The End of Technology: Memory in Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2

Today the mind is not part of the weather.

—Wallace Stevens, "A Clear Day and No Memories"

Contemporary memory's greatest difficulty lies not in its weakness but in its strength: rather than an amnesiac disappearance of memory, recent technological developments promote an artificial and debilitating abundance of memory. The novel's traditional mediation of public and private experience may easily be understood as the negotiation of public and private memory, in the sense not only of recording but of accounting for the past and of forming it into meaningfulness. Novels may symptomatically register the strains under which memory operates while also intervening in the construction and appreciation of memory forms that transform consciousness more widely.

For both of these reasons I elaborate my proposal regarding memory's superabundance in contemporary culture with a reading of Richard Powers's novel Galatea 2.2. In it narrative forms of memory confront the seemingly limitless power of artificial intelligence to simulate the distinctly human: the self-conscious experience of memory, the ability to appreciate aesthetic objects, the tragic awareness of temporality. In Powers's novel different models of memory compete for primacy. On the one hand, a model of total storage and infinite recall carries on the Western dream of reproducing the real in order to master it. On the other hand, a model of partiality and selectivity is foregrounded that resembles Jean-François Lyotard's notion of postmodern pragmatics: the self-legitimation of narrative that bolsters sociality and affirms agency by embracing forgetfulness. Galatea 2.2 treats a moment when the attenuated memory and the extensive form of subjective and collective identity associated with print and literary culture seem at their weakest. Newer technological and textual forms appear overwhelmingly successful in remodeling memory and identity along their more dispersed and immediate lines.

Perhaps literary fiction's most authoritative voice in the fields of science and technology, Powers manages to revivify the purpose and potential of his form of narrative: to render "an apology for fiction in a post-fictional age." ¹ His defense of narrative depends precisely on its capacities as a model and a modeler of memory. Importantly, he insists on these strengths not despite the emergence of other technologically driven alternatives but because of them. His text, then, is more than another diagnosis of postmodernity's challenge to individual consciousness and collective identity from a superannuated perspective. Rather, Galatea 2.2 permits us to envision the persistence of the power of narrative, particularly literary narrative, in a more affirmative light: more than a record of memory within a postmodernity determined by different technological and textual forms, narrative is the animating consequence of these developments. Whatever its apparent deficits in cultural prestige at present, literary narrative may find, in the register of memory, the renewal of its centrality to cultural life.

To expect any single novel to confront, extend, or alter the historical direction of developments in memory seems overly optimistic; however, Powers presents Galatea 2.2 deliberately as a placeholder for the category "literature" as it relates to the category "technology." These categories do not simply oppose one another. The novel neither triumphs over the rising tide of technology nor merely extends this trend into the deepest interstices of the human. Rather, it draws forth, furthers, and subverts trends in the history of memory even as it is exposed, stretched, and subverted by precisely the technological developments we might expect it to contain on the level of content. The dialectical relationship Powers elaborates between the fictive and the technical, and the reflexive subtlety of their relationship, justifies our granting his text, at least temporarily, its presumptuous claim to the status of the literary writ large. The argument I want to make could proceed with a plethora of other examples from literature (certainly, that is how Powers himself works), but for it to do so would...