The Screens of Lost Pleasures
SCREEN MEMORIES
With Ernest Schachtel (who bases his work on Freud’s) memory takes a position of revolutionary importance or an importance for revolution. In Ernest Schachtel’s essay “On Memory and Childhood Amnesia” we see a revolutionary view of memory. Starting from Freud’s concept of “deckerinnerung” (concealing or screen memories) and childhood amnesia, Schachtel explores the causes for this amnesia of childhood; why a portion of our past is hidden and lost to recall buried beneath the “deckerinnerung”. Schachtel offers as an explanation the imposition of language and the manner in which its linguistic categories entails a delimiting of preverbal experience; as the infant enters the circle of society by internalizing language, she must relinquish any uniquely singular, intense experiences of the world for the common, stereotypical categories of language. It is only by exchanging the singular experiences of untutored perception for the shared meanings of language that the child can communicate its thoughts, feelings and memories. However the internalized categories of language repress the unique experiences of early childhood to such an extent that they become lost and forgotten and inaccessible to the powers of conscious recall because the experiences occurred before the imposition of language. There is a trade-off here according to Schachtel; the price paid for the ability to communicate is the liquidation of truly unique preverbal experience because it is only through tailoring our early inner experience to the shared categories of language that memory based on recall can develop.
Unfortunately our most intensely joyful and painful experiences are part of this preverbal world and the recollection of this happiness (and sadness) locked in these lost memories, according to Schachtel, runs counter to the predominant organization of mental life according to, not only language, but a “reality principle” dominated by the reigning social order. The recollection of these buried memories could release revolutionary desire by connecting us to experiences of a lost world where pleasure and life intertwined intimately.
There sits (notice my spatial metaphor of memory, a help and a hindrance) in early lost memories a kernel of pleasure that transcends any of the shared, instrumental categories imposed by language and culture. A paradox develops; how to utilize the revolutionary potential of lost memories and create a subversive practice of remembrance that is at its core indescribable, incommunicable and asocial. This would not only be the micropolitics of desire but the charged thought of an excavated experience of pleasure that would make living within any regime based on a repressive performance principle intolerable. Schachtel (and Herbert Marcuse) see the socialization of individuals as a process of giving up these childhood memories for the delayed gratifications of adulthood. The psychic economy of socialized individuals however does not permit a total repression of these pleasurable memories so there is always a remainder within the psyche that is not fully repressed and persists in causing unease and prevents humans from completely adapting to a society of total administration.
So for example cultural traditions, even in highly distorted forms, can preserve among social groups these lost memories. The example of Christmas is instructive. Even though Christmas is a highly necessary institution for the circulation of capital and suffers all types of abuses, at its core is a festival that retrieves memories of a world where the performance principle of compulsive labor time, accumulation and competition recede and a potlatch of free time, gift giving and celebration emerges; a social manifestation of values that subvert the social order based on a capitalist reality principle. Thus tradition through a returning to the past disrupts the glaciation of history and introduces a subversive phantasy based on deeply shared memory.
