Memory in the Twenty-First Century

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 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-52057-9 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 Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-56642-6 ISBN 978-1-137-52058-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137520586 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. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 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 ix Foreword: From Causality to Correlation by N. Katherine Hayles x Acknowledgements xiv Notes on Contributors xvi

Introduction: Memory in the Twenty-First Century 1 Sebastian Groes Part I Metaphors of Memory Introduction to Part I 16 Sebastian Groes 1 Metaphors of Memory: From the Classical World to Modernity 27 Corin Depper 2 Proust, the Madeleine and Memory 38 Barry C. Smith 3 Proust Recalled: A Psychological Revisiting of That Madeleine Memory Moment 42 E. Leigh Gibson 4 The Persistence of Surrealism: Memory, Dreams and the Dead 51 Jeannette Baxter 5 The Brain Observatory and the Imaginary Media of Memory Research 57 Flora Lysen 6 Memory and the Fictional Imagination: Creating Memories 63 Peter Childs 7 Misled by Metaphor 67 Nicholas Carr 8 Calling Gaia: World Brains and Global Memory 70 Stephan Besser Part II Memory in the Digital Age Introduction to Part II 78 Sebastian Groes 9 What’s in a Brain? 89 Will Self

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10 Will Self and His Inner Seahorse 97 Hugo J. Spiers 11 Navigational Aids in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation 103 Ineke van der Ham 12 Living Digitally 108 Wendy Moncur 13 Death and Memory in the Twenty-First Century 113 Stacey Pitsillides 14 The Oceanic Literary Reading Mind: An Impression 119 Michael Burke 15 Memory and the Reading Substrate 125 Adriaan van der Weel 16 Memory, Materiality and the Ethics of Reading in the Digital Age 130 Sebastian Groes

Part III Ecologies of Memory Introduction to Part III 140 Sebastian Groes 17 Time That Is Intolerant 147 Claire Colebrook 18 Climate Change and Memory 159 Mike Hulme 19 Memories of Snow: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Re-Reading 163 Greg Garrard 20 Writing Climate Change 170 Maggie Gee 21 Against Nostalgia: Climate Change Art and Memory 175 Sebastian Groes

Part IV Memory and the Future Introduction to Part IV 190 Sebastian Groes 22 The Trace of the Future 199 Mark Currie 23 Simulation and the Evolution of Thought 205 Joanna J. Bryson 24 Imaginative Anticipation: Rethinking Memory for Alternative Futures 208 Jessica Bland 25 Memory Is No Longer What It Used to Be 213 Patricia Pisters Contents vii

26 ‘We Can Remember It, Funes, Wholesale’: Borges, Total Recall and the Logic of Memory 218 Adam Roberts 27 Remembering without Stored Contents: A Philosophical Reflection on Memory 229 Daniel D. Hutto Part V Forgetting Introduction to Part V 238 Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery 28 Remembering 251 Larry R. Squire and John T. Wixted 29 Directed Forgetting 263 Karen R. Brandt 30 Remembrance in the Twenty-First Century 268 Peter Childs 31 The Body and the Page in Poetry Readings as Remembrance of Composition 271 Holly Pester 32 Our Plastic Brain: Remembering and Forgetting Art 276 Heather H. Yeung 33 Amnesia and Identity in Contemporary Literature 280 Jason Tougaw 34 Amnesia in Young Adult Fiction 286 Alison Waller 35 Remembering Responsibly 292 Thomas F. Coker and Heather H. Yeung Part VI Twenty-First Century Subjectivities Introduction to Part VI 300 Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery 36 Losing the Self? Subjectivity in the Digital Age 307 Claire Colebrook 37 Memory and Voices: Challenging Psychiatric Diagnosis through the Novel 316 Patricia Waugh 38 Rereading the Self 325 Alison Waller 39 Neuroscience and Posthuman Memory 330 Robert Pepperell 40 The Confabulation of Self 334 Joanna J. Bryson viii Contents

41 Malingering and Memory 338 Neander Abreu 42 Trauma and the Truth 343 Martijn Meeter Conclusion: ‘The Futures of Memory’ 347 Sebastian Groes

References 364 Index 388 List of Figures

3.1 Illustration of the acronym olfactory LOVER covering the core features of an autobiographical memory evoked by olfactory information 44 14.1 The five sign-fed and mind-fed categories active during engaged acts of literary reading that make up the affective inputs 120 14.2 The four fluvial stages of the literary reading loop 122 14.3 The oceanic processing nature of the literary reading mind 123 28.1 The medial temporal lobe memory system 253 28.2 Organization of mammalian long-term memory systems 256

ix 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,

x Foreword xi 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 xii Foreword 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 omis- sion 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 Foreword xiii 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, provoca- tions, 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

xiv Acknowledgements xv

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 dis- ruptive 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

xvi Notes on Contributors xvii

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. xviii Notes on Contributors

