Remembering with Things: Material Memory, Culture, and Technology 9781786613189, 9781786613196, 9781538183540, 1786613182

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Remembering with Things

Remembering with Things Material Memory, Culture, and Technology Ronald Durán Allimant

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available ISBN 9781786613189 (hardback) | ISBN 9781786613196 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538183540 (paperback) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To the memory of my loving mother, Adriana (1958–2020)

Contents

Introduction ix Chapter 1: The Dynamic View of Memory, Culture, and Technology Chapter 2: Material Memory, Technology, and Cultural Heritage Chapter 3: Material Memory and Technical Images



1

35 55

Chapter 4: Memory and Oblivion 1: Technological Somnambulism and the Material Memory of Things

79

Chapter 5: Memory and Oblivion 2: The Dynamic View of Nature and the Natural

97

Acknowledgments Glossary Notes

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119 123

Bibliography

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Filmography, Documentaries, and Videos Index



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147

About the Author



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vii

Introduction

We make our life with technical artifacts. Alarm clocks wake us up every morning, cars take us to work daily, clothes express and define our public personas, mobile phones go along with us everywhere, and advertising captures our attention at every moment. We are surrounded by technical artifacts we buy, use, and then throw away or leave behind. And when we die, all this stuff remains, surviving us, keeping alive our memory, saying something about us. But often, they are mute things urging for a voice. Consider what happens when someone close to you, with whom you have lived a lifetime, dies. Without her or his presence, the house may look empty, but not being empty at all, because it is full of her or his belongings. We can recognize some of them, and they take us to the past, to lovingly treasured moments. But others seem so unfamiliar. They remain as mute objects, retaining their secrets, stories and meanings. We fix our present attention on them, trying to reach the past, but unsuccessfully. Other things, on the contrary, take us to future actions, to decisions we have to make: What shall we do with all this stuff? Trying to make up our minds other questions emerge: How do we make our life and memory with all these things? How do we remember with them? How does this material environment define and express our identities? What is their role in our actions, decisions, and possibilities, in the ways we see the world and ourselves? Could our memories and remembering practices be possible without all of them? An interest in technical artifacts is notorious nowadays, probably because, more than ever, we live in the middle of an artificial environment. We see in every direction the traces of human actions, their creations and productions. But somehow, in this human-made environment, artifacts take on a new life of their own, forcing us to consider them and think about them.1 How can we think about the life of “inanimate” things without becoming a kind of neo-animist? Supposedly, in our secular age, we no longer believe in the life of things, even less in the life of artifacts, which are our own production and creation. But perhaps a certain kind of “neo-animism” is necessary, ix

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after all, using this term to emphasize that creating something does not mean we have complete control over it or that we establish absolutely its dynamic and the possibilities it opens up. Creating and producing something do not establish a unidirectional submission but a reciprocal relation of action and constitution. We must remember that by modifying the form of things, we also modify ourselves. The abundance of artifacts constituting our contemporary societies obliges us to consider their moral and political dimensions, incorporating the active and constitutive role they play in shaping our forms of life. Several theoretical efforts have been proposed to meet this challenge, offering new conceptual frameworks that permit incorporating the role of artifacts: Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS), some new approaches in Philosophy of Technology, Historical Epistemology Studies, Material Culture Studies, and Cultural Studies, among others (Verbeek, 2022, 35). However, the traditional views of technology, memory, and culture remain preeminent among the general public and between researchers not related to the approaches mentioned above. Thus, technologies are still conceived of as neutral instruments we create and use to achieve ends external to them. Technical artifacts are viewed as passive tools for use and throw away, passive objects adapting to our desires without making any change in those who use them. Their active and constitutive role in the shaping of our forms of life is then overlooked. This passivity associated with technology also extends to our consideration of memory and culture, viewed as mere reservoirs or storage of human activities and ideas. Using the current computational language, memory and culture would be the reservoirs of the information we produced and transferred to them. They would be then mere mute remains of a past already gone. This passive and static view of technology, memory, and culture, involves a persistent material-immaterial dualism, as reflected in the technical metaphors we use: memory as the trace of a seal, as an archive, as a hard disk, or a video recorder. In this dualistic view, memory is associated with the mental and spiritual (knowledge, language, recollections) and opposed to the material, which is seen as a mute means of preservation contributing with nothing to the constitution of memory itself. Processes and production of things are seen as the active imposition of pre-existing forms (pre-existing as mental or spiritual entities) upon unformed and passive matter (serving as a kind of receptacle). I call this the artisanal paradigm of processes and production because it represents the way we think artisans produce things. Now, the separation between the material and immaterial ignores the active and constitute role that material things and technical artifacts play in the shaping of forms of life, with important consequences for understanding the relations between technology, memory, and culture:

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• Technology, memory, and culture are conceived of as static and fixed without considering their continuous configuration in time; they are seen as something made, not as something in the making. • The dualist paradigm promotes a radical separation between the passive and the active, the former associated with the material and the latter with the immaterial, without considering their inextricable connection in processes and practices. • Finally, the artisanal paradigm conceives possibilities statically as already given in advance before its realisation or concretion, and not as emerging in the very processes, as something in continuous elaboration. The traditional conceptions associated with the artisanal paradigm cannot face the complex problems technology, memory, and culture give rise to today: the questions about the role of material culture in intangible and industrial heritage; the challenges for the construction of our memories and identities due to the overabundance of digital images; the relationship between memory and ruins of traumatic pasts (e.g. concentration camps); the dissolution of our memory in the exuberance presence of our daily merchandises; the dissolution of the material memory of our daily merchandises behind their present usefulness; and the forgetting of the material memory of the things we call natural. All these pressing questions call for a reconsideration of the ways we think about material memory, culture, and technology. I think, however, we can go beyond this dualistic approach through a dynamic view of technology, memory, and culture, that emphasizes the active and constitutive role that technical artifacts play in the shaping of our forms of life and memory practices, and in the creation and modulations of possibilities. The elaboration of this view is the main aim of this book. My approach will be mainly theoretical and philosophical, incorporating concepts and perspectives from different disciplines and fields of study, especially the arts, humanities, and social sciences. I will consider memory as a disciplinary cross-fertilizer, or better, a cultural concept, because it is relevant not only to academic research but also to everyday life. I am convinced that knowledge develops through the interchange of notions, metaphors, and images and that this is the only way to go out of our partial and unilateral views of things. Probably, some of the analyses in this book will seem irrelevant or even superficial to disciplinary specialists (e.g., I make no use of memory classifications of experimental psychology and cognitive sciences); however, my aim has not been to go deeper into a particular discipline but to contribute to the exchanges between different fields. Although they often deal with the same issues, they do so from approaches so unfamiliar to each other that they

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seem to refer to completely different worlds. Thus, what is evident in one field is often not so in another, or what is new in one it is not in another. Just to mention a pair of cases. The French philosopher Henri Bergson raised the difference between representational and pragmatic memory as early as 1896 (1991, p. 79), but this distinction just came into use in experimental psychology with the study of the famous patient Henry Molaison (H.M.) in the 1950s (Squire, 2009, p. 4). Memory is a relevant topic for historians due to its political and ethical dimensions, as the current discussions show (Mudrovcic, 2005), but for English-speaking analytic philosophers memory is almost entirely an epistemological and metaphysical question, that they conceive of as something pertaining to the fields of experimental psychology, cognitive science, and neurosciences (Michaelian & Sutton, 2017). I am sure we need to connect the different disciplines to deal with today’s pressing global issues and contribute, in this way, to the public understanding of them. We must bring to light the decisions, the disputes of power, the judgments, and the views about the world and ourselves involved and acting in our technologies, cultures, and memory practices, which the dualistic and static view of them overlooked. We must put in evidence the contingency of the ways we have chosen, the possibilities that were open and those that were closed but maybe still latent, to build new ways for the future. All this is more pressing in our contemporary societies because of the omnipresence of technologies in our everyday lives. Thus, it is necessary to problematize their own trivial and evident presence as a starting point to understand how we can actively build and shape with them our present and future from our past. In this book, I navigate between disciplines to move ideas and images. In writing it, I have tried to be as clear as possible, although I have not always been successful, because English is not my mother tongue and also because the discussions are often abstract and complex. The book is intended for a general audience interested in these issues, not for specialists in a particular field, although I think it could be of interest from the perspective of interdisciplinary projects or used as an introduction to the study of the relations between technology, memory, and culture. The structure of the book is as follows. In the first chapter, I elaborate the conceptual framework of what I call a dynamic view of memory, technology, and culture. I critique the static view of memory and culture as storage and the view that technical artifacts are simply neutral instruments, both based on the material-immaterial dualism, which I call the artisanal paradigm of production and processes. To construct my proposal, I base on the following theories: The French philosopher Henri Bergson’s ideas on memory and image as material and immaterial, hermeneutic and pragmatic, at once; the Deutsch philosopher of technology Peter-Paul Verbeek’s theory of technology as mediation; the US technology thinker Langdon Winner’s

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view of technologies as forms of life; and the Spanish philosopher Fernando Broncano’s idea of technical artifacts as operators of possibilities. In the following chapters, I use this framework to analyze different cases and examples of interrelations between memory, culture, and technology, emphasizing the processes and activities that are forgotten when artifacts are conceived of as neutral instruments and memory and culture as simply passive reservoirs. In chapter 2, I study the relationships between material memory, culture, technology, and heritage. I analyze UNESCO’s notions of intangible cultural heritage and industrial heritage, showing that their limitations are due to the underlying material-immaterial dualism, which does not consider the active and constitutive role that technical artifacts play in the shaping and conservation of heritage, which leads to seeing heritage nostalgically. I analyze specific cases of intangible cultural heritage (Chilean organ grinders) and industrial heritage. In chapter 3, I focus on the relationships between material memory and technical images, particularly those of digital photography and cinema, using Bergson’s notion of images as material and immaterial, as representation and action, at once. First, I propose what I call the loop of remembering to deal with the dynamism of mental images and technical ones in the process of remembering. Next, I analyze digital images as memory technologies, identifying how they influence our memory practices: they determine an eternal present, a fragmentation of meaning, new forms of experience, and the shaping of a technologically mediated identity. Finally, I turn to French director Alain Resnais’s cinema of memory to analyze it through the notion of layers of material memory. In chapters 4 and 5, I deal with topics unusual in memory studies, the production of technologies and the notion of nature. In both, I identify an oblivion of the material memory of things, which I call technological somnambulism (using Winner’s expression). In chapter 4, I first highlight technologies as a memory of power relations and their oblivion in everyday use and consumption, using Marx’s notions of commodity fetishism and alienation to analyze them. Then, I emphasize the need to recover the material memory of things, in its hermeneutic and pragmatic dimensions. Finally, I analyze the case of internet content moderation as an example of technological somnambulism, in an effort to remember with things. In chapter 5, I deal with what I call the technical production of nature, based on Spanish philosopher Félix Duque’s philosophy of the technique of nature. I claim that what we call nature is defined in relation to the capabilities for technical action and that the natural does not stand in absolute opposition to the artificial. On the contrary, they mutually configure each other, defining a dynamic frontier that varies over time, and a human history

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of nature. I establish that the “appeal to nature” constitutes a technological somnambulism similar to that of commodities, in which naming something natural forgets or conceals the human dimension of its production. This is evidently so when human-made commodities are called “natural.” As in chapter 4, I propose remembering with things as a way to recover in this case, the material memory of natural things. As a specific case, I analyze the naturalization of the conception of the body as a machine and the notion of death, as brain death, to which it has given rise. At the end of the book, I added a glossary of the terms I have introduced.

Chapter 1

The Dynamic View of Memory, Culture, and Technology

In this first chapter, I introduce a framework to conceive and analyze dynamically memory, culture, and technology. I shape it from different theoretical sources, all of which emphasizing the key role played by possibilities in actions, decisions, and processes. I begin this chapter by drawing the main features of what I call the artisanal paradigm of processes and production, which I state is at the base of the static view of memory, culture, and technology. This paradigm has implicit a material-immaterial dualism, which has significant consequences for thinking about memory, culture, and technology, namely: memory is conceived of as a container; culture is divided into material and immaterial kinds; and technology is considered as neutral and merely instrumental. THE ARTISANAL PARADIGM OF PROCESSES AND PRODUCTION When we think of how we make a thing, we generally appeal to a model I call the artisanal paradigm of processes and production because it is based on how it is supposed an artisan works and produces things.1 According to this view the process of production is conceived of as the active imposition of a preexisting form (preexisting as a mental or spiritual entity) upon an unformed and passive matter (a kind of receptacle). The production itself is not considered a source of novelty but only the expression or development of something already existing (the form exists before its material concretion) (see ref. to Marx and Aristotle in Braverman, 1998, 31). This model has implicit a material-immaterial, or passive-active, dualism. This dualistic model has a long tradition. Just to mention a few prominent cases: the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus, where the artisan god, the demiurge, 1

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Chapter 1

forms the cosmos imposing preexisting forms or ideas upon an unformed and chaotic matter (Timaeus 28ss); the distinction between natural and artificial beings in Aristotle’s Physics (192b1-24); the distinction between software (information) and hardware in computational sciences, with vast influence in the cognitive, biological, and social sciences. For example, in the deterministic and reductionist views of biological development based on gene (molecular biology) and its extrapolation to social field (sociobiology); and its application to culture using the notion of meme. In all these examples, that which is analogous to matter (e.g., the hardware) does not play an active role in the creation or production but only a passive one, as the medium for the expression of something active and immaterial (form, software, or information). I think this artisanal paradigm is at the base of what I call the static view of memory: memory as a container; and that it underlies the different metaphors of memory elaborated from a variety of technologies. For example: memory as the image that a seal leaves on the wax (from the Antiquity), or as the books in a library, or the rooms in a building (in the Art of Memory) (Draaisma 2000). In more recent times, various audiovisual technologies, such as videotapes, CD-ROMs, or DVDs, have led to new metaphors, being the computer and the notion of information a source of influential models and metaphors. Information has become an almost universal term when speaking of memory and its dynamics. Instead of forms, images, or ideas, we talk nowadays of information but preserving, in the end, the artisanal dualistic paradigm. Underlying these metaphors is the view of memory as a static conservation of something. Paradoxically, memory, a notion related to time, is thought spatially; memory becomes spatialized. In this way, the problem of the persistence of memories is no longer a question of time (the duration of memories in time), but a question of space. Thus, we speak of the location of memories, and the durability of the spatial “container” is taken for granted, unquestioned, because it seems obvious that space conserves and preserves itself. We find this crucial idea in the Art of Memory, where familiar places serve as memory aids (Draaisma 2000, 38), fulfilling the function of conserving the memories because their familiarity makes their permanence appear unproblematic; but this is an illusion. The familiarity overshadows the processes making possible the stability of something that remains. So then, the spatialization of memory keeps the attention away from the processes that ensure the preservation of something, making this preservation self-evident. Consider, for example, the three stages generally associated with memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval (Foster 2009, 6). Only the first and last phases involve activities; the storage is taken for granted, like a treasure

The Dynamic View of Memory, Culture, and Technology

3

hidden in a chest waiting to be taken out. Appealing to information as an all-purpose, self-evident notion referring to something whose preservation is considered evident and not problematic does not change the situation. Because what does information mean without the codification and de-codification processes? Without these processes the information contained, for example, on a hard disk, would not be such. If we forget the infrastructures that make the information possible, we risk forgetting its fragility and the fragility of memory. This is the focus of the short film Lost Memories (Ferracci 2012), where an electromagnetic storm destroys all access to digital information and data. Photographs, videos, audios, texts, all are lost. Our memories are lost. This reminds us that the “cloud,” so crucial in our daily life, is not something ethereal or immaterial, not a hidden treasure self-preserving outside the world but something requiring for its preservation a continuous exchange of energy, information, and social and technological networks (see, e.g., the case of the songs uploaded to MySpace between 2003 and 2015, accidentally deleted; Porter 2019). Now, we can find in the very term “memory” the dualistic artisanal paradigm separating the active from the passive. Memory can mean something stored (recollections) or the access to it (recollecting). But better than opposing conservation and access is to consider both as complementary moments of one and the same process: the remembering. Memory is not the active retrieval of something passively stored but the coordination of two processes equally active. This is something that even researchers working under the computational or informational paradigm recognized. Thus, to Jonathan Foster, the mechanisms underlying memory are best characterized as “a dynamic activity or process rather than as a static entity or thing” (Foster 2009, 8). We could think of remembering as a process consisting of the coordination of two active processes, access and conservation, instead of a three-stage process (with two active phases and a passive one). The artisanal paradigm is not only at the base of the static view of memory but also of what I call the static view of culture, which separates the “culture,” as something immaterial (spiritual or mental), from the material things in which it supposedly inscribes and they would preserve it passively. “In this formulation, material culture is treated as a repository or product of purely mental activity. Ideas that emerge inside a person’s mind are then transferred onto material objects” (Jones 2007, 5, 12). The material culture studies have put into question this dualistic view emphasizing the role that materiality plays in culture; however, I still see the presence of the artisanal paradigm, particularly in the semantic and textual interpretations of material culture. These approaches view material things simply as the carriers of cultural meanings that they do not contribute to create. In the end, artifacts do not play an active and constitutive cultural role by themselves. In terms of Jones,

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the material is merely an “external symbolic storage” (2007, 5); it is a mere container of “culture.” Material objects would store meanings, texts, symbols, signs, immaterial forms that could then be read. The matter preserving these meanings is not valuable in itself but insofar as it signals something other that is valuable, for example, a past human action. “This turns things into little more than projection screens for our interpretations, reduces them to the words with which we describe them, and fails to give them their due, their proper weight” (Verbeek 2005, 1–2). This view of the material culture occurs, for example, when we consider commodities as mere expressions or signs of certain lifestyles but not as active and constitutive makers of identities (Miller 2012; Coccia 2018). The British anthropologist Tim Ingold has criticized the textual view of material culture and the consideration of reading as the crucial method to understanding material cultures. “Their engagements are not with the tangible stuff of craftsmen and manufacturers but with the abstract ruminations of philosophers and theorists. To understand materiality, it seems, we need to get as far away from materials as possible” (Ingold, 2007, 2). Ingold’s words show that the artisanal paradigm underlies the textual view of material culture because, in it, the stuff or materiality of things is negligible in relation to the form. The making of an artifact adds nothing to the preexisting form, only its embodiment as a material entity. As in the case of memory, a dynamic view of culture needs to rethink the relation between the material and the immaterial, emphasizing the coordination of temporal processes, the modulation of possibilities (a modal view of culture, as it were), and the constitution of forms of life. Finally, the artisanal paradigm is also present in how we conceptualize technology, particularly in its neutral and merely instrumental consideration, summed up in the statement: “technology is neither good nor bad, all depends on its use.” This conception is what I call the static view of technology. To say that technology is a mere instrument, a mere means to an end, is to say that technology has nothing to do with the ends themselves, because they would only depend on the intentions or desires of the user or the designer. Technical artifacts would be only passive tools to be used in one way or another, and for this reason, ethically and politically neutral. Conceiving technology as merely instrumental and neutral leads to excluding its influence in the configuration of the very ends. In the following sections, I try to go beyond the artisanal paradigm, setting up ideas to elaborate a dynamic view of memory, culture, and technology. Let us look at technology first.

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THE ACTIVE AND CONSTITUTE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGIES: MEDIATION, FORMS OF LIFE, AND POSSIBILITIES Generally, technology is viewed as neutral and instrumental (Winner 2020b, 6; Verbeek 2011, 4; Durán-Allimant 2020a), reinforcing the material-immaterial dualism implied in the artisanal paradigm. Technology is viewed as external to culture and society, alien, secondary, out of control, or a source of domination and dehumanization. But this view is insufficient when trying to assess adequately the role technologies play in our societies, the possibilities they contribute to open and close, and the problems they set out: “the way technical artifacts influence human behaviour cannot be captured and understood by taking technical artifacts to be merely passive instruments to be used at will for morally good or bad purposes” (Kroes and Verbeek 2014, 1). Technologies structure and shape human activities and forms of life; in turn, humans structure and shape technologies. “Humans are technological beings, just as technologies are social entities. Technologies, after all, play a constitutive role in our daily lives” (Verbeek 2011, 4). We make our lives and ourselves not only with other people but also with artifacts, some of them relatively new but so present such as mobile phones and computers, and others so familiar that they pass unnoticed, like a second nature, such as clothes and food. The philosopher of technology, Peter-Paul Verbeek has emphasized with his theory of mediation (elaborating on Don Ihde’s post-phenomenology, 2008) the active and constitutive role, the mediating role, artifacts play in our everyday life. Technologies “are mediators that actively help to shape realities. Technologies do not merely provide means but also help to form new ends” (Verbeek 2011, 46; 2005, 154). Technical artifacts mediate our relations with the world in two ways: pragmatically, referring to how human beings are in the world, how they act, behave, do things, or engage with the world; and hermeneutically, referring to how human beings interpret the world, how they perceive it, or imagine it (Verbeek 2005, 121; 2011, 50). Cell phones, for instance, explicitly help new ways of communicating and interacting to come about: they create new ways of dealing with appointments (long-term planning becomes less necessary if everybody can be reached everywhere anytime), new styles of communication (including SMS), and new definitions of the separation between public and private (by making it easy to have private conversations in public). (Verbeek 2009, 64)

Technologies mediate the experiences and practices of human beings, the way things are present or how they are perceived, and the possibilities of

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action (Verbeek 2011, 50). For example, the traffic calming devices: “[they] are not ‘sleeping policemen’ simply made of concrete instead of flesh and bone. If I consider calming devices as mediators properly speaking, it is precisely because they are not simple intermediaries which fulfil a function” (Latour 2002, 250). Mediation implies that technologies help to shape certain actions; they are conditions of possibility, opening and closing possibilities, inviting and inhibiting certain actions. See, for example, the case of the obstetric ultrasound, which plays an active and constitutive role with moral consequences (Verbeek 2008, 15). The obstetric ultrasound is not, as usually conceived, merely a neutral window to the womb but actively constitutes how the fetus or the unborn is given to the human experience. First, the fetus becomes visible at a specific size, which does not match its actual size in the womb; and appears as something independent of the mother’s body. The way the ultrasound machine shapes the image contributes to perceive and conceive the unborn as a person, as an already constituted individual that would simply be “contained” in the mother’s womb. Second, the ultrasound machine constitutes the fetus as a patient. The image permits specifying the “normality” of development, some relevant features such as sex, and detecting possible congenital “defects,” among other possibilities. The mother is no longer the unique access to the fetus, and the pregnancy is medicalized, making medical specialists with ultrasound technology the intermediaries between the parents and their child, and between the mother herself and the fetus she is carrying in her womb. Finally, in countries with abortion legalized, ultrasound technology sets up moral questions and decisions about the continuity or the end of pregnancy, not raised before the introduction of this technology (Verbeek 2008, 14–18). We find similar situations with other crucial medical innovations. For example, the role mechanical ventilators and organ transplants played in the definition of death as “brain death” (Lock 2002), as we will see in chapter 5. In Winner’s words, “When a sophisticated new technique or instrument is adopted in medical practice, it transforms not only what doctors do, but also the ways people think about health, sickness, and medical care” (2020b, 6). Thus, technologies mediate human actions, playing an active and constitutive role in the practices and the interpretations, in the ways we live and in the meanings we give; they contribute to the shaping, structuring, and ordering of forms of life. They constitute the vital space and modulate its associated possibilities. Therefore, by modifying the form of material things, we also modify ourselves (Winner 2020b, 14, referring to Karl Marx: “By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he [man] at the same time changes his own nature,” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1867/2010a, 187; see also Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 1845–6/2010b, 41). Our actions do not occur in a purely indifferent material world, where all possibilities were equivalent

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or depending only on the human will. We act in a world of artifacts, objects, and things already modulating and configuring possibilities, where some are opened and others closed, where specific routes and directions are promoted, and others prevented. For this reason, technologies are operators of possibilities (Broncano 2009), helping to open and close possibilities (being imaginary, physical, pragmatic, or legal), and defining different and complex relations with our “vital projects” (Ortega y Gasset 2015). We are open to the past and future, imagining and projecting, taking the given opportunities as starting points for undertaking future actions, and modifying and changing the world and ourselves. To project is to take advantage of the facilities the world offers us to overcome the difficulties opposing the realization of our plans, and in consequence our vital projects depend on the technologies we have (Ortega y Gasset 2015, 79). But the possibilities are not simply given and static, waiting as something already made; they are historic and dynamic, changing and modifying in time due to our actions and interpretations. New technical artifacts transform the existing human-technology-andenvironment complexes setting up new relationships, modifying “individual habits, perceptions, concepts of self, ideas of space and time, social relationships, and moral and political boundaries” (Winner 2020, 9), and, of course, the ways we memorize and remember. In these vital spaces we shape ourselves, our identities. We become the beings who work on assembly lines, who use smartphones and communicate through social media, who eat processed food, and travel to distant places (Winner 2020b, 20). Thus, technical artifacts are not simple tools; they are things in the old sense of the word: causes (similar to our daily use of expressions such as “judicial causes”) or problems that require active involvement and interpretation. They are not something static but dynamic, problematic (Bodei 2015, 20). Technical artifacts are nodes in networks of diverse complexity, which crystallize in specific forms of life and material cultures (contributing to the identities and continuity of communities). Technologies are forms of life, using Langdon Winner’s expression (2020b, 19), because they contribute to configuring, structuring, and ordering the ways humans live; they are not simple tools indifferently used for good or bad. Instead, they express what we are and what we want to be, and in turn, we must adapt to them and act according to the space of possibilities they offer us. The term “forms of life” excludes a unique meaning,2 condensing different nuances. It is an open notion relating to social and individual dimensions: identities, habits, practices, representations, ethical, political, and cultural relations and structures. J. F. M. Hunter tries to define it as follows: “a way of life, or a mode . . . that it has something important to do with the class structure, the values, the religion, the types of industry and commerce and

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of recreation that characterize a group of people” (1968, 234). For her part, Rahel Jaeggi relates the term with culture: The talk of forms of life, as I understand it, refers to forms of human coexistence shaped by culture, to “orders of human coexistence” that include an “ensemble of practices and orientations” but also their institutional manifestations and materializations. Therefore, differences in forms of life find expression not only in different beliefs, value orientations, and attitudes but are also manifested and materialized in fashion, architecture, legal systems, and forms of family organization, in what Robert Musil called the “the durable stuff of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions” that constitutes our lives. (2018, 3)

Jaeggi stresses different dimensions in the forms of life: They implied stabilized practices, establishing continuity in time and a certain inertia; they have a normative dimension, defining what should or should not be done, what is a correct or incorrect interpretation; they condense responses to vital problems (2018, 50). The stability of forms of life is in time. They are not static but dynamic. They possess certain stability but simultaneously are under continuous change related to the changes in the human-technological-environmental complexes. I prefer to work with an open meaning rather than to restrict it to a closed or a single one, because it suits better the attempt of thinking about technology, memory, and culture dynamically. Therefore, I will not give a strict definition of form of life, just I will emphasize some aspects that are important. I can resume the principal features of forms of life and, consequently, technologies as forms of life, as it follows: order, normativity, and openness, each one having a practical and hermeneutical moment or aspect. All these characteristics define what I call the forms of life’s dynamism. The first feature points to the structural dimension of technologies in our everyday life; they set up certain limitations (opening and closing possibilities). The second aspect points to the operation of technical artifacts that defines a technical normativity, establishing the conditions for a good or bad functioning. Lastly, the third feature refers to the tacit knowledge associated with technical practices (design and use). TECHNICAL ORDERING OF SOCIAL LIFE Technologies as forms of life are ways of ordering and structuring social life, people’s actions and interpretations, by establishing a certain inertia that delimits the possibilities of human actions in time. As Winner says:

The Dynamic View of Memory, Culture, and Technology

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The things we call “technologies” are ways of building order in our world. Many technical devices and systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways of ordering human activity. Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time. (2020b, 28)

This is especially noteworthy in the examples Winner uses to show how technology has politics (2020b, 19). According to him, artifacts “act” politically by establishing arrangements and distributions of power in the humantechnical-and-environmental complexes. Even when they are not, properly speaking, agents like human beings, they “act” delimiting the scope of possibilities, which implies different power distributions. Artifacts do politics by fixing in their structure the power relations that the designer, deliberately or not, defines (this is what Winner calls technological arrangements as forms of order); or by requiring for their functioning, due to the rigidity of their structure, specific forms of human organization (inherently political technologies) (Winner 2020b, 22). A case of the first type is the Long Island highways’ overpasses, which the urbanist Robert Moses would deliberately have designed too low to prevent the circulation of public buses, used mainly by African Americans and poor people, excluding them from the parks these highways lead to (Winner 2020b, 22). Through the design, varying the height, the urbanist fixed in overpasses’ structure a sociopolitical relation of injustice. They would be political as long as they embody this relation, fixing and stabilizing it in time. This example has become a sort of “classic” in Science, Technology and Society studies (STS); however, Winner’s interpretation has been criticized, denying Moses’s discriminatory intentions (Joerges 1999). But, in my opinion, the critiques do not point to the crucial issue Winner raises, which is the emphasis on the active and constitutive role technologies play and their capacity to stabilize power relations. Winner also stresses that the setting of power relations in technical artifacts can be nondeliberated. The staircase is a good example. For us, staircases prevent the displacement of people in wheelchairs, but this was not deliberately incorporated into their design from the beginning. There are also what Winner calls inherently political technologies, which structure human actions and decisions because they require for their functioning specific social organizations. For example, a ship on the sea needs a hierarchical organization with a captain commanding and sailors obeying. The same is required, according to Plato, for the correct political organization of the city (Republic 488e–489d) or, as Winner says, for the correct operation of a nuclear plant (2020b, 29ff). Certain technologies require for their functioning extensive social modifications that determine, in a strong sense,

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far-reaching social and political consequences. In this line, Lewis Mumford distinguishes between authoritarian and democratic technologies (1964) that lead to one or another kind of social and political organization. Thus, we should pay as much attention to the roads, bridges, agricultural machines, electrical systems, and other technological infrastructures as we do to the laws and norms that regulate our lives and structure our societies. As Winner says, “technological innovations are similar to legislative acts or political foundings that establish a framework for public order that will endure over many generations” (2020b, 29). Thus, human activities and technical operations do not occur in a vacuum, in a tabula rasa, but in a framework of possibilities, a social order technologically modulated. Technologies as forms of life are conditions of possibility setting up limits that enable our practices and interpretations and the projection of new ones, which in the future will be, in turn, “natural” or given forms of life. Now, the order that forms of life determine is not only spatial but also temporal. They have their own intrinsic temporalities, their own duration and rhythms (Lefebvre 2004). Some of them, longer than others, become a memory, conserving and perpetuating past events and processes for new generations. A longer duration is associated with stability and inertia but also is the condition of possibility for short-term changes. Seemingly atemporal processes contribute to the coherence and stability required by the continuous short-term changes. The apparent naturalness of predominant forms of life is due to their stability (Winner 2020b, 29), but this stability is dynamic—that is, it is stable only within certain limits. Forms of life are multistable (using Don Idhe’s term, 2012; 1990); they retain a certain degree of flexibility, and transformative actions can build on this remaining flexibility. This is the forms of life’s openness, which implies the possibility of moving between different states of stability. Winner proposes a kind of human right permitting citizens to play an active role in the configuration, evaluation, and design of technological systems (2007). For this, it is necessary to open the “black box” and overcome the technological somnambulism, an expression Winner uses referring to the non-awareness of the active and constitutive role technologies play in the shaping of our forms of life, their structuring role in our everyday life. It occurs because “recurring patterns of life’s activity (whatever their origins) tend to become unconscious processes taken for granted” (Winner 2020b, 7). This unconsciousness familiarity is a crucial aspect of my proposal because it implies the naturalization of things and the oblivion of processes and activities necessary for their design, production, and operation. Thus, overcoming somnambulism is to show that seemingly natural things and forms of life are the results of decisions, actions, elections, processes, and activities,

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articulating material and immaterial systems and human-technical-and-environmental complexes. TECHNICAL NORMATIVITY Technologies as forms of life also define a technical normativity. Normativity means an obligation or duty to do something, indicating how things should be done. It is associated with ethics, law, and politics, setting up what we may call a moral, legal, or political normativity. This kind of normativity is in the designers’ and engineers’ ethical codes defining good practices in technology. But we also find a certain normativity in the definition of the correct use of technologies, as they appear, for example, in user manuals. We may call it technical normativity, and it differs from moral, political, and legal normativity because its compliance does not require the subject’s intentions or free decisions (we can find a case of sliding from one to the other when we say, for example, a “bad” ATM). For example, if you want to drive a car, you have to adjust to its mechanism. The technical normativity of the car does not lead to a decision but only to an imposition; either you do it, and the car functions, or you do not, and the car does not function. For this reason, there is no actual obligation in technical normativity but only in a metaphorical sense; because an obligation requires free and intentional beings capable of deliberately choosing to obey or not to obey the orders or norms stipulated. I have insisted on the active and constitutive role that technologies play in our forms of life. But, as I said before, this not mean they act as humans do, but only that they are relevant to the moral and political human actions and decisions, mediating them, that is, playing an active and constitutive role that only metaphorically we may call “action.” Thus, the “actions” of technical artifacts correspond to the modulation of possibilities and the promotion or forbidding of certain actions and interpretations, contributing in this way to stabilizing or destabilizing specific forms of life. Now, who defines the proper use of artifacts? For the instrumental and neutral view of technology, designers do it, fixing it in user manuals. Designers have the idea, technical artifacts concrete it, and users must use them according to designers’ instructions (see documentary Hustwit 2009). Technical normativity is established from the top down. However, this top-down design not always occurs. Users can affect both the proper uses and the designs. The Social Construction of Technology Theorists (SCOT) have shown various examples of this. The most renowned is the design of the modern bicycle, which resulted from the conflict between multiple social groups’ interests (Bijker 1995, 19). The initial designs either maximized speed at the expense of safety (bicycles with a large front wheel) or maximized safety

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by sacrificing speed (bicycles with smaller wheels). Different designs for different users. Whereas young athletes were interested in racing, women wanted bicycles for recreational use. The standard bicycle with two wheels of equal size resulted from the negotiations between these divergent interest groups. Thus, technical designs are not always the result of unidirectional top-down planning: Technology is created by engineers working alone or in groups, marketing people who make the world aware of new products and processes, and consumers who decide to buy or not to buy and who modify what they have bought in directions no engineer has imagined. Technology is thus shaped not only by societal structures and power relations, but also by the ingenuity and emotional commitment of individuals. The characteristics of these individuals, however, are also a product of social shaping. Values, skills, and goals are formed in local cultures, and we can therefore understand technological creativity by linking it to historical and sociological stories. (Bijker 1995, 3–4)

