Memory in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences

By Sebastian Groes

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781137520586

Book preview

Memory in the Twenty-First Century

Also by Sebastian Groes

IAN McEWAN: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (edited)

JULIAN BARNES: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (edited)

KAZUO ISHIGURO: Critical Visions of the Novels (edited)

KAZUO ISHIGURO: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (edited)

McLITERATUUR

THE MAKING OF LONDON

WOMEN’S WRITING AFTER 9/11 (edited)

Memory in the Twenty-First Century

New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences

Edited by

Sebastian Groes

Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Roehampton, UK

Selection, introduction, conclusion and editorial matter © Sebastian Groes 2016

Individual chapters © Contributors 2016

Foreword © N. Katherine Hayles 2016

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2016 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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ISBN 978–1–137–52057–9

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Memory in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Perspectives from the Arts,

Humanities and Sciences / [edited by] Sebastian Groes.

pagescm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–1–137–52057–9 (hardback)

1.Memory—Sociological aspects.2.Memory in literature.3.Memory in art.

4.Memory (Philosophy) I. Groes, Sebastian, editor.

BF378.S65M476 2015

153.1’209051—dc23

2015025957

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

Contents

List of Figures

Foreword: From Causality to Correlation by N. Katherine Hayles

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Memory in the Twenty-First Century

Sebastian Groes

Part IMetaphors of Memory

Introduction to Part I

Sebastian Groes

1Metaphors of Memory: From the Classical World to Modernity

Corin Depper

2Proust, the Madeleine and Memory

Barry C. Smith

3Proust Recalled: A Psychological Revisiting of That Madeleine Memory Moment

E. Leigh Gibson

4The Persistence of Surrealism: Memory, Dreams and the Dead

Jeannette Baxter

5The Brain Observatory and the Imaginary Media of Memory Research

Flora Lysen

6Memory and the Fictional Imagination: Creating Memories

Peter Childs

7Misled by Metaphor

Nicholas Carr

8Calling Gaia: World Brains and Global Memory

Stephan Besser

Part IIMemory in the Digital Age

Introduction to Part II

Sebastian Groes

9What’s in a Brain?

Will Self

10 Will Self and His Inner Seahorse

Hugo J. Spiers

11 Navigational Aids in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation

Ineke van der Ham

12 Living Digitally

Wendy Moncur

13 Death and Memory in the Twenty-First Century

Stacey Pitsillides

14 The Oceanic Literary Reading Mind: An Impression

Michael Burke

15 Memory and the Reading Substrate

Adriaan van der Weel

16 Memory, Materiality and the Ethics of Reading in the Digital Age

Sebastian Groes

Part IIIEcologies of Memory

Introduction to Part III

Sebastian Groes

17 Time That Is Intolerant

Claire Colebrook

18 Climate Change and Memory

Mike Hulme

19 Memories of Snow: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Re-Reading

Greg Garrard

20 Writing Climate Change

Maggie Gee

21 Against Nostalgia: Climate Change Art and Memory

Sebastian Groes

Part IVMemory and the Future

Introduction to Part IV

Sebastian Groes

22 The Trace of the Future

Mark Currie

23 Simulation and the Evolution of Thought

Joanna J. Bryson

24 Imaginative Anticipation: Rethinking Memory for Alternative Futures

Jessica Bland

25 Memory Is No Longer What It Used to Be

Patricia Pisters

26 ‘We Can Remember It, Funes, Wholesale’: Borges, Total Recall and the Logic of Memory

Adam Roberts

27 Remembering without Stored Contents: A Philosophical Reflection on Memory

Daniel D. Hutto

Part VForgetting

Introduction to Part V

Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery

28 Remembering

Larry R. Squire and John T. Wixted

29 Directed Forgetting

Karen R. Brandt

30 Remembrance in the Twenty-First Century

Peter Childs

31 The Body and the Page in Poetry Readings as Remembrance of Composition

Holly Pester

32 Our Plastic Brain: Remembering and Forgetting Art

Heather H. Yeung

33 Amnesia and Identity in Contemporary Literature

Jason Tougaw

34 Amnesia in Young Adult Fiction

Alison Waller

35 Remembering Responsibly

Thomas F. Coker and Heather H. Yeung

Part VITwenty-First Century Subjectivities

Introduction to Part VI

Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery

36 Losing the Self? Subjectivity in the Digital Age

Claire Colebrook

37 Memory and Voices: Challenging Psychiatric Diagnosis through the Novel

Patricia Waugh

38 Rereading the Self

Alison Waller

39 Neuroscience and Posthuman Memory

Robert Pepperell

40 The Confabulation of Self

Joanna J. Bryson

41 Malingering and Memory

Neander Abreu

42 Trauma and the Truth

Martijn Meeter

Conclusion: ‘The Futures of Memory’

Sebastian Groes

References

Index

List of Figures

  3.1 Illustration of the acronym olfactory LOVER covering the core features of an autobiographical memory evoked by olfactory information

14.1 The five sign-fed and mind-fed categories active during engaged acts of literary reading that make up the affective inputs

14.2 The four fluvial stages of the literary reading loop

14.3 The oceanic processing nature of the literary reading mind

28.1 The medial temporal lobe memory system

28.2 Organization of mammalian long-term memory systems

Foreword: From Causality to Correlation

Memory in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Sebastian Groes, is a remarkable achievement. Bringing together an interdisciplinary mix of scientists, cultural critics, philosophers, writers and literary critics, it ranges across a diverse set of topics, including memory as metaphor, anticipation, ecology, subjectivity and even memory’s seeming antithesis, forgetting. Readers will find an equally rich range of references, including novels, films, poems and art works, in addition to what seems like the entire scholarly repertoire of works on, about, and relating to, memory across the centuries in Western culture.

