• 1 Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 45.

3I will begin with a statement which constitutes the fundamental premise of this argument: interpretation is a mode of our existence. However, I do not mean someone else’s interpretation, where we – as a discursive construct, or a product of different technologies of power, knowledge and discourse – are interpreted from the outside by people surrounding us, or by a system of culture “interpreting” our place, role and meaning. Obviously, such interpretation grants us social existence, but it does not constitute – at least not directly – our internal self. When talking about interpretation as a mode of human existence, I mean what Charles Taylor expressed by calling man, maybe in a slightly oxymoronic way, a self-interpreting animal:¹ what sets human existence apart from other modes of being is the continuous interpretation of oneself and of our involvement in what surrounds us. It is interpretation construed in this way that constitutes the essence of our existence.

• 2 “In it [interpretation, Auslegung] understanding appropriates understandingly that which is underst (...)
• 3 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana U (...)
• 4 Heidegger, Being and Time, 195.

4We could support and justify the above statement by referring to Martin Heidegger, who – beginning with the ontico-ontological difference – situates understanding, and hence also interpretation,² among the so-called existentials, or the conditions of authentic existence of Dasein. Understanding and interpretation, next to attunement (or rather state-of-mind, Befindlichkeit) and speech (Rede), constitute the fundamental ontological conditions for human existence in the world. “To exist,” claims Heidegger, “is essentially, even if not only, to understand,”³ and hence also to interpret. The interpreting understanding is the foundation for the existential constitution of the human being: any structure of meaning “is rooted in the existential constitution of Dasein – that is, in the understanding which interprets.”⁴

• 5 “To understand oneself is to understand oneself as one confronts the text and to receive from it th (...)

5One could also follow somewhat similar, yet less travelled paths of HansGeorg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, each of whom – in his own way – expands the ontological dimension of interpretation by supplementing it with the epistemological dimension, or rather, after the radical Heideggerian turn, restores that epistemological dimension to the realm of interpretation, simultaneously subduing it to ontology: the interpretation of not only what is internal and closest to us, but also of what is external – especially interpretation of cultural texts – becomes a road to self-consciousness. Gadamer historicizes interpretation and links it with the hermeneutics of texts, while Ricoeur proposes a “detour” through methodology and the practice of interpretation in order to eventually reach the final telos which is self-understanding.⁵ For both of them, however, interpretation ultimately remains a mode of existence.

• 6 Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 1-6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; vol. 7-8, ed. (...)
• 7 CP 5.313.
• 8 CP 5.314.

6We could also follow an entirely different path, that of Charles Peirce, who identifies man with the signs man employs to learn about the world and himself: “the word or sign which the man uses is the man himself” – “my language is the sum total of myself.”⁶ And since all thought and cognition can exist only in signs, the human mind for Peirce, as well as human beings themselves, are complex signs. He expressed that conviction verbatim: “mind is a sign developing according to the laws of inference,”⁷ and “man is a sign.”⁸ And since we consider man as a multidimensional sign, interpretation, structurally as it were and necessarily, inscribes itself into his or her being as a mode of existence of every sign, including that of human person. I will return to this question later on.

• 9 Barbara Skarga, Tożsamość i różnica. Eseje metafizyczne (Kraków: Znak, 1997), 222.
• 10 Ibid., 223.
• 11 Ibid., 222.

8What we have said about interpretation, however – that it is a mode of our existence – can also be said about memory: it is in an equal measure a condition of our identity. Barbara Skarga, referring to Heidegger, affirms that the past cannot be tossed away like any old coat.⁹ Every present moment of our identity is rooted in the matter of memory: “Memory is a mode of my existence, it belongs to its structure;”¹⁰ “My past is myself.”¹¹ Noticeably, the key role of memory as a fundamental component of identity is also used, with remarkable intuition, by popular culture: loss or lack of memory means, in truth, a loss of identity, or even negation of one’s humanity; let it suffice to recall a few movies: Total Recall by Paul Verhoeven, Bourne’s Identity by Doug Liman, or Blade Runner by Ridley Scott.