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. Notes on Contributors xix

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 xx Notes on Contributors 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 portray- als 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. Notes on Contributors xxi

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,

1 2 Sebastian Groes 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 Introduction 3

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 4 Sebastian Groes 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 Introduction 5 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 transforma- tive 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 6 Sebastian Groes

‘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, Introduction 7 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 are primarily verbal; that the outcome of both diagnosis and therapy depends partly on the narrative experience of each party. [. . .] The collective medical self-image gradually altered 8 Sebastian Groes

and soon doctors were receiving instructions in the complexities of narrative interchange and re-educating themselves in literary analysis.13

Another example of fruitful cross-disciplinary research can be found in Part II, where writer Will Self suggests that that there is a correlation between the human mind’s ability to navigate space and its attraction to narrative, which could open a whole new field of research, connecting literary studies with cognitive studies, psychology and neuroscience. It is only the curiosity of critical-creative minds such as Will Self’s that allows us to break down barriers, and look over the horizon of existing knowledge. This critical-creative dimension also offers less obvious ways of reconfiguring our thinking about memory. We wonder, for instance, what happens to individual and collective memory in the light of climate change. In the popular imagination associated with future catastrophe, connecting climate change to memory is an ostensibly counter-intuitive starting point. What does it mean to live with a shrinking future and an expanding memory? Why doesn’t the knowledge we are choking the earth not make us remember to behave more sensibly on a day to day basis? Why don’t our memories of stable weather in our youth propel us to reclaim that sense of stability? We also pay attention to the relationship between forgetting and memory, and ask what memory might mean in an increasingly posthuman context, and how subjectivity in contemporary culture is shaped through, and undermined by, memory, sometimes to the extent that we feel the coherent self is simply a fiction. The presence of creative writers such as Self, Maggie Gee, Holly Pester and Adam Roberts implicitly argues that we should embrace the idiosyncratic, often peculiar knowledge generated by the arts, subtly probing and penetrating people’s inner worlds and experience.

The age of neuromania: art in the brain, the brain in art

Since the decade of the brain in the 1990s, we have been witness to an increasing emphasis on the value of scientific research, whilst the arts and humanities have seen major cuts in funding, and increasingly have to justify their methodology and outputs – and their very existence. Indeed, mirroring the impact on wider academic research of the mapping of the human genome in the 1980s, funding seems to be obsessively focused on understanding the brain, as if this could solve all major individual biological problems, or even collective social ones. In neuro-positivist works such as Dick Swaab’s We Are Our Brain (2010; 2014), we find claims like the following:

Everything we think, do, and refrain from doing is determined by the brain. The consution of this fantastic machine determines our potential, our limitations, and our characters; we are our brains. Brain science is no longer confined to looking for the cause of brain disorders; it also seeks to establish why we are as we are. It is a quest to find ourselves.14 Introduction 9

Swaab is recycling Joseph LeDoux’s provocative claim in Synaptic Self (2002) that ‘You are your synapses’. There is a tendency towards solipsism in neuroscientific work, and a blinding professional deformation seduced by neurological positivism. In their efforts to decisively undermine Cartesian dualism, which emphasizes a separation of mind and body, some of these works end up by perpetuating a dualism of their own. The foundational belief of this neuromania is that new insights into the functioning of the human brain will lead not only to novel possibilities of technoscientific intervention, but to a radical transformation of our sense of what it is to be human. Much emphasis has been laid on the hippocampus, which, from a neuroscientific point of view, plays a privileged role in memory. The hippocampus often emerges as a modern version of the pineal gland, the organ in the centre of the brain, where Descartes thought the soul resided. Neurosceptics emphasize the role of processes beyond the brain, and even beyond the central nervous system, in forming cognition. Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt argue for the idea that thoughts are not confined to the mind, and certainly not to the brain, alone. Their book The Postdigital Membrane (2000) challenges ‘the unwritten assumption that thought is confined to the mind, or any one area such as the brain. [. . .] the constraints of the human frame do not necessarily correspond with its limits.’15 Philosopher Andy Clark has been scath- ingly critical of the dominant focus on the hippocampus, which he mocks with his idea of the ‘Hippo-world’,

in which for half a century, all neuroscientific attention focused on the hippocampus regarded [. . .] as the sole and obvious locus of human cognitive activity. [. . .] Some philosophers believe that in discovering the causal processes that operate in the hippocampus, they were discovering the scientific essence of cognition itself. It is better, they now insist, to view what the hippocampus does as cognitive and the rest of the brain as merely sending input to, or receiving outputs from, that ‘truly cognitive part’.16

