ERINNERUNG: CYBERNETICS AND HISTRIONICS

-- "It will remember itself from every sides".

For Martin Heidegger, what comes to light in Erinnerung is the "persistence" of the beginning through all that follows:

The beginning is the strangest and mightiest. What comes afterwards is not a development but the flattening that results from mere spreading out; it is the inability to retain the beginning. [ An Introduction to Metaphysics 155]

This inability to retain the beginning is announced in the experience of the "essence" of modern technology in which, according to Heidegger, it seems as though man everywh re and always encounters only himself , in the form of a proliferation of discourse ('The Question Concerning Technology' 308) -- which bears certain resemblances to Hegel's concept of "pure self-recognition in absolute otherness" ( Phenomenology of Spirit 14).

In Heidegger's thinking, however, this self-reflection is not a perfection but "the final delusion," since it is ignorant of technology as a challenge addressed to humanity ('The Question Concerning Technology' 311). This challenge resides in a breakdown in the way, for Hegel, Weltgeist becomes self-conscious Spirit. We can identify this breakdown elsewhere in Heidegger as the relationship between Dasein and the language of idle talk (Gerede), and the way everyday signification introduces a division which closes-off Dasein from self-knowing. This alienating experience of language, which became so important for the Existentialists, is regarded by Denis Hollier (a critic of Bataille) as what "makes man into a relationship to, an opening to," since "it prohibits his withdrawing into utopian self-presence, cut off from his retreat towards closure. It dispossesses him of his origins" ( Against Architecture 65).

This cutting-off is brought into new light, as it were, if we re-read Heidegger's Erinnerung through Joyce's "riverrun" and the deployment of "big innings" (FW 271.23) as a possible signifier of "beginnings". In effect, what (of all the potential beginnings) is seen to persist through all that follows is "a split in their infinitive" (271.21). This would provide us with a sense of remembrance and historicity radically different from that mapped out, for example, in Hegel's Philosophy of History , and would provide certain insights into Heidegger's characterisation, in Being and Time , of Dasein as the site (or theatre) of history. Moreover, if we consider the way Dasein is marked by an embeddedness in discourse, and the fundamental relationship of this discourse to technology , we can begin to see how the Joycean "riverrun" unfolds a concept of history which is irreducible beyond the linguistic or technological forms within which it is articulated. As Heidegger elsewhere affirms: "Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic" ('The Question Concerning Technology' 318).

Following Alan Roughley's suggestion that the Wake's triads, ALP and HCE, might be read "as simulacra of what Heidegger designates as Dasein" ('ALP's "Sein" and "Zeit"' 129), we could commence a charting or navigation of the way these triads motivate a giant acrostic mechanism , a type of historical cybernetic apparatus which would bring-forth an other text with no straight-forward relation to its "parent" text(s). Such a "croststyx" (FW 206.04) machine would borrow from everything we have said so far regarding Erinnerung and "riverrun," along with the signification of an economy of death and breaching ("crossed styx"), and the possible reference to the crucifixion of the Jewish mystic, Jesus Christ, and the notion of "ascens on" as it pertains to Joyce's use of the Phoenix myth throughout the Wake .

Considering the virtually infinite permutations and combinations achieved under the aegis of the two triads, ALP and HCE, it would be possible to draw from Finnegans Wake a model of "history" which would depart radically from a linear teleological structure and from the structural convolutions of historical dialectics. Moreover, in light of Heidegger's remarks in On Time and Being regarding the historicity of Dasein as crossed through by "the eternal return of the same" (7), we could draw into this acrostic theatre Nietzsche's concept so as to breach a path between the (Hegelian) categories of Erinnerung and Gedachtnis; "between remembrance as interiorization and a thinking memory which can also be linked to technic l and mechanical hypomnesis " (Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man 36).