Few days ago Chris wrote:
>it has occured to me after reading Aden's post that human physiology is
>such taht in order to remember humans must repress and in that sense
>constitute a psychological memory. this is the way freud is uasually
>interpreted. derrida appears to accetp as much ttoo. for deleuze, habits
>obviuosly repress or prevent 'unrestrained' repetition. repression,
>however, is a result of social practice and is not a necessary result
>of subjectification. all bodies are finite and it that sense limited, but
>not necessarily repressed. doubtless homo sapien physiology as it now
>exists involves a certain amount of repression, but mutations can certainly
>occur that might enable humans to overcome their current limits. Whence
>all the references to siliconized life forms and cybernetics and third
>generation machines at the end of FOUCAULT.
I might have missed something earlier, so sorry (or something later since
I'm busy working through unread mail), but is remembering always
repression, does all forgetting have to be repression in Freud's sense? I
am aware that this is pretty much so for Freud, but isn't there a lot of
recent work in various areas (cog. science, neurophysiology and all that
brain studies stuff) that suggests that, well, to keep it elegantly (and
inadequately) simple, memory is a much more fluid thing. That it is
physiologically, or biologically, or genetically, useful to remember some
things and not others and that memory itself has various cybernetic (?)
strategies. So my question is, in what way, if we take memory to be much
more rhizomatic (it certainly doesn't appear to be arboreal) than Freud's
model does repression become essential to memory?
Adrian Miles
------------------
>it has occured to me after reading Aden's post that human physiology is
>such taht in order to remember humans must repress and in that sense
>constitute a psychological memory. this is the way freud is uasually
>interpreted. derrida appears to accetp as much ttoo. for deleuze, habits
>obviuosly repress or prevent 'unrestrained' repetition. repression,
>however, is a result of social practice and is not a necessary result
>of subjectification. all bodies are finite and it that sense limited, but
>not necessarily repressed. doubtless homo sapien physiology as it now
>exists involves a certain amount of repression, but mutations can certainly
>occur that might enable humans to overcome their current limits. Whence
>all the references to siliconized life forms and cybernetics and third
>generation machines at the end of FOUCAULT.
I might have missed something earlier, so sorry (or something later since
I'm busy working through unread mail), but is remembering always
repression, does all forgetting have to be repression in Freud's sense? I
am aware that this is pretty much so for Freud, but isn't there a lot of
recent work in various areas (cog. science, neurophysiology and all that
brain studies stuff) that suggests that, well, to keep it elegantly (and
inadequately) simple, memory is a much more fluid thing. That it is
physiologically, or biologically, or genetically, useful to remember some
things and not others and that memory itself has various cybernetic (?)
strategies. So my question is, in what way, if we take memory to be much
more rhizomatic (it certainly doesn't appear to be arboreal) than Freud's
model does repression become essential to memory?
Adrian Miles
------------------