Materiality of Deletion

… and so: “Targeted memory erasure and enhancement may be possible,” says neuroscientist Andre Fenton in response to that Guatama Siddharta quote.

This lecture appears to be part of a series on The Future of Hope. This explains why the talk focuses on the benefits of biomedical memory erasure to human mental development and defense against degenerative diseases as opposed to the possible problems.

The banner on the podium left me thinking of the cosmetic nature of this future practice. Cosmetics is about appearance and the treatments used to shape and maintain it. Those that seek cosmetic treatment usually submit themselves as the subject of appearance modification.

If neuroscience will indeed find a future on the cosmetic shelf, what forms then of ourselves will we fashion by it? Would we use neuroscience to design positive memories about ourselves and those we desire to value?

Fashionable memories of our own self image. If that is indeed the future, perhaps then all that we are is the result of what we have thought of ourselves.

In the nature versus nurture debate, tabula rasa is a powerful image representing the idea of the mind as a “blank slate” open from birth to impression through learning and perception. Yet, the term is somewhat inaccurately translated and oddly restored from its historical context. To be accurate, tabula rasa ought to be translated as “scraped tablet”. To be historically precise, the phrase should be considered within the context of a time in which writing tables were common. John Locke more likely imagined an erased writing table than a blank slate. Suddenly the idea that humans are born with an erased page clear and ready for impression possesses a curious possibility: was the page completely erased?

That idea is not without precedent. Wax tablets, writing tables, Freud’s Mystic Pad. The idea of the mind as comparable to an inscription technology often focused on surfacing the primordial erasure. Anne Whitehead begins her book Memory describing the role of the wax tablet as a working metaphor in Plato and Aristotle’s distinguishable thoughts on memory. For Plato, “the soul enters at birth into oblivion and is covered with a layer of wax on which there is as yet no impression. However, it seems that the wax tablet is not completely wiped clean: there remain imprints of the Ideas, so that we retain a latent knowledge of them.” Important within the very introduction of the inscription medium as a memory metaphor is not only the ability for memory erasure, but an erased memory as the primary condition.

Aristotle was more intrigued by the materiality of the wax tablet and thereby the physical process of memory. “Something is literally stamped into the body, an impression with physiological features, a material trace,” Whitehead quotes Douwe Draaisma‘s description of the wax tablet in Aristotle. Recollection for Aristotle is to access an object of perception from the past. For Plato, the emphasis is on recollecting what was impressed in the wax before the erasure of birth. To Aristotle, “recollection is an autonomous, independent, and self-motivated search.” For Plato, “the process of recollection inevitably involves somebody else.”

The inscription metaphor for memory has had a strong grip on the imagination since Plato and Aristotle. Whitehead’s book is an introduction to the sets of literary and cultural studies that can be classified as memory studies. She follows the inscription metaphor through to contemporary directions in the field to emphasize the continuity in thought on memory. Noticeable in this account is the increasingly subtle connection between memory and the transformations that took place in writing technology since the wax tablet. Reading and writing become simply remembering or forgetting as if electronic writing technology is completely volatile and traceless in effortless reproduction.

Recognizing the shift to collective memory under the inscribing trauma of wars in the 20th century and in reflection on the divergent perspectives of Ricoeur and Derrida, Whitehead argues that the emphasis on memory studies today is footed in forgetting. A precarious foothold, tense with materiality – objects against forgiveness. A tense space held between the hard places of amnesia and amnesty. In amnesia the psychological and material trace is buried and ignored. In amnesty the trace is put out of reach by law. A challenge focused on forgetting without amnesia and forgiving without erasing the medium. An unresolved place. A place in which to “dwell a little longer.” The slate is not blank.

Following the material trace in memory studies in Whitehead’s research draws out two observations concerning erasure. First, thought appears to have shifted from the collective attempt at reading the erasure in the wax tablet to a collective effort at making a proper erasure of collective memory. Second, the shift has the consequence of maintaining the power of the contemporary technologies of inscription as metaphorical conception of memory, but without a thorough material examination of the mechanisms of inscription and erasure. As with the tabula rasa, a conception of the inscription surface as a blank slate has erased the logical and physical objects that are the erasable writing table.

The Spartan Demaratus sent a message of warning to the Greeks of an imminent battle. The message was inscribed on the wood frame under the wax of a wax tablet. This story is commonly told as part of the history of stenography, the practice of hiding a message in plain sight. Whether John Locke was aware of it, his tabula rasa has a hidden message inscribed under a simple layer of translation and contextualization.