In everyday life, users, inadvertently or deliberately, modify interpretations, uses, and designs of technical artifacts. These transformations, where improvisation and spontaneity play a crucial role, can be short-term or long-term. They can be, for example, the personal customization of a mobile phone or the complete redesign of a flat. Therefore consumer goods do not necessarily impose their uses and meanings but can be a starting point for individual or collective expression. Users can also modify the structure and design of artifacts in a more radical sense, altering them from the inside, as it were. For example, hackers, supporters of free software, or people repairing their mobile phones or electronic devices fighting with programmed obsolescence (Slade 2006; Latouche 2012). These practices can also have longlasting consequences, stabilizing and transforming given forms of life in the long term. Here we have a question of importance when considering the climate crisis and its possible overcoming by appealing to individual practices. OPENNESS AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE An important aspect of forms of life is their openness, which implies that they constitute over time, without giving rise to a definitive form.3 They are not defined and fixed once and for all and are not an expression of already given essences and possibilities. This openness implies that forms of life are not reducible or translatable to a set of explicit rules (Jaeggi 2018, 50), involving, in consequence, tacit knowledge.4 Seeing them from the point of view of practices and actions, forms of life’s non-reducibility to rules implies that

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they cannot be expressed as a set of plans or planned actions (consisting of a set of rules). Improvisation and not deliberate actions are then irreducible elements of forms of life, making them compatible with novelty, spontaneity, and freedom. If we think of actions only in terms of intentional decisions, we overlook unplanned actions, a crucial aspect of social and cultural dynamics (Preston 2013, 44). In the field of artificial intelligence, for example, establishing explicit rules initially was thought of as the key to understanding the human behavior. However, this approach failed because of its inability to design machines adapting to environmental changes. Adaptation is another important element in forms of life (Jaeggi 2018, 50). Let me take an example from the literature to make explicit the difference between practices implying tacit knowledge and the intent to reduce them to a set of fixed rules. In his short story “Instructions on How to Climb a Staircase” (1962), the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar shows the complexities and paradoxes we arrive at when we want to translate a commonly easy action, in this case the climbing of a staircase, to a defined set of rules or instructions, or in informational terms, an algorithm. You tackle a stairway face on, for if you try it backwards or sideways, it ends up being particularly uncomfortable. The natural stance consists of holding oneself upright, arms hanging easily at the sides, head erect but not so much so that the eyes no longer see the steps immediately above, while one tramps up, breathing lightly and with regularity. To climb a staircase one begins by lifting that part of the body located below and to the right, usually encased in leather or deerskin, and which, with a few exceptions, fits exactly on the stair. . . . Having arrived by this method at the second step, it’s easy enough to repeat the movements alternately, until one reaches the top of the staircase. (1969, 21–22)

What would happen if the conditions that makes possible the application of these rules change, for example, if a change in the size of the next step occurs? Here we see that the practical cannot be reduced to the nonpractical. In terms of space and time, the temporal (practices) cannot be reduced to the spatial (rules), fragmenting a continuous activity into multiple elements whose connection is problematic (Bergson 2001). In other words, to learn to swim or drive, we must swim or drive. It is not enough to know the rules or be clear in mind about the movements these practices imply. In the case of driving, for example, step by step, the adjustment is achieved, constituting a human-technology dynamic fitting. This is the case with other artifacts. Once the adjustment with them has been achieved, they are for us something ready-to-hand (Heidegger 1962, 98). In these situations, we use technologies without paying attention to the devices themselves (their materiality, design, or parts) or the set of relationships and networks enabling their operation and

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use. However, when tools fail to fulfill their function, when the automaticity and familiarity of their use are broken, we go into their attentive or contemplative observation, thus, passing from the practical to the theoretical sphere (Heidegger 1962, 103). The non-reduction of forms of life to a set of rules also applies to their hermeneutical dimension. Interpretation is a continual and recursive activity that does not lead to a single valid understanding or meaning but to different meanings, more or less stable over time. Like practices, representations and interpretations are dynamic. As hermeneutics has stressed, particularly with its notion of the hermeneutic circle, the preconditions for interpreting define a kind of horizon that makes interpretation possible (Gadamer 1979). So, when we interpret, we never are in a vacuum devoid of presuppositions, but we are in a complex of human-technical-and-environmental practices and meanings that we take for granted as a starting point to interpretation. TECHNOLOGIES AND CULTURE Before ending this section, I want to say something about the relation between technologies as forms of life and culture. We can define culture as a set of forms of life constituting networks of possibilities in the humantechnological-and-environmental complexes. Thus, culture is always material and immaterial, is always a material culture. As Fernando Broncano says, “Culture exists deposited in networks of artifacts. Artifacts are not means or instruments of previous representations, but mediums or environments without which culture cannot grow or flourish” (2012, 24; 2009, 53). Culture is dynamic, not something static or already given; and like forms of life, it has hermeneutical and pragmatic moments. Thus, the weaving of human beings, artifacts, and environment establishes meanings and shapes practices, customs, habits, inheritances, projects, and imaginaries, giving identity, unity, and continuity to communities. Technological artifacts rise and develop in given material cultural spaces, and they mediate their preservation and transformation. It is in their material cultural context that technologies acquire meaning and relate to other practices and artifacts. The automobile exemplifies this with clarity. I take the following description from the French sociologist Michel Callon, who, with French sociologist Bruno Latour, devised the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), putting in their analysis of socio-technical systems in equal foot humans and technical artifacts as “actants.” Consider a common artifact such as the automobile. Its phenomenal success is probably due to the fact that it enables users to extend the range and variety of actions they can successfully undertake, freeing them to travel about without

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having to rely on anyone else. Thus, autonomous users endowed with the capacity to decide where they want to go, and to move about as and when they wish, are “inscribed” in the technical artifact itself, the automobile . . . Paradoxically, the driver’s autonomy stems from the fact that the functioning of the automobile depends on its being but one element within a large sociotechnical network. To function, it needs a road infrastructure with maintenance services, motorway operating companies, the automobile manufacturing industry, a network of garages and fuel distributors, specific taxes, driving schools, traffic rules, traffic police, roadworthiness testing centres, laws, etc. An automobile is thus at the centre of a web of relations linking heterogeneous entities, a network that can be qualified as sociotechnical since it consists of humans and nonhumans. (Callon 2001, 63)

Callon speaks of networks of actants or action-networks, dissolving the difference between humans and artifacts. I prefer to speak of networks of possibilities and preserve the difference between intentional human actions and artifacts’ “actions.” The ideas I have drawn until now in this chapter about the active and constitutive role technologies play in the constitution of our forms of life, and with them of culture, are only the first part of the conceptual framework for thinking about material memory and the remembering with things. A second part is needed, that of material memory. The dynamism of forms of life articulates possibilities, actions, and interpretations, and these notions are justly the core of French philosopher Henri Bergson’s theory of memory and recalling. I now go into his proposal. THE DYNAMIC VIEW OF MEMORY: BERGSON’S DYNAMIC MEMORY Henri Bergson develops his theory of memory in his 1896 book Matter and Memory. He conceives of memory in connection with perception and action, proposing a dynamical unity of them. One of the central elements of his analysis is his notion of image, which articulates a representational and a pragmatic moment. Thus, images are halfway between the material and the immaterial. They are not mere representations or copies of things in the mind; they possess their own ontological status, which permits a subject-object unity (Bergson 1991, 9–10). Also, images are not understood as purely visual but also involving the other senses; hearing, for example. For Bergson, perception and action imply themselves. He expresses this by saying that perception is “the eventual or possible actions of my body” (1991, 22) upon other bodies. The possible actions depend on the body’s place between other things (i.e., its perspective). This perspective is not static

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but dynamic, depending on the movements of the body in the environment. Therefore, for Bergson, perception is not something contemplative or passive but active (1991, 31). Action, for its part, is defined as the effecting of changes in things (Bergson 1991, 63). Action relates directly with limitation because an acting body limits or delimits the scope of possibilities of the body on which it acts. However, action is not simply mechanical; it implies “consciousness,” understood in a broad sense as indeterminacy—that is, possibilities (human consciousness, the awareness of something, is included in it). For Bergson, only living beings are capable of action in this sense, because they are capable of more or less consciousness. Possibilities, for their part, also can be conceived statically or dynamically, either as preexisting and already made before their concretion, or as arising as such at the very moment of their embodiment. In the first case, “all is given” and determined beforehand, and nothing really new happens. This is the way that possibilities are considered in the artisanal paradigm of production and processes. On the contrary, the dynamical view of possibilities does not consider them as preexistent before their concretion or embodiment, because before that, they are only virtualities. To explain it, Bergson resorts to the idea of artistic creation, considered as the creation of something completely new, contrary to what happens in the artisanal paradigm. For him, in the act of artistic creation do not occur the embodiment of an already given form on an inert matter, but an action and a process that is open to the accidental and the spontaneous. For this reason, the possibilities do not exist previously but only in retrospect from the actual creation or production. Only from the work already done can we consider something as a condition of possibility of its existence. In Bergson’s words, “The possible is therefore the mirage of the present in the past” (1946, 118). Thus, we can distinguish between two kinds of concretion or embodiment: the realization of possibilities (artisanal paradigm) and the actualization of virtualities (dynamic paradigm). Concerning memory, Bergson says it is “a synthesis of past and present with a view to the future” (1991, 220). So defined, memory is equivalent to what Bergson calls durée, duration (qualitative or experiential time), which implies conservation and openness. He distinguishes two kinds of memory: habit-memory and pure-memory (1991, 151–52; Ricoeur 2004, 24; Olsen 2010, 116). To illustrate the difference, Bergson uses the case of learning a lesson by heart. Habit-memory permits us to recite the words automatically without evoking the several steps of the learning process. The lesson is now “part of my present, exactly like my habit of walking or of writing; it is lived and acted, rather than represented” (Bergson 1991, 81). The pure-memory, for its part, permits us, in principle, to recall every phase of the learning process, the memorization of the lesson. In this sense, “It is like an event in my life;

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its essence is to bear a date, and consequently to be unable to occur again” (Bergson 1991, 80). Thus, habit-memory corresponds to the mechanisms the body has fixed through habit, exercise, or learning, through actions and practices. It is an embodied memory, the embodiment of past actions and practices. For this reason, the present mechanisms of action are not something merely given but the result of a process; they are constituted dynamically, in a particular network of forms of life, practices, and interpretations mediated by technologies. Pure-memory, for its part, corresponds to the exact preservation in a “virtual” state of all our remembrances of past perceptions and experiences, in the way they were lived and in the exact order in which they were lived (1991, 113)—not conserved in the brain or something material, but in the duration as something mental or spiritual. Bergson describes this pure-memory as passive and inaccessible to consciousness, as an unconscious realm (1991, 141). However, pure-memory, even when inaccessible in itself, plays a leading role in the mechanism of perception-action (or present perception) through what Bergson calls “remembered-images” (1991, 155). These images are halfway between mere virtuality and present action. These remembered-images are accessible to consciousness, and they go into the actual perception according to their adjustment with the needs of the present action. Between the plane of action—the plane in which our body has condensed its past into motor habits—and the plane of pure memory, where our mind retains in all its details the picture of our past life, we believe that we can discover thousands of different planes of consciousness, a thousand integral and yet diverse repetitions of the whole of the experience through which we have lived. (Bergson 1991, 241)

Bergson exposes his notion of “planes of consciousness” (1991, 173) (which I will later relate to the “layers of memory”) through one of his best-known schemes: the inverted cone (1991, 152). The extremes of the cone are pure-memory, with its virtual remembrances, and the present perception-action, associated with the body. They also delimit two types of human characters according to the degree of attention to life: the dreamer and the impulsive human. The different levels of consciousness consist of remembered-images or memory-images that contain all the lived experiences but with more or less detail, depending on the distance to the present action— that is, the level of mental “tension” or attention to life. These different planes of memory permit us to go deep inside the world, making explicit details not seen or considered before. Think of a piece of music or a song, for example. On a first listen, we could identify some general sticking features, such as melody, rhythm, and style. But the repeated listening makes it possible to

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identify previously unperceived characteristics (e.g., sounds, instruments, or nuances not heard consciously or explicitly). This attentive immersion is possible using memory-images and their projection into what is perceived in ever greater detail. The articulation of past perceptions (remembered-images) and the present one (perception-action), in brief, the articulation of memory and action is what Bergson calls “concrete perception.” Thus, our current perceptions and actions are not merely present, but they are full of past. We do not live an instantaneous existence or experience. We perceive with the eyes of our memory and our lived experiences. As Bergson says, “Your perception, however instantaneous, consists then in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; in truth, every perception is already memory. Practically, we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future” (1991, 150). The relevance of memory for perception appears in the acts of recognition (Bergson 1991, 77; 1920, 134). Following his distinction of memories, Bergson identifies two types of recognition: automatic and attentive. The first one relates to habit-memory and consists of recognition without using explicit images but only perception-action mechanisms acquired through habits. Recognition occurs then automatically, and perception leads immediately to a reaction. The second type of recognition involves the explicit use of memory-images and mental effort to find the correct remembrance for the recognition (Bergson 1991, 99). Now, these kinds of memories and recognitions are the poles of one and the same mental reality, of one and the same memory. For this, we should not think of them as functioning independently as separated entities but as opposite moments of a unity. This unity is what Bergson calls dynamic memory (Bergson 2018, 53) or “dynamic scheme” (Bergson 1920, 220). As an example of the dynamical memory, Bergson mentions the way professional chess players perceive the pieces on the chessboard. It is not a visual memory . . . It is not a geometric memory either, because the geometry is of the space and this representation [of the pieces on the chessboard] is not in the space, no, it is of the dynamism, there is a dynamic memory, I would say, implicit . . . Each piece is replaced by an action; that is to say, instead of the static, of the totally made, one has an action, an activity that is represented, and then, instead of the pieces juxtaposed in space, in a place of an explicit departure, one has . . . the interpenetration of all these actions in each other; one has the implicit departure. This is true not only of the chessboard considered at a given moment, but even more so of the succession of all the moves; the whole history of the game, the successive moves, are perceived as penetrating each other, constituting, as some players say, a musical chord. (Bergson 2018, 53–54; 1920, 196)

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In this description, Bergson opposes a dynamic conception of memory to a static or geometric one, the conception of memory as a container or deposit I associated with the artisanal paradigm. The chess pieces appear not as static and merely arranged in space but as opening possible actions. The chessboard constitutes a field of possibilities in continuous modification. At the base of this opening of possibilities is the memory in its double dimension, representational and pragmatic, with explicit use of images and quasi-automatic actions, conjugating at the same time in a concrete perception. Thus, dynamic memory is the essence of concrete perception—that is, the perception that occurs in everyday life. Memory is not a container or repository but the dynamic link between images, perceptions, possibilities, and actions. In fact, there is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience. In most cases these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as “signs” that recall to us former images. (Bergson 1991, 33)

Perception implies memory, and memory opens up to future actions. Therefore, the present is open to the past and to the future. The blurring of memory and perception recalls the discussions in art about perception and imagination, reality and fiction, particularly in photography. Let me use the case Yasunari Kawabata describes in his novel The Master of Go (1951). The protagonist looks at the photographs he shot of the dead master of Go and finds his face different. The photographic images seem to show some hidden dimension, exposed by the camera, not evident to the naked eye. I was struck by a certain intensity of feeling in the pictures. Was it in the dead face itself? The face was rich in feeling, yet the dead man himself had none. It seemed to me that the pictures were neither of life nor of death. The face was alive but sleeping. One might in another sense see them as pictures of a dead face and yet feel in them something neither living nor dead. Was it that the face came through as the living face? Was it that the face called up so many memories of the living man? Or was it that I had before me not the living face but photographs? (Kawabata 2013, 30–31)

The protagonist is also surprised by the length of the master’s eyebrows. He cannot say if the face in the photos is an accurate or false representation of the master’s face. I had written of the long white hair in the left eyebrow. In my pictures of the dead face, however, the right eye-brow was the thicker. It hardly seemed likely that the right eyebrow had suddenly begun to grow after his death. And had he

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really had such long eyebrows? One might have concluded that the camera was exaggerating, but probably it had told the truth . . . It had performed quite on his own, without promptings from me. (2013, 30)

The protagonist thinks the camera cannot lie because it performs on its own. Remember that photography once meant objectivity, the mechanical reproduction of something without bias (Daston and Galison 2007, 125). However, it soon became apparent that this was not the case, and like all images, photographs stay in an unstable zone between fiction and reality. We find a similar situation in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up (1966), inspired by the Argentinean writer Julio Cortazar’s short story “Las babas del diablo [The drool of the devil]” (1959). The protagonist, a photographer, thinks he recognizes a murder in the photographs he took at the park. He zooms the images until they become blurred (they blow up), and a zone of ambiguity between fiction and reality rises, not permitting him to assert whether the crime indeed happened. Today, with the advent of digital images, powerful editing tools, and deep fakes, it is even more difficult to trust photographs at first glance. These analyses show us that memory, combining the mental and the material, is not something merely past nor merely passive but active and playing a crucial role in our present actions and, in consequence, in the actualization of possibilities (understood as virtualities). And here technologies are relevant as active and constitutive elements in our remembering capacities and the interpretations and meanings we assign to memory. Artifacts “provide the ground for humans to experience memory” (Jones 2007, 22), helping to shape remembering because “both people and objects are engaged in the process of remembering” (Jones 2007, 22, 25). Artifacts do not contain or store memories; we do neither. We experience and remember with things. The fact that memory has a representational and interpretative dimension but also a pragmatic one, associated with actions, habits, and practices, makes it possible to speak properly of a material memory. Memory is not purely immaterial but also material. LAYERS OF MATERIAL MEMORY To analyze and understand the paradoxical coexistence and contemporaneity of what is temporarily distant, which is inherent to memory and to the act of remembering in their dual dimension of representation and action, I use the notion of layers of material memory,5 or simply “layers of memory,” which I have developed from the ideas of Bergson and the French philosopher

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Gilles Deleuze (see also for this archaeological metaphor of memory, Olsen 2010, 109). As we have seen before, Bergson calls “planes of consciousness” to the different strata of memory-images we have in our minds; each layer containing all our past in greater or lesser detail, according to its distance to the present action. These memory-images play an active role in how we perceive and act (Bergson 1991, 241). Deleuze, for his part, in his cinema studies, uses these “planes of consciousness” to define what he calls “sheets of past.” He operates a material turn, so to speak, emphasizing the material existence of these layers. In his words, the past accumulated has a virtual existence and insistence on our present representations and actions (Deleuze 2000, 79–80). What does virtual mean in this case? We find a double influence: that of the seventeenth-century German philosopher G. W. Leibniz and that of Bergson. According to Leibniz, virtual refers to something that exists and acts but that is not consciously perceived. Consciousness means here to become aware of something. Leibniz gives the example of the sound of a mill that, after a while, becomes so familiar that it goes unnoticed. Although it still acts on us, we no longer pay attention to it. We are not aware of it, although we do perceive it unconsciously (Leibniz 1996, 53). I could say that this is a case of technological somnambulism due to the familiarity with things. Bergson, for his part, calls virtual to the nonacting, inaccessible and unconscious, images of lived experiences that remain in the state of pure-memory, becoming active and conscious only through the present perception-action. Thus, Deleuze defines the “sheets of past” as elements of the past existing and acting but not being consciously perceived. He also defines temporal stratifications: layers of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. “Each sheet of the past has its distribution, its fragmentation, its shining points, its nebulae, in short, an age” (Deleuze 2000, 123). Each sheet of past is a continuum but a pliable one, different according to its internal diversification or fragmentation. To express the relation between continuum, folding, and fragmentation, Deleuze resorts to the so-called “Baker’s transformation,” a notion coming from the mathematical analysis of nonlinear dynamical systems (Deleuze 2000, 119ss; see Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 269, from which Deleuze takes this notion). Physico-chemist Ilya Prigogine uses this notion when trying to set up irreversibility at the microscopic level in physicochemical systems. According to him, Baker’s transformation would provide a mechanism to establish an intrinsic material age, given by the degree of fragmentation. However, this transformation alone does not define a directionality or temporal irreversibility (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 257ss). In brief, Deleuze’s “sheets of past” are different coexisting layers of past, constituting fragmentary continuums with diverse topologies. Each layer

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contains the entire past with a distinctive degree of fragmentation that defines its “age.” As a result, the present acquires a depth, being the “piling-up of strata or the superimposing of coexistent sheets” (2000, 121). Thus, when we perceive or remember, we “see” what is consciously present and also the virtual. Now, speaking about layers of past could give the false impression that they are static and merely given spatial strata. However, permanence is only such in time (something I refer to with the notion of fragility). Layers, as processes, have their own dynamism, temporality, and rhythms. Some historians have emphasized this, using archaeological metaphors for thinking about the past and memory. It is the case of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck and the French historian Fernand Braudel. Koselleck speaks of Zeitschichten (temporal layers, translated in English as “sediments of time”) for characterizing the different levels associated with the individual and communal experiences, the structures of repetition, and the biological cycles. “Sediments or layers of time” refers to geological formations that differ in age and depth and that changed and set themselves apart from each other at differing speeds over the course of the so-called history of the earth. . . . By transposing this metaphor back into human, political, or social history as well as into structural history, we can analytically separate different temporal levels upon which people move and events unfold, and thus ask about the longer-term preconditions for such events. (Koselleck 2018, 3)

For his part, Braudel in his book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1950) speaks of different historical temporalities, or timescales, of longer or shorter duration: the time of biographies and personal, social, and political short-term events (short timescale); the time of the circumstantial (medium timescale), associated with civil, economic, and political institutions; and the time of very long periods, the long durée (long term). These temporalities lead to different kinds of histories: episodic (évenementielle), conjunctural (conjoncturale), and structural (structurale) (Braudel 1950, 41). For example, the geographical space defined by the Mediterranean Sea includes long-lasting processes of landscape modification and climatic conditions, within which ongoing economic and population processes occur (e.g., the increasing urbanization of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period). Individual events and political developments occur within these medium- and long-term processes. However, these are not mutually exclusive dimensions, nor do they coexist independently of each other, because the individual actions themselves have medium- and long-term consequences. Consider, for example, the current extreme case of human-technical actions having far-reaching global

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consequences (the so-called Anthropocene). From Braudel’s perspective, two persons can be geographically concurrent (structural temporality) but living in very different historical times (conjuctural temporality), for example, a person born a few decades before the French Revolution and one born shortly after. On the other hand, we can be contemporaries from an eventual perspective but not from a circumstantial or conjunctural one. We can belong to different generations that coincide in a specific period of time but with very different customs, experiences, projects, and perspectives. From this point of view, we are noncontemporaries, living in a temporal inequality, in different historical-cultural times, “not belonging to the same conditions and perspectives of those who live in the same chronological time” (Bodei 2016, 58). Think, for example, the generational gap between grandchildren and grandparents, between those who were born with internet and mobile phones and those who were not. The former accumulates a lot of information (images, audio, texts) of their lives, that shapes their worldview and their identities, while the latter perhaps have only a few photos (e.g., from their childhood). In the words of Remo Bodei: The generation is a “cohort” of individuals who are born, grow up and develop together. Sitting at the intersection between biography and history, they participate, together with their contemporaries, in shared historical events in a way that is quite similar and, therefore, different from the other three or four generations that are contemporary, which coexist in time, although with the differences in memory and according to the temporal differences that characterise, in each of them, their own specific horizon (as in the most frequent case of a grandfather, a father and a grandson). (2016, 54)

Technologies play a prominent role in this time differentiation. Artifacts, TV series, video games, clothes and styles of dress, draw distinct temporalities and delimit the shared memories of generations. The coexistence of diverse temporalities also happens in the history and evolution of technology. The English historian David Edgerton presents in his book The Shock of the Old (2008) a history of technology from the user’s point of view, contrary to the traditional emphasis on invention and innovation. Often technological developments are presented linearly and progressively, with new innovations replacing old ones. Edgerton shows that if we consider the uses, a very different story arises, with technologies from different periods coexisting. Time was always jumbled up, in the pre-modern era, the post-modern era and the modern era. We worked with old and new things, with hammers and electric drills. In use-centred history technologies do not only appear, they also

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disappear and reappear, and mix and match across the centuries. Since the late 1960s many more bicycles were produced globally each year than cars. The guillotine made a gruesome return in the 1940s. Cable TV declined in the 1950s to reappear in the 1980s. The supposedly obsolete battleship saw more action in the Second World War than in the First. Furthermore, the twentieth century has seen cases of technological regression. (Edgerton 2008, xii)

We do not live in a technical world purely present. “Sedimentation provides the pre-perceptive context that enables our current perceptions to occur with immediate meaningfulness” (Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015, 25). The past actions and representations contextualized and configured the present, setting the scope of possibilities. In other words, current forms of life continue and modify the past ones. Rosenberger and Verbeek cite two examples of human-technology relations: the familiarity we acquire using glasses, allowing us to see without paying attention to them (human-technology relation Ihde calls embodiment), and the expert readout of fMRI: “As the expert gazes upon the image, due to the pre-perceptive context of meaning developed and sedimented through years of training and experience reading this kind of display, the image’s meaning appears all together in a perceptual gestalt” (Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015, 25). Using Bergson’s terminology, the past actions and representations sediment as habit-memory, as a memory made body. In brief, present forms of life conserve past ones (representations, actions, and artifacts from previous times), and they open to future forms of life. The notion of layers of material memory points to the coexistence of temporal processes of lesser or greater duration that define a temporal deepness in relation to the present. It also points to their active role in the current actions and representations, despite their concealment from our present consciousness. However, the mere coexistence of layers of past is not enough to have memory; this would be a return to the static view of memory as storage. They only become layers of memory, strictly speaking, through a process of remembering, through the coordination of different temporalities, which implies a material interpretation (representational and pragmatic), and a given perspective—that is, a point of view having prevalence. In this way, we pass from the mere coexistence of temporalities to memory, thus having different temporal horizons depending on the relationships established between the different temporal layers and processes. The anthropologist Daniel Miller in “Artefacts and the Meaning of Things” (1994) takes the human duration as the perspective and distinguishes three kinds of temporal relations: longevity, temporal equivalence, and transience. The first implies processes longer than human existence. We know them, for example, through the traces of the past. The second refers to temporalities

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of the order of human life duration. The third one considers temporalities shorter than human life. The differences in temporality or duration are also differences in the degree of permanence or durability (see Jones 2007, 51), what I call fragility. For example, from the perspective of an individual’s life, some historical buildings (e.g., a cathedral) exist as in a perpetual present, connecting past, present, and future generations, and constituting a common source to remember. The preservation of forms of life requires, moreover, specific material and artifactual basis. Technologies have dramatically increased our possibilities for extending and persisting through time and space. Writing made possible the perpetuation of the spoken words transmitted orally up to that time. Photography, cinema, video cameras, and digital technologies have increased in unthinkable ways the possibility of reaching territories and times we cannot directly experience. Travels that once took weeks or months now take a few hours. Our voices, images, and expressions extend beyond the limits of our biological existences (which medical and health advances also prolong). Our search for transcendence and perpetuation, the ever-renewed dream of immortality through technology, awakens new hopes, thanks to our multiform and almost infinite “technological footprint”: countless mobile phone photographs, limitless posts and interactions on social networks, lots of images and videos online; almost infinite files in our computers and in the “cloud”; numerous artifacts and physical objects accompanying our everyday lives. Many of these physical and digital artifacts probably will outlive us. Transcendence through technology is not new. It is the basis of inheritance, for example, that permits the continuation between generations of the same family. Nevertheless, the things inherited have changed. In the past, they were household furniture, domestic appliances, and clothing, but today, obsolescence has rendered them useless as heirlooms. Objects to inherit require longevity, which implies not only a duration longer than a human life span but also a transmissible symbolic value (e.g., acquired through habitual use), which does not always coincide with an economic value. However, in our societies of planned obsolescence, it is not only durability that is in question but also the value acquired through use (Slade 2006; Latouche 2012). In brief, the archaeological metaphor of layers of memory highlights several aspects relevant to thinking about memory. First, there is a recognition of the processual and temporal character of things and processes. Things are produced, used, destroyed, accumulated, and so on, and it is possible to recover artifacts of ancient material cultures, retrieving lost generations. Second, there is a recognition of the need for a process of remembering. The recovery of layers of time requires “sinking” into the depths of time, bringing layers one by one into the light. Their discovery is a temporal and spatial journey, where going downward in space is going backward in time. This

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journey requires some procedures or methods involving knowledge, experience, interpretive skills, and imagination, through which we discover and visualize the networks of artifacts and forms of life. Third, the metaphor of layers of memory stresses the diverse temporality of processes and the role of the perspective, particularly the human perspective. FAMILIARITY WITH THINGS The engagement between people and things is possible due to the order and stability of forms of life. The stability of practices and representations at the individual or local level is what I call familiarity, taking Bergson’s term. Our daily life is spent among objects whose very presence invites us to play a part: in this the familiarity of their aspect consists. Motor tendencies would, then, be enough by themselves to give us the feeling of recognition. But we hasten to add that in most cases there is something else besides. (Bergson 1991, 95)

The “something else” Bergson mentions refers to both the hermeneutic dimension and the openness and flexibility present even in automatic mechanisms or habits. The stability of habit-memory is dynamic, requiring continual maintenance and consolidation. We familiarize ourselves with things by engaging with them and their meanings daily (Olsen 2010, 129ff). I avoid the expression “to attach meaning to things” because I think it implies the artisanal paradigm, considering the meanings as preexistent before their attachment to things or artifacts (as happens in semiotics accounts in which artifacts, being mere signals, point to something other than themselves). Take, for example, the psychoanalytical notion of cathexis, defined as the process of allocation of mental or emotional energy to a person, object, or idea (Laplanche and Pontalis 1988, 62; see also Freud 1917/1966). The word “allocation” reinforces the idea that emotions are something mental that is assigned or attached to something material lacking an emotional meaning. Familiarity, on the contrary, is not the assignment to things of something already given but the joining and inextricable constitution of actions and representations with them. This mutual constitution can be emphasized from one side or the other, from the human side or the things side. If we reinforce this last, then we can say, as Bergson does in the citation, that things invite us to do things with them. This recalls the notion of affordances, developed by James J. Gibson for his ecological view of perception. To define the co-constitution of animals and the environment, Gibson creates the neologism “affordance,” defining it as “something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies

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the complementarity of the animal and the environment” (2015, 119). With the term “affordance,” Gibson points to the double aspect of a surface that separate and unite at once. “Perhaps the composition and layout of surfaces constitute what they afford. If so, to perceive them is to perceive what they afford” (2015, 119). I want to stress two features of this concept, which will let me relate it to familiarity with things, and to forms of life, possibilities, and technical artifacts as operators of possibilities. First, affordances point to possibilities not given beforehand, either in animals or the environment; they are the product of their connection and engagement. Second, such affordances have a double function of opening and closing, which is inherent to any limitation. A limit opens and closes at the same time. If we consider artifacts as operators of possibilities, they fulfill both of these features. They do not bring about possibilities already made but actualize possibilities or virtualities that constitute as such in specific contexts, specific networks of forms of life. And technical artifacts are also limits because they open and close possibilities. They are limits helping to define (to delimit) forms of life and, with this, memories, both in their double dimension of practices and representations. These limits and limitations have some degree of stability but are dynamic, permitting flexibility and openness to changes. COLLECTIVE MEMORY Bergson’s theory of memory gives us an adequate basis for establishing a notion of dynamic or dynamical memory, for understanding the remembering with technical artifacts. The two defining moments that technological mediation implies, representation and action, are equivalent to the two aspects of memory: pure-memory (mental) and habit-memory (material). The human-technology relations imply the two dimensions at once, and the analysis of the remembering with technologies requires the consideration of both moments at the same time. However, Bergson’s theory of memory has been criticized for not including the social dimension, which questions its usefulness for thinking about memory and its relation with social and culturally defined forms of life. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in his book Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire [The Social Frameworks of Memory] (1925), criticized Bergson’s emphasis on memory as something individual. For Halbwachs, memory is a social “collective memory” irreducible to the individual. Even more, individual memory is possible only because of this social memory, which sets up the frameworks permitting the ordering and coordination enabling personal recalling. In the words of Suzanne Vromen,

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To remember means to be tied to collective frameworks of social reference points that allow memories to be coordinated in time and space. Not only are memories acquired through society, they are recalled, recognized, and located socially. Memory also orders the experience and ensures the continuity of collectivities . . . these collective memories are not pure recollections but reconstructions. (1993, 511)

Certainly, Bergson’s analysis of memory is psychological and not sociological, but he does not take a solipsistic stance because he relates personal memory with biological evolution. The absence of social and cultural dimensions in his analyses does not exclude them, and they can be incorporated as constitutive elements of perceptions, actions, and memory. Precisely the dynamic character of memory allows for such incorporation. Memory, as Halbwachs stresses, is a constructive process, a conception that opposes the static view of memory based on the artisanal paradigm (memory as a container or something static). A dynamic view of memory considers that remembering requires a continual reconstruction process because memory is given in time, not in space. Thus, referring to social or collective memory Halbwachs says, We preserve memories of each epoch in our lives, and these are continually reproduced; through them, as by a continual relationship, a sense of identity is perpetuated. But precisely because these memories are repetitions, because they are successively engaged in very different systems of notions, at different periods of our lives, they have lost the form and appearance they once had . . . Any such reconstruction of the past can only be approximate. (cited from Apfelbaum 2010, 89)

What does reconstruction mean? Does it imply that our memories are only a product of our imagination and therefore a mere illusion? No. This is not the case for Halbwachs because reconstruction endows social frameworks with specific stability. Each act of recalling is a reconstruction within some social medium that each individual takes for granted. “Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction” (Bartlett 1995, 213). When we remember, we put something and receive something (not only at the social level but also individually). I call spontaneous what is given in the process of remembering. In consequence, remembering is not a merely imaginative creation, reducible to our mental processes but material and social. In Halbwachs’ words: All memories, however personal they may be and even if witnessed by only one person . . . are linked to ideas we share with many others, to people, groups,

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places, dates, words, and linguistic forms, theories and ideas—that is, with the whole material and moral framework of the society of which we are part. (cited from Apfelbaum 2010, 86)

Now, we must avoid overemphasizing the social dimension, as Halbwachs does, because in doing so we could nullify the personal and individual dimensions of memory and, with it, the freedom of individuals, turning them into mere reflections of social systems. Is the social or collective memory completely autonomous, following its own logic or dynamics? What is social memory without individuals’ memory? Even when social systems and forms of life have certain stability or inertia, using a mechanic metaphor, this is a dynamic one, requiring continuous maintenance and production through actions, decisions, and processes of different nature, all of which are not wholly determined. Thus, we can continually transform and modify the social institutions and systems, the forms of life, but not always with equal facility. The reconstruction of memory gives rise to divergent and problematic social memories, constant source of conflict and negotiation. Remembering has become a relevant issue vis- à-vis conflicting social processes, because the past, or rather the way the past is reconstructed, is crucial for the action in the present . . . the selectivity of social memories is at stake and seems to open up the arena for staging the social conflicts regarding the past. (Sebald and Wagle 2016, 2)

