Memory in the Twenty-First Century

New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences

Sebastian Groes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349566426
  9781137520579
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137520586
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Literature

This book maps and analyses the changing state of memory at the start of the twenty-first century in essays written by scientists, scholars and writers. It recontextualises memory by investigating the impact of new conditions such as the digital revolution, climate change and an ageing population on our world.

Part I

Metaphors of Memory

Introduction to Part I

Sebastian Groes

Like the pigeons of St Mark’s: from classical metaphors to qualia

Consciousness and memory are the most wonderful, but also the most elusive, phenomena in this world. Although humans all have constant access to this most marvellous form of awareness and introspection, what it is, how it works, and what it means, exactly, remain the subject of controversy and misunderstanding. What means do we have of understanding memory, of talking about this complex, mysterious function of the mind? In recent decades neuroscientific research has attempted to shed light on the mysteries of consciousness, memory and human behaviour. In Neuronal Man (1985), a neuroscientific pioneer Jean-Pierre Changeux defines consciousness as ‘a global regulatory system dealing with the mental objects and computations using these objects’.¹ More recently, Stanlislas Dehaene defined it as ‘global information broadcasting within the cortex: it arises from a neuronal network whose raison d’être is the massive sharing of pertinent information throughout the brain’.² Philosophers such as Daniel Dennett have put forward materialist accounts of how the brain produces consciousness, supplanting Cartesian dualism, which assumes that the mind is an independent non-physical entity or event separate from the body. These positions themselves drew criticism from John Searle, who believes that consciousness is a non-physical and biological phenomenon, ‘a qualitative, subjective “mental” phenomenon, and at the same time a natural part of the “physical” world’.³ Consciousness is complex first-person experience comprising the awareness of phenomena, emotions and events, of the perceived appearances making up our reality. The sensation and appearances of a sunset, the taste of wine and the feel of a tropical climate on one’s skin are known as qualia; it is hard to achieve detailed epistemic, objective knowledge of such subjective phenomena, although some neuroscientists, such as Dehaene, are convinced neuroscience can measure them.

Literature offers another mode of thinking about consciousness and memory. Metaphors of memory are an important means of speaking about memory as the rendering of such illuminating images allows us to understand how particular historical periods and fields and disciplines conceived memory. They tell us how technologies dominant in historical periods shaped – and limited – those conceptions. Plato gives us the classical image of the wax tablet (a common writing device for students 2,400 years ago) into which notes were imprinted to be memorized. In classical times memory was conceived through this popular technology. Metaphors are powerful because they can turn abstract concepts into concrete images, especially when it comes to memory. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes, simply, but aptly: ‘Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are easier to remember and more fun to read’.⁴ Metaphors create meta-structures that connect our minds through culturally specific images, with a unifying effect. We are unable to understand the world without metaphors; they are instructive failures, acting as mirrors that allow us to see and make sense of our lives. Consider Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), at the start of which, narrator Charles Ryder stumbles upon the ruins of a Roman Catholic church. The event triggers the memories of which the novel consists:

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of wartime. These memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past – were always with me. Like the pigeons of St Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl.⁵

This image of memory as a flock of pigeons is far removed from the quantifying observations of neuroscience, but it is strikingly lively and accurate nonetheless. It portrays the classic muse, Mnemosyne, in a different guise, demonstrating how erratic, capricious and violent memory can be. Memories are not something we necessarily control: often it’s the memories that control us, and in doing so, determine our self-perception and behaviour. Helen Macdonald’s recent memoir H is for Hawk (2014) describes the struggle of the author to put her life back together after a psychological breakdown, and uses a structuring metaphor throughout: ‘I can’t even now, arrange it in the right order. The memories are like heavy blocks of glass. I can put them down in different places but they don’t make a story’.⁶ Macdonald’s traumatic memories are psychologically burdensome and transparent yet impenetrable, whilst their disconnected and episodic nature prevent her from making sense of her life.

Although metaphors illuminate that which is difficult to conceive of, they also misrepresent. As Douwe Draaisma notes in Metaphors of Memory (1995; 2000), Aristotle literalized Plato’s wax tablet metaphor, equating it with the imprinting of memory traces within brain. In Aristotle, memory becomes a physiological, material and localizable phenomenon.⁷ All the writers in Part I point to the contradictory nature of metaphors, which are often reductive and misleading. Ranging from theatres and mystical writing pads to Harry Potter’s tears (Chapter 6) and the cloud (Chapters 7 and 8), metaphors have captured our mind, but these representations are also misrepresentations. Metaphors are devious, as they have the tendency to mask their representational nature. It’s easy to forget that the tenor and the vehicle are not similar; that they are based on an analogy or a strong association with striking, emotional associations.

