been made since the late 19th century. Prompted by the increasing
audacity of the mass media in invading the sacred precincts of private and domestic
life, Boston lawyers Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis published in 1890 a
highly influential paper in Harvard Law Review, claiming the right to privacy.68
Lamenting over the immorality of the newspapers and journalists, accused of elevating
trivial backyard gossip to the dignity of print and transforming gossip from the
resource of the idle and of the vicious to a fully-fledged trade pursued with industry

64

Ibid., 52.
David Brin, The Transparent Society. Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy
and Freedom? (New York: Basic Books, 1998).
66
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (New York: Penguin Books, 1993).
67
Mayer-Schnberger, Delete, 3-4 relates the case of Andrew Feldmar, a psychotherapist in his
late sixties living in Vancouver, Canada, who in 2006 was barred the right to enter into the
United States after a zealous border guard queried his name in a search engine and found an
article published in 2001 in which Feldmar mentioned that he had taken LSD in the 1960s.
Feldmars case is an eloquent expression of the temporal panopticon made possible by digital
remembering.
68
Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, Harvard Law Review 4
(1890): 193220.
65

408

as well as effrontery,69 Warren and Brandeis reacted by claiming legal informational

protection of the individual against her potential privacy invaders. Each individual
should have the right to choose what parts of his/her private life, habits, acts, and
relations are to be shared or not with others.70 The real fright was not so much the
age-old gossip, be it even given the dignity of print, so as the new technology allowing
journalists to take instantaneous photographs and newspapers to circulate without
authorization portraits of private persons. Eight decades later, it was not the
impropriety of the newspapers but the governmental and corporative eagerness to
gather personal data on its citizens and customers, made possible by newly available
computer technology, that impelled Arthur R. Miller in 1971 to denounce the assault
on privacy.71 Written at the dawn of the computer age, Millers book raised the alarm
on the perils of state and private agencies stocking personal information in
comprehensive databases to be used in administration and/or marketing. The legal
scholar repeatedly warns against the danger posed by the hypnotic attraction to
electronic record-keeping to which both public institutions and corporations have
fallen prey, in the Western democratic tradition of individual autonomy. 72 Today, yet
another (cluster of) technological advancement(s) is prompting other struggles to
prevent the continuous assault on privacy. The right to be forgotten must be situated in
the genealogy of these reactions to technological advances threatening individual
privacy (first by instant photographs, later by computers, and now by the technological
nexus made up of the World Wide Web, the internet, social networking, search
engines, and web crawlers).
In the classical age of memory, after passing through this world, the great
majority of ordinary people left behind, besides genes (if they had children), properties
(if they possessed any), and artefacts (if they made any), only their bones and
excrements. Their names, if ever recorded at birth (or baptized), marriage, and death,
survived their death only to remain buried in ecclesiastic and/or public archives. All
these considerations highlight the tragedy of human ontological precariousness sub
specie aeternitatis, along with its similarly tragic condition of posteritous fragility in
the societal memory. But with the coming of the digital age of memory, almost
everyone leaves a digital footprint. Not being part of the network society and not
contributing to the digital memoryscape requires a highly demanding eremitic
philosophy of life a life of loneliness, social isolation, and quietism. It has become
almost impossible in this digital network society to withdraw from the allencompassing public memory sphere in the now already established digital age of
memory. The will to memory continued to struggle against oblivion while societys
technological basis was running on a default of forgetting. Things are dramatically
changing in the digital network society, where the ever-expanding public sphere of
digital memory prompts individuals to withdraw from the public memory and retreat in
their private spheres by invoking the right to be forgotten.
69

Ibid., 196.
Ibid., 216.
71
Arthur R. Miller, The Assault on Privacy: Computers, Data Banks, and Dossiers (Ann Arbor,
University of Michigan Press, 1971).
72
Ibid., 4.
70

