An Essay on the Normativity of Forgetting
Part 1 of 2
Preface to the Substack Edition
The following essay was originally written for a class I was taking on the subject of normativity, which, for such a multi-syllabic and forebodingly adverbial sounding an abstract noun, means nothing more than what is normal. (Think too long about that sentence and it will go from making sense to becoming a long way of saying nothing.) The essay is deliberately transgressive—I start by quoting myself—if only to illustrate something of how norms structure our practice of reading and writing, a theme which constitutes a subplot I could not help myself from including. Or perhaps the norms of reading and writing are the plot and the subplot is the stated subject of the essay, namely, how we forget, or take for granted, certain norms—you can read it either way. In any case, the essay’s main divisions, sandwiched between the transgressive introduction and the “Concluding Parable,” are: “The Power of Forgetting,” “The Forgetful Power of Myth,” and “Ex-Nomination as the Mythical Forgetting of Subjectivity.” These sections rely heavily on a reading together of Barthes and Nietzsche, and while only the former was gay, both of them have formed something of a seldom acknowledged theoretical basis for Queer theory. In that respect, now seemed a good time to bring them back into the focus of the discussion. For those who are unfamiliar with Barthes and Nietzsche but are interested in learning more about their philosophies, I can easily recommend Barthes’s Mythologies, but have to provide the warning that Nietzsche deliberately went about planting his writings with landmines for the unprepared—and even experienced travelers in his domain make use of what they find there at their peril. It is best, therefore, to read him in the company of a guide or at least a guidebook.
Since this article will be divided into two parts on account of its length, here is something of an overview of the sections so that the essay as a whole can be summarized at a glace. “The Power of Forgetting” is a long exposition of Nietzsche’s understanding of history and the necessity of forgetting for the purposes of life in “On the Uses and Abuses of History For Life,” found in his book Untimely Meditations. This becomes the framework for understanding the next two parts, which rely upon Barthes’s concepts of myth and ex-nomination to explain how strategic forgetting moves from being an operation enacted on the past to one that effects the present, constituting the norm as that which is so pervasive we forget its existence even and especially when it is right in front of us. Of these two sections, “The Forgetful Power of Myth” links our reading of Nietzsche to Barthes’s concept of mythology and “Ex-Nomination as the Mythical Forgetting of Subjectivity” in turn links the concepts of myth and forgetting to the concept of ex-nomination, which is simply the idea that what is ideologically most pervasive makes itself invisible through its very omnipresence. Finally, the “Concluding Parable” draws a story from my experience to illustrate how these concepts relate to daily life.
Introduction: The Break with Objectivity
Frequently in interpreting a work we begin, perhaps unconsciously, with an effort to forget identity, to forget subjectivity, as if the writer and the reader could each encounter the other from a universal position that negates their individuality––despite the fact that such universality is inherently opposed to the possibility of interpretation. Objectivity, in all its pretense to a neutral, universal perspective, is a style of formal language. What we call objective in philosophy is all too often an imposition of one perspective over another––that is, a false universalization of one person’s, or one type of person’s, experience, which is enabled by certain privileges. [1]
I am called out of the universal in the moment of my encounter with my own particularity. Perhaps it is because I am reading Beauvoir and the sequence of events that constitute the chain of her becoming womanhood meet an incongruity in my personal history so that where I attempt to draw a parallel line between her history and mine, I find instead a certain intersection that transgresses the boundary of the intended geometric figure. Or perhaps it is in reading Levinas, where his structure of gendered alterity breaks down through a self-encounter that forever breaks the supposedly untraversable distance which ought to produce a limit against becoming the supposedly absolute other. Or it could even be when my senior essay committee read my paper on Levinas and where unable to ask me about it for nearly the duration of our meeting because we had first to understand the alterity defining our encounter—and they were not prepared for that encounter. Whenever and wherever the moment finds me, it demands I remember myself by producing a break from my