• 12 Heidegger, Being and Time, 376.

9However, there is a fundamental difference between the ontological role of interpretation and the role played by memory. If, as we have affirmed, ongoing interpretation and self-interpretation are builders of identity, then memory is its building material – both the realm of memory that reaches far back into our childhood, teenage years and the entirety of our life, and those most recent memories from just few days, minutes, or seconds ago. It is so because, seemingly, we interpret every present moment of the surrounding world as well as ourselves in that world, but in fact those moments are merely an illusory present, as Bergson would say, since they become past already at the moment of their instantiation and move into the sphere of memory. It is not the present that is an essence of identity – the present is merely a flash of experience; it is the past and memory that constitute the matter of our “I.” Heidegger, once again, put it aptly when he wrote: “Dasein, in existing, can never establish itself as a fact which is present-at-hand […] it constantly i s as having been. The primary existential meaning of facticity lies in the character of having been.”¹²

• 13 Skarga, Tożsamość i różnica, 219.

11Let us, however, go back to the main question: the relationship between interpretation and memory, between the builder and the building material, brings to mind at least one obvious conclusion, which I will – for now – pose as a hypothesis, namely, that there is nothing like objective memory, a recollection fossilized into an ideal, objective form. Memory always wears the clothes of interpretation. Regardless of whether we recall something deliberately – bringing up a remembrance on purpose – or if recollections come to our mind by themselves, they always enter our consciousness as already interpreted and – with the passing of time and the gradual growth of the “snowball” of identity – as reinterpreted over and over again. “Each moment of time,” writes Skarga, “brings something new that merges with my existence, causing a change to occur within it,”¹³ reinterpreting in this way old meanings within memory and creating new ones, we should add.

• 14 “Socrates: Assume, for the sake of our debate, that there is a wax tablet in our souls. Some have i (...)
• 15 “The process of movement (sensory stimulation) involved in the act of perception stamps in, as it w (...)
• 16 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, see also Amelia F. Yates, Sztuka pamięci (Warszawa: Państwowy Inst (...)
• 17 „Yea, from the table of my memory/ I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records” William Shakespeare, Ha (...)

14If we look at writings concerned with memory – from Plato, through Aristotle and Locke to the present day – we notice that, in its essence, this archival model remains unchanged. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates speaks of the wax tablet in our soul – a gift from goddess Mnemosyne – onto which our reflections and thoughts are impressed like a seal.¹⁴ Likewise, Aristotle (in De memoria et reminescentia),¹⁵ Cicero and Quintilianus write about memory as a wax tablet. In Institutio oratoria, the latter claims that the “mind accepts certain impressions, analogous to those made by a seal pressed against wax.”¹⁶ While conversing with the spirit of his father, Shakespeare’s Hamlet assures the ghost that he will wipe all the crude notes off of the table of his memory.¹⁷ And if we look into the poem entitled Memory by William Butler Yeats, we will find the same metaphor as used by the ancients, with the exception that the impression in wax is replaced by an impression left in grass.

• 19 St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Edward Bouverie Pusey (Edward Bouverie), accessed March 15, 2016 (...)
• 20 Ibid.
• 21 Skarga, Tożsamość i różnica, 231.
• 22 See Steven Rose, The Making of Memory. From Molecules to Mind (London: Bantam Books, 1992), 78.

Remembering appears here as a form of perception of something that has been stored in an archive (in the cabinet). Prior to Locke, St. Augustine portrayed memory with a closed-space metaphor – a palace – a storage space for memories: “And I come to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses. There is stored up, whatsoever besides we think […] and whatever else hath been committed and laid up.”¹⁹ St. Augustine completes the image with an important metaphor of reaching to the archive and retrieving memories: “All these doth that great harbour of the memory receive in her numberless secret and inexpressible windings, to be forthcoming, and brought out at need; each entering in by his own gate, and there laid up.”²⁰ Cabinet, or the palace, could be replaced with a library, with an archive containing cimeliums,²¹ or with a filing cabinet,²² but the concept of an archival space remains intact.