Catherine Malabou too has been vocal in rejecting neurological determinism. In a dig at neuroscience pioneer Jean-Pierre Changeux, whose Neuronal Man (1986) focused on the primary role of the neuron in the nature of humans and the biological world, she notes that ‘neuronal man still has no consciousness’.17 Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg reminds us that ‘[t]he human brain [. . .] is arguably the most complex thing in the known universe’, and therefore difficult to know.18 Suzanne Corkin acknowledges the limits of neuroscience:

We will never have a formula to fully explain how the noisy activity of our brains gives rise to thought, emotions and behaviour. But the magnitude of the goal makes the pursuing all the more exciting. This challenge attracts brilliant adventurers and risk takers to our field. And even if we will never completely understand the way the brain works, whatever small part of the truth we are able to learn will bring us one step closer to understanding who we are.19 10 Sebastian Groes

One of the subtler writers amongst neuroscientists is Stanlislas Dehaene, who was educated by Changeux. Deheane defines genuine consciousness as ‘conscious access – the simple fact that usually, whenever we are awake, whatever we decide to focus on may become conscious’.20 Consciousness is not vigilance, attention, or phenomenal awareness, but a focused perception which we are able to describe, and which can be measured in laboratories. This includes qualia and recursive mental constructions such as the ‘I’. Yet, it is neuroscientific methodology, and thus the conceptualization of their subjects, that deviates markedly from, for instance, literary analysis as a critical mode of thinking. Dehaene acknowledges that neuroscience has begun to take subjective reporting by test subjects as a serious, crucial way of investigating introspection, which, historically speaking, in psychology was taken to be flawed because it would take seriously subjective experiences which were illusory or the product of confabulation. Dehaene finds this attitude wrong:

It conflates two issues: introspection as a research method, and introspection as raw data. As a research method, introspection cannot be trusted. Obviously we cannot count on naïve human subjects to tell us how their mind works; otherwise our science would be too easy. And we should not take their subjective experiences too literally. [E]ven [. . .] bizarre introspections must be trusted: unless the subject is lying, they correspond to genuine mental events that beg for an explanation. The correct perspective is to think of subject reports as raw data. [. . .] In fact, the new science of consciousness makes an enormous use of purely subjective phenomena [. . .] As long as we carefully record, on every trial, what our participants feel, we are in business, because we can then sort the trials into consciousness and unconscious ones and search for brain activity patterns that separate them.21

For neuroscience, subject reports are simply raw data, not a research method; the products need to have an extra layer of critical perspective provided by the fMRI scanner and subsequent interpretation of data. This is where their approach differs from literary production and literary criticism. Literature is a form of subjective reporting, but one which has already built into its texture a critical apparatus that constantly scrutinises the material within. Paisley Livingstone notes of Marcel Proust, who produced 1,500,000 words of ‘raw data’:

Writing was for Proust a genuine form of research, and moreover, led to greater self-knowledge, even if the resultant artefacts are not always (and certainly not only) reliable reports of the author’s actual experiences. Moreover, there is no good reason to believe that every reader’s experience of Proust’s writings deserves to be called knowledge or even understanding, although in some hands these works may very well result in some valuable epistemic results.22

Proust’s writing is not simply raw data, as it has a critical awareness built into its operations, which the literary reader and perceptive reader pick up on through Introduction 11 the establishment of a complex cognitive circuitry. This book contains two chapters which pick up on that meta-reflective layer in Proust, through an analysis by a philosopher of the senses (Chapter 2) and from a neuropsychological point of view (Chapter 3). The scientific breakthroughs in neuroscience have led, however, to a newly emergent discipline, ‘neuroaesthetics’, which is the scientific study of the neural bases for the understanding and creation of works of art. By focusing on the visual brain, pioneer of neuroaesthetics Semir Zeki’s Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (1999) offers ‘a neurological opinion as to why [the work of Vermeer and Michelanglo] is considered to be so deeply satisfying by so many’.23 Vermeer’s work is successful according to Zeki’s neurobiological reading because it embodies ‘situation constancy’:

a given situation that has features that are common to many other situations of the same kind, enabling the brain to categorize it immediately as being representative of all. [. . .] It is its capacity to evoke many situations, not one, all with equal validity and hence to cover a whole species of situations. It has the capacity to stir a great deal in the brain’s stored memory of past events.24

