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<div class="section_header"> <span class="decorative_text
small_header"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://thequietus.com/articles/16607-simon-critchley-memory-theatre-architecture-death-interview#">http://thequietus.com/articles/16607-simon-critchley-memory-theatre-architecture-death-interview#</a><br>
<br>
Tome On The Range</span>
<h2>Cult Of Memory: Simon Critchley Interviewed <br>
<span class="sub"></span><span class="sub_sub"> Daniel Fraser ,
November 2nd, 2014 11:59</span></h2>
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<p>Daniel Fraser speaks to Simon Critchley about the architecture
of memory and a move toward its obliteration, the culture of
stigma surrounding death in our current civilisation (as well as
his distaste for that term) and his recent genre-bending
philosophical treatise-cum-novel <i>Memory Theatre</i></p>
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<p>"There is a sense in which the way we enforce remembrance
produces obliteration" Simon Critchley explains, in reference to
the insurmountable position memory has attained in the human
world. Our ability to remember is something we value above all
other brain functions. It defines all of us as who we are. But is
memory also dangerous? Should things be forgotten altogether? And
what would happen if you tried to build a space where all your
memories could be stored forever?</p>
<p>For those unfamiliar, Simon Critchley is a philosopher who has
written on subjects from the divide between the continental and
analytic traditions, to the centrality of finitude in contemporary
thought and many subjects in between (including, naturally, <a
href="http://thequietus.com/articles/16414-david-bowie-simon-critchley-biography-extract-2"
target="new">David Bowie</a>). His work manages the difficult
task of drawing both accessibility and depth from his vast range
of references and his work has a wit and vitality which always
makes his books high on my to-read list whenever they appear. </p>
<p>His new book, <i>Memory Theatre</i>, shifts between the already
difficult textual spaces of ‘fiction’, ‘memoir’ and ‘essay’,
exploring the history of memory and those who dared to construct
‘memory theatres’ architectural spaces of both the mind and the
material world in which might house all their knowledge. Drawing
on Hegel, Giordano Bruno, The Fall and much more, <i>Memory
Theatre</i> questions the validity of memory and whether it can
be anything more than ‘Repetition, repetition, repetition.’</p>
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<p><b>Near the end of the book you mention Hegel’s genius in
conceiving of memory as a kind of ‘perpetual motion machine’ do
you see this idea of motion as being essential to art also?</b></p>
<p>I don’t know, that’s a good question. In the book the way it
works is that the memory theatre that the protagonist builds ends
up being a static two-dimensional structure which there’s then a
critique of towards the end. After which I fantasise about this
total work of art, a work of a kind that would be a
self-perpetuating, self-generating system. </p>
<p>There is a fantasy about art as kind of a non-human
self-perpetuating environment, that’s the fantasy that the
protagonist ends up with. Whether I think that all art has that
character or not, I don’t really know. It’s a question of what we
think about what that character thinks about at the end of the
book: there’s this fantasy of this projection of an island which
would regenerate and repeat and then art would become
indistinguishable from nature and we would become nature itself,
the second sun. Yet you are left with this character waiting
outside this provincial library in the Netherlands, waiting for it
to open so that he can consult title charts: a pathetic spectacle
which exposes as fantasy the idea which artists have submitted
themselves to.</p>
<p>One thing I was thinking of, there’s an artist called Philippe
Parreno who did this piece a couple of years ago called <i>CHZ:
Continuously Habitable Zones</i> where he was he was basically
designing a garden in Portugal which ended up taking on strange
proportions but the fantasy that was driving it was the idea of an
artwork that would have an organic repetitive quality to it, it
was his response to mortality which is analogous to memory
theatre. That was on my mind continually when I was writing the
book.</p>
<p><b>I wanted to ask you about the images in the book, by Liam
Gillick, and why the photographic representation of a process of
dismantling, or the illusion of such which has been created by
their arrangement, was necessary. And further, what it is about
Gillick’s work which particularly resonates with this project?</b></p>
<p>Everything I do is completely contingent and driven by chance, I
just know Liam and when I finished the <i>Memory Theatre</i> I
didn’t show it to anybody, it came out quite quickly, in a
different form and it felt like it had to be said and flowed very
easily in a strange way — it was an oddly easy thing to write.
After a while showed it to Liam, I can’t remember why I showed it
to him, but he read it and immediately he said I see what you’re
up to here, we can put it together with this series of photographs
I’ve been doing from my apartment window of this building being
built. </p>
<p>Originally the plan was for it to be a kind of art book which
would have 30-40 pictures by Liam and the text would go alongside
it, but then the Fitzcarraldo project emerged and it changed form.
