The modernist inhabitation of the world was a rapacious and destructive inhabitation of Earth’s substance—and it was also the luxurious inhabitation of the many-roomed mansion of modern knowledge. These are indivisible aspects of a single dwelling. The latter enabled the former, and the former’s worldwide predations allowed the latter to grow vaster and more splendorous.

So if “habitability” now invites contemplation amid the fallout of imperial modernism—if dwelling now represents a problem—then we might reflect not only on the home modernists make from the physical stuff of the world. We might also reflect on the sort of home they have built from modern knowledge. Furthermore, we might contemplate whether the pursuit of a radical new sort of inhabitation must, as modernists so often presuppose, be a matter of building yet more knowledge—of adding some new wing to the mansion. If the vastness of modern knowledge is internal to the vastness of modern violence, then we may ask ourselves: How much good comes from expanding rather than shrinking it?

Or, to put it another way: What if habitability now requires the exercise of another art, not of building more knowledge but rather of demolishing, abandoning, forgetting, or otherwise losing knowledge dearly held? “The art of losing,” the poet Elizabeth Bishop writes, “isn’t hard to master.” Any new inhabitation will have to be a disinhabitation. This is how you move house.

Within the sprawling archive of modernist reflection on knowledge, quite a lot has been written about building, improving, and safeguarding knowledge. Noticeably less has been written about intentionally relinquishing, forgetting, or disinheriting it. The censorship or restriction of knowledge is usually a scandal. The loss and destruction of knowledge is presumed intolerable. The prevailing conception of knowledge invites modernist subjects to build and conserve.11See, however, Erik Rietveld and Ronald Rietveld, “Hardcore Heritage: Imagination for Preservation,” Frontiers in Psychology, November 21, 2017: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01995 The subjects of modernism have less practice in tearing down or withdrawing even their most obviously dangerous knowledge (although one may note that they have cheerfully razed many rival houses of thought and deployed what materials remain in propping up their own precarious constructions). No grants are awarded to scientists who want to reduce what we know.

However, some architects, confronting the hitherto destructive modernist inhabitation of the planet, now advocate for a moratorium on all new construction.22See, for example, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, “Global Moratorium on New Construction,” n.d.: https://www.charlottemalterrebarthes.com/practice/research-practice/a-global-moratorium-on-new-construction/ Others suggest that the “subtraction” of existing structures is honest architectural work for an overbuilt planet.33See Keller Easterling, Subtraction. Berlin: Sternberg, 2014. It seems that the very discipline that builds can speak, now and then, about the good of unbuilding, about the good of removing architecture from Earth.

Could we demand that certain architects of modern knowledge—say, the shock economists, petroleum engineers, and weapons scientists—do the same to their own, less weighty, constructions? But for all their apparent lightness, such knowledges seem less available for subtraction from the world. Their knowledges can seem as permanent as the radioactive fallout, carbon pollution, and species extinction that are their products—a permanence that arguably makes the rise of such knowledge itself a plausible marker of the “Anthropocene.” The mansion of modern knowledge, however easily condemned, is less easily demolished. How even to begin?

Could there ever be, for example, an anti-architecture of forgetting, set to work on the structure of powerful modernist knowledges? There have been efforts to modify the architecture of the individual brain and its recall. The neurophysiological literature includes the case of H.M., whose hippocampus was partially removed to cool the fires of epilepsy.44G. Watts, “Henry Gustav Molaison, ‘HM’,” Lancet, vol. 373 (2009): p. 456. The lobotomy inadvertently destroyed H.M.’s ability to remember any subsequent events whatsoever. This is, to say the least, nonideal. It is difficult to imagine any viable method to remove, say, weapons science and petroleum geophysics from collective memory.

Indeed, there are no obvious techniques for forgetting knowledge, be it false or true (and that knowledge is true is no guarantee that it will improve our lives, as anyone who has discovered themselves betrayed by an intimate would no doubt acknowledge). No “art of losing” actually suggests itself to us. Bishop’s “One Art” is, of course, not really a manual for forgetting but rather a scene of grief that flounders before the fantasy of disciplined detachment from what one holds dear against all reason: 

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

“Write it”! By contrast, methods of making and securing memory, arts of “inner writing,” are hyperdeveloped. Famous among the classical ars memoriae is the “method of loci”: to help reinforce new information, a student “places” images representing words and ideas into a remembered or imagined architecture—a memory palace. The student “travels” around this virtual space, recollecting at will what they have distributed into its structure, with these various words and ideas adding up to a significant and ordered series. This technique is a powerful one. The Renaissance polymath Giordano Bruno believed that by means of such mnemotechnics, human minds could ultimately accumulate all knowledge of the sensible world, and even of the insensible world too. In the memory palace, knowledge is coterminous with architecture, and the “known” expressed as something “built.”

