Cyborg Memories: Why Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum (plus visitors) is a Cyborg

photo credit: karen horton

Writing in 1988, balding Gallic pervert Michel Foucault threw down the term ‘technologies of the self‘ as an oversized umbrella for those practices that ‘permit individuals to effect (…) operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being’ (Foucault, 1990 [1988]: 18). In other words, the Ferrispunk self-bootstrapping of earnest diarists who eat algae, pop modanifil capsules, and meditate in metal pyramids. All while augmenting their desirability and social status with the latest in v-neck sweaters, injected botulinum, and the electronic pixel manipulation of their public-facing face (as seen on match.com). Charming.

I supress my shudders, and, following a swift return visit to some of Comrade Maly’s early sketch of the wooly and resolutely uncooperative architecture/cyborg continuum, begin to approach a framework in which such ‘technologies of the self’ (cyborg practices) form the base of an increasingly smug politic of bottom-up self-sovereignty; a stark contrast to the imposed, top-down architectures and governmental (cf. governor) infrastructure of larger social entities.

See also: floating islands, seasteading.

Sure, sure, cyborgs don’t have to be libertarian wankers, but it isn’t until the Haraway conceptquake that we begin to move away from the technocratic, self-perpetuating wankerdom implied in Clynes and Kline’s original vision. If these hybrid subjects are to appreciate their role as anything other than technologically-mediated consumption machines, they need to gain an appreciation of context – some sense of historical, or even personal, memory.

This is where things start to get interesting.

From the gloomy, dust-ridden caverns of my own memory, I recall a short story read as teenager. Penned by the ideosyncratic Mary Gentle, this story, ‘Beggars in Satin,’ is set in a world in which, to crib shamelessly from a review by David Soyka, ‘magic works according to the principle of Hermetic science, a 17th century heresy.’ Consider the following extract:

‘Valentine followed the noble Lord-Architect, who swore foully under his breath, and Scaris, past the speaking statues and into the hedged garden. Here, many metal and stone figures stood on plinths, or in niches. A slow mutter began to grow in the air around, of mockery, and oaths as foul as Casaubon’s. The sun gleamed on the golden hedges, on complex topiary, and on the bindweed and ivy that ran riot across fountain, grotto, and fish-pool.

‘It’s my design to build a Memory Garden.’ Scaris said.

Valentine blinked. ‘The same as a memory palace?’

‘It would have the same locations in which to place images.’ Scaris said. ‘Here.”

And, later:

Valentine said sharply, ‘The man’s a fool. A memory palace or Memory Garden isn’t to be built, it’s to keep knowledge here, in the mind! If I’d to carry all the written down Scholar-Soldiers’ knowledge with me, I’d never walk!’

She rubbed her hands across her eyes as if erasing images. More calmly, she said, ‘Pictures are more easily remembered than written words, and carry a whole web of associated knowledge. I’ve a palace memorised – one of Palladio’s – and in every palace room a curious image, that leads me to further volumes of memory, so that I only have to walk through the palace in my mind.’

Casaubon shrugged. ‘Some of my marble-pillar-of-rectitude Councillors would say we ought to confine that to images of Justice, in an Interior Temple. But Scaris and I thought it a pleasant conceit, to have a material Memory Garden. You see what becomes of it!”

– Mary Gentle, ‘Beggars in Satin,’ in White Crow (Gollancz, 2003), pp. 10-12

Here, Gentle is downright subversive; rematerialising the ‘virtual’ architecture of the ‘method of loci‘ as … um … landscape design? Buggy, glitch-ridden landscape design, at that.

From here, take O’Keefe and Nadal’s description of the mnemonic technique’s original (real-world) form, in which:

‘the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject literally ‘walks’ through these loci and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any distinguishing feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by ‘walking’ through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items.’

– John O’Keefe & Lynn Nadel (1978), The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map p. 390

Like blogging or exercise, this ‘method of loci’ was a Foucauldian ‘technology of the self’ – a way of boosting your own baseline abilities. It was as much a technological prosthesis as, say, Jerry Michaelski’s (virtualised) Brain. Here, technology doesn’t have to be physical; graspable; tested in a wind tunnel. Language is as much of a technology as the Dyson Airblade or International Space Station – as is soap, concrete, and the domestication of animals. Memory is fundamentally entangled with such ‘soft’ technologies; with neural plasticity, personal productivity techniques, and so forth.

Medieval memory techniques? Ruth Evans said everything that needs to be said on the subject, and then wrote a post on Jesus-as-appliance – which reminded me of Douglas Adams’ electric monk. Read all of those? Then we can continue.

Memory: computer/cognitive/cultural. How do cyborgs remember? Appropros Robin Sloan on media cyborgs, I’d also like to introduce the notion of mediated and prosthetic memory, more commonly figured as post-memory, particularly in the emerging field of Holocaust studies. Here, one of the key thinkers is Marianne Hirsch, who describes post-memory as:

‘the relationship of the second [and later] generation[s] to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.’

And how do we do this? Photography, oral narrative, literature, art, comic books, and museums. Multiple sites in a culture of trauma and memorialisation. Consider 9/11, and our collective reaction to its intensive mediation; the looping of footage on TV news for days, weeks, and months on end. How will our children and grandchildren apprehend this moment of symbolic violence? Will they attend the museum at Ground Zero? Will their be a guide? A worksheet? How will it make them feel?

To rearrange Robin’s words; ‘Media [also] lets you clone pieces of your memory and send them out into the world to have conversations on your behalf. Even while you’re sleeping, your media – your books, your blog posts, your tweets—is on the march.’ As time passes, first-hand, lived experience of the Holocaust is increasingly scarce, but the trauma continues to echo through our cultural and media output … Lest We Forget.

It is in this context that Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum is a cyborg.

photo credit: Lauren Manning

Much like Gentle’s literal (albeit malfunctioning) memory garden, Libeskind’s Museum is a locus for memorialisation; an architectural extrusion of collective memory; an inverted memory palace; and a site of transmission (hypersigil). It is also a cyborg; a technological hybrid of historical artefacts (memory materialised), curatorial knowledge, media, affect, architecture, infrastructure, staff, and visitors – rewiring the brains of all those who self-consciously tread its corridors. It might be larger than the cyborgs with which you are familar, but – much like an ant’s nest – the museum is an intensely cybernetic entity, with its prosthetic (post-)memories likely to outlive any of its individual biological agents.

In conclusion: don’t be a cyborg wanker – instead, go to some slightly larger cyborgs, and imbibe the memories of the absent. It’ll make you a better person technologically-mediated subject.

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This is one of 50 posts about cyborgs – a project to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the coining of the term. Also: Tim Maly is our king. #50cyborgs