In English, there is no significat distinguishment between the dual meanings of dream, aside from contextual reference. There is the dream as a fantasy, a goal, an ambition to follow in one’s life. And there is the dream when one is asleep. Though there are metaphorical strings threading the two together, the ultimate determination between them is by their tangible connecting force: memory.
Memory, for all its habitual and practical use, remains a mystery in our experience. Phenomenology, our greatest tool for self study in the Neu age, remains in battle when it comes to categorisation of memory, and naturally so. Being the Wissenschaft of experience, memory occupies a land outside of traditional experience, acts as a form of time travel in which one experience is lived again simultaneously with the experience of the present, thus both instances are not fully embodied within the moment, but revisiting that moment in later memory will serve to create another experiential fragment. In this way, it’s not a re-experiencing of events as they were, but rather a new experiencing of events in a way that they could be, that is a fragmented, and more importantly, æstheticised phenomenon.
One will notice, if you chose to scour your brain for past events, that memory takes on a specific quality when it is re-experienced, and that quality is not dissimilar to the human interaxion with Art. Merleau-Ponty in addressing the issue in Phenomenology of Perception attempted to distinguish the fact of memory either as conservation or construxion, but understanding it as not a reliving but a replica of living, memory nicely slots into the latter.
Memory, in the simplest terms, is essentially a simulation, or if you prefer to address all of life in the postmodernism of Baudrillard, a simulacrum. Life and experience themselves being only a simulation produced by the brain during experience is thus the slide placed before the projector of the mind to create a simulacrum, an image of experience after its temporal marking, a memory. A form of time travel and a form of Art. For what is Art? To simplify this answer, we can say Art too is a simulation, or simulacrum if you like. It is a replication of life or of experience, and in the case of temporal artforms like film, it is a literal preservation of a past moment in the same fashion as a memory. In this way, memory has more in common with cinematography than it does with phenomenal experience. Like Art, memory is a voyeuristic act, a viewing of something depersonalised, but memory, whether we intend or not, is a cinematic medium, and as such shares all the characteristics inherent to the cinematic medium--that of time, mise-en-scène and performance. After all, we are the director of our memories, and thus all performance therein conform to our vision. You may notice this if you compare with friends or even investigate why eye-witness testimony has long been slightly discredited in courts of law. People remember as they want to. Often, bad memories fade away into the sea of the unconscious while good memories remain afloat and alter with time and access.
With the establishment of memory as æsthetic, another question arises. How does memory change with time?
It is no secret that Art, like all things, is defined by environment, chief among these informing factors being the German Geist, the spirit of its time of creation. Not only does this initial period of creation affect reception but all subsequent periods of observation do too. Look at the works of Charles Dickens or the view of the Mona Lisa. Both were understood very differently upon their completion and both saw a reevaluation and elevation with the passage of time. As with Art, memory funxions similarly.
This of course--memory being an individual phenomenon confined to the form of being which initially forged it--is a personal change, a reevaluation of past living through the lens of later life. Often people will remark that a time of suffering in their past helped them to become who they are not, and doing such is a praise of the past struggle. That is only one example of this shift of perception.
As is the funxion of mechanical time, many other changes happen to Art of the course of life. Perhaps most notable to the Neu postmodern period is relative deterritorialisation, as outlined by Guattari and Deleuze. This alongside the simpler understood trend of Commodification see Art being transformed into the Commercial Content, an easily sellable and spiritual voyd piece of consumable experience.
The logic of Late Stage Capitalism, which allows for the Commodification of everything and everyone--for an example of being become a commodity, look to the porn industry or the emergence of celebrity and avatar--not only opens a space for but demands the Commodification of Art. Thus the phenomenon of NFTs, of AI image generation software and the continual softening whitewash of formerly subversive artistic elements.
As with Art, memory follows. So now, in our Neu, we enter a post-Fukuyama sphere where present and past experience converge and become a product. This is the blossoming of experiential sales. You are no longer sold a product, you are sold an experience. Whether that be through a brand--a recognisable repeat of former cycles or ideas--or it be through a literal chunk of time. You are now being sold your time, your very being is monetised and served back to you with algorithmically tailored tastes meant to shape Commercial experiences of the near future. You are now the product. Your being has been commodified.
As we have seen with the funxion of memory previously, it is an æsthetic experience, but being minted in the landscape it now is, that æsthetic outline becomes a Contential form. You now must face memory as you might an Instagram post, that is filter it to present the greatest version of it, and as such remove all essence which previously constituted its spiritual integrity. Trauma should be repressed or expelled not left to be faced on the æsthetic plane of perception, reconciled with and used as foundational blocks for individual progress. Trauma is not fit for the tone of a Contential space.
What is the consequence of this tapestry? Simple, we need look no further than Derrida and Fisher. We mourn memory as we once did history. The positive æsthetic elements have been replaced with a glossy filter which projects a perceived--through dreams not reality--form of being. We live ever idealistic in increasingly dire circumstances.
What then, in the words of Lenin, is to be done? In truth, individually, there is no space for self-improvement. Personality, memory, being, all being elements of a processional culture and environment are subject to factors and individual mass can not alter. Instead, if we wish to reclaim memory, to perform an absolute deterritorialisation and form a plane of imminence, we must change the associated culture and systems which govern even the way we reexperience our own lives.
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