Technology Makes Amnesiacs of Us All

The modern world makes much of the past — recent and far away — only murkily visible. We are encouraged to forget history, sell it, trivialize it, or perceive it only in the most confined terms.

Technology acclimatizes us to impatience. We await the next message or the latest tweet. Merely gaining access to a website or app acquaints us with forgetting on a daily basis, too. How do I log in? What is my customer number? What is the answer to that security question? A Google search for “forgotten my password” produces millions of hits.

Technology’s forward-facing nature is conjoined with a widespread prioritization with what has yet to happen. It is an enthrallment that implicitly helps us turn our backs on the past. Modern labor is a practice of attention to the yet-to-come. Professional lives rarely escape from plans — business plans, action plans, financial recovery plans, personal development plans, and the like are the emblematic documents of a working world that help code yesterday as more or less unimportant. The high-value words of employment include “opportunity,” “change,” “innovation,” “entrepreneurialism,” and “growth.” Knowledge of yesterday is of use primarily to make clear how tomorrow could be better. Such vocabulary — the privileging, for example, of innovation in descriptions of what is valuable about a business or a business person — are part of a host of ways in which modernity encourages the negative casting of the past.

One of the casualties of the contemporary world’s fascination with the future is history itself: the achievements, acts, and creations of the past in general. Groomed for tomorrow, we become unmoored from inheritances and what, potentially, they could mean or do for us. We have begun to forget that a relationship with historical events and legacies might be worth thinking about.

And academe has been complicit in this forgetting. It would be easy to think that an interest in the achievements of the past, and an analytical investigation of them, would be found in an education in the arts and humanities. It would be easy to think that contemporary teaching and research in such areas is a redoubt against the general drift of modernity away from history. But those assumptions would be wrong.

A meeting of diverse but potent forces in education distracts students and teachers from much serious and open investigation of the achievements of history. Those forces oblige instead a narrow, instrumental, or self-referential understanding of the past. Modern education is, certainly, futures-oriented. Students are now customarily framed as on a “journey.” Those students’ education is described as part of “personal development,” a kind of business plan: You do this so that you can do that later in your life. Higher education is bewitched by the progress narrative. And it is rarely suspicious of the idea that a biography should simply be a straight line, going upwards.

But what interests me is not so much this futures-oriented element of education. What interests me is how and why higher education contributes to society’s more general pulling down of the portcullis on history. How does the contemporary teaching of the arts and humanities, with their obvious historical focus, inhibit, cauterize, or stall attention to what is interesting about the past?

It is necessary to turn to two distinctive moments in the recent history of ideas and in the history of liberal education, which meet in a kind of sorrowful handshake, to find the intellectual sources of this problem.

The first is the so-called “linguistic turn” and the lingering fallout from it. This might seem an unlikely claim. Few now identify themselves as poststructuralists. And many arts and humanities students do not know what “the linguistic turn” means or, rather, do not realize that something else had been “turned” away from. But legacies are enduring — and the more so when they are not recognized as legacies.

The flourishing of poststructuralism in the 1980s and 1990s, with its complex faith in the simple point that meaning cannot be securely communicated through language, drew adherents who came to believe that the study of the arts and humanities was merely a matter of subjective opinion. Language became perceived, for a cluster of academics and their followers, as a medium not for the expression of intention but the recognition of intention’s irrelevance and undiscoverability. And these scholars were also persuaded that pretty much all opinions were of equal value.

These assumptions persist. Poststructuralism at once gave to the arts and humanities a highly professionalized language (making the subjects accessible only to a few) and confirmed to outsiders that the study of those subjects was amateurish because it was all merely opinion. There was nothing, apparently, that could be said with rigor, clarity, or testability.

The assumptions of those championing the linguistic turn proved tenacious for a while in English departments, cultural-studies departments, and even in parts of history departments — which might be thought to retain faith in the empirical. It provoked work that ruminated on the impossibility of knowing the past, of understanding any document, except as an infinity of possible interpretations, each folding in on itself as the signifier lost contact with the signified.

Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” was a touchstone of the poststructuralist case. For a while in the 1980s, this was an almost compulsory document for anyone seeking a degree in the arts and the humanities. Barthes proposed — or rather, to be fair, he has been taken to propose, for there is an argument, ironically, over whether he quite meant what he was taken to mean — that the “Author’s empire” was too powerful. “The Death of the Author” proclaimed that such rule, such authorial tyranny over a text’s meaning, needed to be toppled.

Barthes became a figurehead for the idea that it was impossible to value the meaning of the past. That was because, within the documents and archives of history, there was merely confirmation of meaning’s incorrigible plurality. What mattered was not intention inscribed in an artifact but the reader’s ability in the here and now to make that document “mean” what they wanted, thought, or whimsically desired, there and then. The past was, in this specific sense, abolished because it was not knowable.