In her study of Bruno and the art of memory,55Frances Yates, The Art of Memory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. historian Frances Yates makes almost no mention of forgetting. The absence of a corresponding literature on ars oblivionalis has gone largely unremarked upon, although the medievalist Umberto Eco devoted a short essay to justifying such an omission. It is, Eco writes, simply in the nature of language that one cannot intend to forget.66Umberto Eco, “An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!,” PMLA, vol. 103, no. 3 (1988): pp. 254–61. Eco refers to a classical memory treatise that advises students to picture themselves removing unwanted knowledge from their memory palace and chucking it out a window. But this technique, he objects, allows one not to forget so much as “to remember that one wanted to forget.” Knowing and remembering, accordingly, is focused activity and order; forgetting, in turn, can only ever be a subsequent natural history of entropy and nonstrategic ruination. The mansion of the mind, he implies, cannot be demolished or abandoned but only left to the weather and time.

The Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria’s case history The Mind of a Mnemonist relates several decades of observation, interviews, and tests with a subject anonymized as S., who suffered terribly from his pathologically vast and unshakable memory.77Alexander Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. S.’s hypertrophic memory, compulsively constructing and filling palaces that he could not unbuild, impeded his life at almost every turn. S. remembered without forgetting, and it was agonizing. The permanence and completeness of his knowledge kept undoing him.

S. struggled to learn how to forget. He tried writing down what he wanted to forget on slips of paper and setting them on fire. Even this was of no use. Luria recounts S.’s despair when, having burned a piece of paper on which he had written numbers he meant to forget, “he could still see traces of the numbers on the charred embers.”

Yet in the course of his case history, Luria does relate a provocation about the architecture of forgetting. If, while constructing his memory palace, S. placed an image in a dimly lit space, his mind might later “walk on ‘without noticing’ the particular item.” If knowledge was an architecture, then knowledge was also susceptible to changes in that imagined building’s ambience. This is curious. Knowledge is cultivated and maintained in a mood—an orientation, a towardness—and it seems that even adjustments to the mind’s “mood lighting” affects it.

Luria’s observation that “bad” “interior” light could induce a form of forgetting confirms the advice of the anonymously authored Rhetorica ad Herennium, a Roman treatise on rhetoric and the art of memory. The Rhetorica ad Herennium advises students that their knowledge must be placed within a very specific sort of building: spacious, not too heavily adorned, and well lit. Reading today, one might think the author is advocating for the International Style—that universalism of light, glass, and volume found everywhere in modernism’s empire, in every place the same.

Indeed, the International Style seems remarkably companionable to the irreversible expansion of modernist knowledge: not only a machine for living anywhere but also a machine against forgetting anything. Perhaps forgetting has become especially difficult for minds molded by these modernist habitats. There might be too much light and air, not enough shadows cast, for knowledge to get lost.

Consider, for example, the International Style of the Berlin Kongresshalle, built in 1957 and now home to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, with all its compulsory space and light—it obliges the mind to duplicate its spaciousness and lucidity. Here one might begin to wonder: Will it ever be time to turn down the house lights, to blur all the clear lines of sight the building stages?

Maybe someday a shepherd will chase their flock into a cave only to discover a lost manuscript elaborating precisely this technique for oblivion. The manuscript will include instructions for advanced students who, having built too permanent a memory palace, now have to learn to relinquish their knowledge by means of a still finer and more difficult art: that of adjusting the atmosphere pervading the rooms of the mind. Might “habitability” be a problem of modulating the interior weather of modern knowing, as much as, or even more than, engineering the weather of the planet?

That art of losing, if ever recovered, might diffuse the radiance of so much modern knowledge. It might throw light instead on the fantasies that modernists hold about the irreducible innocence and value of the knowledge they have built. That would be less a repudiation of knowledge as such than an acknowledgment of how we inhabit what we know. The domain of those concepts by which we inhabit the world, as the philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote, is a “cloudy and shifty domain.”88Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics. New York: Penguin 1999, pp. 74–75.