Screen Memory - Department of English

A deeply mystical version of memory held sway in the
nineteenth century, in the belief, for example, that memory
persisted after the death of its original holder. The final
sentence of Ewald Hering’s 1870 lecture on organic memory to the
Vienna Imperial Academy of Science was, “Man’s conscious memory
comes to an end at death, but the unconscious memory of Nature is
true and ineradicable: whoever succeeds in stamping upon her the
impress of his work, she will remember him to the end of time”
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(Otis 26). Transmitted atmospherically, memory could drift
through the material cosmos; Charles Babbage, John William Draper
and others believed that the universe contained an Akashic memory
(from the Sanskrit word for space) that stored every thought,
word and action that had ever occurred in it (Lowenthal 19). In
Tony Morrison’s Beloved, memory adheres to the places where stark
experience occurred: “The past, its memory, is out there still,
real enough to capture the living in its grip . . . . what's
more, if you go there--you who never was there--if you go there
and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it
will be there for you, waiting” (36). This version of memory was
not exclusively human or animal but referred to a general
function of all organic matter.
Collective memory was more commonly conceived of as having
been transmitted genetically or biologically: as “racial” or
“organic” memory. Nietzsche and other contemporary thinkers
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