This has been one of the most studied areas in memory studies (e.g., the case of the memory of the victims of military dictatorships in Latin America). Now, this is not the focus of this book, so I only mention it without going into it in any depth. In brief, collective memory is not opposed to individual memory, but it is the plural moment of memory associated with networks of forms of life constituting the social and the cultural. As such, collective memory is a source of relationships (integration or disintegration) and temporal continuity, in which the social and the individual take place. As I said before, personal and individual recallings do not occur in a vacuum but in networks of forms of life, networks of representations and actions, meanings and practices. And in turn, social memory requires individual and personal remembering. I think this reciprocity or mutual adaptation between the personal and the collective, the local and global, is key to reading Halbwachs’s work on collective memory and to think the dynamism of memory: Every time we situate a new impression in relation to the framework structuring our existing ideas the framework transforms the impression but the impression also in turn alters the framework. This creates a new moment, a new place,

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modifying our sense of time and space; it adds a new dimension to our group, which we now see in a different light. Hence the continual work of adaptation. (cited from Apfelbaum 2010, 90)

TECHNOLOGY AND THE DYNAMISM OF MEMORY The mutual structuring that Halbwachs describes between the individual and the social is also adequate to describe the role of technical artifacts in the construction of collective and personal memories, which implies meanings and practices. Undoubtedly the sense of time and space has been altered by new digital technologies of information and communication, but also for past technologies such as calendars, mechanical clocks, trains, automobiles, aeroplanes, telephones, and so forth (see Shove et al. 2009, for cases from the first decades of the twentieth century). Moreover, technologies have modified equally the relations between individual and collective memories changing with this the “processes of reception, transmission, and mediation of memory across different generations and transnational contexts” (Bond et al. 2017, 145). Facebook is an example of our days, being part of “the mediascapes that keep memory traces alive” (van de Bildt 2017, 146). As José van Dijck says: “The advent of Timeline signalled Facebook’s transformation from a social networking site into a connective memory tool: rather than a mere instrument for interpersonal or mass self-communication, the platform has also become a prime means for shaping personal and social memory” (2017, 151). Technical artifacts are inseparable from our everyday activities of remembering, inextricably social and individual, material (implying practices and actions) and immaterial (representational and meaningful), defining new ways of experiencing time and memory. When we remember, different temporalities merge, that of things or technologies, that of the societies in which we live, with their networks of forms of life and their environments, and our own as individuals. Many, perhaps even the majority, of the processes and practices implicated in making time—in the sense of giving it meaning, order and personal as well as collective qualities and characteristics—involve the use of things. Time is rich in material culture, and vice versa . . . Things age, and we and our memories and identities age with them. Objects can be signs of enduring or momentary experience (an heirloom that signifies family time; a present that triggers feelings of “growing up” or “childhood”). Objects play a critical role as a kind of compass or clock across our lifecourse. But they also have temporal orientations associated with them, such as an appeal to novelty, different careers of obsolescence

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and recycling, and the various kinds of wear and patina which signify age and interactions with people. (Shove et al. 2009, 5)

The experience of time and remembering is different in peasant or traditional societies, with artifacts that last for generations, such as old family furniture, and in industrial societies, with disposable objects that last a single use or a few months or years. Industrial societies with mass production and consumption lead to a sense of ephemerality, emphasizing the new and the continuous renewal of objects. Practices such as programmed obsolescence, first associated with the proliferation of single-use products (tissues, razors) but now with more expensive and complex products, such as electronic devices (Slade 2006), have led to a sense of time instability and an emotional detachment from things. The continuous consumption of new commodities and their obsolescence (functional or symbolic) make it difficult to construct meaningful connections with things, because they require time and attention, familiarity with things. In 1930s Japan, during its modernization process, mass products were strongly criticized because it was considered that they break the ties between humans and things. For example, in his book In Praise of Shadows (1933), the Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki addresses this problem by accentuating the difference between Westerners and Japanese people in their relationship with things. The former prefer new, clear, bright objects as signs of modernity and cleanliness; the latter, on the contrary, prefer opaque and used things, valuing the traces that time left in them (as in the case of leather and wood objects). Japanese recognize that some things acquire their value in time due to their use, and that this gives meaning and constructs affections. In the words of Tanizaki: We find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter. The Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliance, but we object to the practice. While we do sometimes indeed use silver for teakettles, decanters, or sake cups, we prefer not to polish it. On the contrary, we begin to enjoy it only when the luster has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky patina . . . We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive luster to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artifact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity. Of course this “sheen of antiquity” of which we hear so much is in fact the glow of grime. In both Chinese and Japanese the words denoting this glow describe a polish that comes of being touched over and over again, a sheen produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of handling—which is to say grime. (Tanizaki 1977, 10–11)

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Contemporary to this Tanizaki’s writing is the Japanese artisanal movement mingei, influenced by British arts and crafts, that underlines the value of artifacts made by anonymous artisans, opposing them to the mass-produced merchandise coming from the West. However, the artisanal character should not exclude its availability to the masses, contrary to what happens today with traditional or artisanal products, only aimed at the wealthy public. Mingei products had to be numerous, accessible, and useful for ordinary people, embodying at the same time local features that enable the building of emotional relationships with them. We no longer look upon objects as we used to, which is undoubtedly due to their poor quality. In the past, everyday objects were treated with care, with something verging on respect. While this attitude may in part have been a result of the scarcity of goods in past times, I believe it principally resulted from the honest quality of their workmanship and the fact that the more an object was used, the more its beauty became apparent. As our constant companions in life, such objects gave birth to a feeling of intimacy and even affection. The relation between people and things then was much deeper than it is today. When a person could point to what he was wearing and say, “This belonged to my grandfather,” it was a source of pride. These days, however, the careless way things are made has robbed us of any feeling of respect or affection. From the viewpoint of social mores, this is a huge loss. (Yanagi 2018, 8–10)

Meaning and emotional attachment do not arise immediately but in time from practices and engagement with things. This is the only way to remember with things, to build a material memory. The familiarity with things is also intimacy with them, feelings and memories mutually shaped, constituting a shared memory giving identity and permitting the continuity between generations. As Remo Bodei says, Material things, the product of human labour, are loaded with immaterial symbols (personal, family and social) transmitted and reworked through generations. However, from an affective point of view, objects received in inheritance and passed through other hands before coming to us awaken memories and activate the imagination. (2016, 91)

Thus, memory is material and immaterial at the same time, and technologies help to shape it. This materialization of memory implies that we remember with things. We do not remember through things but with them. Without them, some memories would be impossible to recall. These ideas have been taken up today in Western countries in fighting against the ephemeral nature of our products, seeking longer-lasting products (Cooper 2010)

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and promoting emotional relations with them (Chapman, 2005) to construct personal and collective memories with things. Memory is presence and absence at the same time (Ricoeur 2004, 5ss; Casey 2000, 39). Presence of what it was and absence because it was, but also possible absence in the future because what we now remember might not be remembered in the future. The current memory images could be lost forever and become irrecoverable. Their current presence does not assure their maintenance and conservation for the future. Consider a photograph of our infancy, for example. The photo is only a memory because we recognize in it (and with it) a radical absence, our infancy, to which the photograph points and from which it comes. We recognize with the photographic image a moment paradoxically present but irreversible loss. In brief, a memory image indicates in the present (retrieving) that it is from the past (conservation) and that in the future might or not be present again (fragility). Thus, I set up three moments in the remembering process through memory images: retrieving, conservation, and fragility. Remembering requires necessarily the conservation of something that is accessed from the present but whose conservation is dynamic, not assured once and for all. Its future presence is not secured by its actual presence. A dynamical view of memory has to consider not only the recovery of memories but also their dynamic conservation in time. *** In this chapter, I elaborated the theoretical framework of what I call a dynamic view of memory, culture, and technology. I first presented the artisanal paradigm of production and processes, which I argue underlies the static views of memory as a container, culture as opposed to the material, and technology as neutral and purely instrumental. Then, to concretize the dynamic view, I introduced the notions of technologies as mediation and forms of life that highlight the active and constitutive role of technical artifacts and technologies in the shaping of our forms of life (elaborating mainly on Verbeek and Winner)—that is, their role as operators of possibilities (Broncano). In relation to the dynamism of technologically mediated forms of life, I emphasized the technical dimension of social order, the technical normativity, the tacit knowledge and openness of forms of life, and the relationship between technologies and culture. Then, I draw a dynamic view of memory, based on Bergson’s dynamic memory that, as technologies and forms of life, incorporates a representational dimension (representations and interpretations) and a pragmatic one (actions, practices, and habits). Because of this double dimension, I talk of material memory. The key concepts to understand the dynamic view of material memory (incorporating the technologies) are the perception as intrinsically connected with action, memory as habits and memory-images, and the opening and closing of possibilities (as virtualities).

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Finally, I introduced the notion of layers of material memory referring to the past processes, activities, and decisions that enable the production, use, and maintenance of technologies and forms of life but are overlooked and forgotten in our everyday life. This forgetting is what I call technological somnambulism (using Winner’s expression), which I propose can be remediated by remembering with things (at the individual and social level)—that is, by breaking with the everyday familiarity with things. This theoretical framework I elaborated here will serve as a basis for studying specific cases and examples in the following chapters.

Chapter 2

Material Memory, Technology, and Cultural Heritage

In the first chapter, I introduced some key concepts that will now serve to analyze various domains in which memory, culture, and technology play a role. I emphasized what I call “the artisanal paradigm of production and processes,” which establishes a material-immaterial dualism as the basis of the static views of memory (as a container), technology (merely neutral and instrumental), and culture (as something opposed to the material). Now, in this chapter, I will deal with a field of great relevance for memory studies, that of cultural heritage, particularly the so-called intangible cultural heritage and the industrial heritage. In 1972, the World Heritage Convention promoted the safeguarding of cultural heritage, an essential step toward recognizing and preserving material culture and memory. For this purpose, it promotes the preservation of buildings and monuments of outstanding cultural value, interpreting, in this way, the material in its crudest physical sense. The decision was based on the idea that cultural heritage is preserved in the material, just as the figure of a seal is conserved in the wax. It is thus a static view of memory and culture, which implicates the material and immaterial dualism associated with the artisanal paradigm. This dualism is not only present in the 1972 convention that consecrated material cultural heritage but also in the subsequent conventions that have tried to reinforce the role of the “immaterial” or “intangible,” associated with practices, customs, and habits, in the heritage nominations. The structure of this chapter is as follows. I will first analyze the conceptual assumptions involved in the notions of tangible and intangible cultural heritage; then I will consider these ideas in specific cases of intangible cultural heritage and industrial heritage, showing how a dynamic view of memory that allows us to remember with things can contribute to overcoming the material and immaterial dualism. 35

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THE IMPLICIT DUALISM IN THE NOTION OF INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE In 2003, the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was approved, complementing in this way the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. This 2003 convention resulted from several initiatives aiming to safeguard cultural diversity not adequately fitting into the heritage protected by the 1972 convention—for example, oral traditions, indigenous languages and cultures, and artisanal practices. In fact, one of the recurrent critics to the 1972 convention was its Eurocentric and monumentalist conception of heritage (based on architecture and monumentality), which did not do justice to the cultural diversity of peoples who had not produced monumental buildings. Therefore, to preserve traditional cultural practices, several instruments were adopted prior to the 2003 convention, including the Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore (1989), the List of Living Human Treasures (1993), and the List of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity (2001), which were incorporated to a greater or lesser extent into the instrument adopted in 2003. The 2003 Convention defines intangible cultural heritage as follows: The “Intangible Cultural Heritage” means the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills—as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith—that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity. (UNESCO 2016, 5)

There is also a recognition that this kind of heritage is expressed in a variety of domains: • oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage; • performing arts; • social practices, rituals and festive events; • knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; • traditional craftsmanship. (UNESCO 2016, 6)

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A twofold tension marked the drafting of the document approved in 2003: the intent to placing immaterial heritage as equally important as material heritage and the considering of the former as a product or as a process. Accordingly, the 2003 convention attempted to draw an instrument for safeguarding practices, knowledge, languages, forms of life, and the like that were named “immaterial” (in Spanish and French) and “intangible” (in English). In doing so, it placed at the opposite pole of the 1972 convention setting a dualist categorization of cultural heritage into “tangible” and “intangible.” On the other hand, the challenges associated with the preservation and safeguarding kept in tension the decision to opt for processes or products as the focus of what would be considered intangible cultural heritage. Initially, following the example of the 1972 convention, the emphasis was on the products, as is evident in the World Conference on Cultural Policies, held in Mexico City in 1982: The cultural heritage of a people includes the works of its artists, architects, musicians, writers and scientists and also the work of anonymous artists, expressions of the people’s spirituality, and the body of values which give meaning to life. It includes both tangible and intangible works through which the creativity of that people finds expression: languages, rites, beliefs, historic places and monuments, literature, works of art, archives and libraries. (UNESCO 1982, 43)

Here, the stress is put on the results of processes, the works, while the processes producing these works are conceived of as mere means through which something other than themselves expresses: human creativity. The tension between products and processes is even more evident in the discussions on intangible cultural heritage that took place in Turin in 2011: Products: it is necessary to consider which aspects should be conserved, for example, knowledge or products, practices or performances, the meaning given to physical heritage as related to specific cultural contexts and the group, location and time in which it is created. (UNESCO 2001a, 2)

For safeguarding, products, as physical objects, have the advantage of being more manageable and easier to conserve. But not all that can be called immaterial cultural heritage results in a product or work. This is the case, for example, with oral traditions, languages, and practices. For this reason, the focus on processes progressively increased as the 2003 document was elaborated. However, this also reinforces the implicit dualism, now with the immaterial becoming preeminent over the material, which was considered something at the service of the cultural, defined by the intangible or immaterial. The material was not considered an active element in shaping culture, just a means of expression and preservation of the immaterial. In this way, the processes and

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practices became detached from their material and artifactual dimensions. Thus, while in the first definitions of intangible cultural heritage the tangible (material) and the intangible (immaterial) were practically at the same level, in the 2003 convention the preeminence was given to the immaterial. In a 2001 preliminary study, “intangible cultural heritage” is defined as “peoples’ learned processes along with the knowledge, skills and creativity that inform and are developed by them, the products they create, and the resources, spaces and other aspects of social and natural context necessary to their sustainability” (UNESCO 2001b, 6. The emphasis is mine). In this definition, aspects such as knowledge, skills, and creativity are at the same level as products created. In contrast, in the 2003 document, “intangible cultural heritage” is understood as “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills—as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith—that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage” (UNESCO 2016, 5). Instruments, objects, and artifacts are no longer at the same level with knowledge or uses but merely “associated with.” The use of hyphens further evidences their secondary role. The material and artifactual remain “in brackets,” as mere instruments enabling to reach an end or as the expression of human creativity and culture, but not as essential protagonists in their constitution. An author even defines intangible cultural heritage as “heritage that is embodied in people rather than in inanimate objects” (William Logan, quoted in Ruggles and Silverman 2009, 1). In the tension between material and immaterial and between processes and products, we find the artisanal paradigm and, therefore, a static view of memory, culture, and technology. Safeguarding raises the problem of how to delimit or fix the limits of something that is temporal and dynamic (Viejo-Rose 2015, 5) and how to cope with complex units of meaning (Cabrera 2011, 119) that do not confine themselves in dual categories such as material and immaterial. To address these difficulties, it is necessary to appeal to a dynamic view of memory, culture, and technology and to propose a unitary notion of cultural heritage bringing together the material and immaterial dimensions. This will require a modification of the purely instrumental and neutral view of technical artifacts when considering material culture and cultural heritage. As we will see in more detail in the following sections, the material artifacts are not merely a support for the conservation or transmission of the cultural but active constituents of it as such. All culture is material (see “Technologies and Culture” in chapter 1).

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INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE IN CHILE: THE CASE OF THE ORGANILLEROS In this section I will refer to the trade of organillero (street organ-grinder) in Chile, which has been declared intangible cultural heritage, to show how the dual notion of heritage is insufficient to adequately understand and preserve material memory. Street organs are mechanical pneumatic musical machines constructed of wood, consisting of tubes through which air comes out, with an air bellows and a cylinder, usually made of metal, on which the music is engraved. The organ-grinder puts into motion this mechanism by moving a crank, allowing the music to be produced from the engraved cylinder. Thus, from the perspective of the operation of the street organ, it is not an exaggeration to say that the organ player is at the service of the organ, rather than the other way round, maintaining the flow of air through the crank while the organ mechanism produces the music. The first street organs were built in Europe in the seventeenth century. They were mass-produced in Germany, especially during the nineteenth century, and they arrived in Chile from the 1880s until the end of the 1930s (around two hundred, almost all German). In this country, they helped to shape the traditional trade of organillero, which still preserves the use of street organs (organillos, as they are called in Chile) as it declined in the rest of the world. In Chile, they have become an important marker of cultural identity, so the traditional trade of organillero was declared a Chilean intangible cultural heritage in 2017,1 in the framework of the 2003 convention, ratified in Chile in 2008. In the nomination, the central focus was on the organ-grinder, keeping the artifact that enables the activity, the organillo, in the background. Thus, on the website of the Information System for the Management of Intangible Cultural Heritage (SIGPA for its acronym in Spanish), we read the following concerning the 2017 nomination: The traditional trade of organ-grinder-chinchinero is, first of all, a cultural heritage of those who cultivate and work the trade, with strict adherence to the tradition forged in Chile. In most cases, these people have inherited the trade from their relatives, with some families of three or even four generations that live cultivating it . . . this trade is also heritage because it is a survival of an activity that was once globalized, which during the twentieth century disappeared almost everywhere in the world . . . not any practice including an organ is part of this heritage, but what historically has belonged to this traditional activity and form part of the family economy. For this reason, it is considered

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that the chinchinero who dances to the rhythm of the street organ music is also part of this. (SIGPA 2017. The emphasis is mine.)

This description focuses on the organillero and their family as agents that preserve the trade and a past era. The street organ appears only in passing among the other elements that define the activity. Certainly, as stated in the citation, the mere use of a street organ is not sufficient to define a trade as a cultural heritage, but this does not imply that its role in the practice of the organillero should be considered purely instrumental. Indeed, the organilleros do not do so, placing the organillo at the center of their activity. They highlight the active and constitutive role organillos play in their forms of life. For them, the organillos are not mere instruments but part of their families and identities. They give them names, usually using the most famous song the organillos’s cylinders contain. For example, La chica del 17 [The girl from the 17], Pobre pollo [Poor chicken] (Ruíz 2001, 84). In the words of the organillero Marcelo Castillo: I love what I do, I love the instrument, but I do not idolize the instrument, because for me it is something material, but I love it in the sense that I would like it to be maintained for many more years . . . The organillo for me is like a living being. (quoted in Álvarez et al. 2013, 296) For me the organillo is everything, it is everything because it has helped me, as I would say, to maintain the family, to give my children an education, everything, the economic part and the sentimental part are associated completely with the organillo. (quoted in Álvarez et al. 2013, 115)

The organillo is considered an essential element of organilleros’s identities and forms of life, the organizing principle of the trade, being the node of a complex network of practices, knowledges, and traditions that define the activity. This central role is also evident in how organilleros learn organillo’s operation through practice and manipulation. The organillero Pedro Castillo states: “organillo teaches you, you play in different places, and organillo teaches you” (quoted in Álvarez et al. 2013, 93). Thus, learning organillo’s functioning is an adaptation of the human to its music-making machine. It is not just knowledge transmitted from human to human, from fathers to children, generation by generation, through orality, observation, and imitation, but, at the same time, it is knowledge acquired and transmitted through the manipulation of machines. It is clear in this case that the separation between material and immaterial elements is not adequate to understand this active learning interaction between the orality transmitted by humans and the active manipulation of artifacts. Indeed, when organ-grinders are asked about the material elements

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that constitute their trade, they many times do not mention the street organ itself. They mention clothes, toys, and accessories. For them, the organillo is not something purely material and external that they occasionally incorporate into their trade but something that is part of their very identities. The organillo is embodied in them. Thus, organillo and organillero constitute a dynamical unit. Street organs allowed music to be more easily taken to different locations. People no longer had to leave their homes or neighborhoods in search of musical bands; the street organ brought them to their homes (Álvarez et al. 2013, 38). The first organillos had the function of livening up rooms and family spaces. However, from its first days in the country, the organillo was a street and travelling instrument. Its transportable dimension, the possibility of easily alternating eight pieces of music and the high range of sound of its pipes made this invention the most appropriate means to bring the music that was fashionable in the popular scene and salon to the most remote neighbourhoods. This function, so typical of the street organ, as well as that of emitting music both in enclosed spaces and in the street, are not exclusive characteristics of its practice in Chile, since this function seems to have arrived with the instrument from Europe. In fact, in the old continent they fulfilled similar functions . . . The high degree of acceptance that it had in its beginnings [in Chile], was largely due to the novelty that it represented for being able to listen to musical broadcasts in streets, squares or any other place. (Ruíz 2001, 59–60)

Thus, the organillo opened up “a landscape of objective possibilities that were not there before their existence” (Broncano 2009, 53), helping to shape “the context in which they fulfil their function. They contribute to the coming about of specific relations between human beings and reality, and co-shape new practices and new ways of living” (Verbeek 2009, 64). This shows the importance of the role of the technical artifacts in the configuration of material culture and their associated forms of life. The street organ operator, for his part, becomes a “traveling musician,” even not knowing how to play a musical instrument. “The organ grinder is not a musician as such, but rather a worker, a worker whose task is to operate the mechanisms of the organ grinder in the place and situation that brings him an economic retribution” (Álvarez et al. 2013, 38). In Chile, the dynamic unit of organillo and organillero gave rise to original practices and possibilities. The local appropriation of the street organ was different from the European and from that of other Latin American countries, such as Mexico and Argentina. Let me show some of these distinctive features.

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Incorporation of nonmusical elements. A first characteristic is the incorporation of nonmusical elements in the organillero’s performance: swirls, sawdust balls, toys, and other items for sale, made by the organ-grinder and his family, and the incorporation of the loro choroy [talking parrot, lucky parrot] (Ruíz 2001, 64). These elements, which have been maintained throughout the history of this trade in Chile, have provided the practice with a theatrical dimension, which expands the musical performance. They are not mere accessory elements or aggregates but constitutive of how the organ-grinder’s trade has been developed in this country, allowing them to forge an identity that differs from that of organ-grinders in other countries (e.g., Mexico). These elements have also been adapted to new times and contexts, incorporating, for example, Chinese plastic toys (Álvarez et al. 2013, 128). This first form of appropriation is not only a pragmatic element transforming the organ-grinders’ performance but also an important hermeneutical dimension in how it is perceived and how organilleros perceive themselves and interpret their activity. The role of the chinchinero. A second feature is the incorporation of the bombist or chinchinero as a companion in the organillero’s staging (Ruíz 2001, 66). The chinchinero plays a bass drum and cymbals (chinchín) that he carries on his back while dancing, making characteristic turns at great speed. The organillero-chinchero or organillo-chinchín tandem is thus established, being an exclusive feature of this trade in Chile. This unity is so tangled that many organilleros start their activity as chinchineros when they are children. Local music in the identity construction. A third kind of local appropriation is the music organillos play. Initially, they played European music; however, to adapt to local tastes, popular Chilean musical pieces were incorporated, such as cuecas and tonadas. To accomplish this, bronze cylinders with this music engraved were commissioned to Europe because Chile did not have the technology to transfer music from the score to the curved surface of the cylinder (Ruíz 2001, 56). The incorporation of local music enhanced the audience’s feeling of belonging and identity. As a result, the organillo and its music became part of people’s experiences and memories. This was further reinforced when the music could not be renewed due to World War II, which contributed to solidifying the link between identity, nostalgia, and organillo’s sound. The repertoire became outdated, and the obsolescence of the music became— over the decades—an added value, as it became a medium that began to mobilise the audience with the remembrance of past times. This new significance, which was articulated not only on the repertoire but also on the instrument’s timbre, has left both the instrument and the organillero linked to the image of a past time. (Ruíz 2001, 62)

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The role of the family and the ownership of organillos. Also, the role of the family in the transmission and preservation of the trade and the purchase of organillos by organilleros were essential elements of appropriation. Initially, in Chile, as in other places, street organs were not owned by organ-grinders but were leased to businessmen who owned several of them. When they could purchase them, the organillos became part not only of their working time but also of their family life. As a result, the trade became hereditary, with children and grandchildren working in the same activity. Thus, the organillo established intergenerational links between family members. Occasionally, persons from outside the family were incorporated into the trade if they showed sufficient “love for the instrument.” In consequence, the identity and continuity of the trade, its practice and interpretation, are mediated by the street organ, helping to shape new spaces of possibilities. The construction of specific ethical values. The trade has led to the construction of ethical values specific to Chilean organ-grinders. The organilleros shape an identity of respectability (trying to distance themselves from the image of the first Chilean organ-grinders associated with poverty and alcoholism) and pride for being a living tradition, which they manifest in their clean and careful presentation (e.g., by using suits). The organillo also plays an active role in this construction of the organ-grinder’s morality. For example, the organillero feels pride for having an authentic organ, not a fake one (“mula” in Spanish), and this pride implies some obligations to the artifact: constant attention and care of it, and rejection of its misuse—that is, not using it only to earn money or to pay for vices without respecting the tradition (Ruíz 2001, 75). These values can be summarized in the expression “love for the trade” (Álvarez et al. 2013, 94) or “love for the organillo” (as emphasized by the organillero Pedro Castillo quoted in Álvarez et al. 2013, 94). Repair, maintenance, and manufacturing. Finally, the last feature I want to emphasize in the Chilean appropriation of street organs is the repairing, maintaining, and making of organillos through self-learning, something that did not occur in other Latin American countries. The pioneer was the organillero Manuel Lizana,2 who in the 1970s became a self-taught “maestro organillero” [street organ master], who traveled, for example, to Mexico to work as a street organ master. He also traveled to Germany to discuss and exchange knowledge with German organ builders. The repairing and making of organillos expanded the organillero’s practice and activity, beyond their use for musical performance, to the creation and incorporation of practical and technical knowledge not existing before in the country and not transmitted from European street organ builders. This knowledge was not a mere rediscovery but a reconstruction incorporating new techniques and skills.

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These appropriations illustrate the organillo’s active and constitutive role in the configuration of a trade considered intangible cultural heritage. The organillo is neither a mere instrument nor just another element in organilleros’s activity but an essential one, something that the dualistic view of heritage cannot adequately accommodate. This view fails to grasp the symbiosis of humans and artifacts, the dynamic unity that this trade involves, in its practical and hermeneutic dimensions. An example of the practical consequences of this view is the difficulty of financing the maintenance of street organs, because strictly speaking it is not intangible heritage. The organilleros themselves have had to take care of organillos through usually self-financed initiatives (Ruíz 2001, 57). A more nuanced view of cultural heritage requires overcoming the artisanal paradigm and putting the technical artifact in its proper place, promoting the training of people capable of building, repairing, and maintaining street organs, being players or not, something crucial for the future of the activity. As the organillero Pedro Castillo states, “I see organ building as a good possibility for the continuation of the trade because the idea is that it continues” (quoted in Álvarez et al. 2013, 100). In a more pessimistic tone, the organillero Héctor Lizana says, “if the organillos die, so do their exponents [players]” (quoted in Álvarez et al. 2013, 51). To conclude the review of this trade, I would like to emphasize its role in the construction of a collective memory. For people in Chile, the organillo is synonymous with the past and nostalgia; it is an agent of identity and tradition, important in the constitution of individual and collective memories (Álvarez et al. 2013, 100). As some people say: “it was our radio; with this music we danced” (Ruíz 2001, 60). Organillo’s music evokes memories. This was a key consideration in the trade nomination as intangible cultural heritage. “From a social point of view, this trade is also heritage because it is a survival of an activity that was once globalised, which during the 20th century disappeared almost all over the world” (SIGPA 2017). Organillero’s trade is considered a “survivor.” Does this mean that it can only exist as a survivor—that is, as a mere echo of an era that is gone? How can we move beyond the nostalgia that keeps us tied to the past? How can a trade like this be preserved without turning it into a museum object, something purely past? To what extent is compatible with a social and cultural context where music’s portability is within everyone’s reach? These are questions I cannot answer, but I think that a dynamic view of memory, culture, and technology might help to do it.

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MATERIAL MEMORY AND THE INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE Now I turn to another kind of cultural heritage, the industrial heritage, that poses similar problems that those of the intangible cultural heritage, also involving the artisanal paradigm and the material-immaterial dualism, and in consequence, a static view of memory, culture, and technology. Industrial heritage is a relatively new development in cultural heritage. Its promotion arose in the second half of the twentieth century when industrialized countries (European and the United States especially) were coming into a post-industrial era, leaving behind the traces of their old nineteenth-century industries. Factories were closed, jobs were lost, and once-thriving towns and cities became mute and rusty remains exposed to the elements, the debris, and the passing of time. In this context, it became urgent to preserve the material memory of industrialization, and the radical ways in which it changed the forms of life, the practices, and the meanings. As Neil Cossons says, referring to the Industrial Revolution: [it brought] new technologies, new methods of organising labour, new means of applying the power of water or steam to manufacture, in new forms of buildings that we now call mills or factories and, crucially new models of settlement. And in these new industrial communities grew up a new industrial culture with patterns and conditions of work that were novel, replacing the thousand-year traditions of seasonality and uncertainty that had characterised pre-industrial agricultural economies. (2012, 7)

At present, preservation, promotion, and diffusion of the international industrial heritage are responsibility of The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH), funded in 1978. This committee is also a designated consultant of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) in matters related to the study and preservation of industrial heritage. The presentation of its principles is in The Nizhny Tagil Charter for the Industrial Heritage (2003) and the Joint ICOMOS-TICCIH Principles for the Conservation of Industrial Heritage Sites, Structures, Areas and Landscapes (2011). Due to its very nature, the conservation of industrial heritage requires a complex approach avoiding the separation between the material and immaterial, or the tangible and intangible. As declared in the Nizhny Tagil Charter, The delegates assembled for the 2003 TICCIH Congress in Russia wish therefore to assert that the buildings and structures built for industrial activities, the processes and tools used within them and the towns and landscapes in which

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they are located, along with all their other tangible and intangible manifestations, are of fundamental importance. (TICCIH 2003, 1)

This complexity is also part of the difficulties for its preservation. As Michel Cotte points out, What is probably the core of the difficulty in achieving industrial, scientific and technological heritage recognition is that it belongs to different or opposing fields: intangible versus tangible heritage, movable instruments and tools versus unmovable properties, static issues versus dynamic processes, and so on. In fact, the value and interest of this heritage is precisely the fact that it is related to all these categories and the dynamic relationships between them. (2012, 173)

However, despite the recognition of the complexity of industrial heritage, the separation between material and immaterial has persisted, manifesting in two aspects in particular: the emphasis in buildings and structures over processes, and the subsidiary role given to workers. These weaknesses are patent in the very definition of industrial heritage in the Nizhny Tagil Charter: Industrial heritage consists of the remains of industrial culture which are of historical, technological, social, architectural or scientific value. These remains consist of buildings and machinery, workshops, mills and factories, mines and sites for processing and refining, warehouses and stores, places where energy is generated, transmitted and used, transport and all its infrastructure, as well as places used for social activities related to industry such as housing, religious worship or education. (TICCIH 2003, 2. The emphasis is mine.)

