In 1932, Bartlett has British subjects read a Native American legend. On recall, canoes become boats, spirits vanish, the narrative structure reorganizes around familiar schemas. The subjects do not distort the memory through negligence. They reconstruct it so that it serves, to understand, to narrate, to anticipate.
Each recall reconstructs the event according to the demands of the present. The memory trace is not a degraded recording. It is material reshaped by each use. Memory produces, it does not archive.
The events that survive forgetting are not the most intense. They are the most usable, those whose form lends itself to narratives the subject has not yet constructed. Past experience deforms under the pull of its future uses.
Doctrine
Memory does not preserve the past. It manufactures raw material for the future. What is forgotten has not been lost, it has been deemed unusable.
Vecteur ouvert
Cities preserve only the buildings that will serve the revolutions to come.
