Porous Memory and the Cognitive Life of Things
John Sutton
Page 4
Source: http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/CognitiveLifeOfThings.htm
The Arts of Memory
One reason prehistory is useful is that it’s often difficult to see the mutual contaminations operating between brains and technology in the present. Historical case studies offer a better grasp on the ways in which machines like us are naturally cultural, flexibly soaking up and hooking up with a variety of norms and artifacts. The medieval and Renaissance arts of memory, way back beyond Descartes’ porous memory, offer an example of the way humans can freeze their thoughts, interiorizing relatively stable forms of scaffolding in the quest for self-mastery. But where the English critics of Cartesian confusion tried to believe that stability was natural to the brain’s storage systems, these earlier practitioners were sensitive to the inevitability of prosthetic supplements in anchoring human memory. The monks, scholars, and magi described by Yates and Carruthers can be seen as laboriously disciplining their brains by the use of specific inner objects.
Cybercultural theorists return zealously to these early forms of intelligence augmentation. They may celebrate the memory artists’ architectonic immersion in an array of virtual inner data spaces, strange interactive habitats of the imagination (Davis 1994), or query new-media hype by carefully teasing apart analogies and disanalogies between old and new forms of artificial memory (Tofts and McKeich 1997, 62-82). My brief remarks here seek to link this kind of "interiorisation of the artefactual" (Scarry 1988, 95-6, 101-2) with my prehistorical topics, porous memory and the mnemonic role of things, as I try to historicize what the historians themselves tend to see only as "certain enduring requirements of human recollection" (Carruthers 1990, 130; compare Coleman 1992, 600-614) .
The techniques of local or place memory involve the internalization of a memory architecture, most simply a set of palace corridors with rooms on each side, but alternatively grids, theatres, bestiaries, alphabets, and wheels. I must insert a permanent set of memory locations or niches – two, perhaps, in each memory room – on which I will mentally place items when I’m learning a speech or a set of instructions. Then in recall I mentally walk down the corridor, entering each room in my chosen sequence and reading off whatever is stored at each address. Then I can erase this set of items and store new ones in the same locations for future use.
Initially the process seems to double the cognitive load: what’s the point of remembering this memory palace as well as having to remember your speech? But the system is highly flexible: once locations are built in to my own memory architecture, I can use them for any purpose. The art of memory allows me to construct, or to turn my mind into, a random access memory system (Carruthers 1990, 7) . Items are kept rigidly ordered by their location, to be inspected and manipulated only at will. Whether ‘stored’ as images or as text, pictorially or linguistically, the key to success is the rigidity and the static nature of the format. Even when the images used to chunk encoded information were strikingly affective, bloody and violent, each atomic item was to remain independent of all others, isolated at encoding. These are not external objects, yet they are clearly artefacts, interiorised prostheses intended to revise the brain to render it susceptible to voluntary control. The desire is to trap intensity in the memory rooms. So the system has no intrinsic dynamics: the point is to eliminate the activity endemic in what was called ‘natural’ memory, because it leads inevitably to the confusion of items. Semantic stability is thus built in, to allow only deliberate combination and recombination. These men’s fantasy is of totally voluntary memory.
So the Renaissance arts of memory were not wild proto-hypertextual schemes for the free flow of information, but the disciplined purging of what St Bernard called "filthy traces" (see Coleman 1992, 182-191) from the past. Adepts imposed (an approximation of) rigidity and inflexibility on their own mental representations. By freezing the contents of memory, monks and scholars sought to tame and recalibrate their minds. The control of items in memory was to be guaranteed by separating data from process, memory from executive self. Artifice was required just because of corruption, the result of sin or of embodiment, where one effect of the Fall was loss of control over the personal past. We are immersed in matter and in time: where angels constantly have in view the whole scene of their former actions, humans need to scramble for the past in the face of oblivion (J. Locke 1975, Book II chapter 10). Hamlet assures the Ghost that he’ll wipe away all trivial records from the table of his memory, vowing that the Ghost’s urgent command "all alone shall live/ Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmix'd with baser matter" (Hamlet I.v.102-4). The arts of memory were a moral quest, so that the true memory artist would never be haunted by reminiscence and the intrusion of unwanted thoughts. Escaping the murky forests of natural memory, the artist aspires to the angelical, using his artificial memories to resist the crowding, interfering, and overlapping of traces in the brain (compare Tofts and McKeich 1997, 80-2).
Material Memories and Extended Minds
But of course the branding of morality on the memory was always wishful. Hamlet fails to flatten his past out, to eradicate affect from memory, to act as a free or sovereign executive. Volition in memory is a vanishing goal, for the putative autonomous memory artist is already caught up in a vast and uneven world of objects inside and outside the skin (compare de Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass 1996). As I’ve argued, we can’t avoid leaning on artificial systems whether inside or outside of skull and skin. There’s a continuum between the relatively mindless tidying of the local world in which most animals engage and these highly socialized and morally-charged quests for mastery of the self by the self. Many civilizing processes require a kind of self-oppression, in which control of the brain involves the assimilation of symbolic props and pivots. As Derrida argues, it’s not as if evicting every such "prosthesis of the inside" would leave subjective reminiscence as "spontaneous, alive and internal experience" (1996, 11, 19; compare Wills 1995).
To celebrate the Internet as "a chaotic memory system" (C. Locke 2000, 30) is to be overimpressed by the decentralizing of authority, and to forget how familiar is the net’s primary localist mode of information storage. As Tofts notes, "sites are simply ‘there’, located at a particular address" (Tofts and McKeich 1997, 115). Not only does the hype confuse issues about control with quite distinct issues about the activity of the bearers or vehicles of information; it also takes our attention from the deep contingency of the dynamic historical and developmental processes by which we extend our minds with various forms of external scaffolding.
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