At this point the criteria become so vague that, as many mnemotechnical theorists recommend, it is advisable to commit to memory the relationship that connects a place or a figure to a res memoranda. Which is tantamount to saying that practically all mnemotechnics were based on relationships chosen almost arbitrarily and were therefore, more than symbolic systems, semiotics, however imperfect. But however imperfect they might be, they were, nonetheless, tentative semiotics. To say that in a functive of a symbolic nature the correlation is badly formulated does not exclude the possibility that the functive be proposed as such.
It is the semiotic nature of mnemotechnics that makes it impossible to construct an art of forgetfulness on the mnemotechnical model, because it is a property of every semiotic system to permit the presentification of absence. It is a venerable topos to recognize that that all semiotic systems are characterized by their ability to actualize, if only in the possible world circumscribed by our assertions, the nonexistent. This is why, as Abelard points out, the sentence nulla rosa est (“there is no rose”) actualizes to some extent, at least in the mind’s eye, the rose.48
Worth (1975) is the author of an essay entitled “Pictures Can’t Say Ain’t” in which he argues that no image in a mnemotechnic can act by canceling out what it refers to (illustrating just how provocative Magritte was when he painted a pipe with the caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” [This is not—or ain’t—a pipe]). But the fact is that the words of a verbal language too—whether or not they can say “ain’t,” since existence can be predicated only in a proposition and not in an isolated term—cannot say “do not take into consideration—or forget—what I am naming.”
It is not possible to use any expression to make one’s content disappear, because a semiotics is by definition a mechanism for making things present to the mind, and is therefore a mechanism for producing intentional acts.49 At most, mnemotechnics, like other semiotics, can lead to forgetfulness (albeit accidentally) thanks to two phenomena: interference among data and excess of data. Setting aside interference among data, which is a psychological rather than a cultural phenomenon, let us concentrate on the desire to forget in order to avoid an excess of information.50
1.9.4.
Ars Excerpendi
While we already encountered the problem in Themistocles-Cicero, the dread of excess certainly increases with the invention of printing, which not only makes available an enormous quantity of textual material, but also facilitates access to it for the man in the street and “leads to the transition, in not much more than a couple of centuries, from the primacy of remembrance to the primacy of forgetting” (Cevolini 2006: 6). Thus, we witness the development of an art not unknown in the centuries of manuscript culture but which acquires central importance in the culture of print, the ars excerpendi, the art, that is, of compiling abstracts or summaries so as to retain only such knowledge as is judged indispensable, and to let marginal information fall by the wayside.
In any case, what we may call the Themistocles complex returns over and over again in the course of cultural history, and one of its most dramatic manifestations is assuredly the second of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, on the advantages and disadvantages of historical studies for life. The text begins with a statement that could be another of the sources for Borges’s Funes:
In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness, however, it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sink down on the threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy and afraid, will never know what happiness is—worse, he will never do anything to make others happy. Imagine the extremest 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. A man who wanted to feel historically through and through would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep, or an animal that had to live only by rumination and ever repeated rumination. 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. (Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 62)
This is the starting point for an analysis of the negative effects of the excess of historical studies which, now they have reached such an unbearable complexity and richness, oppress the memory of a culture to such an extent as to make it unsuited for life. And now, on the crest of this wave of vitalistic admonitions, comes the call for youth to develop an art of forgetfulness (Nietzsche 1874: 351, and see also Weinrich 2004: ch. VI).