• 23 [Cicero] Ad C. Herennium de ratione dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium), with an English translation b (...)
• 24 Rom Harre and Roger Lamb, The Dictionary of Ethology and Animal Learning (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Pres (...)

16I will now quote two short fragments which very well grasp the idea of memory as archive: the former tells us that „memory is the firm retention in the mind of the matter, words, and arrangement,”²³ while the latter says that “memory encompasses acquisition, storing and preserving information.”²⁴ Both quotations carry almost exactly the same idea, and there is nothing extraordinary about them, except for the fact that they are separated by two thousand years. The former comes from an anonymous Latin text Ad Herennium from the eighties of the 1st century B.C. (86-82 B.C.), and the latter comes from a contemporary Dictionary of Ethology and Animal Learning, also published in the eighties, but in the 20th century. It would be difficult to find a better confirmation of the hegemony and persistence of the archival model of memory in our (Western) culture; also, most likely for the majority of readers this model of the archive and of recollection as retrieval from the archive will sound familiar and natural.

• 25 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946) (...)

19Bergson based his theory on a surprising assumption which undermines the concept of memory as an archive, naturalized in the Western consciousness. He believes that – to begin with – the question about where memories are stored is fundamentally ill-posed, since it assumes that memories are stored somewhere at all (for example, in a kind of archive or on a wax tablet). Instead, Bergson proposes an equally surprising thesis: according to him, recollections – as something that belongs to the past – are stored in themselves.²⁵ But how is that possible?

• 26 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy M. Paul, W. Scott Palmer (London: G. Allen & Co., 19 (...)
• 27 Deleuze, Bergsonism, 58.

20Without going into all the complex details of Bergson’s theory, but following his path, we have to reformulate the generally accepted ideas about the relationship between the present and the past. According to Bergson, what really exists (and what is equal to being) is the past, while what in fact does not exist is the present: “Nothing i s less than the present moment, if you understand by it that indivisible limit which divides the past from the future. When we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet; and when we think it as existing, it is already past.”26 That relation of the past to the present – or what Deleuze calls “the most profound paradox of memory” – is based on the fact that “the past is ‘contemporaneous’ with the present that it has been .”27 Unlike in common understanding, the past does not follow the present – it is not a relationship of succession – but, on the contrary, the past coexists with every moment of the present, and is temporally parallel with it. More specifically, all the moments of the present pass through a continuously existing past:

• 29 Ibid., 56-57.
• 30 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 171.

21This all-embracing past, “the past in general,” as Bergson calls it, is precisely the virtual space of memory – eternal and ontological Memory, where all the moments of the passed present, and all the “recollections” virtually coexist; it is “a past that is eternal and for all time, the condition of the ‘passage’ of every particular present. It is the past in general that makes possible all pasts.”²⁹ It is a truly virtual space, having nothing in common with psychology or individual consciousness – it exists outside of any singular mind. It is only our immersion into that virtual space that is an act of our psyche – Bergson calls it a “leap into ontology,” a leap into being itself – and only then does the recollection pass “from the virtual state […] into the actual.”³⁰ Our personal remembrance, a specific individual recollection, is an actualization of that omnipresent virtuality.

• 31 Ibid., 211; See Deleuze, Bergsonism, 60.
• 32 Bergson calls it expansion and contraction.

22Even that brilliant and fascinating model of memory proposed by Bergson, however, does not leave room for interpretation. Even though there is an interpretative moment within that model, it pertains only to the density of virtual memory that we actualize. To be precise, Bergson presents virtual memory in the shape of a cone, in which all the moments of the past coexist.³¹ Whenever we enter that virtuality, we always enter into its totality, into the past as an existing, passive globality. At the same time, however, we always enter it on some specific level of particularity: depending on whether we “leap into ontology,” or “enter” the cone closer to its broader or sharper end, we can actualize that same moment of virtual memory in an extensive, detailed way, or even expand the time of remembering with respect to the time of the event (as does the protagonist in Marcel Proust’s novel), or we can condense a long-lasting event into a single, compact fact.³² As I have mentioned before, however, this kind of actualization relates to the density of a recollection, and not to its semantic interpretation.