The emphasis is clearly on the architectural, structural, and monumental, a static view deriving directly from the 1972 World Heritage Convention. In the context of this convention, industrial heritage nominations are in general justified under criterion iv of the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention, namely, “be an outstanding example of a type of building, architectural or technological ensemble or landscape which illustrates (a) significant stage(s) in human history” (UNESCO 2019, 25). Thus, the structures and buildings and not the processes are the elements considered when deciding the inclusion of industrial heritage as world heritage. Despite its complexity, industrial heritage is conceived of in terms of material and tangible stuff, not taking into account what then was called “intangible heritage.” Peter Stott notes that the 1977 version of the Operational Guidelines emphasized even more the structural and architectonical bias by using the word “structure” explicitly in the text “The key word was ‘structure’” (Stott 2012, 163). In the 1984 version, the term was replaced by “building or architectonical ensemble,” whereas in 1995 it introduced the phrase

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“technological ensemble” (Stott 2012, 163). The structural emphasis was also evident in the preparation stage for the founding of TICCIH. For example, at the international assembly held in England in 1973, the discussion on industrial heritage was in terms of industrial monuments (Douet 2012, 24). So then, the notions of industrial heritage and material memory are identified with the material in the sense of something solid and static (stones, bricks, iron), excluding the technical processes and, even more, the human work. The strategies for conserving and promoting industrial heritage have followed this tendency, notably in conserving buildings and structures for their adaptive reuse (Douet 2012, 110). Old factories are transformed into boutiques, coffee shops, and studios, following the so-called brooklynization fashion internationally extended (Lindberg 2015). These strategies trying to reconcile the preservation of industrial heritage with the economic development of cities often led to mere facadism (i.e., the preservation of industrial buildings’ facades merely for their aesthetic value). If we only preserve an industrial facade, are we not conserving an empty shell separated from the processes that gave it life? Maybe this facadism is equivalent to what sociologists call disneyization (Bryman 1999). We can make the same criticism that Susan Sontag, following Brecht, makes of photography when picturing a factory: “As Brecht points out, a photograph of the Krupp works reveals virtually nothing about that organization. In contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand” (Sontag 2001, 23). Krupp was one of the world’s principal steelmakers and arms manufacturers until the end of World War II. As Sontag says, to have a dynamic industrial heritage, it is necessary to take into account time, the processes, the work, and the narratives and stories associated with them that define identities and material memory. However, the recognition of the industrial’s aesthetic value has been a key factor in promoting its preservation. Scientists and artists have contributed to appreciating the beauty of machines and machinery, factories, and industrial landscapes. For example, the industrial archaeologists in the 1950s and 1960s (Douet 2012, 24); the Italian futurists and their appreciation of speed, metal, and aerodynamics in the 1910s; and the new objectivism of the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch in the 1920s. The structural view of industrial heritage has considered the material in its crudest sense, leaving aside the dimensions associated with actions, operations, and processes of the human-technical complexes constituting the industries. Managers, engineers, supervisors, administrators, and especially the workers are absent from the heritage discourse centered in structures and architecture. Let us remember here the work of Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado and his effort to document the humans in the production

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processes, particularly his book Workers: Archaeology of the Industrial Age (1993). Also, we can recall the U.S. artist Kara Walker’s installation A Subtlety, or the Marvellous Sugar Baby featuring a sugar-made sphinx with African characteristics in the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn as a reminder of the labor oppression in that particular fabric but also in industrialization in general. Walker also put in discussion the gentrification of Brooklyn and questions about race and sexuality. Michel Cotte describes the human-technical complex that is absent from the structural view of industrial heritage: Understanding such sites [industrial or technical heritage] means a comprehensive analysis of a dynamic process running at different scales: machines and tools in function, the relationship of man with machines, the flows of material and energy, the experimental use of instruments, social planning and management of the production process, and so on. Integrity of structure is of course an important issue, but it is not enough, and we must pay attention to the functional integrity of the process and site . . . The Convention [World Heritage] is devoted to “properties” in a juridical sense and not to “movable” items. There is also a powerful dividing line between site and collection, heritage and museum, infrastructure and rolling stock, and so on. (2012, 172)

Unlike other types of heritage, in industrial heritage it is possible to have stories and narratives of workers, which allow the reconstruction of forgotten identities and experiences. As I have said from the beginning, memory is pragmatic and hermeneutic at once, involving actions and representations. And one way to get a more complete image of cultural memory is through the stories and narratives of those who worked in the industries. This has been done in recent years through oral history and the testimonies of workers and managers. A good example is the collective book Patrimonio Inmaterial e Intangible de la Industria [Immaterial and Intangible Industrial Heritage] published in 2012 by the Spanish industrial archaeology association INCUNA (Industria, Cultura y Naturaleza) (Álvarez 2012). Using reports of workers, administrators, and families, photographic collections, and the study of documents and archives, attempts have been made to reconstruct the memory of work and industry. The identities and interpretations of the industrial work are recovered, giving us a clearer and more complete view of workers’ lives, both at work and outside of it. In the industrial era, employers commonly used workers’ leisure time to control them and make money, transforming leisure into part of the work. A remarkable example of this was the Chilean Saltpeter Works that flourished in the Atacama Desert in the golden age of natural saltpeter between 1880 and 1920. Nitrate was essential for agriculture and the production of

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explosives, but it fell into decline with the invention of artificial saltpeter. Two of the Chilean Saltpeter Works, Humberstone and Santa Laura, were declared World Heritage in 2005 for their exceptional value as representatives of a unique urban-industrial complex of activity of international importance. These Works constituted small cities, where money circulated from employers to workers and back to them through consumption and leisure. What the employers paid to the workers was received back through the workers’ purchases of products, food, clothing, housing, and leisure activities. Not only were the Works abysmally neglectful of their workers’ safety on the job. They did not give them the money they owed them for their work; the salary consisted of tokens [fichas-salario] they were handed weekly. These tokens, made of metal or high density plastic, were issued by the Works themselves and could be exchanged for products in the General Store, owned by the owners of the Works, with prices and stocks also fixed by the Works themselves, which assured the owners they would be profitable. In this way, the workers were forced to acquire everything they needed to survive in the Works themselves which meant they would eventually have to return to the Administration practically everything they had earned. That was the main reason that prevented the workers saving and returning to their native lands: the tokens were only valid for the Works that issued them. They could not be traded anywhere else, not even in other neighbouring Works and no bank would ever accept them as currency. Each time a worker left a Works, either of his own will or because he had been fired or laid off, he left with only the clothes he was wearing and the minimum in personal effects. He would have to begin from scratch again. (Republic of Chile 2003, 64–65)

Examples of this kind show the necessity to complement the remains of buildings and structures with stories and archives documenting the forms of life, not only the technical operations but also the human relations, actions, and fights.3 The architectonical view of the industrial heritage has also forgotten the expression of these struggles between capital and labor in the design of industrial buildings, towns, and technical processes. Factories and related industrial edifices are not merely neutral buildings but constructions embodying political and social relations in their structures. Remember Winner’s ideas about technology and politics and his example of Robert Moses’s overpasses (chapter 1). According to this, artifacts can embody and preserve political and social relations in their structures, deliberately or unintentionally fixed by the designer. In the case of industrial structures, they make clear the increasing separation between planning and execution characteristic of the increasing industrial mechanization. Consequently, workers lost power and control over the processes and operations (Braverman 1998). This power and control

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gradually passed to the supervisors and employers, shifting from a distributed control of processes to a central one. If possible, we should identify these relations in the remains of industrial buildings, which will require an effort of remembering with things. “Little has been said, until recently, about the human side of industrial archaeology . . . The rapidly disappearing craft skills which were so necessary in the early phases of the industrial revolution need to be recorded wherever possible” (quoted in Douet 2012, 68). Industrial remains are not mute, empty ruins devoid of meaning; and they always are interpreted in specific contexts. For this reason, it is important to set adequate contexts permitting the interpretation of industrial heritage in all its complexity as a dynamical material memory with multiple meanings and dimensions that require continual actualization. In this way, to remember with industrial buildings would simultaneously be the recovery of actions, decisions, struggles, processes, and operations, in a word, the human-technical-environmental complexes in all their changing developments. The old, and maybe disappeared, forms of life must be reconstructed using images, sounds, artifacts, narratives, the diffusion and teaching of old practices, and so forth; and the continuity and difference between those old forms of life and the present ones have to be stressed. I think this could contribute to a dynamic view of cultural heritage to go beyond mere nostalgia. From this perspective, the exclusive aesthetic use of industrial buildings is reductive because it shrinks their multidimensionality to a single meaning, that of being a good-looking old facade. Conservation should not be conceived of as the preservation of fixed and inalterable remains of a definitely gone past technological era. On the contrary, industrial heritage is important as memory because of its still working influence in the shaping of our present forms of life. These forms of life preserve, to a greater or lesser extent, the practices and meanings that industrialization put into action, and the closure of factories of the post-industrial era has not suppressed these older forms of life. Even when specific industrial processes and works have disappeared, some of the general practices and habits they introduced are still in exercise. For example, the relations people establish with time and space. We still live quantifying our time, our working and leisure time, and our movements; quantification of time and space that it was crucial for consolidating Taylorism in industry. And we still consume mass-produced commodities and pollute the environment with our ever-growing quantities of trash and waste. The continuity between old and present forms of life is important for thinking about the strategies for heritage conservation and its integration into contemporary life (Choay 2014, 199). Conceiving cultural heritage from a dynamical point of view implies an emphasis on the actuality of the past (the past is present). If we do not want that heritage transformed into a mere nostalgia of something already gone, we need to see the possibilities its

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preservation opens up. To do this, the industrial heritage must be an operator of possibilities.4 I think the conservation of industrial heritage would benefit from this emphasis on continuity, even more so when many of the processes that disappear from developed countries are now taking place in developing countries (as it happens with the digital labor, as we will see in chapter 4; see also Sholz 2013). Thus, the notion of the past as something already gone, as a kind of refuge for mere nostalgia, forgets that the past remains and that we are embodied memory. We find here a recurrent problem in the conceptualization of heritage and the strategies for its preservation. To show this, I will use the example of the city where I live, Valparaíso. Valparaíso’s Historic Quarter of Seaport was declared a World Heritage site in 2003 because it is “an excellent example of late 19th-century urban and architectural development in Latin America” (UNESCO 2003). Also, because the city combines natural and artificial elements considered of universal value: “In its natural amphitheatre-like setting, the city is characterized by a vernacular urban fabric adapted to the hillsides that are dotted with a great variety of church spires. It contrasts with the geometrical layout utilized in the plain. The city has well preserved its interesting early industrial infrastructures, such as the numerous ‘elevators’ on the steep hillsides” (UNESCO 2003). Valparaíso is a good example because it combines cultural and industrial heritage, putting the dynamic and static views of heritage in tension. The city’s nomination as a World Heritage was directly related to its role as a major port in international commerce through the South Pacific in the second half of the nineteenth century. This commercial role attracted European migrants (especially British citizens) who settled in the city. Moreover, Valparaíso was a pioneer in Chile in the incorporation of state-of-the-art technologies, such as electrical public lighting and transport, characteristic of the modernization process of the main cities at the end of the nineteenth century. “The Industrial Revolution motorised the Port’s commerce and suggested machines and measures to change urban life” (Martland 2017, 20). However, the port began to decline in the first half of the twentieth century due to the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. The city also suffered the consequences of a devastating earthquake in 1906 that destroyed a large part of it. In 1990, after Pinochet’s military dictatorship, Valparaíso’s port was only a distant reminder of its past glories. In this context, the Chilean central government considered tourism as a way to reactivate the declining city. For this, it was postulated to the UNESCO World Heritage List. However, tourism was not a sufficient source of employment. Today, Valparaíso is one of the Chilean cities with the highest unemployment level and a growing poor population located mainly on the upper sides of the hills. This failed reactivation opens a tension in the dynamics of the city, between the necessity of new

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sources of labor, lost by the decline of the port, and the fixation of the city on its glorious past, required by its role as a World Heritage site (Aravena 2020). Although poverty grows in some parts of the city, other areas are protected and renewed (especially Cerros Alegre and Concepción) as immaculate remains of the past for tourists’ consumption. Thus, the city divides into two: a touristic city of postcard images, and another one, in some sense invisible to foreigners, of everyday citizens. We have a tension between the facade of a frozen city and the processes and dynamics that constitute it. The city’s heritage, more than promoting and opening up real possibilities for development, struggles to maintain amid the city’s decline (burning of historical buildings, not working funiculars, excess of graffiti in the streets, and so forth). TOWARD A DYNAMIC VIEW OF CULTURAL AND INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE Intangible cultural and industrial heritage confront the same difficulties because both are based on the static view of memory that opposes the material and the immaterial. From this perspective, safeguarding heritage means preserving and protecting it inside a container (the buildings and monuments) to avoid its disintegration amid the turbulent currents of the present. Recall the homunculus (the artificial human) in Goethe’s Faust, whose fragility made it necessary to protect it in a crystal still to keep it alive. A dynamic view of heritage considers the past not as something already gone but as something being present, so safeguarding must be conceived not against time but with it. Neither is material memory a mere repository of already lost events. For this reason, heritage conservation cannot be reduced to the preservation of buildings, factories, or machinery in disuse as silent witnesses of past glorious times. On the contrary, heritage must be understood as an amalgam of humans and technologies, practices and artifacts, actions and operations, which is recovered through structural remains (such as buildings and monuments) but also through written testimonies, photographs, and narratives of former and present inhabitants and workers. And we must not forget, as usually happens, that the places of memory (using Nora’s term) are also spaces of struggle and negotiation, of conflicting identities and contending meanings, whether between neighborhoods of a city or between workers and employers in factories. For elaborating a dynamical view of cultural and industrial heritage, we have to consider several aspects. First, it is necessary to think about processes and products in time: practices, habits, and knowledge associated with trades and activities, the industrial and technological processes, innovation, work and organization, and relations with and within the society and the

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environment. It is not enough to preserve structures and remains. We must reunite what is now separated into tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Oral history, narratives, and archives can contribute to this, but also technical knowledge because it involves tacit knowledge that cannot be translated into rules or theories and it defines the experience and knowledge of the practitioners of a trade or work. Second, considering technologies as forms of life compels us to preserve technical artifacts and operations but also the associated practices, habits, and representations. Thus, the conservation of industrial heritage must include the saving of structures, machines, knowledge of production processes, and the memory of labor, its place within society, and its relations with the environment. So, protecting the facades is insufficient. Facadism, considering brick and metal for their purely aesthetical values, distorts the memory of the industrial era, sweetening and aestheticizing it. Third, the analysis of cultural heritage requires considering what I call layers of memory—that is, recognizing that processes do not happen in a single temporality but in different ones. For example, a factory building seems to live in an extended present for generations of workers. Temporal layers should also play a role in defining the descriptive and analytical dimensions. For instance, to situate the testimony of a worker or employer in the overall functioning of a factory or industry. This obliges to use multiple methodologies and strategies to recover the past. Finally, a dynamical view of material memory underscores the continuity between old forms of life and present ones, emphasizing that the past is not entirely gone but is still present. Otherwise, we fall into mere nostalgia for a past already lost. This is the case with industrial heritage, raised to stop the disappearance of the industrial identity of Europe and the United States but without acknowledging that industrialization did not entirely fade; rather, it moved to other regions. Local industries disappear, causing nostalgia for lost jobs and local forms of life. But the forms of life associated with industrialization persist. So, we still live in an economy of extraction and exploitation of resources and human beings, a mass consumption society; we still measure and quantify our times and define our lives through our jobs. Preserving past buildings and structures should be a starting point to show that the processes that took place there—for example, the generation of electricity5—are still part of our forms of life and make us aware of the invisible activities that continue sustaining our everyday lives. So, when we turn on the lights, for instance, we would consider the history, processes, and work involved in this apparently simple everyday gesture. ***

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In this chapter, I analyzed the relationships between memory, culture, technology, and heritage through UNESCO’s notions of intangible cultural and industrial heritage. I emphasized that the basis of these notions is the artisanal paradigm of production and processes and, therefore, the material-immaterial dualism, which prevents thinking and putting into practice a dynamic view of material memory and heritage in their interpretative and practical dimensions. To overcome the static view, it is necessary to consider the active and constitutive role that technical artifacts play in the shaping of our forms of life. In particular, I analyzed the case of the Chilean organ-grinders as an example of intangible cultural heritage in which a technical artifact plays a key role. In the case of industrial heritage, I analyzed the problem of its disconnection from work and workers due to its focus on architectural structures. It becomes necessary to remember with things, recovering the past technical infrastructures in their dynamism.

Chapter 3

Material Memory and Technical Images

In chapter 1, I introduced the notion of image as consisting of two dimensions, one pragmatic (actions) and one hermeneutic (representation), following the ideas of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. In this proposal, images are conceived not as something purely mental or immaterial but also material. In consequence, images not only play an active role in how we see and interpret the world and ourselves but also in how we act and in our practices (e.g., our daily habits). So then, in this chapter I will explore how the current abundance of technical images, particularly digital photographs and cinema images, reconfigures the forms of life in their pragmatic and hermeneutic dimensions and the manner we remember with things. TECHNOLOGY, IMAGES, AND MEMORY: THE LOOP OF REMEMBERING In February 2019, a Chilean newspaper announced in its headline: “They stole all from her. She only begs for the back of her mobile phone.” The mobile phone of the mentioned woman stored the only photos she had of her recently dead mother. Without them, the image and memory of her mother seemed to fade away and irreversibly disappear. This is a potentially common situation in our world plenty of technical images. Digital photographs in electronic devices record our daily experiences, lives, and identities, even when these images are scantly seen more than once or maybe never. This abundance of digital images contrasts with the scarcity of mental images we access when remembering. I recall a passage from Milan Kundera’s novel The Immortality (1992), where the main character struggles to remember the faces of his past lovers, not having any 55

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photos of them. Despite his efforts, he only gets a few nebulous images in his mind. The lovers seem to have vanished in time as if they had never existed. Our increasing dependence on external storage mechanisms has been a subject of research. Recall for example the so-called “Google effect” (Sparrow et al. 2011), where it is shown that retention or memorization is affected by the availability of searching information on the internet. Those without access to the Web attempted to fully recall the requested terms. On the contrary, those with internet access tended to remember only clues allowing them to complete their recollections using Google Web browser. The memory resulting from the entanglement between digital media and personal and collective memories is what José van Dijck calls “mediated memories”: “Mediated memories are the activities and objects we produce and appropriate by means of media technologies, for creating and re-creating a sense of past, present, and future of ourselves in relations to others” (van Dijck 2007, 21). The mediation between media and memory is at once representational and pragmatic. Technical images have become an environment or context for our daily lives, actively playing a key role although we hardly pay attention to them (e.g., think of advertising). They contribute to shaping our culture and the possibilities associated with our concrete forms of life. As I said before, culture is dynamic, requiring the continual interplay of people (individually and collectively) and networks of technical artifacts. In this line, “cultural memory can be viewed as a process and performance, the understanding of which is indispensable to the perennial human activity of building social systems for cultural connectivity” (van Dijck 2007, 25). However, the mediation of memory is not new or peculiar to our digital or mass media era but is associated with humanity from the moment it “externalizes memory,” as reflected in the use of certain metaphors of memory: buildings, books, photographs, cinema, computers (Draaisma 2000). Moreover, the conflicts new technologies of memory bring about are not new either. Recall Plato’s criticism of writing (Phaedrus 274c–275a). According to it, books, rather than enhancing our capacities of knowledge and memory, would contribute to false and apparent wisdom, neglecting the exercise of remembering by relying on what is written. Paradoxically, according to this statement, preserving memory through its externalization would, instead, contribute to its oblivion. Without judging whether Plato’s statement is correct (a discussion only possible due to the preservation of Plato’s writings), I want to underline its resemblance to our current situation. The increasing availability of technology memories seems paradoxically to lead us to remember less and less. We do not remember phone numbers or birthdays like our grandmothers did until

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recently. Nor do we remember complete poems as was done in the oral tradition. And before “sinking” in our minds, looking for something forgotten, we prefer to use our mobiles phones to search for it online. “Digital remembering . . . today is so omnipresent, costless, and seemingly ‘valuable’—due to accessibility, durability and comprehensiveness—that we are tempted to employ it constantly” (Mayer-Schönberger 2009, 110). Are we gaining or losing the capacity to remember? Certainly, our storage capacity has increased almost limitlessly, but also our memory? The problem is not the storage capacity itself but what we do with it, because to remember we have to set in motion the dynamics of interpretation and making meaning. This is why increasing our storage capacity does not lead directly to the improvement in our capacity to remember. Digital images (fixed and moving, photographs and videos) have unlimitedly expanded our storage capacity, but can we make a sense of them? Do we really have memories with all these images? Are they just an illusion of conservation of the past that paradoxically brings us deeper into our present? The tension and contrast between the unlimited technical images and the scarce and fading mental ones will be vital to answering these questions and understanding the role of technologies in the remembering. As I said before, the mere accumulation and conservation of images are not sufficient to remembering, because it requires giving meaning to them. In this process a few mental images of past events and experiences act as a kind of trigger of a circular or dialectical process between technical and mental images, the former playing the role of perception-action images and the latter of remembered-images, using Bergson’s terminology, as we saw in chapter 1. It is not a unidirectional process going from the mind to the technologies but a circular one, which I call the loop of remembering (drawing inspiration from the hermeneutic circle (Gadamer 1975; 1979) and Ian Hacking’s notion of “making up people,” 2002; 1993). As van Dijck says concerning autobiographic photographs, “Memories are made as much as they are recalled from photographs; our recollections never remain the same, even if the photograph appears to represent a fixed image of the past” (2007, 100). The few mental images we have (voluntarily retrieved by looking into our minds or spontaneously at hand) become starting points to explore external technical images, for example, digital photographs stored in our mobile phones. In turn, these technical images bring about new mental images, helping to recall what was forgotten (however, they also can contribute to deviating actual memories; see van Dijck 2007, 103). Thus, photographs that in the first instance were mute and without a particular meaning (e.g., photographs of a forgotten dead relative) get a voice to constitute concrete memory-images, giving rise to meanings and potential actions (e.g., going to the graveyard of the forgotten relative). This loop of remembering can also be

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enhanced intersubjectively. For example, asking the family about the photos. Remembering does not occur solely in our minds, detached from our bodies and artifacts, and neither, obviously, do our artifacts recall by themselves; it puts them in action simultaneously. So, we remember with things. The notion of the extended mind can help us to clarify this dynamism between minds, bodies, and artifacts (Clark and Chalmers 1998). Consider, for example, the performance of a difficult mathematical operation, such as dividing by two numbers. Without paper and pencil, most people would be unable to do the operation. These artifacts extend our mental capacities, and we acquire new calculating powers. In this way, the mathematical division is not a unilateral action going from the mind to the paper but a distributed one entailing the mind, body, and things. A recursive loop sets up between them, similar in structure to the loop of remembering. We can also think of a guitar player who has forgotten the chords of a song but that remembers them by running his fingers along the neck of his guitar. He remembers with the guitar, combining mental images, finger movements, and the guitar. The words van Dijck uses commenting on the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004) and the ambiguity of memory locations can help us to clarify the loop of remembering: On the one hand, personal memory is situated inside the brain—the deepest, most intimate physical space of the human body. On the other hand, personal memories seem to be located in the many objects Joel and Clementine (like most of us) create to serve as reminders of lived experiences. Most of these items are what . . . I dubbed “mediated memory objects,” such as pictures, videos, recorded music, diaries, and so on; people have a vested interest in them because they come to serve as material triggers of personal memories. Mediated memory objects, however, are not simply prostheses of the mind, as the movie wants us to believe. Mediated memories, as I argue . . . can be located neither strictly in the brain nor wholly outside in (material) culture but exist in both concurrently, for they are manifestations of a complex interaction between brain, material objects, and the cultural matrix from which they arise. (2007, 28)

For their part, the words of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty can help us to understand the active and constitute role of artifacts in the process of remembering: Things are not simply neutral objects that we contemplate; each of them symbolises for us a certain behaviour, evokes it for us, provokes favourable or unfavourable reactions on our part, and therefore a man’s tastes, his character, the attitude he adopts towards the world and the external being, can be read in the objects he has chosen to surround himself with, in the colours he prefers, in the walks he takes. . . . Our relationship with things is not a distant relationship,

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each one of them speaks to our body and our life, they are invested with human characteristics (docile, soft, hostile, resistant) and inversely they live in us like so many emblems of the behaviours we want or detest. Man is invested in things and they are invested in him. (Merleau-Ponty 2008, 34–35)

Memory is presence and radical absence at once, and memory technologies mediate this relation of presence and absence in their pragmatic and hermeneutic dimensions. Recalling Marshall McLuhan’s dictum, “the medium is the message,” I can say that technologies we use to remember, memory technologies, actively mediate and configure what we remember, how we remember, and the possibility of remembering itself. Technical artifacts modulate and change remembering, modifying its constitutive moments: conservation, actualization, and fragility, and with this, the tension between presence and radical absence that memory implies. DIGITAL IMAGES AS MEMORY TECHNOLOGIES Technical images have historically played an active role in memory. Just recall painting, writing, photography, and cinema (Mayer-Schönberger 2009, 28). However, the current abundance and availability of technical images have radically changed our possibilities for remembering to such an extent that, when trying to remember something (an event, a person, a date, etc.), we resort more and more to technical images (internet searches, photographs in our mobile phones, etc.), and less and less to our mental images; “memory today derives its primary meaning, its existence as such, from visually based technologies” (Kilbourn 2010, 1). This is particularly the case with digital images. In our contemporary societies, digital images are preeminent, not only by their sheer number and abundance but for the power they exert. Images are not mere reflections of our desires and imaginations; they have a life of their own, combining imposition and openness, and these have expanded with digital images. The power of images is called “la furia de las imágenes” [the fury of images] by the Spanish photographer Joan Fontcuberta. We are surrounded by active, furious, and sometimes dangerous images. The power of images has long been exploited by advertising, using images to drive consumer actions. The Italian philosopher Emmanuele Coccia has related this use to ethics. For him, the morality of our time rests on “the good in the things” (Coccia 2018), on what advertising images show us is good. Even though we would like to think we are looking for something more profound or immaterial when speaking of happiness, we ultimately desire material things. However, the mobilization of images is by no means exclusive

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to advertising. We need only to recall their use in religious iconography and nationalistic imagination (remember Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” referring to the construction of national identities). We also find them in everyday metaphors, such as the war metaphor referring to cancer, AIDS (Sontag 2009), or the COVID-19 pandemic, and in the imagination of utopias and technological dystopias (Santos 2017; 2019). Images are not purely representational things that we contemplate from a certain distance, putting aside our daily concerns (as paintings in a museum). Thus, when dealing with images, we are not dealing with mere representations but with highly mobilizing powers, having even harmful consequences (e.g., the killing of Charlie Hebdo’s journalists in 2015). Digital images are not only powerful, but they are also self-dependent, dependent on themselves. Images have become a reality in themselves, a kind of environment for our daily lives. In the words of Fontcuberta, “we inhabit the image and the image inhabits us” (2016, 7). This self-sufficiency was stressed years ago (at television’s peak) by the French philosopher Guy Debord: “When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings” (2014, 6). In a similar vein, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard proposed the notion of simulacra for hyperreal images possessing an entity of their own, images no longer referring to something beyond themselves. They are not copies of anything else; they are their own truth. And this is especially so in the case of digital images, constructed through algorithms and pixels, not as direct copies of some original. We move from the analogic representation of objects to the digital codification of sensations (Kuspit 2006; Mayer-Schönberger 2009, 53). In this way, digital images put into question the notion of indexicality, traditionally associated with the photographic image—that is, the reference to something real stating its veracity. And this is crucial when we deal with the documenting and witnessing role of images and memory. For example, sometimes victims mistakenly identify perpetrators, trusting in their own memories, just to find years later that the people they accused were innocent (see psychologist Elizabeth Loftus’s TED talk “How reliable is your memory?” and her book with Katherine Ketcham, 2015). So then, victims become unintended victimizers, suffering in consequence not only the burden of being harmed but also the guilty for the imprisonment of an innocent. Other examples casting doubt on the veracity of memory are the recollection of false memories, for example, of some epoch-making events such as the 9/11 attacks; and the implantation of false memories—for instance, the “lost in the mall” technique (Shaw 2017). Indexicality is also crucial in constructing our identities. Think, for example, how destabilizing it can be to discover that something or someone we trusted is fake.

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The problematic relationship between memory, truth, and experience has been a subject of the literature, cinema, and music. For example, we find it in Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novels: La invención de Morel [The Invention of Morel] (1940/2003), where the limits between images and reality are blurred; and Dormir al sol [Asleep in the Sun] (1973/2004), where the protagonist’s wife looks the same, but she has become someone else, as in The Beatles’ song I’m Looking through You (1965): “You don’t look different, but you have changed.” The invention of Morel inspired the French director Alain Resnais’s film L’Année dernière à Marienbad [Last Year at Marienbad] (1961), in which the reliability of memory is again called into question because we do not know if the meeting of the protagonists really happened the last year at the hotel in Marienbad. Other movies dealing with the relationship between memory, truth, and experience are Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), where extraterrestrials mimic the bodily appearances of terrestrials; Inception (2010), which shows the attempt to implant a false memory in a rich man to steal his money; Blade Runner (1982), where Rachel does not know if she is a replicant because she has memories of her childhood and her family, then revealed as fake; and Total Recall (1990), where false memories are implanted in the protagonist (a holiday on Mars), who should not remember this implantation. Digital images increase the problems associated with images’ indexicality and self-sufficiency, as the proliferation of fake news, deepfake photos and videos put in evidence. Implicit in the idea of post-truth is the problem of indexicality and the dependence or independence of images and memories of something other than themselves. How do images’ abundance, power, and self-sufficiency affect our remembering capacities? How do we remember with digital images? I want to emphasize, not pretending to be exhaustive, four features of our remembering with digital images: the continual flux and superabundance of digital images lead to a state of eternal present, and to the fragmentation of meaning; they also contribute to the constitution of new forms of experience, characterized by sharing, connectivity and globalization; and to a new technologically distributed identity. ETERNAL PRESENT Some authors speak of a “relentless past,” referring to the abundance of technical means to conserve the past and the consequent overflow of our attention (Hoskins 2018, 1). I think, however, that the situation is the contrary. The abundance and continual flux of images, more than bringing to the fore the past or the remembering, immerse us in a kind of perpetual or continual

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present, an “eternal present” (Fontcuberta 2016, 114), “an incessant repetition of the same . . . , a homogenisation of the different” (Santamaría 2020, 17). In this eternal present, even images of the past seem devoid of their reference to what it was. “Memory of the past has been replaced by a nostalgia for the present” (Fontcuberta 2016, 114). This “nostalgia for the present” emphasizes our current paradoxical relation with the present, defined by its painfully insistent ephemerality. The sheer speed of the flow of images and information traps our attention in the present without allowing us to catch it. We cannot get out of this eternal present, which drives us to a continual repetition. Mobile phone apps designed as endless slot machines are a good example. At the social level, we find a similar case in what German sociologist Norbert Lechner calls “presentism” (2015), referring to societies detached from the past and lacking a future, societies incapable of constructing meanings for the future, and where social life seems to exhaust in the immediate. The experience of being trapped in an eternal present has been described in literature and psychology. We have, for example, the case of “Funes el memorioso” [Funes the Memorious] (1944/1998, 131ff), Jorge Luis Borges’s character, who after an accident can recall past events with an infinite richness of details; and the patient S. the Russian psycho-biologist Alexandre Luria describes in The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968), who could perfectly remember series of numbers dictated to him years ago (consider also the cases of persons with hyperthymesia who recall perfectly past events, especially autobiographical ones). Funes and patient S. are described as trapped in the past because of their incredible ability to perfectly remember an extraordinary quantity of past details (see Formazzari et al. 2018). However, they are trapped, in fact, in a continual present. Strictly speaking, they do not remember because they do not forget. In this situation, images from the past lose their “pastness,” becoming just one among other present images. In William James’s words, “If we could recall everything, we would be as incapacitated as if we could not recall at all; a condition to remember is that we must forget” (James 1980, 689). Analysing Funes and patient S., Reed Johnson says, Deriving meaning from the world requires us to relinquish some of its texture. . . . “To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract,” Borges writes. “In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.” Similarly, Luria writes that for S., almost every word, every thought, was freighted with excessive detail. When he heard “restaurant,” for example, he would picture an entrance, customers, a Romanian orchestra tuning up to play for them, and so on. (Johnson 2017)

In these cases, memory becomes a burden, a barrier to thinking or constructing new meanings. To remember, we need to recall and forget. So,

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memory implies forgetting in its structure. We can remember because we can forget. Remembering is not the mere retrieval of past events or an exact copy of the past but an operation involving the three dimensions of time at once (past, present, and future). For this reason, an exact copy of the past does not have the flexibility and openness required for memories to play their active role in the present actions opened to the future. “Products of memory are first and foremost creative products, the provisional outcomes of confrontations between individual lives and culture at large” (van Dijck 2007, 7). The act of remembering also requires time and attention; it requires effort to go deep into our minds to constitute meaning with memory technologies. However, we constantly escape from this remembering effort, seduced by the ever-renewing flow of images and information, which by itself does not ensure a better memory. For example, we can save and keep all our past emails (which is possible due to the cheap information storage capacity, Mayer-Schönberger 2009, 62), but without a conscious effort to remember, those emails are a mere amassing of mute information. Equating mere accumulation with memory is an illusion analogous to that Plato denounced when equating the mere conservation of written texts with knowledge. The mere accumulation of books does not make you a better knower. To know, you must bring the written words alive again, in a kind of interior dialogue. Likewise, to remember, we need technical images but also mental ones, for example, “luminous images” defining important events of our lives. In this way, we break the endless flux of information, puncturing, as to say, the eternal present. These mental images do not necessarily have to be the product of voluntary acts but can arise spontaneously (as in the famous Proust’s madeleine). In any case, they are calls from the past attracting our attention, allowing us to play a kind of dialogue that sets in motion the loop of remembering. FRAGMENTATION OF MEANING Fontcuberta compares the excess of images with a type of metastasis (2016, 24). Just as a spreading cancer turns unviable an organism, so does the excess of images, making unfeasible the construction of meaning when remembering. Meaning is replaced by the mere renewal of given images, one image replacing the other. “The omnipresence of cameras, screens and images grows to the rhythm of that hammering of more, more and more, until the abundance reaches such an excess that it causes an explosion” (Fontcuberta 2016, 24). The excess of images leads to an explosion or fragmentation of meaning, a short-circuit of the loop of remembering. Determining meaning becomes difficult or even impossible. Narratives and interpretations become unstable, and institutionalized interpretations (as represented by history or the

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museums of memory, for instance) become one of many other ways of telling the past. This relates directly to post-modernity’s problems and the collapse of the great narratives (Lyotard 1984), which weighs less and less in the face of manifold opinions and micro-narratives—the problem of the post-truth, as we say today. The fragmentation of meaning is expressed with clarity in the work of the Dutch artist Erik Kessels (see also the TV series Black Mirror’s trailer of season 2). I consider, particularly, his work 24HRS in Photos (2011). Here, he printed 350,000 images, uploaded to internet sites such as Flickr and Instagram in a period of twenty-four hours, and then scattered them in different rooms. He showed in this way the “overload of images nowadays” (see https:​//​www​.erikkessels​.com​/24hrs​-in​-photos). The dispersion of images makes impossible the construction of a single, unique meaning enveloping all the photos. On the contrary, a conflict of different possible narratives takes place. But even the construction of any meaning becomes difficult due to the constant renewal of images blocking the stabilization of any narrative. The scattered images become fluctuations that destabilize the relative and temporal closing associated with defining a sense, because giving meaning requires selecting and choosing some images over others to establish a provisional unity. The excess of images makes this provisional closure impossible, triggering a continuous revision and modification without stabilization. The excess dilutes any attempt of unification. If only thirty years ago an analogue camera produced a limited number of photographs comparable to our direct memory of an event, the advent of digital technologies turned this relation incommensurable. Now we can have hundreds of photos of only one event, even when we still have just a few mental images. As a result, a paradoxical situation sets in. The availability of images instead of consolidating the memory of our lived experiences tends to weaken it, making our narratives and interpretations fragile. Before the digital era, analogue photographic machines established their own limits, allowing a limited number of photographs (depending on the roll in use, this number could be twelve, twenty-four, or thirty-six pictures) and requiring a complex development process, which did not permit us to see the images taken immediately. Because of this, determining the relevant moments to preserve, the “solemn moments” (Fontcuberta 2016, 114), was crucial and required beforehand. For example, a journey to the countryside had to be preserved in twelve or twenty-four snapshots, fixing more or less carefully selected moments. Digital cameras, on the contrary, have essentially eliminated the selection process.1 Instead, everything seems equally memorable and preservable, and the selection of images is deferred to a later time, often never arriving (Franganillo 2020; Whittaker et al. 2010). “In many cases, the photos are no longer made to be seen but have become an occupation that goes far beyond

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their original uses (representation, memory, etc.) to become in themselves an inalienable activity of life itself, “halfway between addiction and pleasure” (Fontcuberta 2016, 118). We now preserve, for instance, the various attempts to capture a single image, a smile, a posture, the right angle for a selfie. “When a picture is taken, we want those photographs to match our idealised self-image” (van Dijck 2007, 102). We are not forced to pay attention to possible photographic situations (a person smiling with a diploma in her or his hands as a condensation of past university years; a gesture captured in passing as a hint of future sorrows) and catching these treasured moments in a few images. On the contrary, the ongoing capture of experiences that digital technologies make possible, particularly with the advent of mobile phone cameras, dilutes our attention between the perception of the selected moment, its representation on the digital screen, and its online sharing. Taking pictures in the digital era brings up profound changes in our forms of life, configuring new ways of experience. In the digital era, memory’s tension between presence and radical absence takes a greater urgency because the excess of images makes eagerly evident that there always will be unseen, unattended, hidden, or concealed images, not because of their essential inaccessibility but because of our lack of time. Rather than leading us to recognize our limitations and consequently to a stop, this openness immerses us even more into the visible. Our attention restricts to the visible, to what is an image. If something does not become an image, it does not exist at all.2 As I said before, remembering requires forgetting, and forgetting is something we increasingly fail to do in our digital era. As Mayer-Schönberger says, “as more and more information is added to digital memory, digital remembering confuses human decision-making by overloading us with information that we are better off to have forgotten” (2009, 163–64). We need to forget because the overwhelming recording and preservation of past images has suspended the “society’s ability to forget” (Mayer-Schönberger 2009, 4; Fontcuberta 2016, 74), placing it in a kind of eternal present. “If all our past activities, transgressions or not, are always present, how can we disentangle ourselves from them in our thinking and decision-making? Might perfect remembering make us as unforgiving to ourselves as to others?” (MayerSchönberger 2009, 5). The constant availability of past images enhances the power of irrelevant and forgettable events that suddenly determines our present life: firing from jobs due to inappropriate photographs of youth, false accusations impossible to erase from internet searches, and fake images and videos endlessly circulating online. These situations have led to the proposal of the “right to be forgotten” and initiatives for online reputation (Werro 2020). In J. D. Lasica words, “our pasts are becoming etched like a tattoo into our digital skins” (1998).

