Reification colonizes even memory, annulling the emigré’s past as mere background data.

Evidence

To them shall no thoughts be turned . – The past life of emigrés is, as we know, annulled. Earlier it was the warrant of arrest, today it is intellectual experience, that is declared non-transferable and unnaturalizable. Anything that is not reified, cannot be counted and measured, ceases to exist. Not satisfied with this, however, reification spreads to its own opposite, the life that cannot be directly actualized; anything that lives on merely as thought and recollection. For this a special rubric has been invented. It is called ‘background’ and appears on the questionnaire as an appendix, after sex, age and profession. To complete its violation, life is dragged along on the triumphal automobile of the united statisticians, and even the past is no longer safe from the present, whose remembrance of it consigns it a second time to oblivion. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 42

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The final turn — that the present’s very remembrance consigns the past to a second oblivion — compactly reverses the commonsense view that recording preserves. Dense enough to sit with for days.
• SEED: Angle for essay on bureaucratic erasure: how the questionnaire/checkbox form of memory — ‘background’ — actively destroys what it claims to register. Citizens’ data as a second forgetting.
• XREF: connects to: Memory has become a degraded repository of images and simulacra rather than authentic perception. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 314; The past is value reversed, being fixed in-itself as pure gratuitous fact — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 436; The past is a for-itself that has hardened into an in-itself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 434 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Memory has become a degraded repository of images and simulacra rather than authentic perception. #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 314
• The past becomes a collection of images, the referent effaced into texts #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 80
• The past is value reversed, being fixed in-itself as pure gratuitous fact #expands (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 436
• The past is a for-itself that has hardened into an in-itself #expands (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 434
• Neohistorical explanation flattens history into raw material, stripping its causal function #corroborates (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 703