• 33 CP 2.303.

25Let us begin with the prerequisite theoretical background by recapitulating the essence of Peirce’s semiotic vision. From our perspective, the most important element of that vision is the very way in which the sign exists. A sign does not necessarily have to exist in a material way, since it can be an idea, a thought, a fiction, a quality or a feeling; so it is not the properties of the vehicle of meaning that are decisive of the mode of sign’s existence – on the whole, they are irrelevant. To clarify this and make it more accessible, it will be useful to recall the basic structure of Peirce’s sign: it is composed of three codependent and necessarily connected correlates: the representamen (the sign vehicle), the object (called the immediate object) which is a representation within the sign of the external reality which the sign represents (the so-called dynamical object), and the interpretant which is the meaning of the sign – the element most crucial to our discussion. The interpretant not only explains the sign, it is not only the meaning of the sign, but it is also a sign in its own right, and as such it has its own interpretant which, being a sign, has its own interpretant, “the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum.”³³

• 34 CP 8.225, footnote.
• 35 CP 5.594.
• 36 See Hanna Buczyńska-Garewicz, “Sign and continuity,” in Ars Semeiotica 2 (1978): 3-15.
• 37 CP 2.57.

26The sign, therefore, exists not because someone is actually using or decoding it, but because it is interpreted by other signs; and it is in that interpretation that the sign’s existence is rooted: “No sign can function as such except so far as it is interpreted in another sign… What I mean is that when there is a sign there will be an interpretation in another sign.”³⁴ “A sign is not a sign unless it translates itself into another sign.”³⁵ The ontological domain of the sign, therefore, is thought construed in a non-mentalistic way through the category of Thirdness, and the fundamental mode of existence of the sign is its interpretation in and through other signs, with the important reservation again that interpretation is not understood here as an activity of a subject performed on signs, but as an activity of the signs themselves.³⁶ In other words, signs are not separate entities, but on the contrary, they are anchored in one another precisely because one interprets the other, and so on into infinity. Interpretation – which will be important for our subsequent discussion of memory and identity – appears here as a category which is both ontological and epistemological: it simultaneously warrants cognition and existence: “cognizability (in its widest sense) and being are not merely metaphysically the same, but are synonymous terms.”³⁷

• 38 A sign “determines some actual or potential mind, the determination whereof I term the Interpretant (...)

27What is important – and here we find a certain analogy with Bergsonian eternal memory – is that the process of mutual interpretation among signs does not occur in any individual mind, or any particular act of thought; it takes place among signs themselves, in the entire universe of signs, the universe of a “potential Mind.”³⁸ We might imagine that universe – even though it is a simplifying analogy – as a vast, spatial and all-encompassing dictionary, in which every word is interpreted (i. e., explained) by words from that same dictionary, and these in turn are explained by yet different words from the same dictionary, and so on without end.

• 39 In terms of technical categories of Peirce’s semiotics, I have explained that difference before, in (...)

28Of course, we too participate in that process of sign interpretation whenever we think, read, speak, observe reality or, more generally, whenever our consciousness is active. This, however, is only secondary and incidental with respect to the virtual interpretation occurring amongst signs outside our minds.³⁹ Our specific interpretative activity is merely a realization of virtual possibilities, a choice and subsequent following of one among many possible virtual interpretative paths (although, when I use the word “choice,” I do not necessarily mean a conscious choice, but rather an intuitive activity of our consciousness). To pursue the analogy with the dictionary further: such a confluence of endless interpretations of signs by other signs continues independently of whether we actually browse through the dictionary or not. And when we do, we actualize only a fraction of the options offered by the dictionary. We should note a Nietzschean moment at this juncture, even though derived from semiotics: because the sign always represents and interprets reality from a certain perspective, exposing some of its qualities and omitting others, our perception of the world through signs is by necessity perspectival – there is no such thing as an objective interpretation of reality.