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The forgetting, intrinsic to the act of remembering, underlines memory fragility, the possibility of definitively losing our preserved memories or not being able to reach them in the future (Fontcuberta 2016, 80). The fragility is of our minds but also of our memory technologies, for example, due to the continual technological innovation that makes obsolete old artifacts and formats (cassettes, VHSs, CD-ROMs, DVDs, etc.). Forgetting and fragility have a double dimension. On the one hand, the disappearance of memories makes room for new meanings and narratives, new identities and forms of life. On the other, the fragility of memory threatens our constituted practices and representations, our culture and identities. Forgetting is an intrinsic component of remembering, but what is forgotten and what is retained is a dynamic process depending on the act of remembering itself. Memory is not the simple access to information or data or its immediate accessibility but the construction of meaning in its double dimension of representation and action, connecting past, present, and future. Unfortunately, the excess of images makes this construction difficult, fragmenting the meaning. EXTENDED EXPERIENCE For those born before the invention and massification of mobile phones, going to a live event, a rock concert, for example, had the special feeling of the authentic, a direct experience of music and musicians in person playing here and now, without the mediation of technical images, either photographs or videos. That meant a real experience. On the contrary, for new generations, experience is always technologically mediated. For example, they experience a music concert through their mobile phones, being at the concert physically but also online, sharing the event on social networks. They take photos mainly for live communication, not so much for later recall (van Dijck 2007, 99; see also Bushey 2014).3 Their here and now is physical and mediatic (multimedia) at once, living in a double habitat, so to speak (Casilli 2010, 60). And the sharing involves not only uploading photos but also a whole set of practices of continuous disclosing of information online: writing entries and commentaries, liking and disliking, tagging, adding and removing friends, and so on (Mayer-Schönberger 2009, 3). Photographic images become circulating messages, an interactive exchange in which personal photographs casually mix public images . . . Pictures distributed by a camera phone are used to convey a brief message, or merely to show affect. Connecting and getting in touch, rather than reality capturing and memory preservation, are the social meanings transferred onto this type of photography. (van Dijck 2007, 114)

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Considering all this, perhaps we have to change our notion of experience, including the new sharing practices. If before, we associated it with intense attention to the physical here and now, of a musical performance, for example, now we must associate it with a kind of distributed attention, considering at once the physical experience and the intersubjective online sharing (van Dijck 2007, 114). This experience implies a “field of awareness,” with the attention distributed among online and offline elements (Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015, 23). This division of attention can be dangerous, as in the case of using mobile phones while driving (Rosenberg 2012). Could it also be dangerous in other kinds of experiences (e.g., a musical concert)? Would it imply a diminished experience? I am not sure of the answers. What is certain is that intersubjective online sharing introduces a new element that transforms what it means for people to experience something. Through these sharing practices, individuals participate in “communal exchanges that mark their identity as interactive producers and consumers of culture” (van Dijck 2007, 116). Rather than a desire to document the experience as such, it is an affirmation of our own presence: “It is me who is here or was there.” As Fontcuberta says, “Images are now acting as messages that we send to each other” (2016, 119). The culture of sharing and the ongoing recording of our lives is possible due to the accessibility and cheapness of digital means of image production, reproduction, and storage: digital cameras, scanners, personal computers and notebooks, editing software, mobile phones. Digital images are easily retrievable and shareable, reaching a global dimension (Mayer-Schönberger 2009, 52). They are easily produced and cost almost nothing. “The image is no longer the domain of magicians, artists, specialists or ‘professionals’ in the service of hierarchical powers. Today we all produce images spontaneously, as a natural way of relating to others” (Fontcuberta 2016, 37). This new technological environment shapes new forms of life and new identities. Fontcuberta calls homo photographicus to the new human being continuously producing and reproducing images: “For the first time, we are all producers and consumers of images, and the simultaneous accumulation of these circumstances has led to an almost infinite iconic avalanche. The image is no longer a mediation with the world but its amalgamation, if not its raw material” (2016, 31–32). The homo photographicus is shown in an extreme form in the TV series Black Mirror’s episode “The Entire History of You” (2nd season, chapter 3, 2011).4 In this episode, a recording technology called “grain” allows people to record all they see and hear and rewatch it later. The experiences become audiovisual images, repeatable, available, and shareable at will, a perfect expression of the idea of memory as a storehouse, in this case, an unlimited storage of digital recordings. However, as I have repeatedly said, the mere accumulation of memories and the access to them is not remembering. It requires the construction of meaning through a loop of remembering where

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our few mental images play a crucial role. This is precisely the case in this episode. Liam, the protagonist, suspects that his wife is cheating on him with her friend. This suspicion was triggered by the embarrassment he perceived in his wife on his arrival at the party while she was talking to her friend. Once at home, he chooses from his recorded memories the images he thinks are relevant to clear his doubts, reproducing them on his TV screen once and again until he finally confirms his apprehensions. The recorded images have consolidated a meaning already hinted at in the initial suspicions, constructing a coherent narrative of past events. What would have happened with the initial suspicions without the images recorded in the grain? The ongoing sharing, the connectivity, and the possibility of reaching audiences beyond our physical limits contribute to the globalization of memory and experience in a double dimension: that of global events defining shared transnational memories and that of the fragmentation of these global events through individual and local appropriations. The globalization of memory gives rise to a co-temporality involving grand narratives and local interpretations, determining a co-historicity “where individuals construct their personalised historical timelines, their affective intimate interpretations of their singular pasts out of commoditised pop-cultural content” (Pogačar 2018, 29). Traditional mass media, such as radio, television, and cinema, provided the bases for a common transnational memory of movies, TV series, news, and major sports events. Global televised events such as the Challenger explosion, Chernobyl accident, 9/11 attacks, and COVID-19 pandemic contributed to defining a shared global memory, even without being at the places where the events happened, incorporating them into our own identities and narratives. So then, co-historicity permits, at the same time, the shaping of personal, intimate, and affective memories. This ambivalence shows that memories are never merely inside or outside, but in between; they are flexible and open. These tendencies have increased with the introduction of digital technologies, going from broadcasting to multiple sharing. TECHNOLOGICALLY DISTRIBUTED IDENTITY The new forms of experience associated with digital images also have significant consequences in the shaping of individual identities. These identities are increasingly defined by images and online sharing, diluting the limits between the private and the public (see Fontcuberta 2016, 48, and especially the chapter “La danza sélfica,” 83ff; see also Sibilia 2008). Selfies are a good example of these new dynamics of identity constitution, focusing more on constructing a public online identity rather than conserving privately treasured experiences defined by their uniqueness (Fontcuberta 2016, 50). Think,

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for example, on Instagram filters and selfies influence on plastic surgeries (Manavis 2019; Pressler et al. 2022), and the cases of “Zoom Dysmorphia” (a negative perception of our own appearance), especially during the pandemic (Ramphul 2021). This notion of personal identity, which I call a technologically distributed identity, contrasts with the traditional one established during modernity. One of its most significant statements is due to the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, who defines personal identity by relying on the continuity of memory. According to this view, we construct our identity by recognizing ourselves as being the same before and now (Locke 1695/1997, 302). But what kind of recognition and what kind of images are involved? Locke’s definition appeals to mental images, not technical ones such as paintings or portraits. So, his notion of personal identity is private, being the individual as the sole bearer of his or her identity. A technologically distributed identity, on the contrary, strongly depends on others, persons and technologies. When thinking about ourselves, we are strongly determined by the technical images of our life, from childhood, youth, and even before birth, in the womb. We shape our identity by connecting these images of different kinds in a single narrative, from the embryo seen through ultrasound to the here and now. Personal identity does not reduce to the sameness granted by our direct memories of ourselves; it incorporates external memories, technical ones, and those from the accounts of others. We take as part of our identities images of ourselves in situations we do not remember or even experience, distributing in this way our identities. The distribution of the identity augments with the plethora of artifacts and technologies that prolong the traces of our existence. Paraphrasing Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s famous dictum, “I am me and my circumstance,” we could say, “I am me, my things, and my circumstance.” Or, using a recent notion, we could say we are network selves (Wallace 2019). This situation contrasts drastically with that of Locke’s times when even mirrors were rare objects, and if you wanted to know how you looked before your earliest memories, you could only rely on family or friends’ testimonies. Our identities bear on others, persons and things. They are constituted through images and stories we take for granted because we trust in those that issue them. Our personal memories and identities are constructed out of a technologically mediated collective memory. The Peruvian artist Lúa Coderch shows this collective construction of personal memories and identities in her project Recopilar las fotografías sin memoria [Collecting the Photographs without Memory], in which she looks for people who appear in her family albums but no one of her relatives remembers or recognizes. She undertook a reconstruction of their lost identities through a kind of police investigation, using testimonies and preserved images, giving new voice and

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meaning to those silent images: “The album thus reveals its legacy status: a legacy requiring the transmission of the story so as not to dissolve into the void” (Fontcuberta 2016, 143–44). This is a good example of what it means to remember with things, and that the simple accumulation of images or information is not enough to recall. The complexities that technology brings about for defining and constructing our personal identities appear in the Black Mirror’s episode “Be Right Back” (season 2, episode 1, 2014), which poses the possibility of reconstructing the identity of a dead person from his digital traces or footprint. Ash, the protagonist, dies in an automobile accident. Martha, his girlfriend, to cope with her grief and the pregnancy she discovers after her boyfriend’s death, resorts to an artificial intelligence that, based on Ash’s digital footprint, mimics his manner of speaking in a chat. But this is only the first step in his identity reconstruction because it is also possible to go from the digital to the physical and organic, endowing a formless mass with Ash’s appearance and behavior. Allusions to traditional human creation myths are evident: Prometheus’s creation of human beings from clay, the Jewish legend of the Golem, and Frankenstein (Ball 2012). Martha feels uncomfortable and fearful facing Ash’s replica, knowing that he is not the original. She says to the artificial Ash, “You are almost him,” marking a difference that cannot be erased. This is naturally so because she remembers the death of the real Ash, but what if she could not remember this? Would she notice any difference? And even noticing it, would she not try to make sense of it as part of Ash’s identity? That is what we do every day because people change, and we change, and sometimes there are radical modifications. For example, we continue regarding as the same people who have suffered severe brain or physical injuries, even though they may have changed drastically. We consider them the same even without being the same. As the main assumption in the supposed reconstruction of the identity from the digital fingerprint, it is the idea that personal identity implies a specific pattern or regularity, as a kind of signature of our activities and expressions, the replication of which allows recovering the lost identity. This idea is ubiquitous in the fields dominated by computational notions and metaphors, even being just one way, and a very limited one, of understanding personal identity. One initiative in this line was eterni.me born in 2015, which asked, “Do you want to live forever?” The site has ironically stopped working, even though the initiative seems to be still in the making (see “The Journey to Digital Immortality” on medium.com). There are other examples of the so-called digital afterlife, such as Facebook memorial pages, digital memorials, and sites such as hereafter.ai, which are mostly short lived. These initiatives tend to forget that our identities are not fixed but dynamic and that time and

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temporality make the construction of meaning possible. An eternal life would be a meaningless life. MATERIALITY OF DIGITAL IMAGES The abundance, power, and self-sufficiency of digital images help to shape new forms of life, identities and ways to experience, and, with this, new ways to remember. I have characterized their consequences, highlighting four main aspects: eternal present, fragmentation of meaning, extended experience, and technologically distributed identity. Images’ profusion, immediacy, and sharing are dominant features of our forms of life mediated by digital images. Images and media have become a medium, an environment where we move and build our identities and worldviews. But we must remember that it is a humanly constructed (even not merely human) technological environment. This is crucial because the materiality of this medium is more dependent on human-technical systems than ever before. If negatives and analogue photographs could remain quasi-independent physically, as was the case with cassettes, CDs, and DVDs, now the preservation of digital images depends on data centers, networks, hard disk drives, cables, wireless transmissions, and high energy consumption. This is particularly true when photographs or images are no longer kept in personal or family albums or on the hard drive of our personal computers, but posted on social networks such as Facebook or Instagram and stored in the cloud, a cloud we generally imagine as something almost immaterial and clean but that hangs on materiality in its rawest sense, namely: electricity consumption, refrigeration, cables, computer fans, and so forth (Crawford 2021; Blum 2012; Cubitt 2017; Parikka 2015; Hu 2015). Information technologies have made possible the easy sharing of digital images, images we consider “immaterial” and immediate—immediate because they are easily and quickly produced and accessible. Images seem instantaneous and without mediation, but this, as with the cloud, is only an effect of perspective because the technical processes producing the images are out of sight; they are invisible automatisms (Fontcuberta 2016, 53), condensing a vast quantity of technical and scientific knowledge (a material memory on their own). And we have to consider all these hidden processes when shooting a new photo. As we shape our identity with globally mass-produced clothes, we also construct it with the global memory medium of images, technologies, practices, processes, and networks we do not see or see only partially. Technology has expanded almost limitless our storage capacities of images, text, audio, and so forth. We can see images of ourselves from all stages of our lives, even before we were born. However, this infinite proliferation

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makes constructing individual, collective, and global meanings increasingly difficult, something crucial for remembering. The simple accumulation of information or data does not ensure our memory or capacity to remember. Only through a process of remembering that involves an effort and a desire to remember can the symbols recorded in external memories become living witnesses of past events, happenings, and experiences. And this remembering process is a material interpretation because it also implies a pragmatic dimension; it is a remembering with things. Interpretation is not simply decoding a given information but a reconstruction or constitution of meaning implying subjective and objective dimensions. And meaning is not a mere reflection of something spiritual (mind, society, or culture) applied to mute material objects devoid of any sense; they also play an active role in its constitution. Therefore, meaning arises in the very act of remembering, imposing and being flexible at once. LAYERS OF MATERIAL MEMORY IN ALAN RESNAIS’S CINEMA Cinema has been a traditional reference when talking about memory, both as a record and witness of past events and as an analogy of what remembering involves. Here, I will refer to both registers, using the notion of layers of memory and the films of French director Alain Resnais. For the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Resnais’s cinema is a “cinema of memory”: “Throughout Resnais’ work we plunge into a memory which overflows the conditions of psychology, memory for two, memory for several, memory-world, memoryages of the world” (2000, 119). Thus, in his movies, we find different kinds of memory: memory-person, memory-country, memory-world, extending the notion of memory beyond the limits of personal minds and reflecting the different ways in which the past plays an active role in the present, both from a hermeneutic and a pragmatic viewpoint. At the end of Resnais’s documentary Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog] (1956), about Nazi concentration camps, we hear the narrator saying: As I speak to you now, icy water lies in the hollows of the carnal houses. Water as sluggish as our own bad memories. War nods, but has one eye open, but faithful as ever the grass flourishes on the muster grounds, around the blocks. An abandoned village still heavy with threads. The furnaces are no longer in use. The skill of the Nazis is child’s play today. 9,000,000 dead haunt this landscape. Who is on the lookout from the strange watchtowers to warn us of our new executioner’s arrival? Are their faces really different from ours? Somewhere in our misty life, Kapos survive . . . Reinstated officers and anonymous informers.

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These and those reluctant . . . believing from time to time. There are those who look upon these ruins today, as though the monster were dead and buried beneath them. Those who take hope again as the images fade, as though there were a cure for the scourge of all those camps. Those who opined it happened only once. Those who have at a certain time and a certain place . . . Those that refuse to look around them . . . Deaf to the endless cry.

While these words develop, a continuously moving image shows us from afar Auschwitz’s ruined buildings, a metal structure, and finally, the concrete rubble of the crematoria. Word and images reinforce together, stressing the intimate connection between the past, present, and future. The power of memory lies precisely in its openness to the future, in being something still present and possibly present again in the future. This inextricability of past, present, and future is key in Resnais’s treatment of memory. The ruins of the Nazi concentration camps do not preserve a past already gone but stand latent as a wake-up call to the evil lying dormant in any place and in apparently ordinary people (recall Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”). He also raises the central question of material memory: how do we remember with things; how do we make them talk? Ruins and destroyed artifacts acquire meaning in a particular context through a process of remembering (see C. Gruant’s documentary Ruines: les blessures de la guerre [Ruins: the wounds of war], 2021). Thus, they become more than indifferent objects; they become living witnesses of tragic and painful pasts, through which they themselves are preserved. They become remainders, that is, living memory. Resnais’s Night and Fog is just an effort to constitute and consolidate a living material memory, actualizing the process of remembering (Pollock and Silverman 2011). To achieve this, Resnais combines archival footage and recordings in situ of the ruins at the time of the filming. In doing so, he brings the past into the present, giving meaning to what would appear to be mere ruins at first glance and out of context, turning them into unique material witnesses of the past. He shows the actual presence and action of the past, its weight on present actions and possibilities, and the coexistence of different historical moments, different layers of material memory. How are they present in Resnais’s cinema? In different ways, according to his approach to memory and the past. We find layers of individual memory, for example, in the movie Je t’aime je t’aime (1968), where the protagonist, using a time machine, immerses himself in his mind, trying to relive the moment he killed his wife. We also find layers of memory of two, with something in common, as in the L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961), where the two protagonists cannot agree on whether they met the last year at the Marienbad hotel; or nothing in common, as in Hiroshima mon amour (1959),

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where the protagonists are separated by personal memories in different countries (France and Japan). A crucial layer of memory for Resnais is what Deleuze calls world-memory, which sets the frame for the other memories (individual, of a city, of a country); for example, World War II in Hiroshima mon amour, and the hotel in L’année dernière à Marienbad. Each of these memory approaches has its own distinctive access to the past. In Je t’aime je t’aime, the protagonist accesses his layers of past through a time machine. He settles on several layers of personal memory, all dominated by a bright spot giving rise, again and again, to a series of fragmented memories. They all have in common a specific age, the protagonist’s adult life, delimited by the moment he met Catrine (his wife) and the moment after her death. In L’année dernière à Marienbad, the male protagonist X moves in his layer of past marked by his encounter with A (female protagonist). A, for her part, seems unable to access the layer in which she would have met X. The whole film corresponds to fragments of memory (present and past), and the age of the layers seems to be as old as the supposed meeting of the two protagonists the last year at Marienbad. In Hiroshima mon amour, the access to the female protagonist’s layers of the past is through her own story, her remembrances of her youth in Nevers during wartime (World War II) when she was twenty. We know nothing from the male protagonist’s memories. Only indirectly we access his past (his experience of WWII) through the images of the nuclear holocaust at Hiroshima that the French actress sees at the museums. In Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963), we access the past mainly through the consequences it has left in the present. The epochs correspond to World War II (Helene, Alphonse) and the Algerian war (Bernard, Muriel). In Mon oncle d’Amerique (1980), we access the layers of past through the accounts of the three protagonists (Jean, René, Janine). Resnais uses the relations of the characters with objects and places, the material memory, as markers of different times in memory. This is evident in Mon oncle d’Amerique, where the protagonists take a biographical journey through their lives from birth, each showing their particular attachment to certain places and objects. For example, Jean and the island in Brittany, the place where he was born, his comic books, and the hidden treasure that every island must have. In Muriel ou le temps d’ un retour, we know the characters and their layers of memory through objects. Without explicitly biographical narratives as in Mon oncle d’Amerique or Hiroshima mon amour, we must reconstruct the characters’ biographies through objects: Alphonso and his coat, Helene and her old furniture, Bernard and his camera and recordings of the Algerian war, and so on. These objects construct a topology of the memory and ages of each character. In Nuit et Brouillard, the abandoned concentration camps constitute a topology of pain, grief, and death that goes beyond a specific event.

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Let me look at some of these ideas in detail in the film Hiroshima mon amour, filmed by Resnais in 1959 with a script by the French novelist Marguerite Duras. In this film, we encounter two individual memories, that of the French actress and that of the Japanese man with whom she has an affair; both situated in a layer of the past marked by a shared global event: World War II. This world-memory is not explicitly represented but indirectly accessed through the protagonists’ memories and the cities in which they lived. Precisely, the film focuses on the conjunction and intersection of the individual memories and the respective city-memories. So that, at the end of the film, the protagonists can say: “Hi-ro-shi-ma . . . Hi-ro-shi-ma. That’s your name,” “That’s my name. Yes. Your name is Nevers. Ne-vers in France” (Duras 1961, 83). The French actress’s individual memory is marked by the death of her German lover in war during her youth in Nevers, while the Japanese’s memory is marked by the nuclear holocaust and the death of his entire family. These events inseparably bind the cities and the individuals. Sometimes we have memories detached from a certain place, but sometimes detaching a memory from the place where it occurred is impossible. In the film, the protagonists try to go through each other’s memories, but they cannot do it, not having any direct experience of the events the other lived. The French actress tries to immerse herself into the horrors of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. She visits museums and the hospital looking for direct witnesses of the past, but she only accesses the narration of the facts. That is why the Japanese man says to her: “You saw nothing at Hiroshima” (Duras 1961, 17). Likewise, when she tells him the story of her past, about her German lover, and her youthful days at Nevers, he thinks he is entering into her memory being the only one to whom she has told her story. But she says to herself, alone in her apartment, looking at the mirror: “You think you know. And then, no. You don’t” (Duras 1961, 73). Forgetting and memory are the fundamental themes of the film. At the beginning, when the two lovers are in bed, they talk about forgetting and remembering, and we see how they are sunk into their own memories, and how they have tried to forget, fearing at the same time the forgetting: SHE: Like you, I know what it is to forget. HE: No, you don’t know what it is to forget. SHE: Like you, I have a memory. I know what it is to forget. HE: No, you don’t have a memory. SHE: Like you, I too have tried with all my might not to forget. Like you, I forgot. Like you, I wanted to have an inconsolable memory, a memory of shadows and stone. For my part, I struggled with all my might, every day, against the

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horror of no longer understanding at all the reason for remembering. Like you, I forgot . . . Why deny the obvious necessity for memory? (Duras 1961, 22–23)

Forgetfulness, both feared and sought after, is nonetheless necessary. We cannot actualize all our rememberings in memory-images. Forgetting opens up to new possibilities. She says, recalling her German lover: Oh! It’s horrible. I’m beginning to remember you less clearly . . . I’m beginning to forget you. I tremble at the thought of having forgotten so much love. . . . Fourteen years have passed. I don’t even remember his hands very well . . . The pain, I still remember the pain a little. HE: Tonight? SHE: Yes, tonight, I remember. But one day I won’t remember it any more. Not at all. Nothing. (Duras 1961, 66–67)

The Japanese man says to her in the restaurant: In a few years, when I’ll have forgotten you, and when other such adventures, from sheer habit, will happen to me, I’ll remember you as the symbol of love’s forgetfulness. I’ll think of this adventure as of the horror of oblivion. I already know it. (Duras, 1961, 68)

And she talking to herself in front of the mirror: I told our story [that of she and her German lover]. I was unfaithful to you tonight with this stranger [the Japanese]. I told our story. It was, you see, a story that could be told. For fourteen years I hadn’t found . . . the taste of an impossible love again. Since Nevers. Look how I’m forgetting you. (Duras 1961, 73)

She needs to forget her German lover, to open herself to the present and the future, to the memory of the two she is forming with the Japanese man. The only way to be part of each other’s memory is by building a memory together, a memory of two, a memory that is Nevers and Hiroshima; a memory not erasing the past but preserving it and transforming it. And this is crucial in the film. Despite its strong emphasis on forgetting, it also stresses the permanence of everything in memory; memory is always here, and we see through its eyes, even without realizing it. In Hiroshima, the past of the French actress becomes present again, and she returns to her youth at Nevers. The very streets of Hiroshima become the streets of Nevers as she sees Hiroshima through Nevers’s eyes. When we least expect it, memories we thought forgotten come back with all their actuality. The articulation between layers of different temporalities, memory, and materiality is also well represented in Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s documentary El botón de nácar [The Pearl Button] (2015). In it, we find three

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main layers: a cosmical and geological one corresponding to the temporality of the stars and the formation of the Chilean territory’s geography, particularly the water in its multiple concretions: Pacific Ocean, canals and fjords of southern Chile, rivers, glaciers, ice. A second layer corresponds to the time before the Spanish conquest, the time of the native peoples of Chile, in particular the inhabitants of Patagonia, and their relationship with water. And finally, the time of the Pinochet dictatorship and the murders of disappeared detainees. It is precisely the materiality of a pearl button from this period that links the different layers. The button corresponds to a woman’s clothes, a disappeared detainee, dumped in the ocean from a Chilean army helicopter, recovered sometime later attached to the trunk to which she was tied. Through connected associations having as their axis the relationships between human beings and water, the button, as a kind of memory-image, opens up to events of different layers of memory: the story of Jemmy Button, the Yaghan native who was taken from Tierra del Fuego to England by Captain Fitz Roy for the price of a pearl button; the connection of Yaghan people with water; Chile’s links with the sea; and the cosmic origin of the oceans. Thus, we have temporal layers of long, middle, and short duration that shape the memory of a nation, materially and humanly, at once—layers that continue acting even when individuals are not fully aware of them, shaping the present features of a nation and its people, and their present and future possibilities. Images, as layers of memory, are heterochronous, intricate combinations of different times and memories. Using Didi-Huberman’s words, we could say: Image is something other than a simple cut made in the world of visible aspects. It is a trace, a track, a visual mark of the time it wanted to touch, but also of other supplementary times—fatally anachronistic, heterogeneous among them—that it cannot, as an art of memory, agglutinate. It is ash mixed from various braziers, hotter or colder. (Didi-Huberman 2020, 51)

*‌‌* * In this chapter, I focused on the relationships between material memory and technical images, particularly digital photographs and cinema images. I used Bergson’s notion of images as material and immaterial, representation and action, as the conceptual key. I proposed the “loop of remembering” as a scheme to deal with the dynamic relationship between mental and technical images in the act of remembering. I stated that digital images, due to their superabundance, power, and self-sufficiency, influence memory practices in at least four aspects: configuring an eternal present of images, contributing to the fragmentation of meaning, helping to shape new forms of experience, and technologically mediated identities. Finally, I analyzed Resnais’s cinema of memory through the notion of “layers of material memory.”

Chapter 4

Memory and Oblivion 1 Technological Somnambulism and the Material Memory of Things

In this chapter, I enter into a subject not usually associated with memory studies, namely the production of technical artifacts, which, nevertheless, I think is fundamental to developing a dynamic view of material memory. Its importance is overlooked due to technological somnambulism, the forgetting or concealment of the memory of things, and remembering with things requires recovering that memory. In our everyday life, as we saw in chapter 1, we tend to disregard the active and constitutive role that technologies play in shaping our forms of life (in our practices, actions, identities, representations, etc.), considering technical artifacts mere neutral instruments. It is the technological somnambulism, using Winner’s words (2020b, 10). Because of it, the active role of technologies disappears from our sight, as do the conditions that made them possible. They become something taken for granted, something “natural” or ready-made, available for use. To remember with things tries to reverse this situation. Technological somnambulism refers not only to the domain of use but also to the conditions of the production, operation, and maintenance of technical artifacts. But, different from what happens in use, we are not familiar with these conditions, because, for the most part, technologies are black boxes for us. So then, remembering with things takes a different meaning here. It is no longer a question of undoing our familiarity with things but of reconstructing the conditions that made them possible, the human labor, power relations, processes, raw materials, decisions, actions, and so forth, that constitute the material memory of the production of things. Certainly, we do not grasp this material memory immediately or intuitively; we need a reconstruction involving knowledge, experience, inquiring, interpretation, education, and more. It 79

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requires putting in evidence the infrastructures that enable the fabrication, operation, and maintenance of technologies. Remembering with things thus acquires an irreducibly social and political dimension. TECHNOLOGIES AS MEMORY OF POWER RELATIONS AND THEIR OBLIVION In the first chapter, I showed Winner’s arguments for claiming that technical artifacts have politics. Technologies have politics because they embody power relations (intentionally or unintentionally designed) in their structures, which order human activities. Here “power” has a double meaning: it refers to politics and to the capacity to make something. The flexibility of the embodiment depends on the materiality of things and their context. They are multistable—that is, they have different equilibrium states. Sometimes, the user may alter the artifact’s initial design or expected function. At other times, they are less flexible. Artifacts’ embodiment is an instance of material memory because it preserves the past into the present. The past is the activities, processes, and power relations associated with the designing and fabrication of technical artifacts. Therefore, we can say that technologies are memory of power relations; that they are “the frozen labour of the past, and thus human and very political in content” (Wendling 2009, 118, referring to Marx’s ideas about machines). Power relations and manufacturing conditions are put in the background in relation to the consumer sphere. In our societies, products and goods are available as ready-made things, as merchandise coming from nowhere. We find them displayed and classified on supermarkets’ shelves and in shopping windows, as almost natural, merely given, things. The production processes, the multiple decisions and activities that enable things to be in front of us at our disposal (if we have enough money), keep out of our sight; and with this, the multiple asymmetries of power and the exploitation of humans, animals, and the environment. In brief, the conditions of possibility of the infinite quantity and variety of commodities and consumer goods largely defining our current forms of life remain out of our eyes. The oblivion of production, particularly of the human labor, in the sphere of consumption is expressed in J. B. Forster’s words: Within the so-called popular culture—the world of TV and films, commodities and advertising—consumption occupies centre stage, while the more fundamental reality of work recedes into the background, seldom depicted in any detail, and then usually in romanticized forms. The harsh experiences of those forced to earn their living by endless conformity to boring machine-regulated routines,

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divorced from their own creative potential—all in the name of efficiency and profits—seem always just beyond the eye of the camera, forever out of sight. (1998, ix)

These words are not only valid for the grand industry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries or the factories of precarious labor of our twenty-first century but also for our current economies of digital labor, as we will see later in the case of internet content moderation. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx put forward the notion of commodity fetishism, referring to the oblivion or concealment of human labor when considering commodities and their exchange value. They were considered only in relation to other things, leaving aside the human factor. As a result, artifacts are considered as having an independent life of their own, almost as if they were “natural” things. Marxian scholars have discussed this idea and its implications largely. Here I only want to take it as an expression of the forgetting or concealment of humans in consumption. In Capital’s section “The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof,” Marx says, A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. (Marx 1867/2010a, 83)

The workers’ labor is objectified in the things they produce. In other words, the product of their labor becomes external, alien, to them. Because of this, commodity fetishism has been related with alienation, even when Marx does not use this notion explicitly in Capital but in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (thus in a different theoretical framework). Alienation involves several dimensions; the worker’s estrangement from: the product of his or her work, the labor process, the other workers, and himself or herself (see Marx 2010b, 270; see also Wendling 2009, 17). A key point is how things appear to the workers themselves. Being a question of presence and appearance allows us to connect it with the notion of ideology. Ideology implies seeing things wrongly or falsely, without realizing how they really are or what they involve. According to Marx, the unseen reality is the exploitation of the workers (the dominated class) by the capitalists (the dominant class). Ideology arises when the dominated class follows the norms and ways of seeing (ideas, beliefs, representations, actions, practices, etc.) of the dominant class, incorporating them as its own, without being conscious of the underlying relationships of exploitation to which they are

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subjected as workers. Overcoming the ideology implies realizing the falsity of the habitual way of seeing (Iacono 2016). Remembering with things, reconstructing the material memory of things, can be considered an attempt to get out of the ideologies we live in daily. However, when we see artifacts (e.g., a mobile phone), we do not grasp their production and the processes that enable their functioning. For this reason, to “see” the production processes, we must reconstruct them in the imagination, recovering all the layers of the material memory of things, recovering the human labor and the power relations embodied in the artifacts we buy and use every day.1 To summarize, using Matthew Mcallister’s words, For Marx, commodity fetishism referred to how social relations and production processes of a thing, including the dynamics of labour, were masked by commodification, thus decontextualizing the commodity and making it seem autonomous from its means of production. In commodification, relations between people are hidden, while relations between things become naturalized. (2015, 1)

Thus, artifacts become naturalized: The fetish character of the commodity means that the social form of things is endowed with naturalness. More explicitly, the social form of things appears as a natural property of commodities . . . The character of fetishism can therefore be seen as the attribution of naturalness to relations that are social. (Iacono 2016, 121–22)

The naturalization of artifacts makes them something merely given and self-evident to us, devoid of history or memory (like manna from heaven).2 Their commodity character makes them something purely present (representationally and temporally speaking). Like in the case of digital images, we immerse ourselves in an eternal present of commodities. The notion of commodity fetishism allows us to think of artifacts as embodiments of processes and power relations, recovering their dynamic character. To overcome the artisanal paradigm, we must go beyond the processes’ results or final stage; we must redynamize things, recovering their material memory. This also leads us to surpass the purely neutral and instrumental view of technology, showing its intrinsic political and ethical dimension. RECOVERING THE MATERIAL MEMORY OF THINGS I have stated that technological somnambulism can be overcome by recovering the material memory of things, which requires a reconstruction of

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the activities and processes that enable the production and functioning of technical artifacts; also retrieving the different layers of memory that are present virtually. For example, when considering a mobile phone, we have to grasp the human-technology networks and infrastructures that enabled its fabrication and availability (supply chains, manufacturing, distribution); the networks and complexes allowing its functioning and use; the different stages of design with their social and historical implications; the forms of life, habits, and interpretations that the mobile phone promotes and inhibits; and also the long-lasting processes at the base of raw materials and energy sources (such as oil, metals, and rare earths) needed for its fabrication (Parikka 2015; Pitron 2020). To break with the technological somnambulism, we must be aware of the active and constitutive role that technologies play in shaping our forms of life, which means breaking with the automatism of their use and familiarity. Recall that things disappear from our attention in their very use. Here, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s distinction between objects “ready-to-hand” and “present-at-hand” (1962, 95) can be useful. With this distinction, he emphasizes that theory follows practice. In our daily lives, we manipulate artifacts without realizing how they fulfil their operations or how they were produced. We become aware of this when artifacts (e.g., a hammer or a clock) stop working. Their nonfunctioning brings to light or makes present what was hidden in the everyday or familiar use of these things—namely, the set of practices, artifacts, and actions (the human-technical networks or “world” in Heidegger’s terms) enabling the use, functioning, and meaning of particular artifacts (e.g., the hammer as a tool for hitting, or the clock as a mechanism for counting time). Thus, the shift is from practice to theory; a break with the familiarity of things. As I have insisted, this “seeing” the human-technical complexes, the “world,” is not immediate but requiring an effort of reconstruction. For recovering the material memory of things, we also must keep in mind that technologies are operators of possibilities, that they help to open and close possibilities. With this, the contingency of our present situation is affirmed. Other possible worlds were and are possible (see the examples of the social construction of technological systems, Bijker 1995). This openness breaks with the technological determinism that an excessive emphasis on the active and constitutive role of technologies may entail. Therefore, a comparative analysis that recognizes and contrasts the multiple possibilities is crucial. Through this analysis, we step out, so to speak, from our present situation visualizing and imagining other possible worlds or situations where our everyday technologies are absent, so stressing the contingency of our present situation and the metastable character of our technologies. I call this exercise uchronic analysis, taking inspiration from the notion of uchronia

