A History of The Idea of Organic Memory

Abstract

“Organic memory” means that I – more exactly me – am (or is) by memory remembered. Not I but the organic, namely that which has become differentiated in and through my own vital activity, and this must include the differentiated world, this memory remembers me. It is different from the way in which we ordinarily experience memory, namely as its users, hence the difficulty of conceptualizing it. Such memory involves the world as its medium, whether of our own body taken as part of the world, or of various parts of the world which emerge as something like “found objects”. In and through my own activity I am as it were remembered by my body and by parts of the world. “Organism” holds both the meaning of being remembered by its past, as well as meaning of the world construed in my “dismembering” of it, in and through my own activity. While I as it were dismember the organic, the organic is remembering me. My usual experience of the organic is that of waking consciousness, while the condition in which the organic remembers me lie outside consciousness, rather more like dreaming or trance awareness.

As there is a geometry in space, so there is a psychology in time, in which the calculations of a plane psychology would no longer be accurate because we should not be taking account of time, and of the forms that it assumes, forgetting

Proust, The Fugitive, III, 568