Amidst this profusion, I noticed what seems to me a curious absence. Although digital databases do not go entirely unmentioned in the collection, far less attention is paid to them than seems warranted by their prominence and importance in twenty-first century culture. Although a full analysis of their cultural significance as an exteriorization of human memory is beyond the scope of this modest foreword, a few remarks here may help to underscore their importance and suggest some of their implications for topics covered in the collection from other points of view.

Relational databases parse data items into rows and columns in ways that allow them to be searched and concatenated by query languages such as SQL. In this way, they are able to correlate entries with each other, and their standardized formats also allow separate databases to be linked so they can be searched together, as if they were individual train cars that can be coupled together to form fantastically long trains puffing off to the horizon.

Lev Manovich has famously contrasted database with narrative, calling them ‘natural enemies’ (2001: 228). Databases, on his account, operate according to a paradigmatic logic, consisting of items that can be substituted for one another, while narratives operate according to a syntagmatic logic, adding elements together to achieve artistic effects.

As I have noted elsewhere, this claim is not technically correct (Hayles 2007: 1603–1608). Database elements are not alternatives that can be substituted for one another, as in paradigmatic substitutions within a sentence, but rather entries representing different pieces and kinds of data elements. Moreover, Manovich claims that databases are overtaking narratives in cultural importance, implying that they are ascending while narratives are receding, whereas I see them as ‘natural symbionts’ (2007: 1603) that work together to create a more holistic picture than either could alone.

Nevertheless, there is a kernel of truth in Manovich’s observation, for databases are indeed proliferating at an exponential rate far greater than the growth of narratives. With the recent revelations about the NSA’s data collections and surveillance practices, there is more reason than ever to be concerned about databases, their implications for the invasion of privacy, and their use in identifying persons of interest for more intense surveillance.

In this respect, Louise Amoore’s analysis (Amoore 2011) of what she calls data derivatives deserves recognition for exploring the implications of how technical memory is being used in the service of the sovereign state. The analogy she draws is with financial derivatives, traded in their own market that exists apart from the underlying assets on which they are based. Similarly, data derivatives are created from correlations independent of, and indifferent to, the underlying identities of the people whose activities are being correlated. Amoore points out that risk flags are created by bringing together entries in databases that may seem to be unrelated. For example, tickets paid in cash may be correlated with bought less than five days before flight and with special meals ordered and British citizen of Pakistani origin. Once a risk flag is created, when the identified subject crosses border patrol, his file is marked and he is likely to be detained for questioning—or worse.

Like biological memory which has been shown to be essential in planning and anticipating the future (the subject of Part IV), data derivatives are also aimed at anticipating future events which have not been—and may never be—predictable using causal connections. When correlation replaces causality, size matters, and matters crucially. In this respect, digital memory’s quantitatively greater reach, density and mass have become so vast as to amount to a qualitatively different way of collective and cultural remembering than that constituted by biological memories in humans.

Correlation, databases’ modus operandi, implies that many single data entries, innocuous in themselves, can become potent invasions of privacy when concatenated together. The more correlations that may be put together, the more likely it is that revelations occur that are damaging to people and their right to free speech and dissent, not to mention privacy. As databases rocket upward, grown gargantuan by scraping off and gulping down data from social media, loyalty cards, corporate ads, search queries and myriad other sources of data collection, it becomes possible for someone with the right access to form data derivatives to look for almost anything under the sun—women who are pregnant, teenagers worried about acne, men with waistlines over or under 38 inches, elderly people likely to fall for financial scams. In the face of this overwhelming tsunami of data mining, human memory begins to occupy different ecological niches within social, economic, cultural and capitalist contexts than it had previously.

There are any number of rabbit holes down which this insight could be followed, but the one I want to pursue in this brief foreword is the correlation (if I may use that word) with contemporary narratives that seemingly abandon causality, the staple of narrative craft and intelligence for millennia, for correlation. In David Markson’s remarkable experimental novel, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1984), the protagonist, a woman named Kate believes that she is alone in the world; no other humans are alive to relieve her immense and overwhelming loneliness. The narrative consists of individual paragraphs, composed on a single or a few sentences, that Kate types as she sits naked and menstruating on a chair in a house on the beach. The short paragraphs float free on the page, loosely connected to what precedes and follows, with nothing to knit them causally together other than the fact that they all narrate Kate’s thoughts as she sits typing.

From a contemporary perspective, it appears that Kate is creating a database of unconnected entries that the reader must correlate in some fashion in order to grasp her situation and its implications. Published in 1984, Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a bit too early to participate fully in the cultural changes wrought by data derivatives. Rather, as Markson’s title suggests, he came to his database-like style via a different route. In a brilliant analysis, David Foster Wallace suggests that this peculiar style of narration represents what it would feel like to live in the world that Ludwig Wittgenstein postulated in the Tractatus. In this philosophical work, Foster Wallace explains, Wittgenstein famously argued that the world consists solely of isolated facts: the world is all that is the case. Wittgenstein’s approach in the Tractatus assumes that the purpose of language is accurately to mirror the world, and what counts as the world are denotative utterances stating what is the case. This approach entirely leaves out community, people, connection (an omission that Wittgenstein pursued in Philosophical Investigations, his late work that entirely contradicts the assumptions of Tractatus). And so Kate sits alone, typing sentences that she cannot dare to hope will ever be read by anyone.

