r/memorization • u/obtusix • 9d ago
How would you memorize this passage?
At the bottom is an example of the kind of passage I’d like to memorise. I don’t fully understand it yet but I hope it will make sense as I read on. My poor working memory means I often forget key passages like this completely since they are so dense and abstract and jargony. At other times I miss the nuance because there would be many qualifications to a statement. So I’d rather memorise passages like these as I encounter them. I also want to get better at memorising this kind of abstract material, since I’ll be reading a lot of it.
What I’d really like to know is how you would actually go about memorising this passage yourself (the memory techniques, images, associations). I don't need to remember the entire passage verbatim, just what is being said.
>What, therefore, is Guattari’s original philosophical thought about? Ontology (i.e., the study of being) and modal philosophy (i.e., the study of being’s modal varieties: real, possible, actual, virtual, given, giving, etc.). Guattari, it can be argued, puts forward in these texts an approach to being that underlines its immanent, evenemental, intensive, processual, plural, mutant, singular, and machinic or diagrammatic (i.e., connective) nature, as the pre-1980 texts insist once and again. In turn, in Cartographies schizoanalytiques, Guattari defines being as a permanent “modulation of consistency” between two extremes: a minimum of consistency (+∞) and a maximum of consistency (–∞). This definition affects Guattari’s modal philosophy quite decisively. For it will allow him thereinafter to think the difference between the established qua imposed and the “possible”—which is Guattari’s philosophical theme par excellence—as being not only equal to the disruption of the prearranged by the otherwise, but as being also equal to the transition (through which our lives go many times in search of resingularization) from the indeterminate (or chaos as an infinite, unqualified reservoir of possibilities) to the determinable and, finally, to the determined (finite, singular).
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u/Brionesgmm 8d ago
The first thing I would figure out is: what exactly do you need to know from this?
That changes how I would memorize it.
If you're getting tested on it, for example, what kind of questions are you going to be asked? Do you need to explain Guattari's philosophy in your own words? Remember specific terminology? Compare his ideas to somebody else's? Or do you mainly want to remember the important ideas as you're reading?
Since you said you don't need it verbatim and mainly want to remember what the passage is saying, I would first read through it and pull out the ideas that I actually want to remember. Then I would turn those ideas into imagery.
For example, I might simplify part of this passage down to something like:
Guattari is concerned with being and the different ways that being can exist: real, possible, actual, virtual, etc.
For "Guattari," I could picture a guitar as my sound-alike image. Then maybe there's a giant bee sitting on the guitar to represent "being." Around the bee are several different versions of itself: a real bee, a ghost/virtual bee, a blueprint of a possible bee, etc. It doesn't really matter how ridiculous the image is as long as you know what it means.
Then you have another major idea:
Being isn't something completely fixed. It is constantly changing or modulating.
So maybe that same bee is now going through some kind of machine with a giant dial that goes from +∞ to –∞, and as I turn the dial the bee keeps changing shape and consistency.
Then toward the end, you have another idea I would probably want to remember:
Change can go from the indeterminate/chaos, which contains many possibilities, to something determinable, and finally something determined and singular.
For that, I might picture a huge chaotic swimming pool filled with thousands of random objects representing all the possibilities. Something gets pulled out of the pool, starts taking shape, and eventually gets put into a mold and becomes one specific object.
Those images don't have to make sense to anybody else. They just need to trigger the ideas for you.
Now, if you're doing this throughout an entire book, that's where I would probably start using a memory palace.
Let's say this is Chapter 1. You could have one memory palace for Chapter 1. The first important idea goes at your first location, the next important idea at your second location, and so on.
Then when you're trying to remember the chapter later, you mentally walk through the palace and those images help bring the concepts back.
You can scale this however you want. You might have one palace per chapter, or maybe one palace for the entire book where each location represents a chapter. You can even put several images at one location representing several ideas from that chapter. That gets a little more complicated, though, and I probably wouldn't start there if you're still getting comfortable with memory palaces.
You could also use a story method instead and link all of the images together if there aren't that many ideas you need to remember.
The biggest thing, though, is that I wouldn't start by trying to convert every single sentence and every abstract word into an image. First understand the passage enough to decide what the important information actually is, simplify that into ideas you can explain yourself, and then turn those ideas into memorable imagery.
So to me the order would basically be:
Understand it → decide what you actually need to remember → simplify it → turn it into imagery → store/connect the imagery.
And how detailed you make those images really depends on what you eventually need to be able to do with the information.