Erasability was an important feature of the Renaissance writing tables. These little books were heralded for their functionality, portability, affordability, and by some accounts, their value for reflection upon the human condition.

In “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England” Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe inquire into the thinking about this writing technology through Shakespeare’s characterization of Hamlet and his writing table. By cataloging the technical dimensions and physical workings of the Renaissance writing table meaningful reflections on the material understanding of personal memory emerge.

The writing table freed the renaissance writer from accepted place of inscription. Writing tables were personal, highly portable writing devices comprised of pages treated with a compound that allowed for inscription with a scratch of a metal stylus and erasure with a rub of a wet finger. The authors tell of the emerging industry and popular acquisition of the writing table in England through the course of the 17th and 18th century. Practical for its price in comparison to the costliness of paper. Popular and affordable to a wide cross section of the literate population. Elegantly bound and therefore a popular gift. Commonly derided for its increased association with “weak” dramatists – using their tables to copy ideas from other people’s plays – and “weak” puritan women – tables in hand at church to accumulate “crums of comfort” (sic).

Nevertheless, this personal writing medium remained popular and found a firm place in the human activity of remembrance. The authors describe the intermediary role the device played in handling memories. Out in the world, the user of the writing table would transcribe their thoughts, often in a type of shorthand. Filtering and distilling their notes occurred in the act of copying the writing table by hand on to paper with ink. The authors emphasize this act of repetition. “Repetition is itself a memorial system.”  The repetition inscribes memory with meaningful organization and a sense of value. For the authors this in turn emphasizes the extension of the writing table to mind in Renaissance culture. A beholden extension where erasing from “one’s tables” is to erase from one’s mind.

A memorialization of the ability to forget and a sense of permanence in the act of organizing thought in the transposition to paper. The authors argue that Hamlet is caught in the gripping illusion. Securing himself in the technologies of permanence and of erasure. But the environment betrays the affordance of selectivity in the writing tables. All around Hamlet, surfaces of inscription resonate with erasability – graves are opened, tombstones incomplete, the Ghost’s suit of armor fades, a father’s royal command rendered immaterial. Technologies of permanence are recognized as a virtualization process, sustaining an illusion of permanence in the process of moving notes from writing tables to parchment, of the body to a tombstone, of memory to the fixed place of material permanence. In response, Hamlet subverts the process by a deliberate act of transcribing the shorthand of his writing table to mind and heart: “Full charactered with lasting memory, / Which shall aboue that idle rancke remaine / Beyond all date euen to eternity”.

Transcription out of the haunting memory of the father and the memory of the beloved drowned in the stream that flows to the sea of oblivion.

To combat the cultural expectation of the fleeting electronic text and the “illusion of immaterial behavior” that the digital environment projects, Matthew Kirschenbaum brings into focus the mechanisms that facilitate inscription and transmission in Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

Key to this discussion is Krischenbaum’s classification of forensic and formal materiality. Forensic materiality is used to refer to the physical manipulation of magnetic impressions on the rotating platters of hard drives.  He emphasizes the stability of the trace on the hard disk drive, recounting stories of data recovered from “deleted” drives sold on eBay to those hard drives excavated and completely restored from the ground zero site at the World Trade Center. Formal materiality on the other hand is an emphasis on the manipulation of symbols. We experience it as buttons on the screen or a blank page that we fill with writing. These are negotiations between applications and the operating system, conceptual and logical objects, beneath which occurs the material exchanges of inscription and erasure on the physical object, the hard disk drive.

Formally, an erasure can take place on the computer screen as file in the trash can or sentence in a document deleted. The file, however, forensically may remain intact on the hard drive as a physical object. Physical erasure takes place at a variable granularity of the trace, the inscription.

Kirschenbaum’s work is primarily concerned with accurately preserving digital works which accounts for his immersion into the substratum of the electronic text. In this he follows historical precedent in literary theory: “we can effectively address questions of literary history or interpretation … until we know how books have been created and reproduced; how books have been preserved and destroyed.”

A hyperlink seldom tells us where we will be physically drawing information from. The suffix in the URL string may hint at a country, but the IP address that the URL serves is a more accurate indication of the content’s physical location. Conceptually we are dealing with information that is ready at hand – available at our fingertips rather than distant and requiring transmission.