In terms of its meaning the book is a kind of worst case scenario
for people like me: how life might end up for me. I hope it
doesn’t but it might. And Liam is someone who is in the same boat
and he recognised some commonalities. I don’t really have any
taste or judgement when it comes to anything visual at all, I
really don’t, so when Liam said he got it I was pleased and then
he said that it would go together with this I said OK, and then we
did it. So there’s no necessity to it, I like the idea of the
decomposition of the building as a reverse commentary of the
construction of the memory theatre, a visual critique on some
level. It does give a kind of punctuating sequence which I like a
lot. I’m pleased how it turned out.</p>
<p><b>I was wondering how you thought the failure of architecture to
encapsulate memory might relate to the idea of the memorial, the
edifice of remembrance?</b></p>
<p>Yeah, the idea of memory theatre comes out of this in a sense. I
re-read one of the source texts the other week, which is this
apocryphal text attributed to Cicero called the <i>Rhetorica ad
Herennium</i> which gives this distinction between natural and
artificial memory. It’s a twenty page discussion, and there was
clearly a whole literature on this subject – most of which has
been lost. It’s just this not-particularly-interesting rhetorical
manual which has survived, and its description of artificial
memory always links it to images and space and defines it in
architectural terms. So artificial memory, something one
cultivates, is a cultivation of an architectural space which is a
space that you imagine and then inhabit and then it’s taken a step
further in the physical incarnation of that space. </p>
<p>There is a sequence in the book, which might be my favourite part
of the book, there’s a dream of a series of gothic cathedrals
which were things which fascinated me particularly when I was in
my twenties, I was obsessed with English gothic architecture, but
a penny dropped two or three years ago that these spaces are
memory theatres: These cathedrals are architectural spaces which
are designed to evoke certain memories in this case: creation,
fall, redemption, last judgement. </p>
<p>There’s a scene in the book where the protagonist, we have to say
the protagonist I guess, whoever it is, drives into work and the
landscape itself appears as a kind of memory theatre which you can
then link to a psycho-geographical set of concerns: to inhabit the
space of a city or a town or a village is to inhabit a memory
theatre. So the concept can be wildly generalised it seems to me.
</p>
<p>The question of monuments is a central one as the book is, in
some sense, the story of the construction of a failed monument.
Separately I’ve got problems with monuments, and with architecture
too. In a way, I’m against architecture. There’s that book by
Denis Hollier about Bataille which begins with Bataille looking at
Chartres cathedral and thinking ‘this is shit and I want to
destroy it’ and there is something about architecture which stirs
this impulse in me. There is a way which architecture is merely an
oppressive monumentalisation of memory which obliterates other
possible memories, other possible lines. </p>
<p>One thing which has concerned me over the years in response to
this is thr question ‘could you have a monument to something
immemorial’, or, could you have a kind of im-monument? Could you
have a different notion of architecture which wouldn’t be prey to
this memorialisation? I’m thinking of this particularly in
relation to the cult of memory surrounding Holocaust memorials,
the issues they have thrown up in recent years and, more
specifically, I’m thinking of the things that Thomas Hirschhorn
was trying to do with his monuments, which are different, almost
im-monuments. They are these precarious, badly constructed,
transient structures used for a social purpose and then
dismantled. Which I guess is what the memory theatre ends up
becoming in the back garden at the end.</p>
<p><img src="cid:part4.06030305.07000906@ziggo.nl" alt=""
class="normal" height="413" width="550"> <i>(Thomas Hirschhorn,
Bataille Monument, 2002)</i></p>
<p><b>Reading the book, I was reminded of Bolano’s <i>2666</i> and
the printing of the murders and its play with the idea of memory
and forgetting, the reader finding themselves skipping and
skimming past them after a certain point, as though by their
very presence they are forgotten. Do you think writing is better
at articulating forgetting than remembrance? Is this true of
architecture?</b></p>
<p>That’s a very tricky question. It’s like what will happen here in
New York on September the 11th, there will be the 911 memorial
event at ground zero and the names will be read out again and
you’ll hear the first few and then the cameras will switch to
something else or you’ll lose interest. There’s something to the
listing of names which produces a kind of obliteration because you
can’t take it in, it becomes a list. </p>
<p>I don’t want the dead to be forgotten but there is a sense in
which the way we enforce remembrance produces obliteration, and
it’s counterproductive.</p>
<p>There then is the huge philosophical issue of whether you should
remember or whether you should forget, and there is an
overwhelming preponderance in all traditions including the
philosophical tradition, towards remembering. The idea of
recollection in Plato, anamnesis, and through to Hegel, that I
discuss in a sense philosophy becomes this total recall and that’s
meant to be good because that’s knowledge. Knowledge is
recollection based on whatever metaphysical theory that you have.
