We need to trace out the intersection of memory and information. Even if tge question “Where are recollections preserved?” is badly framed, a mechanical reduction of a more basic metaphysical structure, we are nevertheless justified to ask “How is information processed as information? And what are some of its distinguishing features?” Memory may be only one form in the nexus of information storage, retrieval, processing. Nevertheless, if we speak of memory in more general terms (that is, not a specific function of a single mind, or multiple minds, for example when we speak of a muscle memory) then memory may be a useful designation.

It’s not simply an act of recalling the past in comparison to the present. For “the present is not; rather, it is pure, becoming, always outside itself.” The present is active and useful, the past has ceased to act or to be useful, but has not ceased to be. It is incorrect to say that the past was, rather the past is being “in-itself, and the form under which being is preserved in itself.” The past is pure ontology. Moreover, the past is contemporaneous, coexists, with the present. The past does not follow the present, but is constituted immediately with the present. The past is presupposed, a pure condition, within the present. “Each present goes back to itself as past. Not only does the past coexist with the present that has been, but, as it preserves itself in itself (while the present passes), it is the whole, integral past; it is all our past, which coexists with each present.”

Duration is a virtual coexistence. Each successive slice of the past always contains the totality of the past. Memory is not merely an act of recollection, but an evocation, a state where recollections become actualized or embodied. Thus, we have a revolutionary definition of consciousness. “We do not move from the present to the past, from perception to recollection, but from the past to the present, from recollection to perception.” Recollection is actualized when it becomes an image. The past enters into a coalescence with the present,

Memory involves two simultaneous movements: a translation and a rotation. A translation “moves in its entirety to meet experience, thus contracting more or less, though without dividing, with a view to action; the other of rotation upon itself, by which it turns toward the situation of the moment, presenting to it that side of itself, which may prove to be the most useful.”

“The four aspects of actualization: 1) translation and 2) rotation, which formed the properly psychic moments; 3) dynamic movement, the attitude of the body that is necessary to the stable equilibrium of the two proceeding determination; and finally 4) mechanical movement, the motor scheme that represents the final stage of actualization.” In practice this can be described as follows. “The first moment ensures a point of contact between the past and the present: the past literally moves towards the present in order to find a point of contact (or of contraction) with it. The second moment ensures a transposition, a translation, an expansion of the past in the present: recollection-images restore the distinctions of the past in the present – at least those that are useful. The third moment, the dynamic attitude of the body, ensures the harmony of the two preceding moments, correcting the one by the other and pushing them to their limit. The fourth moment, the mechanical movement of the body, ensures the property utility of the whole and its performance in the present.” To this, we add a “fifth aspect of actualization: a kind of displacement by which the past is embodied only in terms of a present that is different from that which it has been.”

We can distinguish between a psychological unconscious and ontological unconscious. A psychological unconscious “corresponds to a recollection that is pure, virtual, impassive, inactive, in itself. A psychological unconscious, by contrast, “represents the movement of recollection in the course of actualizing itself: like Leibnizian possibles, recollections try to become embodied, the exert pressure to be admitted so that a full scale, repression originating in the present and an attention to life are necessary toward off, useless or dangerous recollections.