Now imagine that these sentences were encoded in such a way that they could be entered into a database and correlated into data derivatives. Something like this happens late in the narrative, when Kate’s isolated sentences begin to form patterns of connection—full of ambiguities and contradictions, to be sure—that link her condition with her biographical details, particularly the death of her son (who seems to be named Simon, although Kate sometimes refers to him as Adam) while she was away from home, the infidelities she commits and the subsequent departure of her husband. Foster Wallace sees this descent into narrative motivation as a falling-off of Markson’s strategy, an unnecessary and unfortunate concession to conventional causal explanation. He would prefer a purer form of uncorrelated entries, stark in their uncompromising disconnection. But perhaps Kate’s isolation and intense loneliness would be too much for readers to bear if left unrelieved until the end; after all, a book must try to find its readers, or find itself a participant in Kate’s situation.

Created nearly a quarter-century later, David Clark’s 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein registers the advances of digital technologies in multiple ways, presenting as a work of electronic literature that includes animation, graphics, voice-over and extensive links between the constellated vignettes comprising the piece. The entry to this fascinating work is through a map of the 88 constellations, each star of which, when clicked, opens one of the vignettes.

As one clicks through the stars, curious threads emerge of what may at first appear as coincidences. There are 88 keys on the piano, and Wittgenstein’s brother, who lost his right hand in World War I, commissioned pieces for the left hand only, which serves as the subtitle for the work (to be played by the left hand, alluding to interactive features playable by the left hand). In another example, Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and Wittgenstein were all born in 1884—a date that includes 88. Wittgenstein and Hitler attended the same school in Vienna for a time; Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator alluded to Hitler. In another thread, coincidences emerge between the twin towers, the black obelisk of the film 2001, the idea of the double as a repetition that indicates a pattern (when the first tower was hit, many radio commentators assumed it was an accident), the body double for Janet Leigh in the infamous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, the double interpretations of equivocal images (a vase or two women’s faces).

As we slide along these chains of coincidence, it is as if we were inside a database, constructing a data derivative through correlations between seemingly disparate entries, aiming toward a risk pattern at whose meaning we can only guess. If Kate is trapped inside the world of the Tractatus, readers of 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein are caught in a maze of connecting paths that hints both at the duplicities of ordinary language (one of the themes of Philosophical Investigations) and at the possibility of some overwhelming meaning that remains maddeningly just out of reach, as if human memory were not adequate to hold all the connections in mind long enough to grasp its massively complex entirety.

Intersecting the themes of the following chapters in multiple ways, data derivatives and these two literary works suggest that the work of compilation, as complex and massive as this collection already is, remains unfinished. More can be written, and no doubt will be written, as digital memory continues to expand and human memory struggles to cope. Meanwhile, Memory in the Twenty-First Century provides us with excellent starting points: data summaries, analyses, provocations, interventions and critical inquiries interrogating the past, present and future of human memory in the twenty-first century.

N. Katherine Hayles

Duke University

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of the Arts and Humanities and Research Council (AHRC) funded research networking project, The Memory Network, which ran from 2012 to 2014. The project set out to investigate the changing nature of memory in the twenty-first century by drawing on the knowledge of scientists, scholars, writers and artists. We would like to thank the AHRC for funding us, and for providing various forms of support for our activities. The Leadership Fellow for AHRC’s Science in Culture theme, Barry C. Smith, and his assistant, Dorothy Fallon, are particularly thanked for their support. The two symposia which informed the thinking behind this book were funded by the Wellcome Trust, and I am very grateful for their ongoing support. I would like to thank Santander for awarding me a travel scholarship that allowed me to connect with Brazilian colleagues. The Museum of London is thanked for hosting one of the Memory Network events. At Palgrave Macmillan, I thank Paula Kennedy, Ben Doyle and Tomas René.

My Memory Network Co-Investigator Patricia Waugh and co-ordinator Alison Waller are thanked for their support. I would especially like to thank Will Self for his courage in undergoing the neuroscientific experiments into the navigational capacity of his brain, and for allowing us to reprint his report here. Hugo Spiers and I are in an ongoing dialogue, and I thank him for the various events that we have successfully staged together, at University College London, and beyond. I would also like to thank Rose Stuart and Sarah Smyth at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, who worked with us to stage four highly successful events. The writers who were involved at the Cheltenham Literature Festival were Maggie Gee, Kevin Fong, Lisa Appignanesi and Adam Roberts. My Roehampton colleagues in Psychology, Leigh Gibson and Jon Silas, are thanked for working with our team on the two ‘Proust Phenomenon’ experiments, as are Barry C. Smith, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr and John Downes. Jessica Bland at Nesta has been a particularly inspiring collaborator. I would like to thank Roehampton University for supporting The Memory Network. Thomas Vaessens at the University of Amsterdam provided infrastructural support during my sabbatical, when parts of this book were researched. Other colleagues with an interest in cognitive studies at the University of Amsterdam include Stephan Besser, Maria van Dalen-Oskam, Patricia Pisters and Flora Lysen. Other international partners that have had involvement in the project are Ruzy Hashim at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Sean Matthews at Nottingham University Malaysia Campus. Neander Abreu at Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil and Francisco Ortega at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil are thanked for being such excellent hosts. Special thanks go to Paul Bloom at Yale, and colleagues at MIT (Suzanne Corkin and Alex Byrne) and at Maryland (Chuck Caramello, Bill Cohen, Maud Casey, Zita Nunes and Sheri Parks) for making my trip to the east coast of the States such as tremendous success. I would also like to thank Marianne Hirsch and William Hirst at Columbia University for inviting me to their The Politics of Memory in Global Context network meetings. Asifa Majid gave excellent presentations of her amazing research in Malaysia and at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. At various points Paul Antick provided creative interventions with his ‘Smith at Batang Kali’ performances. Antal van den Bosch at Radboud Universiteit is also thanked for thinking with us. I would also like to thank the writers who contributed to the literary festival, The Story of Memory, held in September 2014 at UCL: Naomi Alderman, Jessica Bland, Tim Jarvis, Jason Tougaw, Anna Stothard, Suzanne Corkin and Ian McEwan. Nick Lavery is thanked for his excellent support of the Memory Network project in various fronts. Thank you to the amazing Kate Hayles for providing the Foreword.