Now on the one hand to remember is good, and the purpose of art is
to make us remember. However the flip side of it which I am always
conscious of is Nietzsche’s argument that we should actively
forget, that we are flayed alive and tortured by memory as Beckett
would say, and what has to be cultivated is the attempt to forget
the ways in which we’ve been programmed as memory machines. </p>
<p>So there are two options: philosophy, or art, as total recall and
then the counter proposal that what we should be cultivating is a
kind of obliteration in the name of some kind of freedom from the
past and I don’t come down on one side or another, they are merely
opposing strategies.</p>
<p><b>Do you think then that there is some sense that writing offers
a third way, a plane in between these oppositional forces?</b></p>
<p>Yes, definitely. One moral of <i>Memory Theatre</i> is that it
is a kind of parable of writing. Here is someone who writes and
then goes crazy and then that writing becomes a sort of
monumentalisation of death in this fantasy of total recall where
everything would become meaningful at the moment of the extinction
of one’s life in death. Which is a very reassuring picture of
writing, writing helps us to remember but in many ways writing
should be pushing us towards that which we can’t remember, that
which escapes memory, that which really haunts us. Or again to
push us towards something which actually involves other people
rather than this masturbatory activity of writing which can lead
to catastrophe.</p>
<p>I think there is a way of writing, a kind of Derridean theme: you
can try to write in a way which encourages a certain otherness in
the self, a certain self-distancing, and <i>Memory Theatre</i>
therefore is a negative example, something to be avoided. However,
<i>Memory Theatre</i> is also importantly a universe without love,
this is what an existence without love looks like and love is also
a kind of other-ing. It engenders a disposition in you which is
orientated towards something which you cannot control or
recollect. It is the same way I see psychoanalysis which again is
not premised on a fantasy of total recall, it’s about an
orientation towards something which is in you that is maybe not in
your conscious memory, and is not really memorialisable in any
way. </p>
<p><b>At the end of the book you visualise a memory theatre as a
kind of second sun. Bataille famously conceived of two suns, one
which was the highest concept of mankind and the other, the one
gazed directly into, was horrific and led to madness. Do you see
an echo of this dichotomy in the concept of memory?</b></p>
<p>Bataille is of particular interest to me because you could see
Bataille condemning the memory theatre and in particular the
memory theatre that is Hegel’s fantasy of absolute knowledge, the
closed economy of the theatrical space in the book, and opposing
that in the name of what he calls throughout his work
‘sovereignty’. Sovereignty is an odd word to use in many ways,
because what Bataille was interested in wasn’t sovereignty as the
capacity to make a decision or act in a certain way but rather to
engage in an experience where you give up who you were and be free
of that fantasy of a closed economy. </p>
<p>So in Bataille you’ve got this cultivation of a series of
experiences: eroticism, squandering, sacrifice and so on and so
forth which are about staging something which would let that
memory theatre go in a way; would let go of the delusion of
absolute knowledge.</p>
<p>In many ways you can read the book as a negative moral: the point
of the book is what’s not in it in many ways. I wrote the book in
order to try to correct that tendency in myself which of course
you fail to do but nonetheless you have to try. </p>
<p>To write at all is to construct some kind of delusional memory
theatre which so often leads to you becoming like some machine
which just produces words, like Zizek, just saying the same things
over and over again. How do you stop doing that? Does it mean
stopping writing? Maybe. Maybe it means writing in a different way
such as writing collaboratively, something I’ve tried to do over
the years to try and give up the authority of the voice. </p>
<p>Good question though, I don’t have a good answer!</p>
<p><b>Discussing memory often leads us to death. In <i>Very Little…
Almost Nothing</i> you discuss the concept of finitude and its
central importance to modern philosophy, do you think death is
politicised? </b></p>
<p>Yes, it’s true in an obvious way. There was a story on the radio
this morning about the way people die in the US and it is an
empirical fact that people who die in New York spend much more
time in hospitals than people who die in other cities because of
the number of specialists here. If you get sick there are so many
people you can see that you become completely medicalised which
leads to absurd situations where, in the name of keeping people
alive, people suffer miserable deaths from – let’s say – cancer
where they could be given a last few months of life with
palliative care and they could live at home with their loved ones
in some dignity, but instead they’re given aggressive therapies
and die on an intensive care unit. There is some sense then that
the medicalisation of death is an obscenity and something which I