This would probably also explain the success of sitcoms, from Friends and Seinfeld to Married with Children and Family Guy: one group of friends represents all groups of friends, one family evokes all families, as Tolstoy would have it. Zeki goes on to ponder on the interest of horizontal, vertical, squares, rectangles and parallel oriented lines in twentieth century abstract painting. This type of analysis stands in marked contrast to the work of a humanist art critic such as T. J. Clark, whose close reading of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin in The Sight of Death (2006) leads to remarkable, subtle insights, and some fine writing as well. Since the start of this new century, neuroaesthetics has been increasingly prominent, making claims on all forms of art. There is also a growing trend towards investigating how literature and other forms of culture affect the brain; scientists are looking at what classical music, poetry and novels do in and ‘do to’ the brain. Fiona Shaw has performed T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) in an fMRI-scanner,25 and Daniel Margulies has used fMRI-scanning to show how the mind responds to Igor Stravinksy’s The Rite of Spring (1913); other research shows how choral singing has restored the brains of patients suffering from aphasia after a stroke (Tamplin et al. 2013). More recent research has shown that reading a novel changes the connectivity of your brain.26 In a riposte, cognitive neuroscientist Christian Jarrett demonstrates both this type of neuroscience’s flawed unscientific underpinnings as well as its general irrelevance because it excludes the role of cultural factors (Jarrett 2014). Indeed, many of these often gimmicky experiments lend themselves to ample attention from the media, yet the scientific value of these experiments is often negligible. Another approach lies in the fruitful trend towards thinking about how literature represents the brain, consciousness and memory. There is a burgeoning field of non-fictional engagement with the brain and body, in which usually memory 12 Sebastian Groes plays a key role. Jason Tougaw calls this the ‘brain memoir’, and there is also what Charles B. Harris has dubbed ‘neurological realism’: the role of the brain is investigated in works such as Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006) and Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005). Where traditionally this engagement with science belonged to the realm of SF authors such as William Gibson, Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin, literary authors too are bringing (neuro)science into their work: Will Self drew on research into taxi drivers’ brains for The Book of Dave (2006), and James Smythe’s The Machine (2013), Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013) and Lottie Moggach’s Kiss Me First (2013) all think about the relationship between the mind, brain and machine. All of these authors are profoundly interested in the workings of memory, and they are also turning to science to understand how the physiognomy and biological processes are involved in producing that still most mysterious, wondrous enigma: consciousness, imagination, dreams and memory. Memory in the Twenty-First Century argues, however, that those enigmatic characteristics of human existence are changing rapidly because of the culture and context in which are living are altering. The rapid nature of changes make it necessary for an inspection of the specific characteristics and contexts of memory at the start of the twenty-first century, as well as for an ethical debate that safeguards the equally mysterious and wondrous workings of the human mind. In the fabric of interwoven thoughts that makes up this book, the reader will encounter new research that challenges some atavistic assumptions of memory, and be invited to rethink the intellectual paradigms in which we situate our consideration of the experience of human beings living in the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works (New York and London: Vintage, 2011), Loc. 3231. 2. C. P. Snow, ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’, Encounter 69 (1959), 17. 3. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (London: Faber, 2010), 238. 4. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5. 5. N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2002), 9. 6. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Penguin, 2012), 141. 7. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1992), 426. 8. See, for instance, Susan A. Hall’s and Alexander H. Levis’s ‘Information Theoretic Models of Memory in Human Decision-making Models’, 1983, http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/ handle/1721.1/2860/P-1300-15668387.pdf?sequence=1. 9. Introduction to The Future of Memory, ed. Richard Crownshaw, Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland (New York and Oxford: Bergbahn, 2010), x. 10. Suzanne Nalbantian, The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanstic Perspectives (Boston: MIT, 2010), 1. 11. Dorris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (London: Fourth Estate, 2010), Loc. 196–294. 12. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham, 2008), 2. 13. Stanlislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain (London: Penguin, 2014), 70–71. 14. Dick Swaab, We Are Our Brains: A neurobiography of the brain from the womb to Alzheimers. Trans. Jane Hedley-Prole. London: Spiegel & Grau), p.1. Introduction 13

15. Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt, The Postdigital Membrane: Imagination, Technology and Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 28. 16. Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Loc. 2348. 17. Malabou, What Should We Do, 3. 18. Nick Bostrom and Andres Sandberg, Human Enhancement, ed. Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 376. 19. Corkin, Permanent Present Tense, 314–315. 20. Dehaene, Consciousness, 9. 21. Dehaene, Consciousness, 12. 22. Paisley Livingston, ‘Literature and Knowledge’, in A Companion to Epistemology, ed. Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 258. 23. Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 23. 24. Zeki, Inner Vision, 22. 25. ‘Inside an actor’s brain: Fiona Shaw performs in an MRI scanner’, The Guardian, 24 November 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2009/nov/24/fiona- shaw-brain-scan. 26. Gregory S. Berns, Kristina Blaine, Michael J. Prietula and Brandon E. Pye, ‘Short- and Long Term Effects of a Novel Connectivity in the Brain’, Brain Connectivity 3(6) (2013), http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/brain.2013.0166. 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 misunder- standing. 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

