Forgetting Democracy

I recently watched the movie Code 46 on movies on demand. The film stars Samantha Morton and Tim Robbins. It's great--a dystopic future characterized by cloning and the elevation of the incest prohibition to the fundamental law: what must be avoided at all costs are liasons between those sharing more 25% of their genetic material. The film relies on oppositions between included and excluded, the protected (covered) and the vulnerable, exile and membership, and memory and forgetting.

What is interesting to me is that in the film, forgetting is a privilege of those who are included, those under the protective cover of society. Unfortunate events, violations of Code 46, are erased, medically, from their memories. The exiled bear the pain of continued memory.

For Nietzsche, the privilege of forgetting is the privilege of the strong. Yet, the advent of moral law, of some version of Judeo-Christian-Kantian morality and the claims of the demos, involves inscribing memory on the subject, on creating people capable of keeping contracts because they have memories. In the liberal legal tradition, the presumption of legal responsibility is that people are accountable for their acts, that they have memories, that they won't forget their responsibilities.

This suggest to me a problem of contemporary political subjectivity--are people who forget, people who have no historical or cultural memory, capable of democratic governance? Gore Vidal says something like this when he says that Americans suffer from cultural amnesia. I think he's right. And this amnesia enables all sorts of reappropriations and articulations, where events come quickly to signify something they were not. Fast media add to this, sweeping us along, and past any hesitations or questions on which we might, on which we should, pause.

Without memory, can we take responsibility for each other or even for ourselves? And what about a sense of shame? For the Tim Robbins character, there is no shame in his reintegration into the safety of the society, no shame in the exile or banishment of Samantha Morton. In a way, what little societal memory remains is handled by the Sphinx, the complex government/scientific group that determines who can be 'covered,' who can travel, who can be included, who can have sex with whom. Without memory, there is no accounting, no accountability.

And, for me, the problem with the loss of memory is the loss of our past hopes and aspirations, the loss of our dreams that our arrangements, our living together, might be otherwise.

Comments

[kevin]

Wasn't Nietzsche's valuation of forgetfulness tied to resentment and how to avoid it? So forgetfulness might be useful for democratic practice in that it elides pettiness and revenge in favor of a deeper engagement? Except that N. posited pettiness and revenge and resentment as constituent of democracy. It's not a problem of amnesia per se but amnesia in the wrong location...

[Kim Dot Dammit]

Wow. This is such an amazing dissection of the film and of the function of memory. One of the things that attracted me to the film is that it is the science fiction of the very near future, barely discernible from present. So your read on the creation of false memories and false visions of history is right on the mark. I hope you don't mind, but I'll probably respond to this in more detail later in my blog. You've really opened something up here. Thanks.

[Ajax Bucky]

Our arrangements, our living together, *were* otherwise.
The lines of tradition, except the Biblical and the Greco-Roman, were severed pretty thoroughly. And the remnants treated with scorn.
Not much remains to contradict the approved storyline. And we were all raised to see the brutal primitive life as failure. But we did live hundreds of millenia as human beings outside the narrow boundaries of "civilized" existence. Some of that must have included laughter, happiness, joy.
Which sounds like an idealist's wet dream of native life somewhere that never was, but what I mean is we've forgotten even that that's who we once were, so no comparisons can be made with this. We're cut off, we don't remember who we were. That's the saddest part of not remembering, we don't know who we are beyond this shrinking moment.
It makes us vulnerable.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

I think this 'forgetting' and this 'cultural amnesia' is for me the most important phenomena. But it doesn't seem like a privileged few, it seems like nearly everybody is 'putting things behind them.' I am so depressed about this I don't think there is anything that can be done about it except on the individual and small-group levels. And when Vidal said that, he said it before ever more massive machinery for forgetting were even put place--so that his 'cultural amnesia' was maybe 10% roughly what he'd mean today. Especially since Europeans are learning how to do it too now.

[Alain]

Jodi

This amnesia takes a distinct form in the United States. Perhaps there has never been a truly independent media that challenged government policy. But I am old enough to remember there were elements of the media that challenged the account of what was happening in Vietnam, that revealed the abuse of power in the Nixon white house, and even had some tough questions for Oliver North. These events are not ancient history but given the enmeshed corporate culture of the media, and the concentration of ownership, it is hard to remember. In fact, much of the revisionist history of these events is that the "liberal elite" brought inappropriate attention to these issues, that it undermined American interests and "divided the country." This is part of the rationale for a lack of public interest in getting more independent accounts of what is going on in Iraq. We do not want to know.

I am a self-professed old school liberal, but it is time we face facts. Call it what you will: neofacism, plutocratic theocracy, or just plain stupidity. But we have entered a time and political space that is uncanny, familiar and yet disturbing. I tend not to like hyperbole but all the revelations that are coming out everyday (torture of children, extraordinary rendition, social security privatization)lead me to these conclusions. Lennin's question is always pertanent but especially so today: What is to be done?

I would say fight the amnesia, call on an alternative history of American politics. This includes the recent tradition of tough journalism and a reclamation of our great democratic thinkers: Jefferson, Whitman, Emerson, and hell, even Dewey. But who has the balls to do this in the public realm? I haven't got a clue.

What's the frequency Kenneth?

[Alain]

Jodi

Sorry about the rant. I want to add the following quote from Dan Rather speaking to a British journalist last week:

"It's an obscene comparison," Rather said, "but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around peoples' necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck."

Talking to another reporter, Dan told it straight about the careerism that keeps US journalists in line. "It's that fear that keeps [American] journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore in on the tough questions so often."

Silence as patriotism. Ugh. He confessed, "One finds oneself saying, I know the right question, but you know what, this is not exactly the right time to ask it." It was making him ill and he was ready to say, BASTA, enough. Suddenly, there was fire in those eyes: "It's extremely dangerous and cannot and should not be accepted and I'm sorry to say that, up to and including this moment of this interview, that overwhelmingly it has been accepted by the American people. And the current administration revels in that, they relish and take refuge in that."

[Charlie Bertsch]

This is awesome, Jodi. I'm also taken with some of your commenters' words. Thanks for alerting me to those Rather quotes, Alain.

My film-critical instincts derive from reading a good deal of Frederic Jameson's work before I knew much about the history or art of cinema. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the circumstances. In the case of Code 46, I want to make the "Jamesonian" move of saying that the film's manifest content must be read in light of what it works hard to keep latent. However, since this is a film -- as you adeptly point out, Jodi -- "about" -- what a word! -- the power of forgetting, who has it and who does not, that move is bound to get twisted up with the film's self-reflexivity.

[Jodi]

Thanks, everybody, for these really thoughtful remarks. It's a little weird for me because right now I am in San Antonio, Texas, a city of perpetual renewal, new stores, new restaurants, new subdivisions. And the memory? well, it's weird, too: I took my friends to the Alamo and the tourist info emphasized that we were at a sacred site on hallowed ground and that the sacrifice made at the Alamo was a symbol of freedom around the world. I had my doubts about this.

Like Charlie, I really appreciate the words from Rather in this context.

It's weird, this combination of memorializing and forgetting. They seem to me to go together, that there becomes a proper framing of patriotic memory, of a re-membering only in the service of the present that some want.