feel very strongly about.</p>
<p><b>Do you think that this increased medicalisation of death
forces us to define ourselves increasingly through death?</b></p>
<p>There’s no question that the civilisation that we are coming to
the end of, whether we even call it a civilisation, I think it’s
the wrong word even though that itself is a pejorative term, but
the thing which we are coming to the end of is certainly the
culture that’s the most scared of death of any culture that I’m
familiar with. Part of my ruminations on death over the years have
led me into looking at anthropological material, such as mourning
practices and the rituals around death, I think these are very
important things. We are just a mess when it comes to death and
it’s just got worse and worse.</p>
<p>One of my earliest memories in Liverpool with my family was of my
great-grandmother dying and the open coffin funeral and the Irish
wake. You kissed the corpse and there were old men sitting round
the sides of the room, the chairs were pushed to the edge of the
room, the curtains were drawn and people were drinking whiskey
telling us jokes and stories and who knows what that meant but
there was a corpse: and you kissed that corpse and were related to
that corpse. There were a set of practices around death – people
knew what to do and they knew what to say, not that it helped
enormously but at least they could say something. </p>
<p>It seems to be that death has become increasingly politicised and
medicalised but it has dropped out of language. We don’t know what
to do or say anymore, and this is particularly the case in
relation to suicide. I think I might write something soon in
defence of suicide, which I have been thinking about writing for a
long time. Part of which is the confusion which follows the
suicide of someone that you know or someone you don’t, like Robin
Williams or Philip Seymour Hofmann. They kill themselves and
people don’t know want to say. People want to say on the one hand
that it was an act of cowardice, or if it was a free act then it
was a cowardly act, or people will say it was because of
depression or because of addiction, and therefore it wasn’t a free
act, and therefore was ok. But the idea of there being a freely
chosen act of suicide which was what basically defined what we
think of as antiquity is now abhorrent to our modes of thinking. </p>
<p>In Greek and Roman antiquity and most other versions of antiquity
suicide was a practice people would engage in, not willy-nilly,
but when the situation demanded. Now we are still locked within a
Christian metaphysics when it comes to thinking about suicide and
death but at least a couple of generations back there was the
patina of Christian ritual, or just ritual, which meant that
people knew how to cope by performing certain actions. So there is
this politicisation and medicalisation of death but we remain the
culture which is most terrified of death. If you look at all the
monotheisms, but more than that, if you look at any cultural
formation across the world, its existence is predicated on a
relationship to the ancestors and the dead and it is that
relationship to the dead which allows things to continue. This
relationship has broken down radically for us and it has left us
terrified and silent. We have become anti-Victorians in the sense
that we imagine the Victorians had a problem with sex but
seemingly had no problem with death: expressing themselves in
those wonderful cemeteries and funereal monuments. On the other
hand, we think we can talk about sex – even though we can’t – but
death is off limits for us. We’re in really bad shape I think.</p>
<p><b>There are a number of great works of literature which might be
read as attempts at the construction of a memory theatre,
Proust, inevitably, and Benjamin’s <i>Arcades</i> project
spring to mind. In one sense they are failures in the same way
as the one constructed by the protagonist in <i>Memory Theatre</i>,
how important is it to keep failing?</b></p>
<p>I think the one which is closest to the surface of the book and
the one which is closest to my mind is Joyce’s <i>Ulysses</i>
which, again, is clearly an act of memory – an attempt to
reconstruct a place – it is a memory theatre from beginning to
end. I think Derrida said of Joyce that he was the most Hegelian
of novelists and you can see Joyce as wanting to produce a kind of
memory machine that is <i>Ulysses</i>. The brilliance of <i>Ulysses</i>
for me is that you don’t end up with absolute knowledge – you end
up with two men, an older man and a younger man, one whose son has
died and has had a vision of the dead son, Rudy, and the other
whose father is alive but wants him dead, Stephen Daedalus, who
after one hundred and twenty pages of catechistic third person
back and forth end up urinating in the back garden and their
streams of piss intersect and then they part. There’s no kind of
reconciliation, no ending to it. Upstairs is Molly Bloom who is
doing something else whilst their streams of piss are
intersecting; she is menstruating and fantasising, engaged in
another act of memory. In that sense I don’t think <i>Ulysses</i>
is a failure, more a parable of how things are.</p>
<p>To live in a non-place where there is no memory is a problem. You
know that feeling when you go to the West of the US or to