16 Introduction to Part I 17 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 18 Sebastian Groes 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) Introduction to Part I 19 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 metaphors for the twenty-first century, we first revisit metaphors of the modernist period. Modernism generated various ground-breaking reconsiderations of the mind and memory, and here we reinterpret two key modernist cultural exponents, Marcel Proust, and the Surrealists. Philosopher of 20 Sebastian Groes the senses Barry C. Smith revisits the famous madeleine moment from the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time project (1913–1928), Swann’s Way (1914), when Marcel’s mind floods with childhood memories after tasting a madeleine cake dipped in tilleul, a lime-flower tea. Proust’s quale has set up a challenge for scientists. What has become known as the ‘Proust Phenomenon’ seems to suggest that smell not only appears to have a privileged access to strong, emotional autobiographical memories, but that it can also bring back memories we thought we had lost. Proust’s passage is significant because it poses questions about the relationship between the original experience and retrieved memory copies, and about the mind’s forgetfulness and repression of memories. It has also drawn a huge response from scientists, who have been making sense of involuntary memory through scientific and psychological experimentation. One may think of John Downes and Simon Chu’s neuroscientific work on the episode, which compares the different responses generated by verbal labels and visual, odour and auditory cues.15 Neuroscientist Gordon Sheppard and Professor of Literature Kirsten Sheppard-Barr wrote an excellent interdisciplinary essay on the subject.16 Larry Squire’s work has also investigated the neurological apparatus of the Proust persona, and Russell Epstein’s ‘Consciousness, Art and the Brain: Lessons from Marcel Proust’ (2004) investigates the neural basis of the Proust Phenomenon, even claiming that ‘a scientific theory of art is possible, and will be found as an inevitable corollary of a scientific theory of consciousness’.17 Here, Smith looks at how phenomenological impulses are responded to by the body and brain, noting that often we confuse smell and taste. For Smith, it is not just the physiological responses that are important, however. Proust’s close attention to psychology allows him to illustrate important facts about olfaction and memory that neuroscience is only now beginning to understand. Psychologist Leigh Gibson revisits the madeleine passage and shows that the ‘involuntary’ memories are triggered by flavour cues and physiological effects of both the cake and the tilleul. Gibson pays attention to associative conditioning via Pavlov’s famous experiments, and investigates the complex make up of that staple English drink, tea. Your cuppa will never be the same again. J. G. Ballard specialist Jeannette Baxter continues this re-visiting of the modernist epoch by returning to the Surrealists, who also offered many different metaphors of memory. Think for instance of Dalí’s melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory (1931), which metaphorically suggested the malleability and subjectivity of experienced (body) time. The Surrealists reacted against the linear, mechanical clock time of modern technological rationality and moved away from the idea that the mind could retrieve the integral purity of the original experience. Their leader, André Breton, understood that memories were deeply informed by contextual association and the unconscious. Baxter notes that the Surrealists’ exploration of metaphor is not a desire for a simplistic process of remembering that straightforwardly brings back the past to make the hidden known: ‘Instead, it is a process of remembering that opens up the experience of what it is to be human to the creative – and often disquieting – energies of getting lost’. Sebastian Groes continues this subversive Introduction to Part I 21 exploration of subjectivity, the unconscious and the work of J. G. Ballard in Chapter 21.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: the metaphors of neuroscience

We might ask if metaphors could play a role in creating consilience between different disciplines by acting as a bridge that enables us to carry over ideas, discourses and methodologies from one field to another. In Part II, the idea of ‘mental mapping’ serves as an idea that could potentially bring together literature, cultural and social studies, and neuroscience. The psychogeographical mapping of place by Will Self and neuroscientific experiments on the hippocampi of London’s black cab drivers could provide a fruitful space for cross-disciplinary thinking. This dialogue is, however, proving difficult, as Self affirms in Chapter 9. Both practices are very far removed from one another and, ironically, metaphor actually seems to be a problem rather than a solu- tion. Neuroscientist Yadin Dudai warns against ‘metaphor fallacies’ in memory research, just as Depper argues that the storage house metaphor of memory might lead people to think that memory is static; metaphors ‘may leak from the metaphorical domain to the real world target domain, and lure the investigator into false parallels’.18 Yet, just as Aristotle literalized Plato’s metaphor, today the fMRI image literalizes mental mapping by attempting to find a correlation between maps of the brain (with specialized functions attributed to regions in the brain) and the brain’s mapping of external space. The fMRI image itself is a weak metaphor, and some neuroscientists are blind to the representational problems fMRI practices pose. One might question the very search for finding models for memory through metaphor, particularly in the light of the dominance of the visual for a phenomenon that is to a large extent a temporal problem. Memories have a time span, take place in the past and may not necessarily correspond to the time of the original experience. Maybe that’s why, particularly in the harder sciences, flowery figurative language is frowned upon. And here’s a reason why. In Self Comes to Mind (2010), neuroscientist Antonio Damasio compares consciousness to

the execution of a symphony of Mahlerian proportions. But the marvel [. . .] is that the score and conductor become reality only as life unfolds. [. . .] The grand symphonic piece that is consciousness encompasses the foundational contributions to the brain stem, forever hitched to the body, and the wider- than-the-sky imagery created in the cooperation of the cerebral cortex and subcortical structures, all harmoniously stitched together, in ceaseless forward motion, interruptible only by sleep, anesthesia, brain dysfunction, or death.19

