It is not possible to use any expression to make one’s content disappear, because a semiotics is by definition a mechanism for making things present to the mind, and is therefore a mechanism for producing intentional acts.49 At most, mnemotechnics, like other semiotics, can lead to forgetfulness (albeit accidentally) thanks to two phenomena: interference among data and excess of data. Setting aside interference among data, which is a psychological rather than a cultural phenomenon, let us concentrate on the desire to forget in order to avoid an excess of information.50
1.9.4. Ars Excerpendi
While we already encountered the problem in Themistocles-Cicero, the dread of excess certainly increases with the invention of printing, which not only makes available an enormous quantity of textual material, but also facilitates access to it for the man in the street and “leads to the transition, in not much more than a couple of centuries, from the primacy of remembrance to the primacy of forgetting” (Cevolini 2006: 6). Thus, we witness the development of an art not unknown in the centuries of manuscript culture but which acquires central importance in the culture of print, the ars excerpendi, the art, that is, of compiling abstracts or summaries so as to retain only such knowledge as is judged indispensable, and to let marginal information fall by the wayside.
In any case, what we may call the Themistocles complex returns over and over again in the course of cultural history, and one of its most dramatic manifestations is assuredly the second of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, on the advantages and disadvantages of historical studies for life. The text begins with a statement that could be another of the sources for Borges’s Funes:
In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness, however, it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sink down on the threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy and afraid, will never know what happiness is—worse, he will never do anything to make others happy. Imagine the extremest possible example of a man who did not possess the power of forgetting at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of becoming: like a true pupil of Heraclitus. He would in the end hardly dare to raise his finger. Forgetting is essential to action of any kind, just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of everything organic. A man who wanted to feel historically through and through would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep, or an animal that had to live only by rumination and ever repeated rumination. Thus: it is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting. Or, to express my theme even more simply: there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture. (Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 62)
This is the starting point for an analysis of the negative effects of the excess of historical studies which, now they have reached such an unbearable complexity and richness, oppress the memory of a culture to such an extent as to make it unsuited for life. And now, on the crest of this wave of vitalistic admonitions, comes the call for youth to develop an art of forgetfulness (Nietzsche 1874: 351, and see also Weinrich 2004: ch. VI).
One of the interesting things about this text is that, on the heels of these declarations that appear to address the individual’s need for survival, the emphasis changes to the need for a systematic forgetting on the part of cultures in general. This switch is of capital importance because, once the impossibility of voluntarily forgetting what the individual memory has recorded has been demonstrated, then cultures present themselves as systems that function, not only to preserve and hand down information useful to their survival as cultures, but also to cancel the information judged to be in excess. The culture does not make individuals forget what they know, but it keeps from them finding out what they do not know yet. In other words, while it may be difficult for individuals to forget that they got burned on the stove a few minutes ago, a culture, using the manipulative techniques we will get to later, can impose silence and therefore no longer inform individuals that, let’s say, in the year 1600 Giordano Bruno got burned (in a big way) in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori. Or, to put it differently, a culture can remove from Lotman’s semiosphere (discussed in Note 38) certain elements that will no longer be exposed to the visitor’s view.51
A century and a half after Nietzsche’s text, reflection on cultural forgetting has become commonplace and, despite Nietzsche’s urgent cry of alarm, the process of cancelation continuously performed by a culture simply in order to stay alive has come to seem normal. Identifying memory and culture, today we study the acts of forgetting that a culture mobilizes through various kinds of cancelation, which can range from out and out censure (the erasure of manuscripts, bonfires of books, damnatio memoriae, forgery of documentary sources, negationism) to forgetfulness out of shame, inertia, remorse, down to those processes current in the exact sciences in which it is decided that not only those hypotheses proven to have been erroneous but even the efforts and procedures followed to arrive at those that turned out to be correct are expunged from the specialized encyclopedia of a particular science because they are no longer useful (see Paolo Rossi 1988, 1998), while certain disciplines go so far as to consider obsolete any contribution published more than five years ago.
If our Specialized Encyclopedias are subject to processes of forgetting, so much more so is the Median Encyclopedia of a given culture. It guarantees remembrance of the important historical facts or the principles of physics, but it omits an infinite amount of information that the collectivity has repressed, because it was judged no longer useful or pertinent. For instance, the Median Encyclopedia tells us all we need to know about the death of Julius Caesar but nothing about what his widow Calpurnia did after his assassination; it provides precious details about the progress of the Battle of Waterloo but does not give us the names of all the participants—and so on and so forth. These are extremely useful “forgettings,” made so as not to overload the collective memory with more than it can bear—and without rendering the filtered or censored facts irretrievable, since there do exist specialized individuals (such as historians or archaeologists) capable of bringing them to light. In such cases, the collective memory sometimes picks up on the data, restoring them to the Median Encyclopedia, and sometimes decides instead to leave them in some specialized “reservation.”
The forgetfulness filtering performed by the Median Encyclopedia does not depend on the will of an individual or on a conscious act of the collective will: it occurs out of a kind of inertia, sometimes even from natural causes, like the cancelation of everything that was ever known about Atlantis, if Atlantis ever existed.
The problem of filtering by the Median Encyclopedia was in any case not unknown to the medieval encyclopedists—even though they seem to us to be intent on handing on everything that tradition had handed on to them. In the Libellum apologeticum that serves as an introduction to his Speculum Majus, Vincent of Beauvais is already shocked by the proliferation of knowledge (“videbam praeterea, iuxta Danielis prophetiam … ubique multiplicatam esse scientiam” (“Furthermore, I saw, as in the prophecy of Daniel, that knowledge was everywhere increased”) (Libellum, 1).52 This is why he decides to make his encyclopedia a florilegium, in other words, a selection of the best of his reading. That the selection is not immune from the suspicion of censorship is confirmed by his citation of the so-called Decretum Gelasianum, De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis, a compendium of what was apocryphal and what was canonical in Holy Scripture anachronistically attributed to the fifth-century pope Gelasius I: “denique Decretum Gelasii papae, quo scripta quaedam reprobantur quaedam vere approbantur, hic in ipso operis principio ponere volui, ut lector inter autentica et apocripha discernere sciat, sicque rationis arbitrio quod voluit eligat, quod noluerit reliquat” (“therefore I decided to put at the very beginning of this work the decree of Pope Gelasius, according to which certain writings are disapproved and certain others rightly approved, so as to allow the reader to distinguish between
