Porous Memory and the Cognitive Life of Things
John Sutton
Page 2
Source: http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/CognitiveLifeOfThings.htm
In attending to this dynamic interplay between brains and world, we don’t need to identify internal with external resources. Post-connectionist cognitive scientists like Andy Clark argue, on the basis of everyday cases like these, that the brain is a leaky associative engine, good at pattern-matching and pattern-transformation, but poor (in isolation) at the permanent storage or logical manipulation of individual items (1993; 1997, 53-69). The classical neuroscientific search for the engram failed because there are no enduring single memories stored alone at local fixed addresses (one neuron for my grandmother, one for my grandfather). Since brain traces are dynamic, we often leave information out in the environment, using the world as its own best representation (Brooks 1991). Brains don’t replicate, but rather complement, the alien formats and media of external resources. It’s just because representations in the brain are partial and action-oriented that external cognitive scaffolding and tools of many varieties supplement our relatively unstable internal memories. As Clark puts it, "our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace" (1997, 180). In a range of couplings with other people, instruments, machines, and objects, bodies come into what Clark calls relations of "continuous reciprocal causation" (1997, 163-6). In dance, improvisational music, interactive sport, and ordinary conversation, or in working, feeling, and thinking with cars, computers, airplanes, and sketchpads, there can emerge a mutually modulatory dynamics. Each component in the larger system is continuously responsive to the activity of the other components, and at the same time feeds back its own influences into the web of causal complexity (Haugeland 1998).
These concerns may seem remote from cultural history and theory. But the methodological revolution implied by these new sciences of the interface, which must combine cognitive science and media theory, is far-reaching. Cognitive systems can genuinely extend across brain, body, and world, and are potentially smeared across the natural, technological, and social environment. As Clark says (2001, 153-4),
The cash value of the emphasis on extended systems (comprising multiple heterogeneous
elements) is thus that it forces us to attend to the interactions themselves: to see that much of
what matters about human-level intelligence is hidden not in the brain, nor in the technology,
but in the complex and integrated interactions and collaborations between the two…The pay-
off, however, could be spectacular: nothing less than a new kind of cognitive scientific
collaboration involving neuroscience, physiology and social, cultural, and technological
studies in about equal measure.
This means that the particular histories of cryptograms and codes, perspective, autobiographical genres, tattoos, roads, diagrams and graphs, photography, artificial memory techniques, laboratory practices, maps, clothes, and religious ritual (to name just a few) now become an integral part of a historical and comparative cognitive science, rather than mere humanistic curiosities. Careful analysis of historical theories and practices with a cognitive-scientific eye, then, may find problems in the past unlike those perceptible by the more cautious historian.
Some straightforwardly exegetical accounts of Augustine's philosophy of memory, to take one emblematic prehistorical example, focus on his attitude to Platonic doctrines of reminiscence and his efforts to parallel the Holy Trinity with the psychological triad of memory, understanding, and will (Teske 2001). Others examine the role of memory in his account of our awareness of time as a "distention of the mind", or investigate the significance of his theory of memory in light of the autobiographical structure of the Confessions (Krell 1990, 52-55; Lloyd 1993, 14-22; Mendelson 2000). These are important and fascinating projects, but they do not rule out a different, more present-centred kind of cognitive-cybercultural history .
The Renaissance arts of memory so richly described in Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory (1966) and Mary Carruthers’ The Book of Memory (1990) form one of two prehistorical case studies I sketch in more detail below. Augustine’s attitude to the classical ars memoria is unclear (Yates 1966, 61-2; O'Donnell 1992, 177-8). But his notoriously spatial images of memory in Book 10 of theConfessions as a field, a palace, or a storehouse drive a less commonly noticed demand that in memory "everything is preserved separately" . Items channelled through the different senses, for Augustine, are captured by the (personified) memory which swiftly "stores them away in its wonderful system of compartments". Augustine knows that control over the contents of memory is not always easy, for sometimes unwanted past experiences "come spilling from the memory, thrusting themselves upon us when what we want is something quite different". But his regulatory ideal is to be able at will to gather (cogitare) the scattered items in memory from the "most remote cells [and] … old lairs", so that a mind which "has the freedom of them all" can "glide from one to the other", effortlessly surfing this strange virtual inner place which is yet not a place.
I want now to quiz two other sets of historical doctrines and practices of memory for their answers to these distinct questions we already glimpse in the case of Augustine, questions about subjective control of memory, and about the format of the vehicles or medium of ‘storage’. Firstly I suggest that it’s not unique to any modern crisis of memory to think of the inner components of memory systems as porous and active, rather than fixed in awful archives. Then I go back to one great era of the cognitive use of artifacts and imaginal places. These analyses only begin to apply the cybercultural grid which the historical material warrants, but they bring some tantalizing topics in the history of memory to the attention of new media theorists.
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