This is an interesting but very loose and arbitrary comparison. Why Mahler? Why classical music, a non-figurative art form? The reference to Emily Dickinson’s short poem ‘The Brain – is Wider Than the Sky –’ confusingly introduces another 22 Sebastian Groes art form and another metaphor. The idea of ‘stitching together’ does not work for a complex musical composition. Neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin gives us another metaphor in Permanent Present Tense (2013), a medical biography of the most famous amnesiac, H. M.:

Memory is not a single event, not a snapshot fixed in celluloid with the click of the shutter. [. . .] memory does not reside in one spot in the brain. Instead, memory engages many parts of the brain in parallel. We can think of remembering as a trip to a supermarket to buy all the ingredients for beef stew. We select the meat, vegetables, stock, and spices from different parts of the store and then combine them in a large stew pot at home. Similarly, calling up the memory of one’s last birthday entails pulling information stored in the different parts of the brain – the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes – and organizing these stored traces in a way that allows us to relive the experience.20

Corkin’s metaphor depicts memory as a process rather than a singular material event. Her rejection of the idea that individual memories are locally inscribed is teased out by Flora Lysen, who historicizes brain observation since the late nineteenth century. These observations were driven by the desire to prove the localization of memory functions within the brain. They coincided with the attractive, but fallacious, idea of the engram, the memory trace which is inscribed into the brain’s physiology. Pioneered by German biologist Richard Semon over a hundred years ago, studies into lesions in the brain aimed to show that specific memories were encoded into the material brain. Semon coined the term ‘mneme’, which designated ‘a permanent material change created by a stimulus.’21 Yet, there persists a nagging inclination to try to find consciousness and memory in specific parts of the brain. After his death, H. M.’s brain was sliced into 2,401 sections, which were photographed and placed online by the Brain Observatory. Lysen points to the idea that this new hybrid form of visualization gives us a new way of seeing the brain, accessible to both scientific community and lay audiences. This medium of the digital brain database has also sparked artistic responses by ‘brain curators’, which give us another prism through which to view the brain via imaginary media and cultural products. Lysen notes that this fusion of scientific with imaginary interventions, and of scientific and popular audiences, creates a digital-material fabric from which metaphors cannot be excised. These types of visualization project continue to fuel the desire for localizing memory. Jason Tougaw explores in ‘Touching Brains’ (2015) this need to grasp memories and the self through understanding the physiology of the brain: ‘Touching another person’s brain to find that person’s self is a fantasy of connecting: finding empathy, sharing feelings, exchanging affect, blending each other’s stories’.22 It seems, then, that qualia and the mystery of consciousness win out, and that the gap between the material and the mental remains unbridgeable – except through metaphor. Indeed, Dudai has revisited the idea of (re)consolidation of memory, whereby specific memories are not so much embedded into the physical structure of the brain, but move from the short-term into the long-term Introduction to Part I 23 memory via the postencoding stabilization of synaptic or cell-wide information storage. Yet, Dudai too admits that engrams are elusive:

They join the distributed, large and dynamic ‘society of engrams’ that comes to constitute our memory. To consider an engram as a discrete, well-defined long- term physical trace is hence a bit naive. In real life, engrams are palimpsests, reflecting physical traces of many layers of past events. Molecular, synaptic, and cellwide mechanisms, of the types described earlier in this chapter, allow the engrams to do just that.23