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(Renouvier 1901), which is associated with the imagination of alternative histories (Evans 2014). I also draw inspiration from the creation of utopias and dystopias, particularly the technological ones, including here science fiction stories and films. The comparative analysis of possibilities can be carried out along the different dimensions of the material memory of things: functioning, production, invention and embodiment, materials. We could, for instance, think of mobility scenarios alternative to the predominant one based on combustion engines. One could imagine the different worlds that would have been possible if, instead of the combustion vehicle, electric cars or bicycles, more or less contemporary inventions, had prevailed as means of transportation. Would these worlds really be possible and achievable? The recovery of neglected human-technical networks and infrastructures is also the exposure of the power relations involved, which implies political and ethical questions. Not only is it important to open technical artifacts’ black boxes, as do, for example, the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), but also to consider questions of intentionality, will, freedom, and responsibility that this kind of approach leads aside (considering both humans and artifacts as actants). As Winner (1993) states, the critical thinking of technology should expose not only the openness of possibilities (the meta-stability) or the contingency of technologies and forms of life, but also the normative questions they imply, and propose normative guides for the practice. So tries to do post-phenomenology with the moralization of technology (Verbeek 2011), retaining human beings’ intentional and reflexive capacities. The attempt to elaborate an ethics of technology always involves a tension between a descriptive approach (as in STS studies) and a normative one (philosophy of technology) and between the individual dimension (post-phenomenology) and the social level (STS studies). The study of power relations in technology demands a critical approach. This is what Andrew Feenberg has tried to do with his critical constructivist theory (Feenberg 2017; 2002). In it, he emphasizes the social power relations involved in technologies, establishing rationality as a constructive criterion for designing, evaluating, and implementing technologies. Feenberg criticizes post-phenomenological approaches for relying too much on the relationship between the individual and technologies and for not explicitly incorporating the social power relations that are present in design (for a detailed account of this discussion, see the special issue of the journal Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol. 24, nos. 1/2, 2020). With the notions of material memory and remembering with things, I aim to complement these different theoretical perspectives, combining the descriptive and the normative and promoting the indispensable practical dimension I associate with critical thinking. The critique must reunite two moments: destabilization through the analysis of a given situation and the

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proposal and construction of alternatives. Remembering with things should entail not only the exposition of the neglected or forgotten human-technical networks or infrastructures and their political and ethical conflicts but also the proposing and promotion of practices, representations, and values that permit surpassing those conflicts (something this book only hints at). We can use, for example, images exposing conflicting situations and promoting, at the same time, actions and practices to overcome them, as was done in the campaigns against cigarette smoking. This use of images, at once representational and pragmatic, is very well known by publishers, sadly only to sell more and more. Initiatives such as those of the Spanish research collective Carro de Combate (www​.carrodecombate​.com) point to the right direction, I think, exposing the human-technical networks and power relations behind our everyday food and clothes and promoting new practices and values. Retrieving the material memory of things is not a direct, definitive, or univocal procedure. Being a reconstructive and interpretative process, it necessarily involves diverse perspectives. Remembering with things is a plural and an open process. There is no privileged standpoint from which the production processes of technologies can be completely determined. On the contrary, the various networks involved cannot be totalized under a complete and closed unity; rather, their reconstruction through a collective procedure of interpretation and negotiation, opened to re-elaborations and disputes, could be analogized with reaching agreements and consensus in the sciences, or better, with the collective and social control of technologies, where citizens, engineers, entrepreneurs, governments, among other stakeholders, confront their different knowledge and values for decision making (Broncano 2000, 225). The loss of familiarity with things leads us from immediacy to mediations, in a kind of reverse engineering exercise. Remembering with things is the continuous effort to reverse the immediacy, and for this reason, it is a case of critical thinking. However, it is not only a theoretical or conceptual exercise but also and crucially, a practical, ethical, and political matter. And we must not forget that remembering with things is not a mere social construction. Indeed, the with alludes to the fact that the meanings and representations we arrive at are not the mere reflections of social or individual conditions or interests; rather, things bring up their own reality, their own truth, which cannot be reduced to whatever interpretation. Remembering with things aims to recover the contemporary and historical human-technical networks at the base of the artifacts appearing to us as selfevident, as commodities available for their use, merely given and lacking a process of production, design, or invention. These networks constitute layers of memory, in the sense we gave them in the previous chapters—that is, processes acting virtually. With the notions of material memory and remembering with things, I want to contribute to overcoming the oblivion of production

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processes (often by design) that our artifacts embody, and with this, to bring to light the underlying human labor, exploitation of nature, decisions, actions, and power relations (geopolitical, strategic, ethical, etc.). In the following section, I apply these ideas to the case of internet content moderation. TECHNOLOGICAL SOMNAMBULISM IN INTERNET CONTENT MODERATION The oblivion of the processes of production, human labor, and the alienation of workers also happen in our times of digital technology, although we often do not realize of it, captivated by our almost ethereal technologies: thinner and lighter mobiles phones and notebooks, and the “cloud” (internet, social networks, etc.). This is the shining face of technology that corporations try to show and promote. However, if we consider the whole life of things, a less luminous picture appears: human labor in deplorable conditions (what Gray and Suri call “ghost work,” 2019; see also the documentaries Poulain 2019; Rigaud 2019), exploitation of humans and nature, pollution, digital rubbish, e-waste, and so forth (see documentaries Dannoritzer 2010; 2014; Scott-Clarke 2018). And all these are the conditions for the fabrication, use, and consumption of our daily technologies. Internet content moderation constitutes one of these processes invisible to users but crucial to the proper functioning of, for example, social networks. As Astra Taylor says, Our general lack of curiosity about how the platforms and services we use every day really work means that we often believe the hype, giving automation more credit than it’s actually due. In the process, we fail to see—and to value—the labour of our fellow human beings. We mistake fauxtomation for the real thing, reinforcing the illusion that machines are smarter than they really are. (2018)

We need an exercise of memory, remembering with things, to bring to light the invisible processes involved in internet content moderation, especially the labor of content moderators, that, despite their importance, has remained until recently in the darkness. Many users believe that the blocking of pornographic images and videos of murder, torture, and rape, among others, is fully automated and is another achievement of so-called artificial intelligence (A. Taylor refers to this as “fauxtomation.”)3 But, this is not the case and probably will never be. People worldwide, particularly in poor countries, work under precarious conditions as internet cleaners (see H. Block’s and M. Riesenwieck’s documentary of 2018, The Cleaners). To recover the

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material memory of internet content moderation, let me first show what kind of labor it is. Internet content moderation is a kind of digital labor that belongs to what Nick Srnicek has called “platform capitalism” (2017). This capitalism follows the logic of classical capitalism associated with alienation, exploitation, and de-skilling, in brief, the undermining of workers’ power (Srnicek 2017, 12), but with a new targeting: the extraction and use of data (Srnicek 2017, 40). Data is information entailing a material medium for recording and storage; consequently, data is not immaterial “as any glance at the energy consumption of data centres will quickly prove” (Srnicek 2017, 39). And data is not something merely given, automatically obtained. To have data, we need to work. In Srnicek’s words, Most data must be cleaned and organised into standardised formats in order to be usable. Likewise, generating the proper algorithms can involve the manual entry of learning sets into a system. Altogether, this means that the collection of data today is dependent on a vast infrastructure to sense, record, and analyse. What is recorded? Simply put, we should consider data to be the raw material that must be extracted, and the activities of users to be the natural source of this raw material. Just like oil, data are a material to be extracted, refined, and used in a variety of ways. The more data one has, the more uses one can make of them. (2017, 39)

The new raw material that is data is exploited through platforms. What are platforms? “At the most general level, platforms are digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact. They therefore position themselves as intermediaries that bring together different users: customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and even physical objects” (Srnicek 2017, 43).4 The term “platform” refers both to firms or companies and to the digital technologies, software and hardware, making possible the data extraction and use. Srnicek establishes the following classification (2017, 49): • • • • •

advertising platforms (e.g., Google, Facebook); cloud platforms (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Salesforce); industrial platforms (e.g., GE Siemens); product platforms (e.g., Rolls Royce, Spotify); lean platforms (e.g., Uber, Airbnb).

The first type of platform extracts and analyses data for selling. The platforms of the second kind own hardware and software for renting to businesses. The aim of the third type of platform is the transformation of traditional manufacturing into internet-connected processes. The fourth type seeks to profit

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by using platforms to collect and rent traditional goods or content, such as music. Finally, the lean platforms function as intermediaries for services (e.g., transport or food) without providing their own infrastructure (hardware) to offer these services. The diversity of platforms also reflects the diversity of the labors involved. The Italian sociologist Antonio Casilli distinguishes three types of platform work—namely, digital labor on demand, micro-labor, and the “free labor” (2020, 90), examples of the so-called gig economy based on crowdsourcing. The first type refers to what has been called the uberization of economy, the kind of work characteristic of the Uber platform and the like (Casilli 2020, 92). The second kind of work refers to repetitive, unskilled tasks needed to apply machine learning algorithms (Casilli 2020, 116). Usually, this labor is hidden behind the publicity hype associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI). An outstanding example of this micro-labor is Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), launched in 2005 as a crowdsourcing marketplace for individuals doing the so-called human intelligence tasks, such as audio transcription, language translation, annotations, and so on. More than tasks, they are micro-tasks because they involve fulfilling small tasks into which a more extensive work or problem has been divided because machines cannot do on their own. Although human labor tends to be obscured when speaking about automatization, Amazon has no problem referring to MTurk as “artificial artificial intelligence,” in the sense of being made by humans and false or fake. Even the platform’s name evidences the tricking behind it because it takes its name from the famous Wolfgang von Kempelen’s eighteenth-century automaton, the “mechanical Turk,” which toured the European courts playing chess, or so it was believed, because, as was later known, it was a person who moved the pieces hidden in the automaton (Riskin 2016, 123–28). So, it was a scam. The last type of digital work Casilli mentions is what we would do as users of platforms, for example, when uploading information to social networks, classifying photographs, tagging people’s photos, and so forth (if this can be considered a kind of work is a matter of debate). Internet content moderation (or commercial content moderation, CCM, using Sarah Roberts’s denomination) corresponds to the second type of digital labor (micro-labor), particularly useful to advertising platforms. In this digital work, workers (many of them professionals with college or university degrees) watch or screen the content uploaded by users, for example, to social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube, to identify content infringing the platforms’ regulations. Then, in a few seconds, they must make decisions, evaluating and deleting the inappropriate content. In Sarah Roberts’s words, “They act quickly, often screening thousands of images, videos, or text postings a day” (Roberts 2019, 1). In more detail:

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In a matter of seconds, following pre-determined company policy, CCM workers make decisions about the appropriateness of images, video, or postings that appear on a given site—material already posted and live on the site, then flagged as inappropriate in some way by members of the user community. CCM workers engage in this vetting over and over again, sometimes thousands of times a day. (S. Roberts, 2017)

What type of content do they judge? What we may call the internet’s “digital rubbish,” which exposes the worst and most repugnant aspects of our human nature. “Pornography, gore, minor’s sexual solicitation, sexual body parts/images, racism . . . brutal street fights, animal torture, suicide bombings, decapitations, and horrific traffic accidents” (Chen 2014; Buni and Chemaly 2016). The work of these moderators ensures that this brutal content does not proliferate on our networks and that they remain pristine spaces for monetary profit. For companies (and for users), networks should be only a space full of smiles and poses of fake happiness. The work of moderation is also an example of global labor injustice because the benefits of people in rich countries are obtained at the expense of precarious workers in poorer countries. Thus, most content moderation is outsourced to countries such as the Philippines (for reasons of English proficiency and greater knowledge of U.S. culture) or other countries with qualified people without job opportunities or very precarious ones. As Srnicek specifies, “content moderation for Google and Facebook is typically done in the Philippines, where an estimated 100,000 workers search through the content on social media and in cloud storage” (2017, 90). In more detail, in relation to the company Accenture making moderation for Facebook, “As of May, Accenture billed Facebook for roughly 1,900 full-time moderators in Manila; 1,300 in Mumbai, India; 850 in Lisbon; 780 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; 300 in Warsaw; 300 in Mountain View, California; 225 in Dublin; and 135 in Austin, Texas, according to staffing records reviewed by The Times” (Satarino and Isaac 2021). This global injustice of moderation has rightly been compared with the shipping of e-waste from rich countries to poor ones, despite international treaties prohibiting it. Many US-based companies . . . continue to consign their moderators to the margins, shipping their platforms’ digital waste to “special economic zones” in the Global South. As Roberts recounts in her paper “Digital Refuse,” these toxic images trace the same routes used to export the industrial world’s physical waste—hospital hazardous refuse, dirty adult diapers, and old model computers. (Buni and Chemaly, 2016)

However, the work on internet content moderation is not exclusive to the global South or poor countries. U.S. technological companies also take

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advantage of the lack of labor opportunities in their own country, employing skilled laborers and recent university graduates for jobs not requiring special qualifications (Chen, 2014). Nevertheless, the pay disparity in relation to the workers in poorer countries remains: Much [internet content moderation] is still done in the US, often by young college graduates . . . Many companies employ a two-tiered moderation system, where the most basic moderation is outsourced abroad while more complex screening, which requires greater cultural familiarity, is done domestically. US-based moderators are much better compensated than their overseas counterparts: A brand-new American moderator for a large tech company in the US can make more in an hour than a veteran Filipino moderator makes in a day. (Chen 2014)

Why is internet content moderation so important? Simply put, it is a crucial factor that enables social media platforms to function correctly. They cannot operate without clearing out digital trash, as happens in our “real” world with our daily waste, and equally, we do not want to deal with that rubbish. The work of content moderation has been present on the internet from the beginning. There are different types of moderation (Gillespie 2018), such as that of forum administrators, which had, and still has, certain prestige; in many cases, it is still done for free, voluntarily. However, due to the growth and internationalization of the platforms, content moderation, which must be done 24/7, overwhelms the volunteers, forcing the hiring of a continuous cheap workforce. Moreover, and this is a key point, content moderation has not been completely automated and probably never will be, despite the hype about AI capabilities. Despite its importance, the work of content moderation has remained in the shadows, in this case because of an invisibility by design, fostered by the platform companies themselves—invisibility of the human labor and the companies’ criteria and rules for moderation. As Sarah Roberts says, “Social-media firms treat their CCM practices as business or trade secrets and typically refuse to divulge their internal mechanisms for decision-making or to provide access to the workers who undertake CCM” (2017). Concerning workers: “the work they do, the conditions under which they do it, and for whose benefit are all largely imperceptible to the users of the platforms that pay for and rely upon this labour. In fact, this invisibility is by design” (Roberts 2019, 3). The moderators work under nondisclosure agreements, “which disallow them from speaking about their work to friends, family, the press, or academics, despite often needing to” (Roberts 2017; Dwoskin 2019).5 Emphasizing this deliberate secrecy, Casey Newton reaffirms “that people don’t know there are human beings doing this work [content moderation] is, of course, by design.

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Facebook would rather talk about its advancements in artificial intelligence, and dangle the prospect that its reliance on human moderators will decline over time” (Newton, 2019). It is a deliberate fixing of power relations, as in the case of Moses’s overpasses mentioned by Winner, but the embodiment of power relations is more dynamic, with continuous actions, decision making, and changing of rules and criteria by managers and owners of the firms. Why this invisibility by design? I think it is largely due to a question of companies’ image or ideology. They want to be seen as happy, pure, clean, and dynamic companies, as Apple clearly demonstrates (see Ridley Scott’s 1984 promotional video of the Apple Macintosh, which clearly shows these values in contrast to the old bureaucratic, heavy, and obscure companies, such as IBM). This emphasis on the ethereal and immaterial is still the same as Donna Haraway identified in her Cyborg Manifesto (1985), referring to 1980s technologies placed between the physical and the nonphysical. In her words, “Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile” (1991, 153).6 To reinforce their images of ethereal and clean companies of the twenty-first century, tech companies distance themselves from the classic images of labor associated with nineteenth-century industrial workers: repetitive manual activities, dirty workplaces, and poverty. Thus, for these companies, manual labor (and moderation is included here) implies suffering, punishment, and a sort of impurity, which should be eliminated through automation. Here, we find strong religious resonances. Labor is seen as a punishment and a pain due to a fall or decadence: the bronze age in Hesiod or the expulsion from Paradise (Kranzberg and Gies 1975). In the classical images of paradise or “utopian places,” work is not needed to survive. Instead, basic needs, such as food, are effortlessly met as a sort of “gift of nature.” Think, for example, of Hesiod’s golden age, the Paradise Garden, and Cockaigne’s land (see Peter Bruegel the Elder’s painting of 1567). The rhetoric of technological automation and the powers of artificial intelligence draws heavily on these images, associating negative values with manual labor and positive ones with those who try to eliminate it using their intellects and minds (classically associated with the light). In this way, these companies replicate the duality depicted by Fritz Lang in his film Metropolis (1927), in which the world of happiness and leisure of the upper classes (literally, because they live on the surface) is sustained by the labor of workers hidden in the entrails of the earth, giving their exchangeable lives to the Machine (associated with the mythical humandevouring god Moloch). Many technology platforms seem like new Molochs devouring living human labor for the pleasure of a lucky few. Moreover, the appeal to automation has been used as an excuse to devalue human labor, minimizing or concealing its role in cleaning data for machine

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learning or aiding algorithms when computers are incapable to cope with these tasks. This leads to the so-called paradox of automation’s last mile: the ever-delayed promise of full technological automation that is never fully realized and that always requires new sources of human labor, however, devalued by its supposed transience and future elimination (Casilli 2020). Therefore, the invisibility by design of internet content moderation is a deliberate effort of technological somnambulism, which, together with the emphasis on technological automation, promotes the commodity fetishism of digital technologies and platforms and contributes to the alienation of internet content moderators. Alienation from the product of their work and the economic benefits of their work. Internet content moderation, as it occurs in today’s digital platforms, takes to an extreme the tendency to the division of labor between the mental and the manual, between the design or form organizing the labor, and the concrete activities realizing it. This separation between the mind and the hand is part of the process of expansion and consolidation of industrial and postindustrial capitalism. In the case of moderation, this separation is evident in the fact that moderation rules are set in advance by the platforms’ owners and administrators, and complex cases are not resolved by the moderators themselves but sent to headquarters for analysis and resolution. From the companies’ perspective, moderators must simply apply the guidelines, as if they were computers following the steps of a predefined algorithm without even requiring feedback from their workers to improve these rules. For companies, the moderators’ work is summed up by the physical clicking of deleting or permitting while screening uploaded content. In fact, the monetization and payment of these workers is based on the number of clicks and the time spent deciding. But how does this decision take place? Would it be possible without the skills of the moderators, their experience and capacity for judgment? Their mental work and their ability to interpret quickly and efficiently whether a piece of content is inappropriate or not remain unpaid. We can relate this to the surplus value, which, according to Marx’s analysis, constitutes the basis of the value of the merchandise. However, different from the factories, here it is not manual labor but a mental one. Quantification, expressed now in objectified time and the number of clicks, is, once again, insufficient to account for the actual labor performed. The pay that workers receive is thus insignificant compared to the platforms’ enormous profits and unfair concerning the work they do. This results in the exploitation of the workers, whose labor is crucial not only for the platforms’ functioning but also for protecting the image and reputation of “some of the world’s wealthiest companies” (Dwoskin 2019).

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Alienation from their other colleagues. This happens because moderators are excluded from the benefits of the companies hiring their work and the possibilities of promotion in the companies’ hierarchy. Their colleagues also exclude them. Subcontracted workers (to companies such as Accenture) are seen as “second-class citizens” (Dwoskin 2019) with no access to the benefits of the platform’s workers.7 Concerning his work with Facebook’s employees in an office with colourful murals and free snacks, in Austin, Texas, a moderator says, “We live in this Facebook world, but we’re like these weird stepchildren that they kind of claim but don’t really claim . . . It’s like, we love you, and have lunch, and snacks on us, but please know you are going back to your auntie’s house at the end of the day” (cited in Dwoskin 2019). “They sit separately in the same cafeteria, moderators said, adding that they are not invited to company events such as the annual holiday party” (Dwoskin 2019; for the case of France, see Smyrnaios and Marty, 2017). Despite the crucial importance of their work, moderators are seen by their employers and some colleagues as the “impure” ones who should be avoided. Defined by their function, the cleaning up of digital rubbish, they become a kind of pariah. Alienation from themselves. This occurs because the continuous visualization of shocking images psychologically affects moderators, leading many of them to suffer from post-traumatic stress. In this way, they pay with their mental health for the moderation work (Steiger et al. 2021). Finally, I propose another type of alienation, associated with the different relationship of workers and owners with time. It is what I call time alienation. In platform capitalism, this is expressed in the polarization between those whose time is worth virtually nothing (digital micro-task workers) and those whose time is infinitely valuable (the owners or managers of the platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc.) (Braverman 1998, xviii.). Workers become alienated because they no longer possess or control their time, being subjected to the machines’ and the capitalist’s time and rhythms. As a result, workers have no time for themselves or for their personal development while owners have time in control. The secrecy and invisibility of companies’ decisions about content moderation also have consequences for their evaluation and social control. For example, we do not know what the criteria are, who establishes them and how they are established, how they are modified, and so on. So then, invisibility by design turns technology into a black box, feeding the image of the autonomy of technology and technological determinism, as if technology were running its own path by itself. Human decisions are passed off as technical reasons, concealing the decisions and negotiations involved in adopting certain technologies and technological designs: part of the material memory of internet content moderation.

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Is there something in the platforms’ structure, design, and operation that forces the concealment of moderation? Must it be low-paid work or carried out under precarious conditions? I think that neither the invisibility of moderation nor moderators’ working conditions are technical or structural conditions but rather a matter of companies’ pursuit of economic profits and good image. Notwithstanding, the change in moderators’ working conditions will require not only willingness and new company goals but also technical changes in the platforms’ operations: modification in the way tasks are assigned, the way work performed is measured, the setting up of feedback loops between moderators and the determination of moderation rules, among others. In this way, the change in the production conditions will lead to changes in the design (Feenberg 2002, 45). The work of moderation can and should be done differently. The open, complex, and dynamic character of human and social reality, with its continuous novelty and change of meanings, makes algorithmic automation of moderation unlikely. This implies that human labor will probably always be required for content moderation (Roberts 2017; Casilli 2020). Machines are not good at recognizing nuances of meaning, variations of context, metaphors, hints, allusions, and so forth.8 However, this has not been taken seriously by the current approaches to content moderation, based on rules and guidelines more or less fixed and organized top-down. A static view of reality predominates here. I relate this approach with the artisanal paradigm, also at the basis of the myth of complete mechanization. No set of rules can establish all possibilities in advance, no matter how complete it is believed to be. Reality always exceeds foresight (something the champions of artificial intelligence of the 1950s reluctantly accepted) (Dreyfus 1992). This is reflected in the continuous revision of moderation guidelines, always on the back of changes. The choice of this static paradigm is understandable because it offers a means for centralization and control. In a distributed approach, moderators would not be mere interchangeable or disposable human resources but recognized as agents in the organization of the platform. Platforms, as currently designed, embody the social and labor injustices of the factories of early industrialization and their design’s shortcomings. Therefore, I believe that a step toward improving the working conditions of content moderators will require redesigning the platforms. This means that the values they currently embody—centralization, hierarchy, and control— should be modified for new ones, opening up new possibilities and promoting other forms of working and living. The current working conditions of internet moderators oblige us to an exercise of remembering with things—that is, to recover the material memory of social media platforms. It is necessary to get out of technological somnambulism to escape “our misunderstandings about the Internet and our

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view of technology as being somehow magically not human” (S. Roberts, cited in Chen 2014). A first step has been taken by those who have brought moderators’ work to the public eye. Another one is the efforts to create fair working conditions and labor dignity for all digital micro-workers, either by the digital workers themselves or by international labor organizations (see digital workers’ cooperatives and International Labour Organization’s report Digital Labour Platforms and the Future of Work. Towards Decent Work in the Online World, 2018). However, more is needed: diffusion, education, rights, laws, and perhaps even the abolition of platform capitalism itself. For now, significant steps have been taken to recover the memory of internet content moderation, the various layers of memory and the virtual actions that are simultaneously present and absent. *** In this chapter, I have dealt with the oblivion of the material memory of things, their technological somnambulism. I emphasized that we daily deal with ready-made products present and available for our consumption, of which we do not know or do not want to see their conditions of production or operation. We thus forget that technologies incorporate power relations associated with, among others, human labor and the exploitation of raw materials. I used Marx’s notions of commodity fetishism and alienation to think about and analyze the technological somnambulism. Then, I tried to remember with things, recovering the material memory of things, as a way out of this forgetting and overlooking. As a specific case study, I focused on recovering the memory of internet content moderation, where human labor is deliberately hidden. I highlighted during this analysis the symbolic dimensions underlying the understanding of technology and its relation to human labor.

Chapter 5

Memory and Oblivion 2 The Dynamic View of Nature and the Natural

In this final chapter, I deal with a topic that, like of the previous chapter, is not usually associated with the study of memory: nature and the natural. In particular, I will deal with the so-called appeal to nature, considering it as a kind of technological somnambulism that forgets the technical production of “natural” things, that is, it is an oblivion of the material memory of “natural” things. Underlaying this assertions is the statement that what we call natural and artificial are not absolute opposites but mutually constructed moments of one and the same process. In this view, nature refers to what is not controllable by human technical powers, what resists and acts on its own, spontaneously, being at the same time, the basis for human actions themselves. Therefore, nature and the natural are not something fixed and defined once and for all, but dynamic. This is what I call the dynamic view of nature and the natural. In what follows, I will first present some cases of appeal to nature, showing that they imply a forgetting of the material memory of natural things and emphasizing their moral and religious imperatives. Second, I will outline the main aspects of the dynamic view of nature and the natural, which implies a technical production of nature, and a human history of nature where the natural is constituted in relation to the artificial. Then, I will analyze different meanings of nature and the natural, emphasizing the sense of the natural as the artificial concealed. And, finally, in an exercise of remembering with things, I will deal with the case of the current conceptions of body and death as examples of technologically mediated naturalization and its consequent oblivion.

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THE “APPEAL TO NATURE” AS THE FORGETTING OF THE MATERIAL MEMORY OF NATURAL THINGS In this section, I will present some examples of the so-called appeal to nature (Daston 2019; Kaebnick 2011) where things named “natural” paradoxically involve human intervention and technical activities. I will show that in these cases, there is a forgetting of the material memory, a technological somnambulism (like that of the commodities and goods) overlooking the technical production of the so-called natural things, and that this somnambulism is based on moral and religious imperatives. The term “natural” is commonly used in food advertising. We find it, for example, in bottled water, soft drinks, coffee, chocolates, and others, generally associated with ideas of purity and health. But does a concrete definition of this term exist? In the case of the United States, “Both the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture allow food producers to use the word ‘natural’ on labels as long as nothing artificial or synthetic has been added ‘that would not normally be expected in food’” (Weise 2014). Here, the natural is defined negatively in relation to the artificial or human and to the expectations we associate with the natural. Now, what are these expectations? How do we understand the opposition to the artificial in a human-made product? What does it mean to say that nothing artificial has been added if technical processes are involved in the elaboration? Sometimes, the term natural refers to low or unprocessed food or food from traditional agriculture, as opposed to industrially processed food or food incorporating genetically modified organisms (GMOs). But, in what sense is food from traditional agriculture “more natural” than what is industrially produced? Both cases involved human interventions (knowledge, experience, and technical skills). This tends to be forgotten when talking about natural agriculture, maybe due to the distance of modern urban societies from farming places. If natural means the opposite of artificial, then, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as natural agriculture or natural food. Certainly, the technologies involved in each case are very different and determine opposing forms of life, opening and closing distinct possibilities. These differences are more significant if we consider the entire life of things, that is, not only the final product but the use of material resources, the mechanisms of production, the labor conditions, the kinds of labor involved, and the pollution and waste produced (see, e.g., Appadurai 1986; and Annie Leonard’s video The Story of Stuff, 2009). Industrial production tends more and more to the obsolescence of food, an overabundance of food discarded without being consumed, with year-round availability of a variety of food from different regions of the world, requiring large transportation chains (see

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documentaries Thurn 2010; Baldwin 2014). Traditional agriculture, in contrast, is characterized by being mainly local, in production and consumption, and by being seasonal. Thus, the contrast between traditional and industrial food production should be made not appealing to nature but to the kind of forms of life they promote, which requires recovering the material memory of food production and the active role technologies play in it. All our foods have a degree of human intervention, although their technical dimensions are usually naturalized. As T. Weber says, “Preserving, cooking and baking are among the oldest-processing technologies, which are needed to make certain foodstuffs durable, edible and digestible” (2018, 715). The fruits and vegetables that we call natural have acquired their familiar shape through a long process of artificial selection like that of domestic animals. They do not grow wild with the forms that are familiar to us (see “The Rise and Spread of Food Production” in Diamond 2017; Fernandez-Armesto 2001; Cohen et al. 2021; and A. Roberts 2017, for the case of animals). The appeal to nature seems to be effective not through a precise use of the term natural but through a moral emphasis, identifying the natural with the good, healthy, and pure, and the artificial with the opposite values. The food industry knows this and makes use of it. In Miller’s words, “a broad variety of businesses, including major food corporations, sought to burnish their moral images and profit lines by selling goods labelled as natural or organic. By 2008, ‘all-natural,’ ‘organic,’ ‘whole grain,’ and ‘without additives or preservatives’ comprised the most common set of claims made for new food and beverage products introduced that year” (Miller 2017, 2). Such use can have dire consequences. For example, when bottled water is associated with the natural and healthy, despite the enormous amount of plastic waste it produces and the exploitation of local water sources in poor countries (see, e.g., the documentary Bottled Life, 2012, www​.bottledlife​.com). Another example is avocado, which has come to be considered a superfood among those seeking a natural and healthy diet, overcoming the gigantic ecological disaster that its overproduction entails (e.g., in my country, Chile. See documentaries Deutsche Welle 2018 and The Earth Focus Foundation 2019). In these cases, the appeal to nature endows a moral superiority, a mark of distinction that neutralizes the food’s political dimensions. In tourism, the appeal to nature is also common. Here natural refers to regions or places supposedly untouched by human beings. Nature is considered in opposition to humans and their activities, although paradoxically, the so-called natural places can be visited with all the comfort of modern technologies. In the words of the Spanish philosopher Félix Duque,

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Everywhere we find the same paradox: travel agencies offer exotic paradises, prepared and conditioned for the tourist by luxurious and comfortable hotels, together with the possibility of shopping in native shops where English is spoken. Every moderately situated person . . . aspires to return to nature . . . thanks to a garden in the villa, well connected to the big city. (Duque 2019, 17)

Many places we consider natural have been profoundly modified and shaped by human technical actions, or more precisely, techno-natural actions (e.g., a countryside landscape is the product of centuries of agricultural labor, logging, and hunting of animals). Regarding the case of the Rhine Falls, considered a natural expression of natural forces, Duque says, But where can this force of nature be found in its free state? It is impossible to find it because it simply no longer exists. Nature is there, before our eyes: but it is transformed by human technology. It is in the soil modified by centuries of sowing, in the plants grown under the combined action of solar energy and artificially produced energy, thus enabling irrigation, manure, tillage machinery; and it moves the farmer’s own body as heat energy. There is also nature in the water that falls freely; but the play of the dams perfectly regulates this supposed freedom, and the water is channelled to nostalgically embellish the place, presided over by the gigantic building of the power station. Moreover, the entire enclave is a healthy source of foreign exchange, as a place of recreation (i.e., of replenishment of productive forces) for tourists. (Duque 2019, 22; for other contemporary cases, see Robertson et al. 1996; also: “The Humanization of the Wilderness” in Simmons 1993, 79ff; and for the relationship between human beings and water, see the documentary Baichwal and Burtynksy 2013)

The natural, when considered pristine and pure, is placed outside of human history and, consequently, outside of technical activities. However, this appeal to nature ignores and hides the fact that the so-called natural has been the co-production of human activities (technique) and uncontrolled forces (nature). Take, for example, the landscape. This notion emerges in the seventeenth-century European arts, involving both the eyes and the hands of human beings from the beginning: “Landscape is not an objectual entity or a set of quantifiable physical elements, as interpreted by the positive sciences, but rather a subjective relationship between man and the environment in which he lives, a relationship that is established through the gaze” (Maderuelo 2005, 12; Descola 2013, 57). The landscape comprises different sediments or layers of material memory, layers of techno-natural processes that have constituted it over time. Remembering with things, in this case, implies recovering and reconstructing this material memory. “A genuine historical perspective acknowledges the autonomous reality of multiple pasts distinct from our present. Enquiry into this realm cannot rest on direct

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observation or personal experience, but must reconstruct and re-imagine concrete and particular events, prevailing conditions, and temporal evolutions from surviving remains or traces of them” (Hoffmann 2003, x). The British anthropologist Tim Ingold emphasizes this idea in his text “The temporality of the landscape” (1993; Olsen 2010, 107). Meaning is there to be discovered in the landscape, if only we know how to attend to it. Every feature, then, is a potential clue, a key to meaning rather than a vehicle for carrying it. This discovery procedure, wherein objects in the landscape become clues to meaning, is what distinguishes the perspective of dwelling. And since . . . the process of dwelling is fundamentally temporal, the apprehension of the landscape in the dwelling perspective must begin from a recognition of its temporality. Only through such recognition, by temporalizing the landscape, can we move beyond the division that has afflicted most inquiries up to now, between the “scientific” study of an atemporalized nature, and the “humanistic” study of a dematerialized history. (Ingold 1993, 172)

The technical shaping is more prominent and evident in places with a long-standing human presence (e.g., cities or industrial sites, the so-called manufactured landscapes) (Jennifer Baichwal’s 2006 documentary). They were thematized by the exposition of 1975–1976 in New York: New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, continuing the ideas of the German New Objectivity, which in the photography of the 1920s highlighted the aesthetic value of tools, factories, and industrial sites (see, e.g., Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photos). Bringing out the aesthetic value of manufactured landscapes, the “beauty in the banal” (O’Hagan 2010), was crucial for the constitution of the notion of industrial heritage (see chapter 2). We also find the appeal to nature in environmental discourses. Both environmentalists and corporations (especially in greenwashing campaigns) refer to nature, more properly, to the environment, using notions such as equilibrium, harmony, and stability, evidencing an essentialist and static view of it. Nature is conceived of as something pure and pristine without history, a kind of Paradise or Garden of Eden, in which human actions and interventions would necessarily lead to a disequilibrium (Merchant 1996; Ors-Martínez 2020, 28; for connections with eco-fascists, see Biehl and Staudenmaier 2011). However, as landscape, environment is also dynamic and historical, constructed with and against human activities and technologies, as environmental historians have recognized (for the problematization of the notion of “environment,” see Benson 2020, 1ff; Sörlin and Warde 2009); it has, therefore, a material memory, inextricable linking the natural and the artificial, that we have to retrieve, something more urgent than ever in our Anthropocene times (Carrington 2023; Baichwal et al. 2018).

