tour titled South Asian on City of Memory

 

City of Memory

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    Woudenberg, René van. “Thomas Reid on Memory.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 37.1 (1999): 117-133.

    This paper by René van Woudenberg discusses Thomas Reid’s view on memory. The paper offers a philosophical perspective on the nature of the human intellect and the faculty of memory. Reid provides a distinction between memory and perception, saying that memory is a “knowledge of things past,” whereas perception is a “knowledge of things present.” Therefore, the things we remember are separate and inapplicable to the things we perceive. Questions arise as to the way in which we remember things in the past and the possibility of remembering things in the future, such as an appointment the following week. Reid argues that a memory of the latter kind is merely a remembrance of the specific moment in which we learned the knowledge. Memory, therefore, is an “avenue of knowledge.” Reid’s ideas are met with many critics, specifically mentioned here is William Hamilton. Another interesting discussion is Reid’s correlation between memory and belief. Reid states that the presence of memory means that there is also belief. Where there is no belief, there can be no memory. This viewpoint leaves little room for the intentional reconstruction of memory. Next he brings up the intriguing notion of the perception of memory. B can check A’s memory, for example, but only with the predisposition belief in his own. This circularity of reliability he terms epistemic circularity. The question arises then on where does realism exist?

This article is extremely illuminating in the discussion of Kurosawa’s film Rashomon. Since the main argument of the film is the concept of human perceptions and altered reality, the audience questions not only the story as seen from each character but also the story itself. Can we ever be sure of what we are seeing and know for a fact what actually happened? We can only see what is shown to us through different character’s perspectives and then intermixed with our own. Even the witness, therefore, is an unreliable source to ascertain the truth of the crime. Reid’s article made me completely rethink whether I can trust what I see on the screen or how I react to it. Does a story exist if only our memory holds it?

 

    Joyce, Richard. “Cartesian Memory.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 35.3 (1997): 375-393.

    This paper, from a journal discussing the history of philosophy, examines Descartes’ theories on memory. Descartes places memory into two forms: the corporeal and the intellectual. In the discussion about corporeal memory, Descartes provides a scientific description of sensory functions, including the stimulation of nerve fibers and the reception by brain particles. Images transferred into our brain can originate from a physical stimuli or an imagined one. Intellectual memory, on the other hand, is independent of our body and unable to be logically illustrated on paper or in discourse. This title of the article, “Cartesian Memory,” comes into play here in the circularity of Descartes arguments on memory. He writes that all we can trust as true is what we perceive, yet states that such a perception if impossible without the guarantee of clarity and mental distinction. Perception negates truth in this argument. He cannot claim that his reasoning is true and right when memory cannot be trusted; hence the labeling of his discourses on memory as Cartesian, referring to the famous circular argument of his exposed in the now labeled “Cartesian Circle.”

This paper offers another interesting insight into the nature of memory. Descartes does bring up the interesting aspect of the biological nature of memory and perception, despite the overall fallibility of his claims. His misperception just further proves the power of viewpoints and self-assertion. This paper fits nicely with the Thomas Reid paper on memory also included in this project. Descartes belief in his correctness does not denote the actual accuracy of his statements. Again, the notion of individual fact versus actual fact can be applied to Kurosawa’s Rashomon. One can argue that perhaps the characters are not intentionally lying for self-affirmation but rather from an intrinsic error in their memory and reality. The concept of truth is again brought into question here.

Orr closely examines Memento's film fabric as well as its broader cultural implications, presenting it as the result of a natural progression in a decade marked by the transformation of classic film noir into a low-budget identity noir. Nolan's dis-linear identity noir opens a black hole of perception, making the audience share the same amnesiac quality with the beleaguered, lost protagonist. This creates an intensifying suspicion of what the truth is and whether it actually exists. Orr deconstructs Memento as an intersection of popular film genre and experimental montage, discussing Nolan's mise-en-scene reduction to pure image. The author examines the narrative loop of the film as a subject to disorientations, playing forward and backward in time without a serial return to the present. Orr juxtaposes this approach to the fast-forward culture of today, calling it a perverse culture of the rewind. that plays on electronic culture's fatal flaw of .impatience with the slowing image. Nolan makes this perverse reverse dependent on the art of simple montage, creating a protagonist strikingly independent of electronic paraphernalia Leonard does not use the tools of the contemporary investigator, such as bugs, camcoders, computers, or mobiles, but is instead reliant on text and image. This, Orr argues, makes him a fable for the information age, his lack of memory storage both a match and a metaphor for the disaster bound to strike if all the world's electronic technology were to crash. Leonard is thus reduced to pure hard copy, from the tattoos covering his body to the multitude of notes lining his inside pockets. In this respect, Nolan.s protagonist becomes the antithesis of the Kubrickian cyborg monster, a de-programmed humanoid whose retrograde amnesia mirrors this technological retrograde evolution.

Evans examines the relationship between memory and history in Chaucer's romance Troilus, using Christopher Nolan's Memento to illustrate the important historical differences between the medieval and the postmodern. The essay draws on the work of French cultural historian Pierre Nora, who argues that history exists because memory no longer does and society is haunted by this loss. Memento, the author proposes, illustrates the contemporary obsession with .the precariousness of memory. and the crucial relationship between memory and identity. Evans argues that Memento serves as a .surreal projection. of what memory might look like if it were exteriorized and we were incapable of storing it in an internal filing system that allows us to retrieve it as needed. Due to the protagonist.s failure of this psychic archive, he creates a mnemonic system that employs a range of .prosthetics for memory,. such as tattoos, photographs, and notes. Evans compares this system to the techniques medieval monks utilized in the arts of preserving memory through authoritative texts. At the same time, the author suggests that because these are records of discrete and disconnected moments of objective reality, they are detached from a unifying chain of meaning and therefore useless to Leonard in structuring his past, present or future. This places the protagonist in a nightmare of double loss that of his wife and of his reliable mnemonic system. Evans deconstructs scenes from Memento to explore the film's distinctly humanist suggestion that memory is fundamental to one's survival as an individual and juxtaposes it to Chaucer's Troilus, which shares these anxieties of memory but without the radical separation between memory and history. The author stresses the distinctly occidental nature of this separation and argues that while medieval writers did not conflate memory and history, they had a dramatically different understanding of the relationship between the two.

This resource includes 10 different critical approaches to Nolan's 2000 film Memento, including scholarly articles, interviews, and cultural critique.