The Dream of Absolute Memory: On Digital Self-Representation

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Notes

1. Total Recall is also the title of a Philip K. Dick-inspired Paul Verhoeven film from 1990, to which this book does not refer.

2. The self-representation through the complete collection of one’s “memories” and perceptions proposed by Total Recall would, as a gigantic database, be a contemporary, digital form of autobiography, conforming to Lev Manovich’s famous depiction of the database as the symbolic form of the computer age, as compared with the prevalence of the narrative form in the modernist area (Sorapure 269).

3. Self-tracking manifests a striving for self-optimization through rendering visible aspects of one’s life to which one had no access before. See Ruckenstein 69; Ruckenstein and Pantzar.

4. One branch of the growing field of research on digital memories focuses on the archival aspect of digital memory and its link to the subject and to memory. Such issues have been explored in several case studies of memory’s digital shift, such as a movement involving social networks (Garde-Hansen), digital photos, (Van Dijck 98–121), family movies (Van Dijck 122–147) and digital diaries and blogs (Van Dijck 53–76)See also Arthur, “Digital.” By closely examining a more holistic and informed vision of digital memory, my essay seeks to explore some of the tensions involved in this quest for the digitalization of memory.

5. See Paul Longley Arthur, who refers to Bell as well as to other forms of digital biographies: “[A]ccumulated data does not in itself amount to a representation of a life. For that we need the crafting role of the traditional literary biographer/autobiographer, turning life into art” (“Digital” 88).

6. As Inge van de Ven shows, such practices of technological self-documentation, life-logging, and recording memory are not only influenced and inspired by literary autobiographical texts, they also influence them. In her reading of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, van de Ven demonstrates how current practices of collecting data, of quantification, and of representing the self in a serial way emerge within literature. See “Karl Ove Knausgård” and “The Monumental Knausgård.” Minute archiving of life feeds back into the literary world in other ways as well: Kenneth Goldsmith speaks of a new kind of “oblique autobiography,” formed by “inventorying the mundane – what we eat and what we read” forming a trail that amounts to a self-portrait (188).

7. More broadly, the accessibility of digital memories will change the process of individuation. Mark Hansen regards this as a positive effect: “Rather than furnishing a recorded surrogate for [our] experience, as nineteenth- and twentieth-century recording media certainly did, twenty-first-century media exercises its force by influencing how experience occurs” (56).

8. Bell and Gemmell’s perspective provides an interesting contemporary counterpoint to Arthur’s claim that today “it has become patently clear the self can never be fixed and finalized” (“Coda” 314). As a parallel we can think of the work of Emily Rosamond who shows (“Technologies,” “Moods”) how data-based algorithmic attempts to attribute character or identity to subjects display a more positivist perspective and “an unquestionable realism” than we find in literary and theoretical perspectives (“Technologies” 153). Whereas the latter deconstruct such concepts as character and identity, the algorithmic perspective stabilizes them. John Cheney-Lippold, however, shows that within the ambit of such concepts, such algorithmic processes have a surprising flexibility and openness by concluding, for example, that this or that person is, say, 83% male, and in being open to altering that conclusion as new data comes in (28–29, 163–67).

9. Bell and Gemmell’s vision is at odds with the autobiographical tradition, yet it accommodates a radically different ideology of self-representation, one that sees autobiography not as the validation or eternalization of oneself but rather as the letting go of subjectivity and a renunciation of individuality. This position has become, following Paul de Man’s “Autobiography as De-facement,” widely accepted in scholarship on autobiography. Yet this is so clearly not the project of Bell and Gemmell, who seek to solidify, enhance, and eternalize the subjectivity of the self-archiving subject.

10. On the consequences and risks of these larger trends, see Han 55–76; Maturo and Moretti; Cheney-Lippold.

11. For an up-to-date presentation of directions taken by the Quantified Self movement, see Neff and Nafus.

12. For a critical theory approach to the connections between Big Data and the Quantified Self movement, see Ouellet et al.; Nafus and Sherman see Quantified Self rather as a mode of soft resistance to standard practices of data use.