One of the interesting things about this text is that, on the heels of these declarations that appear to address the individual’s need for survival, the emphasis changes to the need for a systematic forgetting on the part of cultures in general. This switch is of capital importance because, once the impossibility of voluntarily forgetting what the individual memory has recorded has been demonstrated, then cultures present themselves as systems that function, not only to preserve and hand down information useful to their survival as cultures, but also to cancel the information judged to be in excess. The culture does not make individuals forget what they know, but it keeps from them finding out what they do not know yet. In other words, while it may be difficult for individuals to forget that they got burned on the stove a few minutes ago, a culture, using the manipulative techniques we will get to later, can impose silence and therefore no longer inform individuals that, let’s say, in the year 1600 Giordano Bruno got burned (in a big way) in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori. Or, to put it differently, a culture can remove from Lotman’s semiosphere (discussed in Note 38) certain elements that will no longer be exposed to the visitor’s view.51
A century and a half after Nietzsche’s text, reflection on cultural forgetting has become commonplace and, despite Nietzsche’s urgent cry of alarm, the process of cancelation continuously performed by a culture simply in order to stay alive has come to seem normal. Identifying memory and culture, today we study the acts of forgetting that a culture mobilizes through various kinds of cancelation, which can range from out and out censure (the erasure of manuscripts, bonfires of books, damnatio memoriae, forgery of documentary sources, negationism) to forgetfulness out of shame, inertia, remorse, down to those processes current in the exact sciences in which it is decided that not only those hypotheses proven to have been erroneous but even the efforts and procedures followed to arrive at those that turned out to be correct are expunged from the specialized encyclopedia of a particular science because they are no longer useful (see Paolo Rossi 1988, 1998), while certain disciplines go so far as to consider obsolete any contribution published more than five years ago.
If our Specialized Encyclopedias are subject to processes of forgetting, so much more so is the Median Encyclopedia of a given culture. It guarantees remembrance of the important historical facts or the principles of physics, but it omits an infinite amount of information that the collectivity has repressed, because it was judged no longer useful or pertinent. For instance, the Median Encyclopedia tells us all we need to know about the death of Julius Caesar but nothing about what his widow Calpurnia did after his assassination; it provides precious details about the progress of the Battle of Waterloo but does not give us the names of all the participants—and so on and so forth. These are extremely useful “forgettings,” made so as not to overload the collective memory with more than it can bear—and without rendering the filtered or censored facts irretrievable, since there do exist specialized individuals (such as historians or archaeologists) capable of bringing them to light. In such cases, the collective memory sometimes picks up on the data, restoring them to the Median Encyclopedia, and sometimes decides instead to leave them in some specialized “reservation.”
The forgetfulness filtering performed by the Median Encyclopedia does not depend on the will of an individual or on a conscious act of the collective wilclass="underline" it occurs out of a kind of inertia, sometimes even from natural causes, like the cancelation of everything that was ever known about Atlantis, if Atlantis ever existed.
The problem of filtering by the Median Encyclopedia was in any case not unknown to the medieval encyclopedists—even though they seem to us to be intent on handing on everything that tradition had handed on to them. In the Libellum apologeticum that serves as an introduction to his Speculum Majus, Vincent of Beauvais is already shocked by the proliferation of knowledge (“videbam praeterea, iuxta Danielis prophetiam … ubique multiplicatam esse scientiam” (“Furthermore, I saw, as in the prophecy of Daniel, that knowledge was everywhere increased”) (Libellum, 1).52 This is why he decides to make his encyclopedia a florilegium, in other words, a selection of the best of his reading. That the selection is not immune from the suspicion of censorship is confirmed by his citation of the so-called Decretum Gelasianum, De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis, a compendium of what was apocryphal and what was canonical in Holy Scripture anachronistically attributed to the fifth-century pope Gelasius I: “denique Decretum Gelasii papae, quo scripta quaedam reprobantur quaedam vere approbantur, hic in ipso operis principio ponere volui, ut lector inter autentica et apocripha discernere sciat, sicque rationis arbitrio quod voluit eligat, quod noluerit reliquat” (“therefore I decided to put at the very beginning of this work the decree of Pope Gelasius, according to which certain writings are disapproved and certain others rightly approved, so as to allow the reader to distinguish between the authentic and the apocryphal and choose with the guidance of reason what he wants and reject what he does not want”). Nevertheless, Paulmier-Foucart and Lusignan (1990) admit that “certain texts have survived only because they were included in the Speculum Majus.”
All a culture does, then, is to select the data for its own memory. It may not do what Stalin did when he erased from historical photographs the faces of the comrades he had sent to their deaths, or what Orwell’s Big Brother did when he corrected the news in The Times every morning. But when we read that some English secondary schools have proposed abolishing the teaching of the Crusades so as not to offend the sensibilities of their Muslim students, it becomes apparent that culture is a continual process of rewriting and selecting information.
1.9.5. Cancelation, Cross-reference, Latency
Still, there is a difference between the Plinian and medieval encyclopedias and the structures of a modern Median Encyclopedia. The first premonitions of this change can already be seen in the encyclopedias of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Let us recapitulate: an Arbor Porphyriana aspired to provide a definitive image of the Great Chain of Being; and that image (had it been exhaustive and had it included all of the beings in the universe—a hypothesis that was formally impossible, as we have seen) would have been definitive in the sense that all its nodes appeared to be primitives. When one knows that a man is Animate, one knows intuitively all one needs to know, and there is no need for any science to define what Animate is to distinguish it from what is Inanimate (even though medieval science often does so). Similarly, when Pliny’s encyclopedia or those of Rabanus Maurus or Honorius of Autun explain to us the “nature of things” or the “image of the world,” they assume that they have told us all we need to know, to such a degree that we need a well-trained art of memory to remember it.53
The form of the modern encyclopedia, on the other hand, is that of naturalistic classification in which, if we say that a horse is an Ungulate, this taxonomical node is understood as a link (exactly in the hypertextual sense of the term) that refers us to a repository of specialized knowledge—and it is there that the properties of the ungulates will be specified (see, in this connection, Eco 1997, 3 and 4).
In this sense it has been said that in speaking of the modern encyclopedia, more than of forgetting, it is appropriate to speak of the “latency” of knowledge (Cevolini 2006: 99). It is not as if the information in excess (the object of Specialized Encyclopedias—and even the information in excess vis-à-vis a Specialized Encyclopedia, such as, for example, the history of astronomical theories proven to have been erroneous) is actually forgotten. It is, so to speak, “frozen,” and all the expert has to do is to take it out of the freezer and put it in the microwave to make it available once again, at least as much as is needed to understand a given context. This latency is represented by the model of the library or the archive (or even the museum)—containers always available even though no one may currently be using them, and even if they haven’t been used for centuries (see Esposito 2001, ch. 4 especially paragraph 4.4).