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As I have emphasized, underlying the appeal to nature are moral and religious imperatives that I think play the role traditionally associated with the sacred, offering something that transcends the changes, giving meaning and direction in life (Eliade 1959). However, there is a paradoxical twist here. In traditional religious cultures, the natural opposed the divine precisely because it represented the impermanent, that which changes and perishes; and its sacred value was only given insofar as it participated in the atemporal divine. But in our secular societies, it is precisely the natural that assumes the role of the divine, its eternality, its purity and goodness, as something untouched by human hands. The appeal to nature pretends to be only descriptive (i.e., merely to say what it is), but it is, in fact, normative (i.e., it says what ought to be). By declaring something as natural, we make a value judgment that sanctions it as a norm. In this way, our statements and positions have an absolute basis making them irrefutable, thereby closing any possible debate. This, however, is unjustified because it leaves aside the problematic character of the natural, which implies questions such as: What is nature? What is meant by natural? What distinguishes the natural from the artificial? What concepts and images are involved in the notion of nature? What role do they play? (Kaebnick 2011, xii) The appeal to nature takes the answers to these questions as obvious and self-evident, even without formulating them. So then, it is not an observation but a fictionalization, which we may call “naturalization.” It implies overlooking the activities and processes involved in the making of natural things, considered as mere facts, disregarding their character as arti-facts.1 In the words of Duque, We have hypostatized (and sometimes even deified) a relationship: that by which man in society builds up his own organism over time in function, not only of the forces external to his body, but fundamentally of those which, by transcending it and connecting it to the environment, constitute it. Man does not use the environment (as if it were left, inert) nor does he adapt to it: there is no adaptation anywhere, unless we understand by it a dynamic interaction in continuous transformation. (Duque 2019, 24)

Finally, I think that the uncritical appeal to nature prevents the dialogue and leads to extreme positions, that of technophiles (very common among scientists and engineers) and that of the technophobes (usual in the humanities and social sciences), and impedes the critical comparison of different technologies and forms of life, not because of their naturalness or unnaturalness but for the distinct way they contribute to the societies we want to construct. I believe that a dynamic view of nature could contribute to this.

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THE TECHNICAL PRODUCTION OF NATURE As we have seen, we frequently call “natural” to human-made things or things having human intervention in their making, endowing them with a transcendent value (the good, healthy, and pure) not subject to temporality and detaching them from the material and technical processes involved in their production. This cancellation of time and the forgetting of the production processes is what I call the oblivion of the material memory of natural things. Underpinning this assertion is what I call a dynamic view of nature and the natural, according to which that we call “nature” does not correspond to a closed or bounded set of things, defined once and for all, but it is constituted and defined in relation to the technical capabilities humans have in a certain historical period. Simultaneously, I affirm that these production processes remain, in this way, out of sight and ignored, naturalizing their outcomes as simple given natural things. Thus, we call natural to “the sedimentation of socio-technical inventions that are accepted as immediately given resources for a community, forgetting their origin” (Duque 2019). Asserting a dynamic view of nature implies recognizing the existence of a technical production of nature, and of a human history of nature (Moscovici 1968; Duque 2019; Cronon 1996; Robertson et al. 1996; Ors-Martínez 2020), in which humans and nature constitute mutually. As Duque says, “Nature is shaped by the action of man on the environment. Man himself is created by the crystallisation and redistribution of material forces” (2019, 27). And in the words of Raymond Williams, “the idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history” (1980, 67). In contrast, the static view establishes nature as something fixed and given before human activities, “as an entity separate and independent of man, but ultimately subject to him” (Duque 2019, 24). We can call “nature” to that which, by virtue of its spontaneous activity, opposes and resists human actions, but being at the same time the basis for them, determining in this way a human history of nature and a technical production of it. Thus, we can understand “nature” as a network of facilities and difficulties (Ortega y Gasset 2015, 79; Merchant 2016). This history determines different images of nature2 that establish what is considered natural and artificial in a specific historical time, the limits between them, and what possibilities of action are permissible and forbidden (for a similar view, see Williams 1980). By using the expression “image of nature,” I want to emphasize the double dimension, hermeneutic and pragmatic, descriptive and normative, I associate with images (as I show in chapter 3). These dimensions are also present in the terms “nature” and “natural,” because with them we seek not only to say how things are but also how they should be.

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There is no consensus to delimit the images of nature. Here I cite just a few ways to do it. The British geographer Ian Simmons distinguishes five stages of techno-natural interrelationships in environmental history: hunting-gathering and early agriculture, riverine civilizations, agricultural empires, the Atlantic-industrial era, and the Pacific-global era (Simmons 1993, 2). The philosopher Félix Duque, for his part, following Moscovici’s “stages of nature” (1968), establishes the following phases: primordial nature (gatherers and hunters), organic nature (farmers and blacksmiths), artisanal nature (landowners, architects, and engineers), mechanical nature (bourgeoisie and mechanical engineers), cybernetic nature (bureaucracy and industrial scientists), digitalized nature (multinational concerns and computer engineers) (Duque 2019, 29). Finally, the historian and writer Lewis Mumford, in his classic Technology and Civilisation (1934), distinguishes three stages according to the use of material resources and energy: eotechnic, paleotechnic and neotechnic eras—“the eotechnic phase is a water-and-wood complex, the paleotechnic phase is a coal-and-iron complex, and the neotechnic phase is an electricity-and-alloy complex” (Mumford 2010, 110). Beyond the degree of adequacy of these divisions or classifications, I want to highlight their existence, which points from different perspectives and disciplinary approaches to a dynamic view of nature and the rescue of the memory of natural things. The forgetting of this memory occurs because “we tend to consider as natural everything that belongs to a stage of the relationship between productive forces, relations of production and the creation of inventive processes that have already been surpassed, and with which we find ourselves as the substratum of our doing” (Duque 2019, 23; for a detailed analysis of culturally diverse ways of shaping nature, see Descola 2013). The oblivion of the previous stages of the human history of nature and the tension in the passage from one to the other has been expressed in myths of transgression and punishment and mythical figures still relevant today (Prometheus, Daedalus, Faust, Frankenstein) (Lecourt 1996). One of the best known is that of the Greek titan Prometheus, who stole the divine fire to give it to humans and for this he was punished by Zeus (he was chained to a rock, and an eagle ate his liver daily).3 Here, fire symbolizes invention and technical creativity (Prometheus gives to humans various arts because of their lack of gifts) but also transgression because it is a stolen gift. Thus, this myth embodies the ambivalence of technical action: on the one hand, it is a source of progress, well-being, and civilization; and on the other, it is a source of pain, evil, and misfortune. From the perspective of the human history of nature, the myth of Prometheus may indicate the passage from a stage in which fire is a “divine gift” (it is found naturally and then preserved and protected) to a stage of mastery of it, which implies its artificial production (see J-J. Annaud’s La guerre du feu 1981). In ancient Greek, transgression

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is expressed by the word hybris, which means to go beyond the given limits established by the order of nature. One can thus speak of “Promethean ambitions” (Newman 2004, in relation to alchemy; Sandel 2007, 26–27, concerning genetic engineering). Prometheus reappears in a new guise in modern times in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818/2003). Here, the notion of transgression is preserved in the figure of the chemist Victor Frankenstein, the “modern Prometheus,” who does not measure the consequences of his actions and trespasses the natural limits between the animate and inanimate, creating an artificial man. Underlying the forgetting of the material memory of natural things is a static view of memory and processes based on the artisanal paradigm of production (see chapter 1). In it, only the initial and final stages of a process are relevant, the form and the thing made, respectively. This also occurs in the static view of nature that leads to the appeal to nature where the natural is something already made, not something in the making. Using the terms of the philosophical tradition, the natural is considered as natura naturata, not as natura naturans (Spinoza 2018, 28). With the recovery of the material memory of natural things, I want to attend to their entire process, not only the result, trying to dynamize the natural. Remembering with “natural” things would mean, in this case, the attempt to reconstruct the processes and activities (natural and artificial at once) involved in the configuration of the things we call “natural.” To avoid a confusion, I am not saying that nature no longer exists because humans have intervened in everything (McKibben 2003). This would reduce the natural-artificial tension to one of its poles, the artificial in this case. The dynamic view of nature affirms that this tension always exists, although it can occur in different ways. The natural-artificial relationship is different in a city, in a traditional agricultural field, or in Antarctica. In a city, the natural, that which opposes human action seems almost nonexistent, whereas in Antarctica, human intervention is still precarious or invisible (e.g., contamination by microplastics). To say that the tension is not resolved or dissolved in one of its poles means that there is always a dimension of spontaneous activity in them, both in the natural processes we try to control and in our own technical actions. In brief, the dynamic view of nature tries to overcome the natural-artificial dichotomy (based on the static view of nature), emphasizing the natural-artificial construction of the world. To better understand these statements, it is necessary to consider the various definitions, ideas, and metaphors associated with the terms nature and natural.

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THE MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF NATURE AND THE NATURAL “Nature” and the “natural” are complex terms with multiple meanings, charged with values, representations, and expectations, motivating actions of different kinds (for a detailed study, see Pannikar 1972, 19ff; Bondí and La Vergata 2014; Soper 1995). Etymologically the word “nature” derives from the Latin natura and this in turn from the Greek physis, which implies meanings such as producing, making, and being born (Leclerc 2013, 101). Thus, etymologically, “nature” means mainly “birth and generation, being and becoming” (for more details on the etymology of these terms, see Pannikar 1972, 55ff). Here is implied a dynamic view of nature. However, a static view is also implicit in the meaning we give to the word “nature,” that is, crucial for the appeal to nature, namely: “nature” as the essence of something, that permanent and underlying structure defining the identity of a thing or a person. In this sense, we talk of “human nature,” for example. From this perspective, things are what they are, once and for all, according to their essences or natures, according to the place they occupy in the order of nature, what ancient Greeks called cosmos. The Christian worldview maintained this idea but with the Christian God as the guarantor of the natural order, and modernity has replaced God with universal laws of nature (Daston 2019, 23ff). Certainly, identity as something fixed and permanent is meaningful in social structures and historical periods with limited mobility and slow changes. For example, in a peasant society, a farmer’s son will also be a farmer. His identity is defined in advance as something given that is not chosen, as a kind of destiny. On the contrary, the development of cities and commerce contributes to establishing identity as a choice, no longer defined in advance but constructed over time through actions and decisions. Identity construction becomes problematic and raises the existential question of who I am. In this context, Sartre’s assertion that existence precedes essence becomes meaningful. The appeal to nature is an attempt to escape the uncertainties of identity construction (both individual and collective), looking for ahistorical foundations defining solid and permanent meanings. The tension between a static and a dynamic view of identity arises strongly in the debates on memory. For example, when the French historian Pierre Nora tried to determine France’s lieux de mémoire (places of memory) (1997), he risks not only making an incomplete or excluding list but also fixing the identity of the “Frenchness” at a specific moment in time. This fixation is at the basis of the construction of “imagined communities” by nationalisms of various kinds (Anderson 2006). There is nothing wrong with having places of memory defining our identity; the problem emerges when

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they close it down, becoming identity no longer a contingent product of history but a timeless essence, a fact. Perhaps, a way to escape the static view of places can be provided by the ideas of the Chinese American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, who appeals to recovering place (topos) as a meaningful space (1979). To understand his proposal, we have to remember that another step of modernity, key in the constitution of modern sciences, was the shift from the Greek notion of topos (place) to the mathematical notion of space, empty of “secondary” qualities such as colour, taste, and smell, and defined only by “primary” qualities such as shape, length, width, and depth (see Galileo Galilei’s The Assayer, 1623/2008). The notion of place in the Greek worldview entailed not only a spatial location but also a meaning, not devoid of quality. The meaning of places is given in advance, and independently of human actions, so they are “natural places,” expressing the natural order. Yuan takes this Greek notion of topos but adding the constructive role of human actions and experiences. In this way, the places of memory defining our identity are not given once and for all but are established over time, depending on our experiences and history. The term “natural,” for its part, is generally defined in opposition to the artificial, as occurs in the appeal to nature. Natural would be the things coming into being spontaneously without human intervention, resulting from their own natures. This idea was put forward by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, for whom exists a fundamental ontological difference between the natural and the artificial, between natural things (animals and their parts, plants, simple bodies) and artifacts: the former possess in themselves the principle or cause of their change or movement, whereas the latter change due to an external principle or cause (Aristotle, Physics, Book II, 192b8-20). The principle is the form (opposed to matter, conceived here as passive), internal in natural things and external in artificial ones. Thus, natural things move trying to reach their own ends determined by their intrinsic forms, whereas artificial things change due to forms imposed onto them by external agents, for example, an artisan making a sculpture (the “artisanal paradigm”; see chapter 1). Now, in the Aristotelian definition, change is not only movement in space or local change but also qualitative change, implying a passage from the potential to the actual. This Aristotelian distinction between the natural and the artificial remains relevant even today, for example, when contrasting the natural as authentic and true because it expresses something intrinsic and the artificial as fake because it is shaped externally. Natural things would be such because they are what they intrinsically are without external intervention. This opposition between the artificial and the natural extends into other equivalent oppositions: nature and nurture, nature and culture, nature and society, and so forth. Sometimes the activity is located on the human side, considering nature as a mere unformed passive receptacle waiting for a

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human form. This is the basis for the idea of nature as uncultured, uncivilized, or wild. On the contrary, when activity is placed on the side of nature, natural determinisms of various kinds raise, for example, genetic determinism, which establishes that human existence is no more than an expression of its genetic inheritance. Implicit in both cases is a static view of the natural-artificial relationship. Now, the notions nature and natural have been also important as moral standing, as we have seen above in the appeal to nature. Something is good because it is natural, and the natural is good (Daston and Vidal 2004; Bondí and La Vergata 2014, 123ff). The natural is thus charged with a moral sense, which in turn serves as the foundation for what is said to be good. This normative use has been especially influential in the realms of the law (e.g., the Natural Law) and ethics (e.g., in the Aristotelian philosophy and the Roman Catholic Church) and in establishing what is considered unnatural (Ball 2012). Traditionally, the moral use of nature has been criticized showing its logical defect, the so-called naturalistic fallacy: the unfounded passing from the descriptive realm of what is to the normative realm of what ought to be. What happens in nature cannot be a basis for moral claims (these ideas are mainly associated with the philosophers David Hume and G. E. Moore; see Daston 2014). But this logical objection is insufficient. Nature as a moral standing is still used in everyday life and also in the sciences. Recall, for example, the debates about eugenics, race, gender, or about the so-called sociobiology (Lewontin et al. 2017). I state that the logical objection is insufficient because, as I said before, underlying the appeal to nature exists a more potent element, not logical but moral and religious, associated with the seeking of transcendence—that is, reaching in the present something that was already in the past and would be in the future; something atemporal. The natural, in a society of overabundance, has a religious meaning because it offers stability and hope, characteristics of the sacred, cutting through the ungraspable fluidity of the contingent every day, serving as a source of meaning and orientation in life. The moral standing of nature, establishing some things as natural and others as artificial, poses the opposition between different forms of life in absolute terms of good and bad. Finally, I refer to a notion of nature and the natural that points toward the dynamic view that I wanted to emphasize, which overcomes the natural/ artificial dichotomy—namely, the “natural” as a learned habit. It was used especially in the English aesthetic of the seventeenth century (in particular, by the philosopher Antony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury). Here “natural” does not oppose artificial but is a consequence and result of it; however, at the same time, this technical origin is hidden. In this way, the term “natural” was used to name the practices performed so fluidly and effortlessly

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that they appeared to be innate and not learned (e.g., “she or he dances or behaves naturally”) (Grean 1967, 143). Nevertheless, this apparent innateness was, indeed, the result of a continuous practice forming a habit. Thus, “natural” refers here to something artificial whose artificiality is concealed. This idea is key to understanding how I think about nature and the natural. Taking into account this previous analysis, I hope it will be better understood what I mean by a dynamic view of nature and the natural. I have stated that when we speak of nature, we are referring to that opposing and resisting but also sustaining and enabling our capacities for technical action in a given historical moment. Hence, nature is not a notion fixed and given in advance, once and for all, but constructed in relation to the technologies at hand. I have also affirmed that the “appeal to nature” implies a forgetting of the material memory of things overlooking the processes of technical construction involved in the so-called natural things (naturalization). Now I want to bring these abstract analyses to a concrete case, the naturalization of the body as a machine in medicine and its influence on the conception of death as brain death. To do so, I will try to reconstruct some of the underlying layers shaping these views. THE NATURALIZATION OF THE BODY AS A MACHINE AND THE DEFINITION OF DEATH Consider the following situation: a person lies in an intensive care unit bed. He or she is unconscious and connected to a series of machines (electrodes, tubes, catheters, lines of monitoring and administration of medication). He or she breathes with the help of a mechanical ventilator but presents a normal colour and temperature and a regular pulse. The person seems just to be sleeping. However, he or she has been declared brain dead, and his or her organs will soon be removed for transplantation. It is what is called a living corpse. In this situation, the features we intuitively associate with death—lack of movement, lack of breathing or of blood circulation—no longer define what it means to be dead. The notion of brain death has replaced the intuitive “natural” conception of what it is to be dead. This new “natural” death is no longer something directly apprehensible with our senses (it has become invisible) but requiring the mediation and sanction of technology, in this case, the electroencephalogram (EEG) that measures brain activity. Underlying this new “natural order” of body and death is the image of the body as a machine (in the twofold hermeneutic and pragmatic dimension of image), which began to be established in Europe from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward. At this time, there was a proliferation of automata (e.g., mechanical clocks, windmills, human and animal self-moving

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mechanical figures) in churches, theatres, palaces, and gardens, among other places (Riskin 2016, 30; Schaffer 1999), all of them constituted of diverse parts or gears in coordinated mechanical operation. Unlike manual instruments or tools such as shovels or hammers, machines and automata possess functional independence because the movement activating them does not determine their operation (the coordination of their parts in time and space). The mechanical clock, invented in European monasteries in the thirteenth century (Mumford 2010), is undoubtedly the paradigm for these mechanisms (Mayr 1986, 28ff) and is the fundamental model and metaphor for understanding living beings and organic bodies, the view of the world as a great clockwork mechanism, and of God as the watchmaker who has designed this world (Rossi 1970, 137ff; Bedini 1964; De Solla Price 1964). The mechanical understanding of living beings and organic bodies implied their identification with a set of parts diversely moved and ordered following the laws of nature, equally valid for the animate and the inanimate (Andrault 2016, 10). In this way, the frontier between these realms disappears, and organic bodies are inscribed in the physical world and understood in purely mechanical terms (shape, movement, magnitude) (Descartes AT VII, 42; 1984, 40). A natural order was thus trespassed, and steps were taken to set up a new one (our own), albeit still only in a primarily conceptual way. The French philosopher René Descartes expresses these ideas clearly in his Treatise on Man (1630s): I assume the body to be but a statue, an earthen machine formed intentionally by God to be as much as possible like us. Thus not only does He give it externally the shapes and colours of all the parts of our bodies; He also places inside it all the pieces required to make it walk, eat, breathe, and imitate whichever of our own functions can be imagined to proceed from mere matter and to depend entirely on the arrangement of our organs. (1972, 2–4; AT XI, 120)

For Descartes, organic bodies are nothing but machines, certainly subtler than those made by humans, as divine or natural creations, but machines in the end. I know of no distinction between these things [artifacts] and natural bodies, except that the operations of things made by skill are, for the most part, performed by apparatus large enough to be easily perceived by the senses: for this is necessary so that they can be made by men. (Descartes, Principles of Philosophy 1984, 285; AT IX, 321)

Thus, there is only a difference of degree and not of nature or essence, between bodies and machines, that depends on the quantity and subtlety of the parts that constitute the natural and the artificial machines, which in turn

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implies differences in their arrangement and functioning. Strictly speaking, the distinction between the natural and the artificial is annulled so that machines can be called natural or artificial indifferently. “It is as natural for a clock, composed of wheels of a certain kind, to indicate the hours, as for a tree, grown from certain kind of seed, to produce the corresponding fruit” (Descartes, Principles of Philosophy 1984, 285–86; AT IX, 321–22). Therefore, the human body is not more than a machine made by the hands of God (Descartes, Discourse on Method, AT VI, 55; 2006, 45; Le Breton 2013), and the mere disposition of the organs can explain nonvoluntary movements, without recourse to the soul, just as “we need not judge that there is a soul in a clock, which causes it to show the hours” (La description du corps humain, AT XI, 226). In this mechanical context, the human soul is placed only as an exception, a source of voluntary movements and consciousness, saving the human transcendence (Cartesian dualism); animals, for their part, lacking a soul, are considered as purely mechanical beings (Descartes, AT VI, 56; 2006, 46; Des Chene 2001, 108; Martin and Barresi 2006, 126). In this way, Descartes sanctions the difference between the body as lived or experienced and the body as an object (in German, this difference is made using the terms Leib and Körper, respectively; and it is similar to that of the ancient Greek between bios, experienced life, and zoé, purely biological life). Accordingly, the mechanical conception of the body neglects and overlooks the experiential dimension of the body (Merleau-Ponty 1948). Machines and automata become the key to understanding the very foundations of the corporeal. Visible bodies would be constituted by invisible bodies that would be basically equivalent in terms of elements and structuring. By blurring the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, this conception of the body gave rise to two lines of development that continue to this day. On the one hand, conceiving the body as a machine makes it possible to study it separately, as a set of parts or systems with a certain degree of independence, and in terms of its mechanical or chemical components, without resorting to forms or souls. The heart, for example, can be considered as no more than a pump. This is the view still present in our modern medicine. On the other hand, conceiving the body as a machine opens the possibility of producing machines imitating the organic. Skilled artisans constructed androids (automata attempting to imitate the human shape) that sought to overcome, in concrete, the boundary between the natural and the artificial, on the assumption that if the human body was a mere machine, it could be imitated by constructing a sufficiently complex machine. Examples of these efforts were the automata of the French engineer and inventor Jacques de Vaucanson (1709–1782) (the Flute Player, the Digesting Duck, and the Tambourine Player), and in the second half of the eighteenth century, those of the prominent Jaquet-Droz family of Swiss watchmakers (Pierre built

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watches, pocket watches, and automata together with his son, Henri-Louis, and his adopted son, Jean-Frédéric Leschot. Their automata, the musician, the draughtsman, and the writer, are still possible to see.) (Riskin 2016, 129ff; Voskuhl 2013). These developments led the eighteenth-century French physician Julien de La Mettrie to trespass the boundary that Descartes still drew between the animate (humans) and the nonanimate (human body, animals, and machines). For La Mettrie, the entire human being, not just the body, is a machine, L’homme machine (1748/1994). In his view, there is no essential distinction between humans, animals, and machines. Another step in the mechanization of the body image relates to the development of a new type of machine, the self-regulating one. The machines of the eighteenth century could only perform specific tasks and were not capable of adjusting to changes in the environment. The cybernetics of the 1940s and 1950s took a step forward in that direction with the idea of self-regulating machines (Wiener 1948), composed of feedback systems allowing them to adjust to environmental variations. Think, for example, of a thermostat or a guided missile. Theoretical and practical developments in this line contribute to further blurring the boundaries between the artificial and the natural, conceiving them now equally as self-regulating systems. The human body, animals, and cybernetic machines would be essentially the same, regardless of their material differences: self-regulating systems leading to states of dynamic equilibrium or homeostasis. In the medical field, machines were developed to maintain homeostasis in the human body (e.g., the mechanical ventilator to maintain breathing and blood circulation and the dialysis machine to supplement the functions of failing kidneys). This transgression of limits is evident in the configuration of the notion of cyborg, which is developed in this theoretical and technological context. The term is introduced in M. Clynes and N. Kline’s paper “Cyborgs and Space” (1960), devoted to human beings’ physiological and psychological adaptation to outer space. The idea was to adapt humans’ organic functions (conceived of as part of homeostatic systems) to extreme environmental conditions incorporating technological devices (a technologically mediated adaptation). The authors ask, “What are some of the devices necessary to create the self-regulating man-machine system?” (Clynes and Kline 1960, 27). This self-regulating man-machine system or cyber-organism (cyborg) could thus be free to venture into space travel, both a technological and a spiritual challenge (the final frontier) (Clynes and Kline 1960, 27). This notion had derivations in science fiction, philosophy, and social sciences (notably Donna Haraway’s 1985 article “A Cyborg Manifesto”). It has also been central to reimagining the body and the artificial/natural division in posthumanist and transhumanist movements (Durán-Allimant 2020b).

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However, before these extensions, it is in medicine where these ideas concretize in the most radical ways, redefining through technological mediation what we understand by body and death (Hacking 2007). In fact, a person in an intensive care unit is really a cyborg (although the term is not used in this field). “More than a dozen tubes, lines, or leads may be inserted in or attached to patient’s bodies—a concatenation of technology that demands constant attention. These tubes and leads link the patient to an array of monitors and machines, among them the indispensable ventilator” (Lock 2002, 63). Traditionally, death was determined based on observable characteristics: a person does not move, his or her eyes are closed, is not breathing, and has no pulse (Jonsen 1998, 235). However, this naturalness of death begins to change with the development of technologies such as the defibrillator, which “reactivates the heart,” and especially with the artificial ventilator (developed since the 1950s). “A major change in hospital practice occurred in the mid-1960s when gravely ill or injured patients could receive respiratory support on a ventilator. This shift transformed resuscitation into a focused, successful strategy” (Hamilton 2012, 340). Initially, positive pressure was manually applied through the tube inserted into the trachea; later, it was automated (Jonsen 1998, 236). These new technologies contribute to define a new natural order of body and death. “Up to this time, death was confirmed when a doctor certified life extinct, and the time of death recorded was the moment when the heart stopped. But prolonged survival on a ventilator raised new questions” (Hamilton 2012, 341). Questions such as: How is clinical death to be defined and determined, and when should life support be withdrawn? And in the case of patients who were unconscious, comatose, and maintained only by mechanical ventilators: should they be allowed to die, or should they be judged already dead? Since the 1950s, death has been associated with brain activity. In 1959, French neurologists studied groups of patients in a deep coma, so deep that they called it coma depassé (literally, “a state beyond coma”), considered as a state of survival. They correlated the absence of brain activity with irreversible brain dysfunction. Those in coma depassé were in a condition of irreversible unconsciousness. It is suggested then to substitute cardiorespiratory signs for the cerebral criterion (Jonsen 1998, 237). These developments are connected to, and gain importance from, another dimension of medical advances, transplantation. There was a willingness to use patients’ organs in deep coma, which offered a good alternative as they maintained physiological functioning. For example, in 1963, the Belgian doctor Guy Alexandre removed a kidney from a patient in coma depassé. The problem was that these patients were considered alive, so harvesting their organs was homicide. The question arises: Is a person in a deep coma a mere corpse from which organs can be removed? Is coma depassé the same

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as death? (Jonsen 1998, 237). Thus, organ transplantation led to the redefinition of death as equivalent to brain death or deep and irreversible coma (Lock 2002, 57ff). This equivalence was sanctioned in 1968 with the Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death: “A Definition of Irreversible Coma.” The following characteristics were established for declaring brain death: bilaterally dilated pupils, absence of reflexes, absence of spontaneous breathing, drop in blood pressure, and flat electroencephalogram (cited in Jonsen 1998, 238; see documentary Mannucci 2008). The U.S. anaesthesiologist Henry K. Beecher, the chair of the 1968 Harvard Committee, considered brain death as a new definition of death, different from the cardiorespiratory. There would be then two definitions of death. Many saw this situation as unacceptable because death was considered a unitary phenomenon. Thus, the 1981 Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) established in the United States a double criterion for declaring death, one cardiorespiratory and the other cerebral. According to this, death is declared if an individual has “(1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including brain steam” (National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws 1981, 5). To maintain the unity, brain death is considered as potentially driving to cardiac arrest or biological death (without technological support), which strictly speaking, is considered the unique death. This implies that “Globally, [physicians] now invariably equate brain death with death and do not distinguish it biologically from cardiac arrest” (cited in Truog et al. 2020, E1). The counterintuitiveness of brain death has led to cases of refusal in accepting brain-dead people as really dead because their appearances and physiological signs show them alive (Sharp 2006, 42ff). The acceptance and the possibility of transplantation hinge on a mechanical view of the human body, in which the exchange of parts does not affect personal identity. However, this mechanical view is occasionally nuanced concerning organs traditionally associated with our identity (such as the heart; remember when one points to one’s chest to say “me”). Thus, those who receive another person’s heart report that they feel the “presence” of the donor (see Barraud’s and Révil’s documentary Un coeur qui bat 2011; and Sharp 2006, 227). In Japan, where death is more a process than an event, accepting this notion of death has also had difficulties (Lock 2022). These are some of the layers of material memory present in this new natural order of body as machine and death as brain death, in this new image of nature. Their recovery would allow us to better understand their assumptions and consequences and to better understand those to whom they are strange and alien.

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*** In this chapter I deal with the technical production of nature. Based on the ideas of Félix Duque, I stated that nature is defined in relation to the human capacities for technical action—that is, that the natural is not opposed to the artificial. The mutual constitution of the natural and the artificial defines a human history of nature, where the frontier between them changes over time according with the technological capabilities. I also said that the appeal to nature is a technological somnambulism, similar to that of commodities, because it leaves in oblivion the processes, activities, and decisions at the basis of the production of the things we call natural. This is evidently so when we call natural things evidently human-made. I proposed remembering with things as an exercise to recover the material memory of natural things. Finally, I tried to do so in the case of our current conceptions of body and death.

Acknowledgments

This book has taken me a lot longer to write than I expected. This was due not only to the difficulty of the subject matter and the approach taken, but also to personal difficulties. I started writing this book before the COVID-19 pandemic and before my parents were diagnosed with cancer, and my mother died in early 2020. So, my first thanks go to my family and friends (especially to my partner and companion over all these years, Myriam) for supporting me through these difficult times and for pushing me to finish this book. Without them, this task would have been impossible. The ideas in this book were developed over the years in dialogue with several colleagues and students from different countries and disciplines. I would therefore like to thank them all for their generous help. I would also like to thank Rowman & Littlefield for waiting so patiently for the manuscript and for understanding my constant delays. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to my first editor at R&L, Isobel Cowper-Coles, for suggesting that I write this book and for encouraging me in the initial stages of this project. Finally, my thanks are due to the entire R&L team, who have given this book its final shape.

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Glossary

The artisanal paradigm of processes and production. It is the model of how an artisan works and produces things (or it is supposed to do). According to it, production is the active imposition of a preexisting form (mental or spiritual entity) upon an unformed and passive matter. The processes are considered only from their beginning (form) or their end (product). This model implies a material-immaterial dualism, which is at the base of the static view of memory, culture, and technology. Culture, dynamic view of. It refers to a set of human-technical-environmental complexes or networks and forms of life in a given time and space. They involve sets of possibilities and their opening and closing. Culture, static view of. This view conceived of culture as something merely mental or immaterial, separated from material things but preserving itself through them, giving meaning to them. Familiarity with things. It refers to the stability of practices and representations in the engagement of people and things, at the individual and local levels. Forms of life. This notion relates to the social and individual dimensions constituting and ordering our lives: identities, habits, practices, representations, ethical, political, and cultural relations and structures. Forms of life have their own temporal and spatial dynamism. Images. They refer to the presence or representation of something. Following Bergson’s ideas, they are defined as material and immaterial, implying representation and action, interpretation and meaning, practices and habits. Further, images are open both spatially (to other images not presently perceived) and temporally (to past and future images). 119

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Loop of remembering. It refers to the dynamism between mental and technical images in the process of remembering, where they actively constitute what is recalled and how it is recalled. Material memory. It refers to memory considering its material and immaterial dimensions, representation, and action, at once. Material memory, layers of. Layers of memory are condensations of past activities and processes (forms of life), preserving, that is, existing and acting in our actual forms of life but virtually (they are not consciously or attentively considered). Thus, they refer to the paradoxical coexistence and contemporaneity of what is distant in time, in their representational and pragmatic dimensions. Memory, dynamic view of. According to this view, memory is presence and absence at the same time. Presence of what it was and absence because it was, but also possible absence in the future because what we remember now might not be remembered in the future. Memory connects in this way past-presentand-future. Further, memory and memory images imply a representation and action at once, that is, has a hermeneutical dimension and a pragmatic one, shaping our perceptions and opening and closing possibilities. Memory, static view of. This view conceived of memory as a container of memories or recollections. It is a spatialization of the temporal dimension of memory. It is based on the artisanal paradigm of processes and production. Nature, appeal to. It is to call something natural to establish its intrinsic moral value. It is a kind of technological somnambulism that implies the oblivion or concealment (deliberate or unintended) of the technical processes, activities, and practices at the base of the production and operation of natural things. Nature, dynamic view of. According to this view, nature is constituted and defined dynamically in relation to the technical capabilities that human beings have in a certain historical period, and it is what opposes and resists human technical actions, due to its spontaneity, but also sustains and enables those same actions. Nature constitutes a network of facilities and difficulties changing over time and does not correspond to a closed or bounded set of things. Nature, human history of. From a historical perspective, it is the mutual constitution of humans and nature (or environment). It implies the accumulation

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of layers of material memory that can be recovered or reconstructed by remembering with natural things. Nature, images of. They establish what is considered natural and artificial in a specific historical time, the limits between them, and what possibilities of actions are permissible and forbidden. They imply the double dimension of images, hermeneutic and pragmatic, in this case, descriptive and normative. Nature, static view of. The conception of nature at the base of the appeal to nature that considers it as something fixed and given before human activities, as something ahistorical. Remembering with things. The process, exercise, and practice, the effort, of reconstructing (or recovering) the layers of material memory of things. It is a representational and imaginative exercise and a pragmatic one (including actions, decisions, activities, etcetera). Imply knowledge, learning, collaboration, interpretation, and imagination. Technological somnambulism. It refers to overlooking the active and constitutive role that technologies play in the shaping of our forms of life. In this book, technological somnambulism also refers to the oblivion or concealment (deliberate or unintended) of the processes, activities, decisions, and power relations enabling the design, production, operation, and maintenance of technical artifacts or technologies. Technologies as forms of life. This phrase emphasizes the active and constitutive role that technologies and technical artifacts play in the shaping of our forms of life. Technologies are not mere neutral instruments to use and discard but active players in our activities and practices, representations, and interpretations of ourselves and others. Technologies as forms of life recall that by modifying the form of things, we also modify ourselves. Technologies as operators of possibilities. This expression stresses the active role technologies and technical artifacts play in the modulation of possibilities, their opening and closing. Technology, dynamic view of. It is the view that considers the active and constitutive role that technologies and technical artifacts play in shaping our forms of life, that is, that conceived of them as mediators and operators of possibilities.