For editorial support, I would like to thank my regular collaborators Peter Childs and Claire Colebrook. Jason Tougaw, Stephan Besser and Corin Depper are invaluable critical friends and helped me research and edit this beast. Zara Dinnen and Heather Yeung are thanked for their coordinating and editorial support.

Finally, I would like to thank my wife, José Lapré, for her support during this project.

SG

London/Amsterdam

March 2015

Notes on Contributors

Neander Abreu is an associate professor at Federal University of Bahia – UFBA, Brazil. He holds a PhD from the University of São Paulo and studied post-doctorally at the Universities of York and Luxembourg. He is the vice-president of the Brazilian Neuropsychological Society.

Jeannette Baxter is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She is the author of J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (2009). She is working on a second monograph, which explores the relationship between British literary surrealism and anti-fascism.

Stephan Besser is Assistant Professor of Dutch Studies at the University of Amsterdam and program director of the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL). His current research focuses on the poetics of knowledge in contemporary neuroculture. He has published numerous articles on the cultural history of German colonialism and representations of illness in Dutch, German and Anglophone literature. He is the author of Pathographie der Tropen: Literatur, Medizin und Kolonialismus around 1900 (2013).

Jessica Bland is a researcher at Nesta, a charity that supports innovation in the UK. Her research focuses on how to best support responsible development of disruptive technology. She also leads Nesta’s work on foresight methods – looking at how we think and plan for the future. Jessica writes and produces reports, web resource and produces events as interventions in public debate about the responsible use of technology.

Karen R. Brandt is a principal lecturer in Psychology at the University of Roehampton. Her research interests lie within the domains of memory, learning and cognitive neuropsychology. She is specifically interested in the qualitative nature of recognition memory and the manner in which this interacts with the type of information that is being remembered, both in typically developing adults and those with brain injuries.

Joanna J. Bryson is a reader at the University of Bath and Visiting Fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University. She specialises in two areas: artificial intelligence (AI) and exploiting AI simulations to understand natural intelligence, including human cognition. In the context of artificial models of natural intelligence, she and her colleagues publish widely in cognitive science, philosophy, anthropology, behavioural ecology, games, robotics and ethics.

Michael Burke is Professor of Rhetoric at Utrecht University. He also lectures at University College Roosevelt (in Middelburg) and University College Utrecht. He is the author of Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (2011) and the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics (2014). His research interest is in rhetoric in all its forms: societal, artistic and pedagogical.

Nicholas Carr writes about technology and culture. His most recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Glass Cage (2015).

Peter Childs is Professor of Modern and Contemporary English Literature at Newman University, Birmingham. The author or editor of over 20 books, he is well known internationally as a leading critic of contemporary British literature and culture as well as post-colonial and twentieth-century writing. He has published widely on post-1900 literature and on such writers as E. M. Forster, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Paul Scott in particular.

Thomas F. Coker is an officer in the British army, was educated at Rugby School and Durham University and has served on operations in Iraq and twice in Afghanistan.

Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. Her recent books include Irony in the Work of Philosophy (2002), Gender (2003), Irony (2004), Milton, Evil and Literary History (2008), Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (2010) and William Blake and Digital Aesthetics (2011). She has written articles on visual culture, poetry, literary theory, queer theory and contemporary culture.

Mark Currie is Professor of Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. His research focuses on theories of narrative and culture, particularly in relation to time. His recent work is focused on the relation between fictional narrative and philosophical writings about time, and more generally, on questions of futurity in intellectual history. He is currently writing a monograph titled Absolute Uncertainty, which aims to explore concepts of uncertainty in the physical and social sciences in relation to questions about novelty in literature.

Corin Depper teaches Film Studies at Kingston University, London. He has published essays on Jean-Luc Godard, Ezra Pound, and Matthew Barney. His current research explores the connections between film, poetry, and the visual arts.

Greg Garrard is Sustainability Professor at the University of British Columbia and a National Teaching Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy. A founding member and former Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK and Ireland), he is the author of Ecocriticism (2004) and numerous essays on eco-pedagogy, animal studies and environmental criticism.

Maggie Gee OBE is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She is the author of 14 books, most recently Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014). Previous novels about climate change include Where are the Snows (1991), The Ice People (1998) and The Flood (2004). She is vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature.

E. Leigh Gibson is a reader in Biopsychology, a chartered psychologist and registered nutritionist, and is Director of the Clinical and Health Psychology Research Centre within the Department of Psychology, University of Roehampton, London. Leigh’s research is aimed at understanding processes controlling people’s habitual diet, attempts at dietary change, weight control and disordered eating, and how their diet in turn affects their brain and behaviour.

Sebastian Groes is a senior lecturer at the University of Roehampton. He is Principal Investigator of the ARHC and Wellcome Trust funded research networking project The Memory Network. He has published The Making of London (2011) and British Fiction in the Sixties (2016), and is Series Co-Editor of Contemporary Critical Perspectives.

