Watching myself live and thinking through Virno's Deja-vu and The End of The History teachings.
" The 'now' is camouflaged as the already-been, and is thus duplicated in an imaginary 'back then', in a fictitious 'other-then'
And the affirmation of an eternal present, a centripetal and despotic actuality is provoked by deja-vu, namely by the form of experience in which there prevails - as Bergson put it - ' the feeling that the future is closed, that the situation is detached from everything although I am attached to it.
Karl Mannheim prophesied in "Ideology and Utopia" - p 235-36
" It is possible... that in the future, in a world in which there is never anything new, in which all is finished and each moment a repetition of the past, there can exist a condition in which thought is utterly devoid of all ideological and utopia elements" Or: "A post historical situation, then; but also at the same time, a condition marked by majestic pathology of which we have already spoken: "there is never anything new...each moment [is] a repetition of the past'.
THE MEMORY OF THE PRESENT
" The formation of memory, Bergson maintains, "is never posterior to the formation of perception; it is contemporaneous with it". Far from being the blurred copy or the belated spectre of immediate experience, the majestic trace is its inevitable correlate. If 'between the perception and the memory there seems to be a difference of intensity or degree, but not of nature' (if, that is, memory we're the residue of perception), then that would rule out their being coexistence and simultaneous."
"There would be no memory at all if it were not, first of all, memory of the present. But then why is deja-vu the exception and not the rule? Why is it 'not being produced every moment? Bergson respondes: between the two heterogenous forms in which we understand the hic et nunc, the impulse to action always and on each occasion privileges the perception-from to the detriment of the memory-form.
"LET US REPEAT. The memory of the present is juxtaposed to the perception of the present. It is precisely in their simultaneous, co-extensive reference to the same object that memory and perception demonstrate their heterogeneity. We can no longer say that memory looks to 'back then' and perception to 'now', but rather must admit that there is a perceived present that exists in memory.
There are two kinds of memory:
1. procedural memory (the past congealed in savour faire, or habit, conserved as technique or ethos) and
2. semantic memory (the explicit re-evocation of signs and meanings that are inherent to long ago experiences.
Painting your faded memories by David Szauder
Labels: Bergson, cancelation of the future, deja-vu, future, Karl Mannheim, memory, Paolo Virno, present, repetition, the end of history
