Forgetting and Forgiving in an Age of Total Recall

Abstract

This chapter examines how Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious” [“Funes el memorioso”] and the Black Mirror episode “The Entire History of You” complicate our ordinary understanding of memory as a kind of mental process. Borges and Brooker suggest that models of computational memory that are modeled on data processing devices need to be supplemented with an understanding of memory that is grounded in both the lived body and the social collectivities to which we belong. In the latter case, we come to see that the boundless, infallible memories that the protagonist enjoys are nonetheless perversely faithless in their own way. They turn out to require an element of sociality in order to become meaningful and not mere exercises in the mechanical conversion of experiential data into fungible information. In similar fashion, Borges’s “Funes the Memorious” suggests that even infallible, computer-like memories may require an element of collective, social negotiation in order for them to become meaningful. In both cases, embodied memory provides a virtual supplement to more traditional notions of recall. The mediatic forms through which those memories are disclosed have something to teach us about the nature of the social ties that bind us together.