Ineke van der Ham is Assistant Professor in Neuropsychology at Leiden University. She specializes in spatial cognition, and human navigation in particular. In her research she combines cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology to study normal and impaired navigation ability.

N. Katherine Hayles is Professor of Literature at Duke University, and is at the forefront of writing about the relations between science, literature and technology. Her books include Chaos Bound (1990), How We Become Posthuman (1999), Writing Machines (2002) and How We Think (2014).

Mike Hulme is Professor of Climate and Culture in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. His work explores the idea of climate change using historical, cultural and scientific analyses, seeking to illuminate the numerous ways in which climate change is deployed in public and political discourse. He is currently working on a book manuscript Cultured Weather: The Idea of Climate and What We Do With It (2016).

Daniel D. Hutto is Professor of Philosophical Psychology at the University of Wollongong. His most recent books include: Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy (2006) and Folk Psychological Narratives (2008). He regularly speaks at conferences and expert meetings for clinical psychiatrists, educationalists, narratologists, neuroscientists and psychologists.

Nick Lavery is a PhD candidate at the University of Roehampton exploring the representation of consciousness in contemporary fiction. He is also the Administrator and Web Editor of the Memory Network.

Flora Lysen is a PhD candidate at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, where she is researching histories of material and visual culture in twentieth century neuroscientific research, particularly in exhibition practices. She has previously worked as a teacher, researcher and curator at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and BAK in Utrecht.

Martijn Meeter is Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on the brain mechanisms that underlie visual perception and memory. He received a VENI grant from the Nederlandse Organisatie Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) to study the role of different neurotransmitter systems play in learning, and later a VIDI to investigate the brain’s response to novel, never-seen stimuli. He has built several neural network models of the key brain regions involved in memory, which were published in journals such as Psychological Review and Hippocampus.

Wendy Moncur is Reader in Socio-Digital Interaction at the University of Dundee, where she leads the Living Digital group. She is also a Visiting Scholar at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Intrinsically interdisciplinary, yet grounded in Computing, her research program focuses on the design of technology to support being human in a Digital Age.

Robert Pepperell is Professor of Fine Art and Head of the Fine Art Department at Cardiff School of Art and Design. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s he exhibited numerous electronic works, including at Ars Electronica, the Barbican Gallery, Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, the ICA, and the Millennium Dome. He has also published several books, including The Posthuman Condition (1995 and 2003) and The Postdigital Membrane (with Michael Punt, 2000), as well as many articles, reviews and papers.

Holly Pester is a poet, critic and practice-based researcher. Her doctoral research at Birkbeck, University of London examined the poetics of noise and sound-media driven poetry. Her current research seeks to develop innovative research methodologies in relation to feminist archive theory. She currently teaches on Oulipo and the Avant-Garde and Poetic Practice at the University of Essex.

Patricia Pisters is Professor of Film Studies at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam and director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (2003) and Mind the Screen (edited with Jaap Kooijman and Wanda Strauven, 2008). Her latest book is The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (2012).

Stacey Pitsillides is Lecturer in Design at the Creative Professions and Digital Arts Department, University of Greenwich. She is also a PhD candidate in Design at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her PhD topic considers creative responses to the digital archive framed through the question of what happens to our data after we die. Her research interests include Digital Death, Digital Identity and Memory, Collaboration, Personal Archiving and Digital Heritage.

Adam Roberts is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely on Romantic, Victorian and science-fictional topics, including the writing of 15 SF novels, most published by Victor Gollancz, some of which have won awards.

Will Self is Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University, where he has launched the first degree-level module in Psychogeography to be established in a British university. His research work takes the form of fiction: his most recent novel was Shark (2014), and he has published 22 books and been translated into 22 languages. He is also a regular broadcaster on British television and radio, and a prolific contributor to newspapers, magazines and review publications worldwide.

Barry C. Smith is the Director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. He is founding director of its Centre for the Study of the Senses and is the AHRC Leadership Fellow for the Science in Culture Theme. He has published both theoretical and experimental research papers on the topics of taste, smell and flavour.

Hugo Spiers is a senior lecturer in the UCL Department of Experimental Psychology and group leader of the Spatial Cognition Research Group in the UCL Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience. In 2010 he established the UCL Spatial Cognition group which employs neuroimaging, virtual reality, single unit recording, eye-tracking and neuropsychology to understand the brain regions supporting spatial cognition.

Larry R. Squire, a Fellow of the American Academy since 1995, is Research Career Scientist at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Health Care System and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, Neurosciences, and Psychology at the University of California, San Diego.

Jason Tougaw is Associate Professor of English at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel (2006) and co-editor, with Nancy K. Miller, of Extremities: Trauma Testimony and Community (2002). His current projects include a brain memoir and a monograph about literary responses to contemporary neuroscience. He blogs about art and science at californica.net.

Alison Waller is a senior lecturer at the University of Roehampton, London, and member of the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature. Her interests include adolescence and young adult fiction, reading and rereading, and portrayals of memory in literature for young people. She is the author of Constructions of Adolescence in Fantastic Realism (2009). Her current research investigates the practice and processes of adults remembering and rereading childhood books. She was co-organiser of the Memory Network.

Patricia Waugh has been a professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University since 1997. Her first book was Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1984). She has since authored and edited many books and essays on modern fiction, modernism and postmodernism, feminism and fiction, contemporary fiction and literary theory. She is completing a monograph entitled The Fragility of Mind examining the relationship between literary cultures and texts and theories and philosophies of mind since 1900.

Adriaan van der Weel is Bohn Extraordinary Professor of Modern Dutch Book History in the University of Leiden’s Book and Digital Media Studies programme. His research interests in book studies concern the digitisation of textual transmission and reading; publishing studies; and scholarly communication. His latest books are Changing our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge (2011), and The Unbound Book (2013), a collection of essays jointly edited with Joost Kircz.