These links are to projects presented in the Media + Materiality Class at the New School University and were located using yougetsignal.com

The way of expressing deletion typically references a media device or a content platform from which the erasure is performed. The idea of a digital object comes into play mainly in a discussion about effective archiving practices and not deletion practices.

“What does it mean to preserve digital objects?” asks Kenneth Thibodeau in his essay on digital preservation. Where he addresses the challenge of fully preserving the digital object, one can recognize the challenge of fully deleting a digital object. The challenges to preservation that include “policy questions, institutional roles and relationships, legal issues, and intellectual property rights” seem to be the very same challenges to deletion. So then it may help to import the model that Thibodeau introduced to understand the object of preservation. The digital object is defined within three classes each with unique properties: a physical object, a logical object, and a conceptual object. A model to be represented here under a different question: “What does it mean to delete a digital object?”

Erasing content from a hard drive is to manipulate an object that is altogether physical, logical, and conceptual. The physical object is the inscription on the hard drive – magnetic impressions performed planographically, heads floating on air over the spinning platters. The logical object is the manipulated unit of binary clusters ordered and processed through the computing infrastructure. It is the page source behind the “page source”. And the conceptual object is the projection on the screen or through the speakers that we recognize. It is the object we handle as if an object.

“Obviously, we have to preserve digital objects as physical inscriptions, but that is insufficient,” writes Thibodeau and so embarks on establishing the complexities that may manifest across the levels. For example, preserving a web page may mean tracking down all the related files (stylesheet, images, javascript libraries) and viewing software and its settings (firefox 3 with adobe flash 10) that establish and define the page.

But when we think of deletion, Thibodeau’s statement of the obvious is anything but. We might rather say, “Obviously, we have to remove that picture from the web page.” Removal of the picture is related to the conceptual object of the page at a specific URL hosted from a specific IP address. But the digital object, removed from conceptual awareness, may remain largely unchanged as a logical and physical object. And this does not mean that it is no longer a conceptual object either – it may be still something within a different operating environment. The deleted file could still conceivably be something in the desktop trash can, something in the data recovery software. The deleted Facebook picture remains a picture, only without the frame.

The picture at the top of this post is an illustration of deletion at the site of the three different classes of the digital object. The representation is deceiving, but meaningful. The conceptual object here is a music file. It will bypass the “recycle bin” when the shift key is held and the file dragged. However, within the hex or disk viewer the digital object will still be accessible, verifying that as a logical object the digital object is still intact. Only if the file is securely wiped will the disk editor represent the logical object deleted. But then methods of logically deleting a file vary as Peter Gutmann’s discussion on secure methods of erasing hard drives demonstrate. Also, there is the presence of a blank space to consider within the logical composition of the hard disk. A palimpsest indicating something was here – an absence that in the ordering of the rest of the disk drive may be rather telling. Then there is the representation of the hard drive performing a file deletion. It too is problematic. Behind the arbitrary seeming motions over the flat surface are targeted inscriptions. Under a Magnetic Force Microscope it is evident that these inscriptions are not necessarily perfectly inscribed, so deletions or overwrites can be detected. Somewhat like the frayed edges of a billboard, the physical inscription on a hard drive can be imperfectly overlaid – preserving some trace of the deleted digital object at the physical level.

source: R. D. Gomez, A. A. Adly, and I.D. Mayergoyz . “Magnetic Force Scanning Tunneling Microscope Imaging of Overwritten Data.” IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 28, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 1992, 3141.

“There is an inherent paradox in digital preservation. On the one hand, it aims to deliver the past to the future in an unaltered, authentic state. On the other hand, doing so inevitably requires some alteration,” concludes Thibodeau. For the eraser, the aim is to deliver the future from the past. There may not be the paradox, but there is a paradigm. Deletion as an act of forgetting to make way for new memories, more space on the drive, depends on a certain perception that the deleted object will rest in the flush of entropy – traces in their minutia and multitude decaying and fading. But as drive space increases, as revision control normalizes in document management, and as backups and cloud computing standardize, conservation of digital objects may become an affordance of digital storage.

Recognizing beyond the screen a stubborn persistence of the digital object, the question of “what does it mean to delete a digital object” summons a reflection upon the notion of a deletable object. What is it? What does it mean? Why does it matter?

The object (n.) of deletion.
The tangible and visible thing that will be deleted.
The object (n.) of deletion.
The goal that will be attained by performing the act of deleting.
The object (v.) of deletion.
An opposition coming from the performed deletion.