"I Don't Recall"
How many times did Alberto Gonzales say that he didn't remember? 70?
That's a lot of not remembering.
But to claim that one doesn't remember, no matter how transparently false the claim, is to invoke radical epistemological uncertainty. It is a thing which cannot be disproven. And it works startlingly well.
What's more damaging from a PR standpoint is the matter of the missing emails. There is something more unsettling to us, I think, about the destruction of records than about being lied to.
The eighteen minute gap on the Nixon tapes. The shredded documents of the Iran-Contra affair. These deletions of public records became lightening rods for criticism.
I've been thinking a lot about why we are more bothered by these deletions than by other, equally damaging (and equally permanent) ways in which the government deceives us. And I think it has less to do with politics, or even deception, than it does with our anxieties about memory and the ways in which we connect ourselves up to our past.
In 5th century BCE, the technology of alphabetic writing was already a few hundred years old in Greece, but the practice of daily, personal writing was new (among those few who could afford such things). Plato theorized these journals, called "hypomnemata" [lit. "beneath memory], as a kind of artificial memory, recognizing at once their potential and the loss they entail.
On the one hand, they denaturalize our relationship to ourself--our memory becomes externalized, hypostatized, prosthetic. The technology of writing is a technology that enables forgetting. Literate cultures have vastly inferior memories to oral ones.
But the hypomnemata also permits us to become analytical and comprehensive. By expanding our natural memory, writing allows us to perform unnatural but enormously useful mental tasks.
I think that one of the reasons that the destruction of documents seems so much more threatening than even being lied to by our public official is that it is a concrete and visible violation of the (artificial) body politic. The enormous amount of activity, of process, that goes on in government is far more than anyone could remember, and our anxiety about how alienating is makes any violation even more grievous.
To say "I don't recall," no matter how patently false is to invoke a kind of forgetting that is familar to us all. To delete documents is to force a kind of forgetting that does permanent damage.
Just some Monday morning ramblings.
That's a lot of not remembering.
But to claim that one doesn't remember, no matter how transparently false the claim, is to invoke radical epistemological uncertainty. It is a thing which cannot be disproven. And it works startlingly well.
What's more damaging from a PR standpoint is the matter of the missing emails. There is something more unsettling to us, I think, about the destruction of records than about being lied to.
The eighteen minute gap on the Nixon tapes. The shredded documents of the Iran-Contra affair. These deletions of public records became lightening rods for criticism.
I've been thinking a lot about why we are more bothered by these deletions than by other, equally damaging (and equally permanent) ways in which the government deceives us. And I think it has less to do with politics, or even deception, than it does with our anxieties about memory and the ways in which we connect ourselves up to our past.
In 5th century BCE, the technology of alphabetic writing was already a few hundred years old in Greece, but the practice of daily, personal writing was new (among those few who could afford such things). Plato theorized these journals, called "hypomnemata" [lit. "beneath memory], as a kind of artificial memory, recognizing at once their potential and the loss they entail.
On the one hand, they denaturalize our relationship to ourself--our memory becomes externalized, hypostatized, prosthetic. The technology of writing is a technology that enables forgetting. Literate cultures have vastly inferior memories to oral ones.
But the hypomnemata also permits us to become analytical and comprehensive. By expanding our natural memory, writing allows us to perform unnatural but enormously useful mental tasks.
I think that one of the reasons that the destruction of documents seems so much more threatening than even being lied to by our public official is that it is a concrete and visible violation of the (artificial) body politic. The enormous amount of activity, of process, that goes on in government is far more than anyone could remember, and our anxiety about how alienating is makes any violation even more grievous.
To say "I don't recall," no matter how patently false is to invoke a kind of forgetting that is familar to us all. To delete documents is to force a kind of forgetting that does permanent damage.
Just some Monday morning ramblings.
posted by Feemus at
8:48 AM
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