• 40 Paul Ricoeur, O sobie samym jako innym, trans. Bogdan Chełstowski (Warszawa: PWN, 2003), 221.
• 41 Let us add as a side note that from the ontological perspective, a portal is an extremely interesti (...)

31So how does one reach those niches of virtual memory? One could simply answer: through signs or, more poetically, through “traces of memory.”⁴⁰ Personally, however, I would prefer to use the metaphor of a portal , which grants access to the virtual space, and which instigates its actualization. In other words, a portal is a threshold between the virtuality of memory and the actuality of our recollections.⁴¹ Any object can become such a sign-portal: a cookie, as in Proust’s work, a photograph, a monument, a tombstone, a dried flower, an old toy, but also a scent, a piece of melody, and often a single thought that opens gates to the past. All of us surely experience sometimes a condition, when an unexpected sign, which we stumble upon – a portal that tells us to go down memory lane – recalls something seemingly forgotten. Let us note, however, that the same sign-portal can open different interpretive paths at different moments in our lives as it reappears in constantly reinterpreted contexts of new events and experiences.

• 42 “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation (...)

34In the case of individual memory, following paths of memory is not, in fact, a “choice,” although I did employ this word for convenience; it is not a choice made consciously between interpretations, but rather a process affected by multiple factors independent of our decisions: personality, experience, cultural conditioning, psychological state, physiology. After all, we do not say: I will remember this, but I will forget that (even a wish like “I want to forget all about it” proves to be an unsuccessful interpretation of memory). Because of this involuntary character of individual memory, it does not in principle fall under ethical qualifications. In the case of collective memory, the situation looks different, since it can be an easy realm of interpretative manipulation. It is easy to foreground and impose interpretive paths here, it is also easy to forget. Collective forgetting is oftentimes a conscious effort to wipe out or to push into oblivion those interpretations which, within the local universe, should constitute an important element of identity, but which may turn out to be painful or destructive to that very identity. In his famous essay, Ernest Renan observes that forgetting is a condition for the identity of a nation,⁴² and we can add: of a nation, of a local community, or a group. Such forgetting is nothing but an interpretation subject to moral judgment, the kind of interpretation whose main mechanism is silencing.

• 43 This needs a certain clarification: this kind of identity is changeable to the degree in which it g (...)

35Let us finally return to the question with which we started, i. e., to the relationship between memory, interpretation and identity. Collaboration between memory and interpretation resolves, in my opinion, the contradiction between remaining the same while at the same time being subject to change. If we were to treat identity in the way Hume did – as something unchangeable, or as an ongoing “being the same” – then, as Paul Ricouer observes, we would fall into an aporia, or a conviction that a person’s identity is an illusion. It is this kind of identity that is implied in the archival model of memory,⁴³ a model which does not comprise interpretation. One could risk a thesis, which however I will not develop here, that this model has its deeper underpinning in the distinction between the cognized object and the cognizing subject, which is deeply rooted in the Western thought.

• 44 For example Barbara Skarga, Tożsamość i różnica, 229.

36Only by establishing an indissoluble connection between memory and interpretation in terms of Peirce’s theory of signs (which overcomes, by the way, the above mentioned split) can we elaborate a consistent, theoretically grounded explanation of identity based on the dialectic of the same and of the changing. One could formulate that dialectic as a paradox: “what’s identical is changeable,” which, however, would merely be a seeming paradox. Identity is contained within a network of interrelated, unbreakable connections and traces of the signs of memory, inherently containing interpretations, reinterpretations and reinterpretations of those reinterpretations. Rather than perceiving identity as the Bergsonian “snowball,” one should see it as an ongoing process of semiosis, or an extremely complex sign, subject to permanent changes. Hence, if we were to treat memory as a text – as it is done sometimes⁴⁴ – then it would have to be a text immersed in incessant activity, an unstable text, accessible only through interpretation and devoid of any essence that would be independent from interpretation.