Library as Memory

A couple of things struck me from the readings this week, mostly from Alberto Manguel’s description of Aby Warburg’s library in The Library at Night. I had never heard of Warburg or his library before and I found the thought of his constant rearranging of books through the processing of ideas very fascinating. His memory seems to me to be prolific in its abilities: where we now use metadata and tagging to search for interconnected materials, Warburg’s system of notes and sheer brainpower was able to connect hundreds of items.

I did find the description of the Warburg Institute library to be somewhat ironic: while alive, Warburg constantly rearranged the contents of his library, but it now stands frozen in time.

This theme of memory as library and the immortalization of a single moment or thought really got me thinking about the present social and political climate. Manguel’s description of the “perseverance of memory” as “the mental phenomenon where something is perceived as true even after it has been proven false” (pp 197) has consistently appeared in Media although I wasn’t aware of its name.

I had stumbled upon something similar in a blog called theoatmeal.com in which the author, Matthew Inman, describes the Backfire Effect: a phenomenon that occurs when you give someone facts which may contradict a particular belief they have, causing them to hold onto it even more so than before you attempted to correct them.  

This idea of the fluidity of truth is also seen in Dali’s famous melting clocks in his 1931 “Persistence of Memory,” completed two years after Warburg’s passing, which art historian Dawn Adès described as “an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order” (Dali, 1982).

It seems that even after nearly a century, we are still struggling with the same anxieties as Dali and Warburg.

 

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