Australia where you think ‘why are white people here? What are
they doing?’ It’s preposterous; they’re just sitting on the
surface of this place: it feels like a place which is the
obliteration of another landscape of memory. The disconnection of
memory and place is a problem but Joyce would be a paradigm of
someone who is able to project place and leave it sufficiently
open at the end and then also imagine how it might be for someone
else, like Molly Bloom, who is not imprisoned within the central
memory theatre but is doing something else. On that level then
Joyce goes beyond memory theatre. </p>
<p><b>It’s interesting what you said about Derrida saying Joyce was
the most Hegelian of writers. It reminds me of Eisenstein who
wanted to make Marx’s <i>Capital</i> using the framework of
Ulysses. </b></p>
<p>I was doing these things with Tom McCarthy years ago on Joyce and
Shakespeare but we began with Joyce and we were trying to think of
<i>Finnegan’s Wake</i> and <i>Ulysses</i> in relation to the way
Capital is invoked as a kind of theological term that makes people
feel good and how so much of Joyce is about money changing hands
and about debt. The first story – the story that’s the origin of <i>Finnegan’s
Wake</i> - it’s a story that Joyce finds in a provincial Irish
newspaper about somebody getting their money stolen in a park, and
it reminds him about a story his father told about getting his
money stolen in Phoenix Park in Dublin. So at the basis of it all
is a financial transaction in the same way that the protagonist of
<i>Memory Theatre</i> uses the money he makes from a book which
allows him to build the memory theatre.</p>
<p><b>TJ Clark wrote that the more he looked at the art of the 20th
century the more he saw a current of retrogression running
through it. Are modernism, and postmodernism, always projects of
memory? And does the concept of memory inherently entail a
rejection of the present/future?</b></p>
<p>If one considers literary modernism to be someone like Joyce or
Eliot then yes, they are acts of memory but they are acts of
memory which occur after the deluge, and there remains only a
wasteland. The acts of memory always take place after the fall,
after everything has fallen apart and modernism is that process of
attempting to shore up these fragments against the ruins. That
would also be true of Benjamin’s entire project, most obviously in
<i>The Origin of German Tragic Drama</i> where the analogy that is
implicit in that book between the time he is writing about and his
time. In Weimar Germany in the ‘20s, the catastrophe has happened
and one is trying to shore certain things up: fragments of text in
libraries, emblems, whatever it might be, against the possibility
of total erasure.</p>
<p>I don’t think that would change significantly in whatever
postmodernism might mean. I think postmodernism makes sense as an
architectural category, where it is a category of work that plays
off the architecture of modernism but as a literary category I’ve
always found it to be a non-starter. I don’t see it as a
historical category either because I don’t believe in historical
categories. I spent much of this year teaching a lot of Greek
material, ancient tragedy, and the more you spend time reading
people like Euripides and Sophocles, the more you realise it was
exactly the same for them. They were dealing with a civilisation
that had collapsed and the remnants were just these myths which
were still kind of in the air, being told, but they weren’t
believed and they seemed to have a difficult relationship to the
institutions of the state – in particular the operation of law,
the courts, democracy such as it existed back then. </p>
<p>It’s not that nothing has happened historically but I think that
if radical historical change was possible then the past would be
illegible to us. I think the most extraordinary thing is not that
you can pick up the <i>Epic of Gilgamesh</i> and read it and
think ‘that was ok’ but that you can read Sophocles’ <i>Oedipus
the King</i> and you can completely get what it is about without
any kind of classical education whatsoever. There is something
about the legibility of the past which for me suggest there are
structures and patterns which are still haunting us and therefore
any kind of distinction into ancient, modern and postmodern falls
away. For me it is about always trying to work in a way which
promiscuously ignores those categories: to just use whatever there
is and shoring up those fragments in a certain way.</p>
<p>The relationship between literature and space is more important
for me than the relationship between literature and time. If you
begin with space rather than time you end up in some interesting
places, whereas the study of literature has always been attached
to this time-based fantasy: of Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Early
Modern, Modern, and Postmodern which to me is ludicrous. We should
be working in all periods simultaneously and using whatever we can
use. The way to do that is to think spatially rather than
temporally. </p>
<center><img src="cid:part5.04020103.06070205@ziggo.nl" alt=""
class="normal" height="539" width="345"></center>
<p>Memory Theatre <i>is out now, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions</i></p>
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