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Technology, neutral and instrumental view of (static view of). According to this view, technology or technical artifacts are mere instruments, that is, means to an end, without influence in the latter’s choice and without political and ethical dimensions; they would be neutral, and everything would depend only on their use. Uchronic analysis. It refers to the comparative analysis of possibilities and possible worlds, imagining alternatives to our present situation removing or incorporating different technologies. The aim of this analysis is to compare the possibilities that open and close and the different possible forms of life. The whole or entire life of things. This expression refers to considering artifacts at all stages or phases of their existence: design, manufacture, distribution, use, disposal; not only at the stage of use or consumption.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. We have books such as Biographies of Scientific Objects (Daston, 2000), Things That Talk (Daston, 2004), In Defense of Things (Olsen, 2010), The Life of Things, the Love of Things (Bodei, 2015), and Persons and Things (Esposito, 2016), exploring the relations between persons and things in different perspectives and with different interests; and we have also a podcast titled Everything is Alive (Radiotopia, 2018–) where artifacts are interviewed and tell us their life stories, just to name a few cases.

CHAPTER 1 1. I say it is supposed because we can see the artisanal work in a different way, not just imposing a preexistent form in an inert matter but creating something new in the process of production. 2. Winner takes the term “form of life” from Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (2010), who in his book Philosophical Investigations (1953) states the concept “form of life” in relation to what he calls “language games” (Cometti 2011), although in Wittgenstein the meaning of the expression is problematic. Forms of life differ from lifestyles: “Lifestyle is not synonymous with an entire way of life but rather refers to something more partial: patterned activities, tastes, and uses of material culture that express meaning about individual identity, preferences, and group affiliations. The sociological concept of lifestyle derives originally from Weber, who talked about status groups giving rise to styles of life that can be the basis of or requirement for social honor; that is, prestige. Significantly, what most clearly distinguishes one status group from another is its consumption of goods that are related to its style of life” (Miller 2017, 24). 3. I relate this character to Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance, which is recognized as the common or stable element characterizing a set of people and determining them as part of a group or kind but not defined by a set of features we can find in every single member of the group. There is not a family’s essence, as it were (2010, xcv). 123

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4. The gap between concrete practices and explicit rules or norms forces an ongoing adjustment, a continuous renewal of practices and interpretations. In the philosophy of science, authors such as Michael Polanyi and Thomas S. Kuhn emphasized the importance of tacit knowledge in the constitution of communities of people working together, as scientists do. Tacit elements are a crucial factor both in the practices and actions, as in the interpretations and representations a scientific community identifies as constitutive elements of their identity, defining the relevant problems, the methodologies, and the accepted results. Tacit knowledge also plays an important role in the identity and definition of forms of life, in their stability and their continual transformation. 5. An interesting case providing “multiple layers” of time is Google Street View, because it combines photos from different years. So, for example, from one street you can see a building in the making, but if you go to it, it is built.

CHAPTER 2 1. The complete nomination is Oficio tradicional del organillero-chinchinero [traditional trade of the organ-grinder or chinchinero], and it was registered as Chilean intangible cultural heritage in the UNESCO item of “Social Uses, Rituals and Festive Events” and “Performing Arts.” Prior to this nomination, the trade of organ-grinder was considered as intangible cultural heritage when the Corporación Cultural Organilleros de Chile was nominated in 2013 as Tesoro Humano Vivo de Chile [Living Human Treasure of Chile], and in 2014, when the Organilleros y Chinchineros de Valparaíso [Organ-grinders and Chinchineros of Valparaíso] were chosen as Cultores destacados [Outstanding Creators] within the Living Human Treasures program. 2. Manuel Lizana passed away on October 21, 2021, at seventy-three. For more information about his family tradition in the trade, see www​.organillerosychinchine roslizana​.cl. 3. Another example of the convergence of work and leisure in the industrial era was the creation of the first workers’ football teams combining the interests of employers, workers, and citizens, as shown by the recent television series The English Game (2020). In Chile, football was introduced by English immigrants, which founded in 1889 the club Valparaíso Wanderers FC in Valparaíso. This club was the model for the foundation of the still existing football team Santiago Wanderers, the oldest one in Chile, declared Valparaíso’s Intangible Heritage in 2007. 4. One approach along these lines, going beyond the heritage field in the strict sense, is the use of an organizational material memory as a principle of relational unity, a link with the past bringing cohesion in the present and opening up to future challenges; see Eisenman and Frenkel (2021). 5. For example, Near Valparaíso there is a museum safeguarding the memory of the dam and the power station that supplied electricity to the city during the twentieth century (“Tranque de la Luz” Museo Histórico de Placilla) (Steiner and Fuentes 2021).

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CHAPTER 3 1. The recovery of meaningful moments through photographic images seems to be the basis of the success of the iPhone app Dispo with the motto “Live in the moment,” allowing it to emulate the process of capturing photographs with old analogical cameras. The time delay, fundamental to constructing meaningful moments, does not occur in this case due to technical limitations but is mimicked through an imposed delay time (you must wait for “development” until the next day). 2. Often, this leads to the use of graphic images for drawing attention to human suffering (remember the case of the Syrian child Alan Kurdi, 2015. See https:​//​en​ .wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/Death​_of​_Alan​_Kurdi), with the consequent problems of privacy and voyeurism, which reminds us again the actual power of images. This power is present even in the cases of the deliberate hiding of images for political reasons, for example, images of torture. 3. “As Susan Sontag argued in 1973, the tourist’s compulsion to take snapshots of foreign places revels how taking pictures can become paramount to experience an event; at the same time, communicating experiences with the help of photographs is an integral part of tourist photography” (van Dijck 2007, 112). Considering this, we could say that the new forms of experience made possible by digital photography, the internet, and social networks do not necessarily constitute an essential change but an extension of previous modes of experience (e.g., the experience of being a tourist with a camera). 4. For an extraordinary presentation of the philosophical questions involved in the relations between truth, memory, identity, and technology, see Ted Chiang’s short story “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” (2019, 185).

CHAPTER 4 1. This idea is already present, for example, in the vindication of the role of labor and workers in developing the cities and buildings of the ruling classes. See, for example, Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 “Questions from a Worker Who Reads.” 2. We can relate this “somnambulism” to the “cargo cult” (Worsley 2009). For the Melanesians who received Western-made goods via cargo planes, these goods were like manna from heaven, like a gift from the gods. The production process was hidden from their eyes, just as it is for us today. 3. The term combines “faux” (the French word for fake) and “automation” and means that the work made by humans is falsely perceived as automated (it is a kind of false consciousness) (Taylor 2018). 4. From the theory of technology as mediation, we can consider platforms as establishing a technological environment or medium allowing the connection or link between clients and “workers,” euphemistically referred to by companies as “associates,” thus avoiding the labor commitments that by law should be fulfilled. “Platforms are not only a means to establish relationships, they have become a medium, an environment of relationships in themselves. While corporations want to portray them as

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merely neutral instruments establishing links for problem-solving, they do not take into account the power relations that the very design of the platforms embodied. While often presenting themselves as empty spaces for others to interact on, they in fact embody a politics. The rules of product and service development, as well as marketplace interactions, are set by the platform owner” (Srnicek 2017, 47). 5. Invisibility by design and secrecy: “And until recently, operations involving moderation were so secretive that none of the companies that use these workers disclosed site locations and names of outsourcing firms. That secrecy, also enforced through strict confidentiality agreements that prevent workers from talking about the job, posting about work locations or inviting visitors to the office, increases the sense of isolation among moderators—though companies say it is for their own safety because the decisions they make are controversial” (Dwoskin 2019). 6. The tech companies’ rhetoric of light also brings us closer to some religious rejections of body and the material and the search for an immaterial transcendence. I call this tech rhetoric “neo-gnostic” (Duque 2003), because for the Gnostics, one of several groups in the origins of Christianity, the body was a prison for the soul; and matter, an obstacle to transcendence. With the appeal to light, technology corporations also point to deep Christian roots. 7. “Without visible consequences here and largely unseen, companies dump child abuse and pornography, crush porn, animal cruelty, acts of terror, and executions— images so extreme those paid to view them won’t even describe them in words to their loved ones—onto people people desperate for work. And there they sit in crowded rooms at call centers, or alone, working off-site behind their screens and facing cyber-reality, as it is being created. Meanwhile, each new startup begins the process, essentially, all over again” (Buni and Chemaly 2016). 8. Machine learning relies entirely on past information and is not good at guessing surprising futures. As I write these lines, I receive a notification from YouTube that audiovisual content uploaded by me will be marked as inappropriate for those under eighteen. What is this content? A video that shows scenes from Resnais’s documentary Night and Fog, where naked bodies appear: the bodies of those murdered in Nazi concentration camps.

CHAPTER 5 1. For example, technologies such as agriculture, food, or, more recently, electricity and drinking water can be considered as natural for those who were born into the technical context and forms of life those technologies shape, because they exist and are part of their everyday life, neglecting or forgetting the processes of production and the human intervention in them. 2. I draw inspiration for this term from German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s The Physicist’s Conception of Nature (1958) and the Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri’s La idea de naturaleza: la nueva física (1934). Both highlight how scientific and technological developments impact how we conceive of nature and the natural.

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3. At least this is the core of the diverse variants, which incorporate and emphasize diverse elements. The main versions are those of Hesiod (transgression, just punishment, Pandora), Aeschylus (benefactor of humankind), Plato (the helpless character of humankind, lack of gifts), and Ovid (creation of man from earth and water). With Pandora (the first woman), the punishment is not only for Prometheus but for human beings. Pandora opens the “box” where all the evils were contained, leaving only hope inside. Prometheus would only have modeled the body of the human being (in clay) but would not have given him a soul, which would have come from Athena (García-Gual 2022).

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146

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Resnais, A., director. 1956. Nuit et brouillard [Night and Fog], film. ———. 1959. Hiroshima mon amour, film. ———. 1961. L’Année dernière à Marienbad [The Last Year at Marienbad], film. ———. 1963. Muriel ou le temps d'un retour [Muriel], film. ———. 1968. Je t’aime je t’aime [I Love You, I Love You], film. ———. 1980. Mon oncle d’Amerique [My American Uncle], film. Rigaud, S., director. 2019. Ghost Workers, documentary. Schnell, U., director. 2012. Bottled Life: Nestle’s Business with Water, documentary. Scott, R., director. 1982. Blade Runner, film. ———. 1983. Apple Mac: 1984, video. Scott-Clarke, E., director. 2018. e-Life, documentary. Siegel, D., director. 1956. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, film. Thurn, V., director. 2010. Taste the Waste, documentary. Verhoeven, P., director. 1990. Total Recall, film. Welsh, B., director. 2011. “The Entire History of You” (season 1, episode 3). In Black Mirror, C. Brooker, creator. TV series.

Index

actions, ix, 1, 6–15, 17–22, 24–26, 28–31, 33, 47–50, 52, 55, 57, 59, 63, 73, 79, 81, 83, 85–86, 91, 95, 97, 100–101, 103, 105–7; and possibilities, 73; and representations, 24, 26, 48, 55; and perception (see Bergson, H.); and interpretations, 7–8, 15; and decisions, 9, 79, 86, 106; and practices, 17, 30, 52, 85; and images, 55; and memory, 18, 33; technologically mediated, 27; technical and human, 11, 15. See also technology; memory; images Actor-Network Theory (ANT), 14, 84. See also Bruno, L.; Callon, M. Alexandre, Guy, 62, 113 alienation. See labor; digital labor; Marx, K. Antonioni, Michelangelo: Blow Up, 20 Aristotle: natural and artificial distinction: 2, 107. See also nature; artisanal paradigm of processes and production artifacts (or technical artefacts). See technology artificial, 51–52, 70, 86, 88, 97–99, 101–5, 107–13, 115, 121; and natural opposition. See also nature

artisanal paradigm of processes and production, xi, xii, 1–5, 16, 19, 26, 28, 33, 35, 38, 44, 45, 54, 82, 94, 107, 109; and the materialimmaterial dualism, xii–xiii, 1, 5, 35, 37, 45, 54, 119. See also cultural heritage; culture; memory; technology Baudrillard, Jean, 60 Beatles, The, 61 Bergson, Henri, xii–xiii, 15–21, 24, 26–28, 33, 55, 77, 119; Matter and Memory, 15; dynamic memory, 15, 18–19, 33; on habit and pure memory, 16–18, 21, 24, 26–27; on images, xii, 15, 19, 33, 55, 77, 119; on body, perspective, and action, 15–17; on rememberedimages, 17, 57; on planes of consciousness, 17, 21; on perception and action (concrete perception), 15–19, 21; notion of virtual, 17. See also actions; image; memory; possibilities; remembering Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 61 Black Mirror (TV Series), 64, 67, 70 Bodei, Remo, 23, 32 147

148

Index

body, 15–17, 24, 58–59, 61, 89, 97, 100, 102, 109–15, 126n6; perspective and action in Bergson (see Bergson, H.); as a machine (naturalization of), xiv, 109, 111; and automata, xiv, 109–12; and organ transplantation, xiv, 6, 114. See also cyborg; nature Borges, Jorge Luis: Funes el memorioso, 62. See also Luria, A.; memory; remembering brain death, 109, 114; definition of, 114. See also body; nature Braudel, Fernand, 22–3; historical temporalities, 22. See also Koselleck, R.; memory: layers of; time: layers of Broncano, Fernando, xiii, 7, 14, 33; technologies (artifacts) as operators of possibilities, xiii, 7, 27, 33, 51, 83, 121; culture and possibilities, 14. See also culture; possibilities; technology Callon, Michel, 14–5. See also ActorNetwork Theory; Latour, B. Casilli, Antonio, 88; types of platform work, 88. See also digital labor Castillo, Marcelo, 40. See also organillero Castillo, Pedro, 40, 43. See also organillero chinchinero. See organillero cinema images. See images Clynes, Mandred, 112 Coccia, Emmanuele, 59 Coderch, Lúa: Recopilar las fotografías sin memoria, 69 commodity fetishism. See labor; digital labor; Marx, K. conservation. See remembering: elements of; cultural heritage Cortázar, Julio: Las barbas del diablo, 20. See also Antonioni, M. cultural heritage (intangible or immaterial), xiii, 35–40, 44–45,

50, 53–54, 124n1; definition of, 36–38; dynamic view of, xi–xii, 1, 4, 50, 52, 54; static view of, x, xii, 1, 4, 35, 45–46; and the material-immaterial dualism (see artisanal paradigm of processes and production); and conservation, xiii, 38, 45, 50–53, 57, 59; and UNESCO World Heritage, 35, 46, 48–49, 51–2; as industrial heritage, 45–54, 101; labor and workers (see labor); Chilean Saltpeter Works, 48–99; Valparaíso, 51, 124nn1, 3, 5; and brooklynization, 47; and facadism, 47, 53. See also culture; memory; remembering; technology culture (or material culture), x–xiii, 1–5, 8, 14–15, 30, 33, 35–38, 44–46, 54, 56, 58, 63, 66–67, 72, 80, 89, 102, 107, 119, 123n2; definition of, 14; always material, x, xi, 3–4, 7, 14, 25, 30, 35, 38, 41, 58, 123n2; dynamic view of (see cultural heritage); pragmatic and hermeneutic dimensions (actions and representations) of, 14; technologies and, 14, 33, 38; and memory. See cultural heritage; static view of (as something immaterial), 3; material-immaterial dualism of (see artisanal paradigm of processes and production). See also cultural heritage; material culture; technology cyborg, 91, 112–13. See also nature Debord, Guy, 60 Deleuze, Gilles, 21, 72, 74; sheets of past, 21–2. See also Bergson, H.; memory: layers of; time: layers of; image Descartes, René, 112–114. See also body: as machine digital images, xi, xiii, 20, 55, 57, 59–61, 67–68, 71, 77, 82; abundance of, 55, 59, 61, 63, 71; power of (see

Index

images); self-sufficiency of, 60–61, 65, 71, 77; as memory technologies, xiii, 59. See also images; memory; remembering; technology digital labor (digital work), 51, 88; workers of, 95; and platforms, 86–95, 125n4; and platform capitalism (see Srnicek, N.); types of, 88; micro-labor (or micro-tasks) in, 88, 93, 95; and internet content moderators, 86, 89–95, 126n5; and invisibility by design, 86, 90–93, 126n5; and commodity fetishism, 92; and alienation, 86, 92–93, 95; and technological somnambulism, 86–87; as ghost work, 86; and social media, 7, 88–90, 94. See also labor; technological somnambulism Duque, Félix, xiii, 99–100, 102–4, 115, 126n6; technical production of nature (see nature) durability. See permanence; remembering: moments of; stability Duras, Marguerite, 75 dynamic view, xi–xii, 1, 4, 15, 28, 33, 35, 38, 44, 50, 52, 54, 79, 97, 102–6, 108–9, 119–21; of memory. See memory; of culture. See culture; of technology. See technology; of nature and the natural. See nature. See also static view Edgerton, David, 23. See also memory: layers of; technology; time: layers of extended experience. See images familiarity with things. See things; see also Bergson, H.; forms of life; technological somnambulism Feenberg, Andrew, 84 flexibility. See openness Fontcuberta, Joan, 59–60, 63, 67; homo photographicus, 67; la furia de las imágenes (see images: power of)

149

forgetting (or oblivion). See memory forms of life, x–xi, xiii, 4–15, 17, 24–30, 33–34, 37, 40–41, 45, 49–50, 53–56, 65–67, 71, 79–80, 83–84, 98–99, 102, 108, 119, 120–22, 123n2, 124n4, 126n1; technologies as (see Winner, L.); dynamism of, 8, 15, 33, 119; features of, 8. See also culture; memory; technology fragility. See remembering: moments of; permanence; stability Frankenstein, 10, 104–5 Gibson, James, 26–27; affordances, 26–27 Guzmán, Patricio, 76; El botón de nácar, 76 habit, 7, 14, 16–18, 20, 26, 33, 35, 50, 52–53, 55, 76, 83 108–9, 119; and memory (see Bergson, H.). See also forms of life; things: familiarity with Hacking, Ian: making up people, 57 Halbwachs, Maurice, 27–28, 29–30; collective memory, 27–30, 33, 56, 44, 69. See also Bergson, H.; memory Haraway, Donna, 112 Heidegger, Martin, 83; ready and present at hand, 13, 83 hermeneutic circle, 14, 57 hybris. See nature: technical transgression of identity, 14, 28, 32, 36, 39, 42–44, 53, 61, 67–71, 106–7, 114, 123n2, 124n4, 125n4; technologically distributed, xiii, 61, 68–70, 77; Locke’s notion of personal (see Locke, J.). See also cultural heritage ideology, Marx’s notion of. See Marx, K. Ihde, Don, 5, 24. See also post-phenomenology

150

Index

images, xi–xiii, 2, 6, 15, 17–21, 23–25, 33, 42–43, 48, 50, 52, 55–71, 73–77, 82, 85–86, 88–89, 91–94, 99, 102, 103–4, 109, 112, 114, 119, 125nn1–2, 126n7; definition of, 119; pragmatic and hermeneutic dimensions (actions and representations) of, xii, 15, 55, 85, 103, 109; as material and immaterial (see Bergson, H.: on images; and memory, 55, 60–51); and technology (technical images), 55–57, 59, 61, 63, 65–67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 120; and the digital (see digital images); and cinema (cinema images), 55, 77; and media, 71; power of, 59, 125n2; and eternal present, xiii, 61–63, 65, 71, 77, 82; and fragmentation of meaning, xiii, 21–22, 61, 63–64, 66, 68, 71, 77; and extended experience, 66, 71; and technological distributed identity (see identity); of nature (see nature); of the body (see body: as a machine). See also Bergson, H.: on images; digital images Ingold, Tim, 4 internet content moderation. See digital labor invisibility by design. See digital labor Jaeggi, Rahel, 8 Jones, Andrew, 3 Kawabata, Yasunari: The Master of Go, 19 Kessels, Erik: 24HRS in Photos, 64 Kline, Nathan, 112 Koselleck, Reinhart, 22; sediments of time, 22. See also Braudel, F.; memory: layer of; time: layers of Kundera, Milan: The Immortality, 55 labor (or work), 7, 9, 32, 37, 39, 45, 47–54, 79–82, 86–95, 98, 100, 123n1, 124n3, 125nn1,

3–4, 126nn5,7; and workers, 41, 46–49, 52–54, 81–82, 86–93, 95, 124n3, 125nn1,5; and commodity fetishism, xiii, 81–82, 92–93, 95; and alienation, xiii, 81, 86–87, 92–93, 95; and alienation of time (time alienation), 93; and technology as memory of power relations, 9; and ideology (see Marx, K.); and forgetting (or oblivion) of production and power relations (technological somnambulism), xiii, 80, 121, 126; and memory (see remembering: with things; memory; cultural heritage); memory of, 48, 53; as trade, 39–44, 53, 90, 124nn1–2; as punishment, 91, 104, 127n3. See also digital labor Lang, Fritz: Metropolis, 91 Latour, Bruno, 14; See also ActorNetwork Theory; Callon, M. layers of memory. See memory Lechner, Norbert, 62; presentism, 62. See also images: eternal present Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 21; notion of virtual, 21. See also Bergson, H.: notion of virtual; virtual Lizana, Manuel, 43, 124n2. See also organillero Locke, John, 69; notion of personal identity, 69. See also identity Luria, Alexandre, 62; patient S., 62. See also Borges, J.; memory Marx, Karl, xiii, 1, 6, 80–82, 92, 95; and commodity fetishism (see labor; notion of alienation). See also labor; notion of ideology, 81–22, 91 material culture. See culture material memory. See memory material-immaterial dualism. See artisanal paradigm of processes and production Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, 65 meaning, xiii, 7–8, 14, 24, 26, 30, 31–32, 37–38, 50, 57, 59, 61–64,

Index

66–68, 70–73, 77, 79–80, 83, 94, 101–2, 106–8, 119; construction of, 63, 66–67, 71; fragmentation of (see images) media. See memory mediation, technology as. See Verbeek, P.-P. medium. See technology: as environment memory (or material memory): ix– xiv, 1–5, 7–11, 13, 15–35, 37–39, 41, 43–45, 47–69, 71–77, 79–87, 89, 91, 93–101, 103–107, 109, 111, 113–115, 119–121, 124n4, 125n4; definition of, 33, 59; always material: 20; dynamic view of, xii, 1, 4, 15, 28, 33, 35, 38, 44; Bergson’s dynamic (see Bergson, H.); static view of, xii, 1–3, 24, 28, 35, 38, 45, 52, 105, 119; pragmatic and hermeneutic dimensions (actions and representations) of, xiii, 20, 24, 33, 48, 56, 59, 72, 120–21; layers of, xiii, 17, 20, 24–26, 34, 53, 72–74, 77, 83, 85, 95, 100, 114; collective, 27–29, 44, 69; as embodiment, 17, 24, 80; dynamism of. See remembering; and forgetting (oblivion, concealment), xi, 3, 63, 34, 65–66, 75–76, 79, 81, 95, 97–98, 103–5, 109; and conservation and retrieving (see remembering: moments of); of things, xiii, 79, 82–85, 95, 109, 121; of natural things, xiv, 97–98, 103–5, 115; and technology (memory technologies), 63, 66; and media, 56, 68, 71; and habit and pure memory (see Bergson, H.); places of, 52, 106–7. See also remembering Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 58 Miller, Daniel, 24 mingei, 32 Moscovici, Serge, 104; human history of nature (see nature)

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Moses, Robert, 9; overpasses, 9, 49, 91 Mumford, Lewis, 104 natural. See nature nature (and the natural), xi, xiii–xiv, 2, 5–6, 10, 13, 29, 32, 36, 45, 51, 79–82, 86–87, 89, 91, 97–115, 120–21, 126nn1–2; definition of, xiii, 103, 105; appeal to, xiv, 97–102, 105–9, 115, 120–21, 126; dynamic view of, 97, 102–6, 109; static view of, 105; in the making (natura naturans), 102, 105; as ready-made (natura naturata), 105; as merely given, 80, 82; as environment, 26–27, 50, 53, 80, 100–103, 112, 120; technical production of, xiii, 97–98, 103, 115; human history of, 97, 103–4, 115; images of, 103–4; technical transgression of, 104–5, 127n3; naturalization, xiv, 10, 82, 97, 102, 109; and artificial opposition, x, 2, 97–99, 101–3, 105, 107, 109–12; and artificial co-construction, 51; as pure, good, and healthy, 99–101, 103; and the transcendence, 108; as landscape, 22, 100–101; and things (natural things), xiv, 10, 81, 97–98, 102–5, 107, 109, 115, 120–21; as spontaneous, 103, 105, 120. See also technology; memory Nora, Pierre: 52, 106; lieux de mémoire, 106 openness, 8, 10, 12, 16, 26–27, 33, 59, 63, 65, 73, 83–84. See also technology: dynamic view of organillero (Chilean organ-grinder), 39–44, 124n1; and organillo (Chilean street-organ), 39–44, 124n1; and chinchinero, 39–40, 42, 124n1. See also cultural heritage; technology organillo. See organillero Ortega y Gasset, José, 69

152

Index

perception and action. See Bergson, H. permanence (or durability), 2, 22, 25, 57, 76. See also fragility; stability planes of consciousness. See Bergson, H. platforms. See digital labor Plato, 1, 9, 56, 63, 127n3; example of ship’s operation, 9; critique of written texts, 56, 63 possibilities, ix–xiii, 1, 4–12, 14–16, 19–20, 24–25, 27, 33, 41, 43, 50–52, 56, 59, 73, 76, 77, 83–84, 93–94, 98, 103, 107; opening and closing of, 5–8, 19, 27, 33, 51–52, 64, 83, 94, 98, 102; embodiment of, 4, 16; and virtualities (see virtual); actualization of (see virtual); realization of, 7, 16; uchronic analysis, 83, 122. See also culture; memory; technology: as operator of post-phenomenology, 5, 84. See also Ihde, D.; Verbeek, P.-P. practices, ix, xi–xiii, 5–8, 10–14, 17, 20, 26–27, 29–34, 35–38, 40–41, 45, 50, 52–53, 55, 66–67, 71, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 90, 108, 119–21, 124n4. See also forms of life; habit pragmatic and hermeneutic (actions and representations). See images; memory; technology Prigogine, Ilya, 21; Baker’s transformation, 21 processes, x–xiii, 1–4, 10, 16, 22, 24–26, 28–30, 33–35, 37–38, 45–54, 71, 79–80, 82–83, 85–87, 98, 100, 102–5, 109, 115, 119, 120, 121, 126n1; and production, x, xii, 1, 37, 53, 119–21; of production, xii, 4, 50, 82, 85, 95, 98, 104, 123n1, 126n1; memory as embodiment of, 82; temporality of, 26; embodiment of, 82; forgetting (or oblivion) of production and, 10, 80, 86; artisanal paradigm of production and. See

artisanal paradigm of processes and production. See also dynamic view production. See processes programmed obsolescence, 12, 31 Prometheus, 70, 104–5, 127n3 remembered-images. See Bergson, H. remembering, ix, xiii–xiv, 3, 15, 20, 24–25, 27–31, 33–34, 50, 55–59, 61, 63, 65–67, 72–73, 75–77, 79–80, 82, 84–86, 94, 97, 100, 105, 115, 120–21; with things, xiii, xivn4, 15, 27, 34, 50, 61, 72, 79–80, 82, 84–86, 94, 97, 100, 105, 115, 121; moments or elements of (retrieving, conservation, and fragility), 3, 16, 22, 25, 33, 52, 59, 66, 83, 85; loop of, xiii, 55, 57–58, 63, 67, 77, 120; as pragmatic and hermeneutic (actions and representations) (see memory); and the spontaneous, 28. See also memory Renger-Patzsch, Albert, 47 Resnais, Alain, xiii, 61, 72–75, 77, 126; Hiroshima mon amour, 73–76; Nuit et Brouillard, 72, 74; L’année dernière à Marienbad, 61, 73, 74; Je t’aime je t’aime, 73–74; Muriel ou le temps d’un retour, 74; Mon oncle d’Amerique, 74. See also images; memory: layers of; remembering retrieving. See remembering: moments of Roberts, Sarah, 89–90, 95. See also digital labor Rosenberger, Robert, 24. See also postphenomenology; Verbeek, P.-P. Salgado, Sebastiao, 47; Workers: Archaeology of the Industrial Age, 48 Science, Technology, and Society studies (STS), x, 9, 84 Simmons, Ian, 104

Index

Social Construction of Technology Theory (SCOT), 11, 83, 85 spontaneous. See nature; remembering Srnicek, Nick, 87, 89, 126; platform capitalism, 87, 93, 95. See also digital labor stability, 2, 8, 10, 26–29, 84, 101, 108; and permanence (durability), 2, 22, 25, 76; and fragility, 3, 22, 25, 33, 52, 59, 66; metastable, 83. See also memory; remembering; things: familiarity with; time static view, x, xii, 1–4, 24, 28, 33, 35, 38, 45–46, 51–52, 54, 94, 101, 103, 105–8, 119–22; of memory (see memory); of culture (see culture); of technology (see technology; of nature and the natural). See also artisanal paradigm of processes and production; dynamic view; nature tacit knowledge, 8, 12–13, 33, 53, 124n4. See also openness; technology: dynamic view of Tanizaki, Junichiro, 31–32; In Praise of Shadows, 31. See also mingei technical images. See images technological somnambulism, xiii– xiv, 10, 21, 34, 79, 82–83, 86, 92, 94–95, 97–98, 115, 120–21, 125n2; and familiarity with things (see things); and forgetting (or oblivion) of processes and power relations (see processes; labor; memory). See also remembering: with things; Winner, L. technology (and technical artefacts), ix–xiii, 1, 3–9, 11–15, 20, 23–25, 27, 30–33, 35, 38, 40–42, 44–45, 47, 49–50, 52–56, 58–59, 66–67, 69–71, 73, 79–86, 91, 93, 95, 100, 104, 107, 109, 110, 113, 119, 122, 125n4; active and constitutive role of, x–xi, xiii, 3–6, 9–11, 15, 20, 33, 40, 42, 44, 54, 79, 83, 121; dynamic view of,

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xi, xii, 1, 4, 33, 44, 121; pragmatic and hermeneutic dimensions (actions and representations) of, 24; as forms of life (see Winner, L.); as operator of possibilities (see Broncano, F.); and human relations, 13, 24, 27, 83; neutral and instrumental view of (static view of), x, xii–xiii, 1, 4–6, 11, 33, 35, 38, 40, 49, 58, 79, 82, 121–22, 126n4; as forms of order (technical ordering) (see Winner, L.); and Moses’ overpasses (see Winner, L.); as embodiment of power relations and politics of (see Winner, L.); as mediation (see Verbeek, P.-P.); obstetric ultrasound and moralization of (see Verbeek, P.-P.); technical normativity, 8, 11, 33; as memory of power relations (see labor; and memory; memory; and nature); as environment, ix, 56, 60, 67, 71, 125n4; and human and environment complexes, 7, 83. See also culture; dynamic view; forms of life; labor; memory; possibilities; processes; remembering; technological somnambulism things, ix–xi, xiii–xiv, 1, 3, 5–6, 23, 27, 31–32, 54, 69, 70, 79–86, 95, 97–98, 100, 102–3, 105–6, 119, 121, 123n1; remembering with (see remembering); familiarity with, 21, 26–27, 31–32, 34, 79, 85; whole or entire life of, 86, 98, 122; memory (or material memory) of, xiii–xiv, 79, 82–85, 95, 97–98, 103–5, 109, 115, 121. See also culture; forms of life; memory; technology time, xi, xiii, 2, 6, 7–9, 12–14, 16, 19, 22–23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30–33, 37, 42–43, 45, 47–50, 52, 56, 59, 63–65, 67–68, 70, 73, 77, 81, 83, 85, 89, 91, 92, 100, 102, 103, 106–8, 110, 113, 115; layers of, 22, 25, 124n5; temporalities of coexistence,

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Index

20, 23–24, 73, 120; and stability (permanence and fragility), 2, 22, 25; spatialization of, 2; alienation (see labor: alienation of time); and space, 25, 28, 30, 50, 110. See also memory: layers of; remembering Tuan, Yi–Fu, 107 Van Dijck, José, 30, 56–58; memory technologies. See images; memory Verbeek, Peter-Paul; xii, 5–6, 24, 33, 84; technologies as mediation, xii, 5, 6, 27, 33, 56; moralization of technology, 84; the case of obstetric ultrasound, 6, 69; post-phenomenology (see post-phenomenology). See also technology virtual, 17, 21–22, 95; Leibniz’s notion of the (see Leibniz, G. W.); Bergson’s notion of the (see Bergson,

H.); and possibilities (virtualities), 16, 20, 33; actualization of, 16, 20, 50, 59. See also possibilities Walker, Kara: A Subtlety, or the Marvellous Sugar Baby, 48 Williams, Raymond, 103 Winner, Langdon, xii–xiii, 6–10, 33–34, 49, 79–80, 84, 91, 123n2; technologies as forms of life, xiii, 8, 10–11, 14, 33, 53, 121; technological somnambulism (see technological somnambulism); politics of technologies, 80; technologies as forms of order (technical ordering), 8–9; example of Moses’ overpasses (see Moses, R.); technologies as embodiment of power relations, 9. See also forms of life; technology Zubiri, Xavier, 126n2

About the Author

Ronald Durán Allimant is professor of philosophy at the Universidad de Playa Ancha, Valparaíso, Chile. He has an electronic engineering degree from the Federico Santa María Technical University and a masters and doctorate in philosophy from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. He has dealt with the study of the notions of nature, time, and life, considering the relationship between sciences and philosophy, based mainly on the thinking of G. W. Leibniz, Henri Bergson, Xavier Zubiri, and Ilya Prigogine. He has also focused on the study of the philosophy and ethics of technology, led research projects, and published articles on these topics.

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