submergence within the universal structures that enabled my self forgetting, which produced my disappearance from all consideration of subjectivity so as to emerge wholly objective. It is the irony of this break that reveals such ‘objectivity’ as emerges from the forgetting of the subjective to be a con. It is not true transcendence to the universal but the elevation of a specific genre of experience to the height of universality, which through its hegemonic discursive power sustains itself as taken for granted so that the distinction between it and true universality—if true universality is possible, and that possibility is always more in question than we acknowledge—becomes camouflaged. The effect is a norm that parasitizes knowledge production to the end of reproducing a set of hierarchical power relations that elevate a few to the status of objectivity through appearing to erase the subjectivity of their experience, while producing another class of subjects whose subjectivity is hyper visible. Whose experience disappears and whose becomes hyper visible depends upon their relation to what subjective experiences are normalized, and these disappearances and appearances are always qualified by their interaction with the norm, or even a set of norms, so that there is not one way of being visible and being visible in one aspect may not imply visibility in another. A more thorough analysis in this direction, however, is beyond the scope of this present essay. The question at hand is why and how ex-nomination makes the subjectivity of the ex-nominated appear as if it were objective, and the relationship of this forgetting of subjectivity with the subjective experience it renders unforgettable or incapable of ex-nomination.
The Power of Forgetting
It would be hard to proceed without remarking that in the United States—a society that, ironically, can only appear reasonable through certain acts of national forgetting—the value of forgetting has been so utterly forgotten that an ode must almost be sung to it before its potency can be recalled. Thus, it seems appropriate to invoke Nietzsche who sings it well:
Imagine the extremest [sic] possible example of a man who did not possess the power of forgetting at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of becoming: like a true pupil of Heraclitus, he would in the end hardly dare to raise his finger. Forgetting is essential to action of any kind, just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of everything organic. […] Thus: it is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting. Or, to express my theme even more simply: there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture.[2] (Emphasis Original )
Why is every mensch1 always a man? But that too must be forgotten if the academic is to live. I must be able to put it out of mind to read and make sense of what the translator has written. No, recalling the translator is also a mistake. I must be able to forget Hollingdale too and the whole chain of signification that conveys meaning through language so that I am not caught up upon the question of whether it is possible to encounter any notion of its ‘intended’ content. Most of all, I must forget this ‘I’ and stop writing about it if this essay… and the rest is already forgotten. Forgetting produces the seamlessness of the world in which one can get up in the morning and not be overwhelmed by yesterday, but also by which one can reach out and grasp an object without becoming preoccupied with one’s arm or hand doing the action and, in fact, be barely aware of them. Likewise, it keeps us from sinking (upward) into a Laputan existence preoccupied with the nearness of events hundreds of millions of years in the future. It maintains the innocuousness of all the thoughtless moments essential to life that if remembered would risk total paralysis. Would it not be already gratuitous to name an example? (If the reader so wishes, they may trouble themselves with whatever comes to mind.) Perhaps best of all, forgetting keeps close what is close and holds at a distance the far off so that the individual does not begin to see their self from that cosmic perspective from which, by pure scale, they disappear and seem now to die of insignificance. At least, it achieves this most of the time. So it is that we can go about our days relatively unburdened and assured that, if by evening our load gets heavy, tomorrow morning it will at least be lighter. Most to Nietzsche’s sense, forgetting, moreover, enables the perception of ends, of complete objects that exist sufficiently in the moment to be useful now, of complete people who are as they appear now, of the self, sufficient in this moment for being whole and therefore acting without waiting for itself to come into itself. The horizon of the psychological self must be drawn close to live and be active in the world at all. It can even be drawn like a pinpoint in the ocean.
