"Erasable Writing and the Materiality of Memory"
Roger Chartier Abstract: In "Notes on a Mystic Writing Pad," Freud wrote: If I distrust my memory. . . I am able to supplement and guarantee its working by making a note in writing. In that case the surface upon which the trace is preserved, the pocket-book or sheet of paper, is as it were a materialized portion of my [memory], the rest of which I carry about with me invisible. I have only to bear in mind the place where this 'memory' has been deposited and I can then 'reproduce' it at any time I like, with the certainty that it will have remained unaltered and so have escaped the possible distortions to which it might have been subjected in my actual memory. But Freud's essay is as much concerned with erasure and forgetting as with memory. For Freud, the history of writing and of writing surfaces has been particularly concerned with the dilemma that "an unlimited receptive capacity and a retention of permanent traces seem to be mutually exclusive." In other words, you can have a writing surface that you can use over and over again, but only at the cost of erasing what you have previously written. In the long history of writing, we would be quite wrong to take a cheap and inexhaustible supply of writing surfaces for granted. In western culture, most surfaces made for endurance have been costly (e.g. stone, papyrus, parchment, rag-paper) and have coexisted with cheaper, because reusable, materials (wax tablets, slates, whitewashed walls, the earth). In our paper, we explore the relation between specific forms of writing and the cultural constuction of memory.
|