Professor Joo Lee
“Those who acquire [the art of writing] will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of on their own internal resources.” (Plato’s Phaedrus)
The body provides what appears to be a definitive measure of personal identity. But just as the body occupies space, the soul occupies time. By using the word “soul,” I do not mean to imply anything necessarily religious. We do, however, make a distinction between the body and the soul—between an outer and an inner life—in everyday language, so it would be disingenuous to drop this distinction altogether. I am using the word “soul” in the Classically Greek sense, encompassing all of those qualities we usually attach to a person’s inner life, setting aside the question of what that exactly entails. With regard to the soul, then, there is no surer way to determine personal identity than through memory. My beliefs, desires, and fears may change over time; but because I remember these changes, I can be reasonably certain that it is “I” who have experienced them. That idealistic, naïve adolescent I remember was me, not some complete stranger—although I may find myself astonished that this should be the case. I share this astonishment with Augustine, who, in his Confessions, finds himself unable to account for the apparent “loss” of his infancy. Yet despite this potential experience of self-alienation, memory enables us to constitute at least the semblance of an integral self.
When memory is threatened, so is the sense of identity. The total loss of memory is a terrifying prospect. Alzheimer’s disease reduces individuals to nameless shadows without the substance provided by a past. The possibility of amnesia reminds us of how tenuous our grasp of personal identity really is. In the 1991 movie Shattered, the protagonist suffers a disfiguring accident in which he also loses his memory. Unbeknownst to him, his reconstructive surgery was not so much a reconstruction as it was a transformation: he is reshaped in the image of the man he murdered. Having lost his memory, he adopts the identity of the man he now physically resembles. You can imagine his shock when he discovers the truth. The reason this movie is so disturbing is that it questions the legitimacy of personal identity. In a sense, it summons Descartes’ infamous evil genius by putting both the physical and spiritual criteria of identity into doubt. With neither body nor memory, one is left with literally no-thing.
Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic amnesia are, of course, limit cases. But our hold over ourselves is no less uncertain under “normal” conditions. Freud and psychoanalysis have alerted us to the manufactured quality of all of our memories. Furthermore, Sartre and existentialism would insist that any identity we ascribe to ourselves is a matter of bad-faith. Yet we tenaciously hold on to the idea of personal identity. In the “real world,” in fact, we cannot function without it. At the surface, we meticulously construct our identities, from the clothes we wear to the texts that line our bookshelves. Below the surface, we maintain identity through a complex network of beliefs, ideals, and the memories upon which they are based.
The legitimacy of this identity is not something I want to dispute. Rather, I would like to consider how our sense of identity—the stuff of the “soul”—has changed in the light of recent technological advancements. Computers have fundamentally altered the way we look at the world and at ourselves. We have progressively come to see the truth of reality as based on a code.
A genetic reduction is problematic enough, but a reduction to digital data may be even more disquieting. Biology and technology come together in the futuristic science fiction genre of cyber-punk. Novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer undermine the traditional relationship between body and soul, between matter and spirit. Spirit becomes nothing more than matter in its transcription onto magnetic tape. Although personal memory currently plays the central role in our sense of individual identity, it is not difficult to envision a day when that role will be seized by hard drives. Already, I am deathly afraid of losing my hard drive—the collection of fragmented thoughts that I hope to be my posthumous legacy—to some insidious virus that would destroy my aspirations to immortality. With the progress of technology, our sense of self is becoming increasingly a function of cold, external determinants. The warmth of personal memory is being displaced by cold, digital data. Letters—a medium of communication that demanded the touch of a friend’s hand on a sheet of paper, which sometimes even conveyed magic scents and associations—are fast becoming antiquated as e-mail gains new adherents every day. We are losing our souls to magnetic tape and electrical impulses. Personal identity is being fractured and dispersed in what Jean Baudrillard calls “the ecstasy of communication.” In the epigram to this paper, Plato warns us of the dangers of writing. If Plato is right about the function of memory, the dangers of writing pale in comparison to the dangers that present themselves in the digital age.
Who am I? The answer to this question has never been so difficult to discern. I am hesitant to locate the truth of my being in something as impersonal as my genetic code or the digital data to which my thoughts can be reduced. Like the texts in my bookcase, the files in my hard drive reflect who I am without defining all that I am. Against the tide of computer technology, I still want to maintain that I have a soul that cannot be reduced to matter. Plato saw memory as the key to the soul. So too did Marcel Proust.
Unlike Plato, however, Proust does not rely on an elaborate metaphysics to account for the reality of the soul. Instead, Proust locates the truth of identity in the deep recesses of a thoroughly material and unconscious—or, more exactly, involuntary—memory. For Proust, involuntary memory is something that transcends consciousness—it is lived, not thought. For this reason, it cannot be reduced to digital data.
When that unique odor of a summer night’s rain wafts into my den, I am miraculously transported to my youth. This transportation is immediate, and it attests to the continuity of the soul through time. Furthermore, unlike voluntary memory, involuntary memory does not present past selves as something alien. In the experiences of involuntary memory, I am my present self, but I am simultaneously my past self, and this simultaneity is where I can locate my soul. No digital media can alienate me from my involuntary memories—they are too personal, escaping any impersonal reductions. They are ultimately, in fact, the stuff of the soul. Yet there is always the chance that involuntary memories may amount to nothing more than romantic illusions, reflections of an unconscious that will eventually be mapped and codified like every other aspect of human behavior. But this much is clear: if there is a soul to be found in today’s information age, it can only be found through some form of irreducible memory.