Corin Depper kick-starts Part I with a historicization of such metaphors of memory. He makes a distinction between two approaches. Firstly, he investigates proto-modern images which represent memory as fixed and immutable, such as Plato’s wax tablet and the memory theatre, which suggest that the original experience can be retrieved in the act of memory. Secondly, Depper explores more modern modes that present memory as a fluid, mutable and subject to manipulation, degradation or enhancement, such as Freud’s Wunderblock and celluloid strips. After taking us through the earliest metaphors of memory in the ancient legend of the poet Simonides, Depper moves to the Middle Ages, in which the monk’s memory is associated with the cell. Mary Carruthers’ The Book of Memory (1990) investigates the role and nature of memory in medieval culture: the model of memory is that of writing, a classical conception that is taken up by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who notes that language and writing not only store, but also ‘code’ memory.⁸ Language imprints itself upon, and thus manipulates and distorts, the phenomenal experience which is stored.

The second approach is the metaphor of the storage room, which ‘refers both to the contents of such a memory and to its internal organization’ by spatializing it.⁹ Depper too pays special attention to the Renaissance’s obsession with the memory theatre – itself a development of the medieval storage room metaphor – and explores how Giulio Camillo creates horse-shoe shaped theatres that allowed him to store knowledge externally in a physical space which, at the same time, acted as a representation of the human mind.

Frances Yates already pointed out this cognitive dynamism when she speculated that The Globe theatre was modelled after Robert Fludd’s memory theatre. Linda Perkins Wilder’s Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre (2010) traces how the bard’s company exerted dramaturgical control by using objects and places on the stage as mnemonics for the actors and the audience: ‘their remembering, and the remembering prompted by the objects that define their memory theatre, constructs a sense of structure and character’.¹⁰ In ‘Distributed Cognition in the Globe’ (2005), Evelyn B. Tribble argues that actors in the early modern period coped with extreme memory loads by using the theatre as a mental prosthesis for mnemonic exercise. Actors would play several roles in up to four different plays during one week, putting a huge demand on the players’ memory; star actor Edward Alleyn had to remember seventy-one roles in the space of four years. Building on the insights of Edwin Hutchins’ seminal work Cognition in the Wild (1995) and cognitive philosopher Andy Clark, Tribble shows that the human mind should not be viewed as separate from the world, other people and technologies beyond the subjective self, but that individual cognition is fully integrated with its environment through complex interactions with a network of external sources. Tribble extends her work further in Cognition in the Globe (2011) and in a study co-authored with Nicolas Keene (2011), arguing that ‘cognition is distributed across a coordinated yet shifting and uneven triad of insides, objects, and people: internal neuro-biological mechanisms that constrain and enable such processes as memory, perception; material tools [. . .] and environment; and social systems’.¹¹ The Globe’s material spaces were used by actors to remember speeches and the folio texts by Shakespeare are themselves inscribed by the possibilities and limits of the theatre practice, in which the actors’ bodies, movements and gestures were part of this distribution of the mind as well. One other important development that Tribble and Keene trace is the increased questioning of memory theatres or palaces – and the art of memory in general – as a useful pedagogic tool. Remembering is dependent on an understanding of topics and prepped by precepts before it can be remembered through the repetition required by rote learning – otherwise we would simply be parrots, who repeat without understanding the meaning of the content or context. This issue is profoundly political and still relevant today when, for instance, former Education Secretary Michael Gove argued that learning facts by rote should be central to the school experience.¹²

Various recent trends have reinvigorated memory theatres and updated memory theatres for the modern age. James Joyce used memory palaces for the construction of his modernist novel, Ulysses (1922). In contemporary popular culture, Joshua Foer uses memory palaces for the Memory Championships in Moonwalking with Einstein (2011). That palaces are not only a popular tool to show off the art of memory, but also to make money in, for instance, poker, was dramatized by the US TV series The Mentalist.¹³ The new incarnation of Sherlock Holmes uses his ‘Mind Palace’ to investigate crimes.¹⁴ Another example is writer Hari Kunzru, who staged a Memory Palace at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2013 by creating a dystopian novella with illustrations, which visitors could walk through.

Yet, there is a limit to the memory palace metaphor, as it is only able to generate images of memory as the retrieval of fixed representations in which the integral purity of the original is retained; our modern conception, on the other hand, defines memory as a processing ability that constantly reorganizes past subjective information. Depper ends his chapter by examining photography and cinema as dynamic twentieth-century metaphors of memory, as found in the work of Alain Renais and Chris Marker. The latter filmmaker’s Immemory project uses a form of HyperCard software which was included with early Apple Macs, and which is an early example of the sort of hypertext linking that would be integral to the internet’s linking system. Immemory fits Depper’s preferred second category of fluid, mutable metaphors. Memory is a verb, not a noun.

Madeleines and the return of modernism

Before we turn to met...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword: From Causality to Correlation
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Memory in the Twenty-First Century
• Part I Metaphors of Memory
• Part II Memory in the Digital Age
• Part III Ecologies of Memory
• Part IV Memory and the Future
• Part V Forgetting
• Part VI Twenty-First Century Subjectivities
• Conclusion: ‘The Futures of Memory’
• References
• Index