John T. Wixted is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego.

Heather H. Yeung is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Bilkent University. She received her PhD in contemporary poetry and poetics from Durham University in 2012, where she also taught in the Department of English Studies. She is the author of Spatial Engagement with Poetry (2015).

Introduction: Memory in the Twenty-First Century

Sebastian Groes

The battle for the soul

This book maps, contextualises and analyses the changing state of cognition, and, more specifically, memory, at the start of the twenty-first century. Our contemporary period is characterised by a multiplicity of revolutions that together are radically reshaping the context of our thinking about what it means to be a human being. Globalisation, overpopulation, climate change, geopolitical shifts and ruptures after 9/11, an ageing population, ongoing scientific breakthroughs, AI and human enhancement, and the dominance of the internet, and the presence of new technologies and social media in our lives are just a few examples of developments that are having a major impact upon the understanding of ourselves and the world. Climate change poses urgent questions about the weight of mankind’s collective carbon footprint on the earth, but also puts forward new temporal complexities and paradoxes. Apocalyptic fictions such as Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2004) and The Age of Stupid (Dir. Fanny Armstrong 2009) ask us to imagine ourselves from an imagined point in the future: the present becomes a future memory. Diseases of the ageing brain, such as dementia and Alzheimer’s, prompt painful question about identity and selfhood, and challenge our relationships with loved ones, as J. Bernlef’s novel Out of Mind (1984; 1989) and Michael Haneke’s film Amour (2012) explore. Amnesia continues to be mined by novelists and filmmakers, from Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2000), to, more recently, Maud Casey’s The Man Who Walked Away (2014), Peter Carey’s Amnesia (2014) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015). Numerous other mental diseases such as confabulation, hearing voices, Asperger’s and epilepsy confront us with questions about the nature and role of memory. Films that explore artificial intelligence, ranging from the Kubrick classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to recent movies such as Moon (Dir. Duncan Jones 2009) and Ex Machina (Dir. Alex Garland 2014), express a cultural anxiety that humans will be replaced by machines. The human mind’s capacities are continuously extended and augmented through new, non-biological tools such as online search machines and GPS, for instance, but are also monetised, exploited and manipulated by global corporations for sometimes beneficial, but often cynical and sinister purposes.

The human mind is once again a contested site where major power struggles play themselves out. Whereas during the first machine age it was the body that was the subject of state and capitalist power, during the second machine age it is the human mind which is subject to demanding changes, and changing demands. At the same time, new social developments and trends have sparked a renewed quest, led by neuroscientific research, to understand how mental life and human biology operate. Indeed, many of the problems this book addresses have its origin in the fact that, although our world is modern, our brain is still the same as that of Pleistocene humans. Paul Bloom notes: ‘Our minds are not modern, and many of our woes have to do with a mismatch between our Stone Age psychologies and the world in which we now live’.¹ Other scientists and humanities scholars too are staking their claim during this boom in the interest in the workings of the human mind. Over the last two decades, we have seen neuroscience make huge headway in understanding the brain; in so doing, this branch of science has encroached on the territory that the humanities has traditionally taken to be its own. Neuroscience continues to make new claims about the nature of the self, about the impact of technology on our thinking, about free will and about art. The accompanying powerful neurological determinism is being challenged by scholars and philosophers, who find themselves working in a marginalised Humanities, the very use of which has been called into question.

There is an odd moment in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), which traces the lives of a group of clones who have been created to provide organs. Unlike his contemporary Ian McEwan’s neuroscience-themed Saturday, published in the same year, Ishiguro’s profoundly humanist novel does not engage with scientific discourse at all, maintaining a divide between science and the humanities recalling C. P. Snow’s ‘The Two Cultures’ (1959), which argued that ‘the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups’, each with its own specialist vocabulary not understood by the other.² Never Let Me Go raises various concerns about the state, and status, of humans in our troubled modern world, and makes a claim for art’s profoundly ethical and critical vision. Towards the end of the novel, the protagonists Kathy and Tommy have a chat with their former teacher, Miss Emily, who reveals that the clones were asked to make art for a particular purpose: ‘We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.’³ Humanist writers seem to suggest that we have lost or forgotten something, confronting us with the possibility that we are losing a kind of shared essence. And yet, these writers never lose sight of the fact that in the modern world most conceptions of man have rejected this proto-modern idea of a shared essence as a foolhardy, archaic notion. So what are we losing, if it isn’t the soul?

In Rewriting the Soul (1995) Ian Hacking suggests that, although we no longer believe in the soul as the core of our being, we equate memory with selfhood:

My chief topic [. . .] will become the way in which a new science, a purported knowledge of memory, quite self-consciously was created in order to secularize the soul. Science had hitherto been excluded from the study of the soul itself. The new sciences of the memory came into being in order to conquer that resilient core of Western thought and practice. [. . .] When the family falls apart, when parents abuse their children, when incest obsesses the media, when one people tries to destroy the other, we are concerned with the defects of the soul. But we have learned how to replace the soul with knowledge, with science. Hence spiritual battles are fought, not on the explicitly ground of the soul, but on the terrain of memory, where we suppose that there is such a thing as knowledge to be had.⁴

The problem with the soul is that it is an empirically untestable entity; it’s more a belief in an idea, which is difficult to prove and express. It is much easier to frame and test memory, making it a more accessible battlefield for scientists and scholars. If the quest for the soul as seat of our selfhood is replaced by memory, it is not surprising that, in the light of all these contextual changes that are reshaping the form and content of cognition and memory, we fear that we are losing ourselves. We are forgetting our memory, which has such an important role to play in self-perception, but also in how we understand other people and the world at large.