The poststructuralist legacy has been strengthened by the now almost complete success of left-wing/liberal values among arts and humanities students and academics. Being nonjudgmental, in the liberal world, has become the new judgment. Liberalism obliges scholars and students to welcome more or less all points of view — so long as they are liberal — and to be hospitable to (almost) all ways of living and being.

The liberal retreat from almost all forms of judgment has major implications for moral and political life. But it also has implications for the specific business of teaching the arts and humanities. The liberal preference for welcoming rather than critiquing adds to the difficulties of moving beyond the idea that, because views on the arts and humanities are only opinion (the washed-out implication of poststructuralism), nearly all opinions must have equal value. Judgment, analysis, or argument are of little use here. For the extreme liberal, questioning looks like intolerance or somehow ideologically suspect. The liberal seminar room can at its worst be the scene of an individualism that defeats the possibilities of discussion. In places, academics must even advise students that, because they might be offended by a view that is outside the liberal consensus, they can skip the offending text, class, or talk. The arts and humanities, with their stated interest in the past, are further confirmed as intellectually insecure as well as accessible primarily to only individual, subjective perspectives.

The second development in the arts and humanities that has influenced our orientation with the past has been the emergence of identity politics in the last 40 years. Its dominance has not made the past disappear. But it has helped confirm that approaches to the past come with conditions.

Among the approaches that the liberal student is taught to pursue, by those in education who champion the priority or even the exclusivity of identity politics in historical inquiry, is to assess how individual needs and desires in the past were satisfied or not. History becomes the story of whether a particular kind of person, a particular form of identity, obtained what they wanted, or believed they deserved, or not.

As identity has established itself as the key lens for historical investigation, the forms of identity that are examined have become more and more granulated. Exploration of human identities through time has value, that is for sure. And in its own way, the archival explorations guided by identity politics are about identifying interesting connections between the present moment and the past, which is what we are losing elsewhere.

But one of the regrettable results of the privileging of identity is the repeated conclusion that reading history is primarily about chastising it. Identity politics encourages an interpretation of the past that is dominated by narratives of the inadequately treated. History, under these terms, comes to students as something largely to be grateful that we have escaped from. Identity politics in historical inquiry has, sometimes inadvertently, assured students and scholars that the first and most important way to regard the past is to see it, with the psychoanalysts, as the temporal location of trauma from which we need to recover or have recovered. At its worst, this means that historical investigation is simply a version of finger wagging.

Seeking primarily, and sometimes only, matters that invite disapproval has contaminated our sense that history can offer anything to celebrate. To regard history’s attainments, archives, and artifacts largely in terms of their failures or their prophesies has become a marker of how to think analytically about the past. To be sure, these compound narratives of identity, these strands of inquiry into the past, are important. We need them. But they have come at a cost.

Identity politics has encouraged students to emphasize contemporary issues, as well as individual priorities, in their examination of the past. History’s artifacts are now required to “satisfy” the individual preferences of their consumers. Those artifacts must be conceived as “relevant,” “relatable,” or in some way available for “empathy.” Privileging such terms licenses, for those so disposed, a jettisoning of that which is not immediately meaningful or emotionally attractive: “I do not find Macbeth relatable so I am not interested in it.” “I didn’t find Plato relevant to me.”

The modern desires for a personal, emotional, or dimly intellectual connection with the past in the study of the arts and humanities are, in rudimentary terms, desires to connect with history. And that is suggestive. But the terms of that connection are as limited as they are self-referential.

We struggle to encourage students, to be allowed to encourage students, to be curious about the archives of the past, to explore history’s achievements, and, where aesthetic forms in particular are concerned, to enjoy them as something more than merely “statements.” An understanding of history, the life and creations of the past, has deteriorated.

The present-day discrediting or ignoring of history is partly a byproduct of modernity’s eagerness for the future. But in the teaching of the arts and humanities there is little evidence of imaginative resistance. What might the loss of history do to us? What might be the political or cultural costs of that loss? What could be the psychic ones? What kind of damage will we do to generations by disenfranchising them from much of the past, and leaving them with only contracted, self-referential ways of understanding it?

There is a task of cultural psychoanalysis, so to speak, to undertake in our arts and humanities departments. The task is to begin to ask more open questions about what we have inherited and how we might relate to it. To ask whether we can see the past in less ideologically determined and less merely private ways; whether we can change the lenses of our perceptions. As in psychoanalysis, the aim would be to start a long process of trying to reach a better, a more helpful, and a far less bounded relationship with what once happened. With that which is more than personal memory — with collective recognition of what is worth remembering — is the precious chance of a richer experience; an ampler, unsentimental respect for the best achievements of men and women in the past; and a safer sense of our (temporarily) belonging in time and place amid a world that isn’t ours.

Francis O’Gorman is a professor of English literature at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book is Forgetfulness: Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia (Bloomsbury).