Nietzsche is quite clear that the need to remember less than too much extends into the collective realm of history: “the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people and of a culture.”[3] History is plural memory, and while it no longer exists on a level where the remembrance of my hand gets between me and the object of my manipulation—who remembers typing cannot type so fast—its forgetting is nonetheless potent for the collective conscience. Yet history is not a purposeless toxic byproduct of life: it exists of a human (all too human) necessity that is for the living it may agonize. The question is how to balance the need for collective forgetting with the need for collective memory:
That life is in need of the services of history, however, must be grasped as firmly as must the proposition […] that an excess of history is harmful to the living man. History pertains to the living man in three respects: it pertains to him as a being who acts and strives, as a being who preserves and reveres, as a being who suffers and seeks deliverance. This threefold relationship corresponds to three species of history — insofar as it is permissible to distinguish between a monumental, an antiquarian and a critical species of history.[4]
Though we are so situated that to comment upon critical history is tempting—and who cannot but poke fun at antiquarians?—the monumental need only concern us here, for where the critical history is concerned with unseating norms and the antiquarian so indifferent as to be like bones ploughed over by whatever discourse holds hegemonic power, the monumental is the maker of myths. Or rather, it is the history that has been made into a myth for the use of those who have the greatest desire for forgetting all the unpleasant details and warnings against the quest for egocentric glory. Monumental history is history distilled into only that content which is conducive to action: it is history for the purposes of a stimulating intoxicant. Such history must evoke a certain seamlessness by which every obstacle to action is overcome and every complication of outcome smoothed over. The remove of historical agency is such that the forgetting of the arm or hand that gasps, so as to enable the ease of action on an object, is already taken for granted, but the ease with which the individual subject of monumental history acts as an historical agent must now be assured, primarily, for the sake of their would-be imitators.
In giving a full explication of monumental history, and its necessary looseness with regards to any (antiquarian) notion of truth, Nietzsche writes:
As long as the soul of historiography lies in the great stimuli that a man of power derives from it, as long as the past has to be described as worthy of imitation, as imitable and possible for a second time, it of course incurs the danger of becoming somewhat distorted, beautified and coming close to free poetic invention; there have been ages, indeed, which were quite incapable of distinguishing between a monumentalized past and a mythical fiction, because precisely the same stimuli can be derived from the one world as from the other. If, therefore, the monumental mode of regarding history rules over the other modes […] the past itself suffers harm […] Monumental history deceives by analogies: with seductive similarities it inspires [its adherents.][5]
In adhering to monumental history we must forget difference. I am George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, the whole cast of “founding fathers,” Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Socrates and all Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, at least potentially through the possibility of my repeating their greatness. Their achievements—and it’s almost always the achievements of white men—are presented as my possibility and thus a smorgasbord to my desire. The adherents of monumental history propose its devouring in the assurance that all greatness must recur and yet, in being truly great, stand utterly unique for all time. This is history for the ex-nominated. Its logic hinges upon the possibility of forgetting one’s self so that one can be anyone else, can make anyone else into one’s self, and can be decontextualized and recontextualized without ever seeming alien to the setting. Such an ex-nominated subject is thus produced as capable of substituting themselves for the hero within the biography provided by monumental history. But this capacity for substitution is not at all opposed to the individuality of the ex-nominated. Rather, the capacity for substitution is built upon the absence of any universalizable remainder, which is not in fact a feature of individuality, but a distraction from it. That is, any peculiarity that breaks with the norm is seen as determining whereas conformity with the norm is seen as freeing. As this idea is somewhat counter intuitive, it is important to remember the contradiction inherent in the example of rationality: there is only one way to exercise free will, which is through rationality, and the path of rationality is singular—only the irrational person is unfree and liable to do anything.
[1] Rose Pelham, “Foundations of a Transgender Phenomenology: On the Incompleteness of Totality and Infinity” page 7.
[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 62.
[3] Nietzsche, Unitmely Meditations, 63.
[4] Nietzsche, Unitmely Meditations, 67.
[5] Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 70-1.
Mensch, the word Nietzsche probably used in the original, literally translates as “person.” The German for “man” is mann. The common tendency to translate mensch as “man,” therefore, in its replacement of the whole of humanity with the abstract of the masculine gender, speaks of a particular sexism expressed more often in English than in German. Hopefully newer translations will avoid this tendancy.