PP-08 Practice Project VIII

Practice Project: „Total Recall“

Elective module 1st to 8th semester

Module Focus

Proust, Grandma’s Fried Potatoes, New Old Town, Memory Culture, Total Recall

Based on Proust’s theories of memory in his novel " In Search of Lost Time ", in which he contrasts "voluntary memory" with "involuntary memory", the aim is to explore and process our own memories.

Proust illustrates memory with the example of the madeleine served to the protagonist as an adult by his mother, the taste of which, dipped in tea, brings back to him the fullness of his childhood experiences, with all their images, sounds, tastes and smells.

Memory as a kind of reflex, as a reaction of the organism to a certain neural stimulus. Or as a conscious memory that, although conscious, always remains incomplete and often falsifies the experience.

In Proust’s work, this finally expands into a theory of time: Non-simultaneities are transformed into lost time through forgetting or fragmentary memory, and into rediscovered time through flashbacks.

Module Content

In the same way that Proust uses a physical stimulus to evoke a psychological experience that is linked to long chains of associations, each student can examine for himself how memory works for him and to which stimuli it is linked.

The concept of memory can also be interpreted in a broader sense, for example from a sociopolitical perspective. What does it mean to rebuild a new old town in Frankfurt, or the Prussian Palace in Berlin, or the tower of the Garrison Church in Potsdam? And what about the famous German "culture of remembrance" in times of absolute AfD majorities in East German constituencies?

Or: What implications and complications could arise if, as in the movie "Total Recall", experiences and the memories associated with them could simply be bought? Or, as in "Blade Runner," the replicants (artificial humans) can’t really tell whether their memories are "real" or just implanted. So memory is ultimately a multi-layered object and an important building block of selfperception and thus of personal consciousness.

Responsible for this module

Thomas Nagel