| Abstract |
This article is the first (Part I) of a series of six to eight parts. Alloying philosophy, psychoanalysis, social theory, and cultural studies, this series seeks to articulate the relationship between Western philosophy’s metaphysical method of dialectics and the general structure of memory in human beings. Covering Western philosophers from ancient to modern times, such as Plato, Socrates, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, Lacan, Derrida, and Jakobson, this series endeavors to elucidate the nature of memory in the neurotypical (NT), i.e., the so-called normal. The series also quotes social, cultural, and psychopathological materials such as Sarashina Diary (the daughter of Sugawara no Takasue in 11th century Japan), Funes the Memorious (Jorge Luis Borges), Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami), and a 1984 Apple Computer television commercial, autism spectrum disorder, late capitalism, and even the Quest Atlantis boom. It is only in comparison with the so-called abnormal that the so-called normal can be defi ned. I conclude that it is ‘the otherness’ which always and already permeates the normal and stable working of memory and frames the structure and content of the ego. In other words, I depict the heteronomous nature of the capability of memory and imagination of typically developed individuals. In part one, I begin my quest by questioning why it is that we feel our futuristic utopia already existed in a super-ancient era, and/or that we are somehow repeating this present moment in a state of déjà vu. This sense of a disturbance of time is a common theme in popular media, such as manga, anime, and film, especially in contemporary Japan. The mass appeal of these representations is signifi cant. According to Fredric Jameson, cultural symbols are the imaginary resolution of unsolvable contradictions we are experiencing at the level of ‘the real,’ i.e., history. This means our tendency to consume these representations of micro-time-turbulence as pleasure, our daydreaming, is a resolving mechanism of larger structural problems we are experiencing at a deeper level of historical and socio-economic dynamism. This is problematic. I then return to Augustine, famous for his obsessive odyssey into the nature of human memory. His brilliant achievement was the discovery of an exogenous factor in the depths of our memory. Something great motivates our memory function and boots up our ‘self’. He was sure that it was the touch of God. Was it really God, though? I argue we should adopt Augustine’s quest and go even further. Augustine dismissed visions in our daydreams and dreams as false content, irrelevant to true faith, yet after his discovery, people in the Middle Ages seemed strongly interested in both waking and sleeping dreams and visions. The research of Jacques Le Goff and Yusuke Maki, shows that people in the Middle Ages believed that dreams and visions were another kind of truth, both in the West and the East. Descartes, from his vantage point between the Middle and Modern Ages, was a person who had many remarkable dreams. For this very reason, he felt he had to strongly reject the content of dreams as untrue. His strange argument on the possibility that our entire reality could be a dream, that an evil god is deceiving us, is well known. Yet in so arguing, Descartes again repressed, following Augustine, the content of our dreams, and isolated the pure function of imagination as a vacuous and self-referential circuit, that is, the Cartesian ‘cogito’. (To be continued.)
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