409

We have stated, in the opening statement of this paper, that the will to memory
along with the struggle against oblivion is an anthropological principle of human
condition. By the end of our analysis, we arrived at the conclusion that, in
contemporary postmodern societies, a paradoxical cultural matrix is coming into being
in the guise of an orally-simulated digitally-mediated culture of communication.
Against the background of an ever-expanding public sphere of memory with its
irrepressible quest of archiving everything, individuals counteract by taking refuge in
the private sphere and by claiming the right to be forgotten. Our conclusion seems to
collide with our initial premises, since we have just asserted the contemporary quest of
privacy and will to oblivion. This inconsistency allows us to revisit the question of
human condition. It should be made clear from the very outset that we are far from
claiming to give a solution to the aporia of human condition. What we are striving to
do is a hermeneutic struggle to make sense of the nature of human condition in the
light of our considerations regarding memory and forgetfulness. In a previous paper,
we have argued for the technological conditioning of memory, proposing a soft and
sober technological conditionalism not determinism of human memory, individual
as well as collective.73 Faithful to this initial theoretical commitment, we extend our
argument so as to cover not only human memory, but human condition. Resting our
argument on the theoretical framework set out in books such as Braden R. Allenby and
Daniel Sarewitzs The Techno-Human Condition and Andy Clarks Natural-Born
Cyborgs,74 we advance a soft and sober technological conditionalism of the human
spirit. Challenging the post-human hypothesis, i.e., the theory that the unprecedented
development of technology that we are witnessing in our times is at odds with human
nature throwing the individuals that are trapped within this technological nexus into a
post-human condition, Clark argues compellingly that human nature is evolutionarily
shaped so as to couple with material and cultural external environment in forming
human-technological symbionts.75 Human minds proclivity of coupling to external
systems (symbolic, social, cultural, technological etc.) along with its natural propensity
to form distributed cognitive networks means nothing else but that humans have
always been cyborgs. Since human nature itself (i.e., the biological makeup of human
species, along with the neurological wiring of the brain and with the internal wiring of
the mind) is technologically embedded, what follows is that human condition cannot be
anything but technological. In this line of reasoning, the post-human condition
cannot be reached by further tightening the symbiotic relationship between humanity
and technology, but, paradoxically, by removing humans from their technological
embedment. Against this background, it is now easy to understand why Allenby and
Sarewitz claimed that human condition is techno-human condition to begin with.
Both as a species and as individuals so both phylogenetically and ontogenetically ,
we are part of a techno-induced evolutionary program that has been going on more or
73

Mihai Stelian Rusu, The Media-History of Memory. Mapping the Technological Regimes of
Memory, Philobiblon. Transylvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Humanities 2
(2014): 291326, 298.
74
Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz, The Techno-Human Condition (Cambridge, MA and
London: The MIT Press, 2011); Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs. Minds, Technologies, and
the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
75
Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 3.

410

less since the origins of humankind a program of continuing expansion of the human
desire to understand, modify, and control its surroundings, its prospects, and its self,
and to couple to the technologies that surround us even more intimately.76 Marxs
notion of homo faber captures this intrinsic link between humans and technology. In
fact, human history (both the anthropological history of human species and the social,
political, cultural history of human societies) makes sense only by reading it in terms
of technological developments. The history of our species is a history of redesigning
ourselves, of fuzzing the boundaries of our inner and outer worlds, say Allenby and
Sarewitz.77 We can concur with them that the history of humankind has been the
history of redesigning human condition, socio-culturally and technologically, by
enhancing, among others, humans memory-systems in their historical struggle against
oblivion. With the coming of the age of digital memory, characterized by the neverbefore possibility of storing virtually everything, we are witnessing yet another
redesigning of human condition. Digital technology of memory has made humans
victorious in their immemorial struggle against oblivion. It is precisely this
technological feat that is responsible for the current uprising against comprehensive
digital memory systems expressed by the quest for individual privacy and the right to
be forgotten. What we have called the mnemonic principle of human existence the
striving for remembering the past along with the quest for memorial posterity in the
survivors collective memory was a hallmark of human condition until technological
difficulties were overcome by the digital revolution which made quasi-perfect
remembering virtually possible. The reaction against the total societal remembering
now technologically possible reveals the technological nature of the human condition.
To put it bluntly, the strive for public forgetfulness in the age of digital remembering
shows that human condition (as expressed in human aspirations, values, and needs) is
more or less a function of technological possibilities.

76
77

Allenby and Sarewitz, The Techno-Human Condition, 2.

Ibid., 17.

411

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