This book is the result in this renewed interest in the changing nature of human character, of the mind and memory, and of social relations. It started when its editor read Douwe Draaisma’s De heimweefabriek (2008; translated as The Nostalgia Factory in 2013), which explores research into the memory of immigrants. It turns out that people have a memory spike around their 20th year, when the highest percentage of intense and emotional memories occurs, after which there is a steady decline of what sticks in the mind (except for a new peaking starting in one’s mid-50s). However, people who move to another country, and into another language, in their mid-30s experience another reminiscence bump. What is appealing about Draaisma’s writing is that he offers both biological, evolutionary and neurological perspectives, as well as cultural, literary and sociological explanations for this type of effect. The reminiscence bump could be attributable to the maturing of the brain around one’s 20th year, which coincides with the age when it is important to imprint information that can be used for survival. But a solely neurological explanation is insufficient: we remember first experiences more vividly, and we first experience many things when we are young. If it’s all about the brain, then it would remember both happy and unhappy in equal measure, and studies have shown this is not the case. There are cultural and psychological factors, then, which are equally important. Émigrés have another reminiscence bump as, besides the shock of the new, their brains need to soak up new forms of social behaviour and cultural conventions, and speak a new language: the brain’s renewed activity might then cause this new accrual of memories.

It is in this same interdisciplinary spirit that this book seeks to reconsider memory by doing a number of things differently, so that various reductive dialectics that inhibit current debate and scientific research on memory can be transcended. This book draws on the work of thinkers in the sciences and the arts and humanities, as well as creative writers, who argue that we need critical and creative responses to the way in which cognition and memory are changing. This project generates transactive knowledge, building on the idea that shared knowledge, cross-disciplinary debate, collaborative writing and experimental thinking make us collectively and exponentially smarter. In the words of N. Katherine Hayles: ‘While no one person alone can swing that small universe [of academia] one way or another, individuals matter in determining its trajectory, and networks of people even more’.⁵ We believe that it is necessary to nurture a creative, playful space where a productive dialogue can happen between critical friends from non-inimical starting points. This exchange, then, also requires an attitude which Daniel Kahneman has described as ‘intellectual fearlessness’, the ability to ‘master any body of knowledge quickly and thoroughly’.⁶

Literature is a form of art that voices concerns about, and formulates responses to, the changes our consciousness and memory are undergoing. As thinking proceeds to an extent on a linguistic basis, and we are still addicted to contemplating the world through fictional narratives, the novel form is an important tool for thinking about global problems in terms of how issues such as climate change impact upon both individual and the collective consciousness. The novel contributes to establishing sustainable change in our private behaviour and shape the way society responds. As Salman Rushdie once argued, the novel simultaneously places, and takes as its subject, ‘the privileged arena of conflicting discourses right inside our heads’.⁷

In the pages that follow, the reader will find a series of experimental, creative-critical interventions as dynamic and protean as memory itself. The writers here are not necessarily looking for consensus or agreement between the different ideas that are covered. We acknowledge that consilience with a meaningful impact distributed across disciplines is often hard to achieve. Yet, when convergence does take place the results can be genuinely original and insightful. We will see, for instance, the conventional idea of memory as simply being to do with the past turned on its head. Various contributors stress the ‘forwardlookingness’ of memory, that is, how our minds use memory to come up with models of the future in order to, for instance, plan ahead and make rational decisions. One key section in Part II forms an experimental collaboration between writer and psychogeographer Will Self and neuroscientist Hugo Spiers in what came to be known as the ‘Soho experiment’, which investigated the role of the memorizing activities of the posterior hippocampus in navigating space. Although there are divergent starting points and ideologies, this research led to a result with a reinvigorating result, and hinted at the possibilities of uniting various disciplines not only by investigating the role of the brain in mapping space, but by understanding the relationship between the navigation of language, stories and space. By combining these new perspectives we are able to make more sense of how our lives are changing today, and suggest how different fields might benefit from one another’s knowledge and practices.

The humanities and the new science of mind

Memory continuous to be a growing field of scholarly interest, and historically there is an huge amount of work in memory studies from an equally overwhelming number of disciplines and fields, which this book can only gesture towards, whilst picking up on the bits that are specifically relevant for this particular project. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, we see a number of developments that lay the foundations of a revolution in our understanding of memory in the post-war period. Psychologists and philosophers made enormous headway in theorizing memory. They were obsessed with the idea of involuntary memory, and the idea that traces of experience nestled themselves into the brain in engrams, which could then later be retrieved. In Remembering (1932), the experimental psychologist Frederic Bartlett showed that socio-cultural contexts were profoundly important forces in shaping remembering processes. Memory is not something that simply happens in the brain, but a process that is fundamentally influenced by contextual and cultural factors, such as gender, individual trauma and education.

Since the 1950s, neuroscience has made a revolutionary series of breakthroughs in understanding the role of the brain in memory, which is investigated in various sections throughout the book. Simultaneously, the knowledge of memory studies accelerated via new, emergent fields. In the late 1960s, with the advent of cybernetics, Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) suggest that memory is simply information that flows through a system, and is comprised of a series of stores. Information first enters short term memory, and if this information is retained through rehearsal, it is transferred to long-term memory. In the 1980s, there emerged more sophisticated information theoretical models of memory, driven by mathematical theories and algorithms that could be used to investigate how humans, with a bounded rationality, used their memory to make decisions in a context that saw information overload.⁸ Cognitive studies concomitantly produced new models of memory, paying attention to philosophical problems about the various ways in which information presents knowledge to us, and how communication itself interferes in memory. Empirical evidence drawn from neurological experiments which focused on the encoding, consolidation, permanent storage and subsequent recall was inflected psychological knowledge, and embedded in cultural contexts.

Over the past 20 years, studies of memory in the humanities have focused predominantly on memory from a collective, socio-cultural point of view, studying cultural and social history, memorialization, trauma or nostalgia. These studies provide retrospective perspectives that stress socio-cultural and political dimensions or therapeutic possibilities, but do not always engage with the transformative and dynamic potential of memory, consciousness and cognition as a subject of scientific enquiry. For instance, Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (1994 and 1998) shows how culture and society are shaped but also manipulated through the way collective memory is represented. Other examples include Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead’s Theories of Memory (2008), Astrid Erll’s Memory in Culture (2011) and Jeffrey K. Olick et al.’s The Collective Memory Reader (2011). These are extensions of thinking traceable to thinkers of the nineteenth century such as Marx and Nietzsche, and the writers and texts they influenced in the later twentieth century, such as Fredric Jameson’s exploration of postmodern culture, Pierre Nora’s Between Memory and History (1989) and postcolonial scholars including Paul Gilroy and Edward Said. Marianne Hirsch’s development of ‘postmemory’ investigates the idea that the relationship of a second generation to the powerful, often traumatic, experiences of their parents that preceded their births but that were nevertheless engrained in their consciousness so deeply that these traumas constitutes memories in their own right. Book such as James E. Young’s The Texture of Memory (1993), Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Crisis of Memory and the Second World War (2006) and The Future of Memory (2010) are still mainly preoccupied with memorialization, testimony and trauma after traumatic, collective post-Holocaust events, whilst recent work on 9/11 mainly focuses on memorialization in the light of loss and mourning. This work is valuable, and its role as a therapeutic ‘working through’ of trauma will continue to have a function in the future. Yet, the establishment of this type of approach as a foundation to memory studies is also problematic, or incomplete, as the editors of The Future of Memory admit, wondering

not just whether it has informed a commodification of trauma, but also whether its own rise has ultimately de-politicised the very memories it once politicized. Has the fixation on the past, inside and outside of the academy, become compensation for the political failures (of utopian thought) in imagining a better future?⁹

The question is a rhetorical one. Many of these projects also mistake an awareness of historical events for memory, as Nora points out in the essay ‘Between Memory and History’ in Les Lieux de Mémoire (1989).

This book reclaims, and broadens out, memory from its definition as a deliberate, voluntary, archival, collective and unavoidably political act, and argues for a return to the idea that memory is in the first place a physical process that takes place, often spontaneously, in the bodies and minds of people as isolated biological units living in societies and cultures. We connect cultural memory to technical memory, that is, how memory processes play themselves out in and for human beings as individual biological organisms. Both forms are not fixed and stable, but dynamic, mutable and ongoing, and their intersection has slowly been building since the late 1990s.

The humanities have seemed to be on the back foot, losing out in the battle for memory. This ostensible struggle between the sciences and the humanities reminds us of the warring scientist Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, who is represented as a naïve, archaic, even obsolete humanist. How to reconcile these disciplines? Nalbantian’s The Memory Process’s inviting of humanists and neuroscientist to share the same discursive space is commendable, the mark of a concerted attempt at creating consilience. Nalbantian’s rhetoric works against its own purpose, however: although she wants ‘a convergence of these two perspectives’ she also speaks of ‘evidence from both sides of the divide’.¹⁰ Such rhetoric reinforces the ostensible gap between the humanities and neuroscience, whilst giving too much weight to the value of neuroscience, and ignoring other disciplines. The goal of Memory in the Twenty-First Century is to further dismantle various dualisms: between cultural and individual memory, between science and the humanities, between neuroscience and literature, between thinking and feeling, between the head and the heart, between brain and emotion.

One precedent can be found in Doris Lessing, who, in her novel The Golden Notebook (1962) responded to C. P. Snow by rejecting his Two Cultures thesis:

By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose [. . .] between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who sense this, and who don’t wish to subject themselves further to this moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won’t be divided against themselves. With all institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave – that process of elimination that goes on all the time and excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like.¹¹

Lessing denies the ideological basis of the Two Cultures debate, depicting it as being based on a categorisation of humans according to prescriptive ideologies that constrain the multitudes that human beings contain. Another critic who is equally helpful in dismantling this false dialectic between the arts, humanities and sciences is the French philosopher Catherine Malabou, who in What Should We Do With Our Brain? (2008) notes simply that it is irrelevant ‘to ask whether the brain and consciousness are one and the same thing – let us put aside this old and specious debate’.¹² One strategy that allows us to negate the Two Cultures argument is to deny the existence of the split between the disciplines, and to promote the flourishing of results of research emerging from collaboration between fields.

This book reaches beyond strict disciplinary boundaries to create cross-disciplinary interplay between the arts and humanities and the sciences. In recent years our understanding of memory has been significantly enhanced through scientific and technological developments. Writers and critics working in the arts and humanities are now turning to new ways of thinking within biosciences, psychology and computer science to explore individual and collective memory in literary narratives. Simultaneously, scientists acknowledge the benefits of engaging with creative ideas, the ethical and hermeneutic perspectives offered by fictional explorations and the critical visions of arts and humanities disciplines. One striking example of how literature has been impacting in other fields is the rise of narrative-based medicine (NBM) since the 1990s, which affirms that

doctor-patient interactions in all medical fields