In this reading, memories are stable and specific, but also generated by distributed patterns of firing neurons and synapses firing in the brain, whose information when retrieved is reconstructed and recontextualzed. This is known as the reconsolidation of memory. In Chapter 28, Larry Squire and John T. Wixted also refer to H. M. and ponder the question of where memories are stored in the brain. Squire and Wixted affirm that memories are distributed throughout the neocortex, but that some areas are more important for storing specific aspects of an experience, such as the visual, verbal or aural qualities of qualia. This also has implications for ideas about specific types of memory, such as the ‘flash bulb memory’ (FBM), a form of autobiographical memory with an astounding perceptual clarity we are able to retrieve (seemingly) intact, often in the case of global or national traumatic events, such as the assassination of JFK or 9/11. It was William James who noted that such events are ‘so exciting as almost to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissue’.24 This suggests that an event is burnt, or etched, into your brain, and that the mind is a life-long series of wounds and cauterizations – metaphorically speaking. Flash bulb memories were first identified by Roger Brown and James Kulik in a highly influential paper in 1977 which built on the neuro- physiological theories of R. B. Livingstone. They occur when a high level of surprise (and emotional arousal) combines with major causality, and were thought to imprint a permanent memory whose original experience could be retrieved intact. Since then, the flash bulb metaphor has been scrutinized and called into question. A highly skilled novelist such as Ian McEwan is adept at creating FBMs: the balloon scene in the opening chapter of Enduring Love (1997), with a random group of men being pulled towards the sky resulting in the death of one, is a simple, contingent event with an ‘explosion of consequences’ that the novel sifts through to make visible the complex, paradoxical ethical archaeology of modern life.25 However, as Martin Conway’s book of essays Flash Bulb Memories (2013) argues, the formation of FBMs is itself a much more complex process, in which many different factors (such as age, culture, gender) play a role.26 Recent neuroscientific studies by Elizabeth Phelps on the 9/11 attacks have shown that FBMs differ substantially from everyday memories. Yet, although we are often very confident about emotional, traumatic memories, our accuracy on contextual details is often wrong: ‘While the memory of the event itself is enhanced’, Phelps explains, ‘the vividness of the memory of the central event tends to come at the expense of the details. We experience a sort of tunnel vision, discarding all the details that seem incidental to the central 24 Sebastian Groes event.’27 It is not far off the famous dolly zoom shots used in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), or Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), where the effect is to convey the immediate experience of trauma itself, but also its radical temporal distortions.

The internet, computation and the global brain in the twenty-first century

In Chapter 6, Peter Childs argues for art as a rich and playful storehouse of metaphors for the mind and memory, and brings us back to the Baxter’s discussion of the power of dreams and the unconscious. Childs meditates on Woody Allen’s film Another Woman (1988) and J. K. Rowling’s use of tears as a metaphor of memory: ‘Perhaps we can think of memories in some ways as similar to these salt-and-water secretions from our tear ducts: chemical mixtures, created by some impact on our emotions, that seep or pour from us, possibly joyfully, often unhappily, sometimes unexpectedly’. Finally, Childs turns to the sieve of our leaky minds via an author obsessed with memory, Julian Barnes, an advocate of the mutability of memory. Childs also sets up the new complex temporalities explored in Parts III and IV (on climate change and the futurity of memory) noting that memory is also ‘oriented in both directions, looking forward to looking back’. What Childs’s reading also stresses is the importance of being able to engage in cognitive play, which is exactly what metaphor is – profoundly human, creative, and full of imagination. We find another recent metaphor if we return to Corkin:

A popular way to think about memory in the brain is to borrow a metaphor from computer science: memory is information that the brain processes and stores. To succeed in the undertaking, the brain needs to perform three steps: it must encode the information, turning the raw data of experience into a brain- compatible format; it must store the information for later use; it must be able to retrieve the information from storage later.28

Corkin is aware that memory is much more complex, of course, and here Nick Carr and Stephan Besser dispute the ‘mind-is-a-computer’ analogy in the final two chapters. Carr argues that the internet should not be equated with neural networks. Google is not an artificial brain. Stephan Besser follows up on this by discussing James Cameron’s movie Avatar (2009), which brings us to the limits of the liberal humanist tradition of thinking about memory, just as Lysen argues. Besser identifies the emergence of a ‘global brain’ whereby all our minds are connected into one huge database that contains all information in the world, something which Claire Colebrook speculates on in Chapter 36. Besser’s argument can be juxtaposed with a metaphor which we find in Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain, that of the ‘global workspace’, a concept first originating in the work of Bernard Baars’ 1989 book A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. ‘Global workspace’ means that we have ‘an internal system, detached from the outside world, that allows us to freely entertain our private mental images and to spread them across the mind’s vast array of specialized processors [. . .] consciousness is Introduction to Part I 25 just brain-wide information sharing’.29 Besser’s final criticism is of the erroneous conflation of the natural world with modern technology; the urge to talk about the web in biological terms, which glosses over important distinctions between hyperlinks and synapses, neural pathways and fibre optic cables. Carr and Besser argue convincingly that the brain, cognition and memory do not metaphorically equate to the computer because there is a huge divide between the mind of carbon man and the mechanics of algorithmic patterning of silicon devices. Besser leaves us to ponder some pressing critical questions about individual human agency and control. Can the individual, with their limited brain power, understand the nature of this emergence of a global brain? Will individuals be replaced by smart AI operating systems, such as in the films 2001: A Space Odyssey (Dir. Stanley Kubrick 1968), Her (Dir. Michel Gondry 2014) and Ex Machina (Dir. Alex Garland 2015)? If computation does not suffice as a metaphor, should we return, then, to the existing humanist archive of images? Draaisma sees in Freud’s Wunderblock, or magic slate, the best metaphor:

Like the magic slate, psychology seems to have two memories. The celluloid sheet on the surface seems to have two memories. The celluloid sheet on the surface receives stimuli and can easily be wiped clean. It is always available for new notes. Everything that is written on that celluloid sheet finds its way into a deeper layer of wax, but this layer is very difficult to access. Permanent traces can only be consulted by removing the outer layer. [. . .] The text is preserved within, but it is a text which is no longer read, which is also a form of oblivion. Unless we consult those deeper registers more frequently, texts will continue to appear on the ever receptive celluloid surface, repeating what has long been present.30

To end this introduction, I am inviting another contender into the ring, the palimpsest, a piece of parchment or animal skin used as writing surface. As writing materials were expensive, the surface was scrubbed clean, after which it was ready to be written on again. In the twentieth century scanners with ultraviolet light and, from 1990, multispectral imaging were able to probe into the layers of text embedded within the skin, and unearth texts we thought were lost for good. The palimpsest is a strong metaphor for memory because it focuses on writing and text, which is important because it connects all civilizations using written traces, up to our present moment of binary coding in computer science. Language is the finest tool for understanding and probing consciousness that we have. Human memory is increasingly competing with non-biological forms of memory, but new techniques such as multispectral imaging should be seen as the tools that aid consciousness and memory, and that recover what we thought was lost – like Proust’s madeleine. The interplay between the palimpsest and the technologies that are integral to the recovery process are able to generate the metaphor for the memory of mankind that is becoming partly posthuman. The very idea that we are once again scrambling for new metaphors suggests that memory and the human mind are evolving rapidly. 1 Metaphors of Memory: From the Classical World to Modernity Corin Depper

How can memory be understood if not through metaphor? It seems that every attempt at definition has necessitated this shift towards the figurative; each age calling forth a new language for tracing the contours of remembering, with these new-minted metaphors sometimes struggling to keep up with humanity’s desire to plumb the depths of its own past. The aim of this chapter is to examine the evolution of this language, to explore how metaphors have shaped our understanding of the mind. From the earliest characterizations of memory as a wax tablet or a storehouse to the modern mind-as-computer, metaphors have been used to offer models designed to illuminate a process so central to our understanding of what it is to be human that one might be tempted to call our species homo recordans. Attempts to understand this history, are, however, a more recent development. Building on her ground breaking studies of Neoplatonism in the Renaissance, Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory (1966) remains a seminal text for studies of memory, seeing the shift in its conceptualization as central to the wider transformation of an essentially magical worldview into what can now be recognized as the beginnings of modern science. More recently, Douwe Draaisma’s book, Metaphors of Memory (2000), has extended Yates’s analysis. From the earliest wax tablets of Plato, through medieval storehouses and Renaissance palaces, past cameras and microscopes, to the computers of our own age, Draaisma shows how powerful metaphors have been in conceptualizing the workings of memory, but he also explores how they have been deployed as prosthetics to enhance the natural capacity of the mind, the metaphor no longer simply describing the mind’s working, but instead seeking to enhance its natural capabilities. Despite their variety, however, these metaphors have taken two main paths: one seeking to fix the shifting dance of thought in a stable substrate, hard and amber- ish; the other, perhaps more ambitiously, aiming to find a structure for consciousness itself, setting free rather than constraining the imagination. In the former category one finds the oldest of these metaphors, Plato’s wax tablet, discussed in the Theaetetus. Memory is viewed as a recording device: thought makes an impression on the memory like a stylus on a tablet, which can then be recalled at a later date. Although, as Draaisma notes, Plato distinguishes between those with a good memory whose wax is plentiful, smooth and easily receptive, and those

27 28 Corin Depper whose wax is less yielding, the memory is in essence passive and fixed; it is wholly separate from the thought itself, and is unaffected by its passage into time.31 One finds a modern companion to this view in the French critic André Bazin’s 1945 account of photography, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, where the photograph transcends mere representation to become, in his words, ‘the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it’:32 the photograph is a latter-day wax tablet on which the world can make its impression. In both cases an imprint of reality is pulled from the surrounding flow of time, each memory remaining discrete and intact: the mind’s arm then reaches into the void and plucks the desired sensation without disturbing those around it. One extension of the wax tablet was, as Mary Carruthers has noted in The Book of Memory, the medieval metaphor of the storehouse in which the objects of the mind were arrayed.33 She cites Geoffrey of Vinsauf, who refers to his memory as a ‘cella’, and another, more celebrated Geoffrey, Chaucer, whose Monk claims to his Canterbury-bound fellow travellers that he has a hundred tragedies stored in the ‘celle’ of his mind, ready to be recalled at a moment’s notice. Here, one can see the mind becoming defined through an ordering of the objects of memory: it is not just the objects themselves that need conceptualizing; the structure that contains them now becomes part of the metaphor. The medieval fascination with this view was of course an effect of an education that was, by necessity, based on rote learning, permitting scholars to recall verbatim lengthy texts. In undertaking such an enterprise the memory required rigorous training, and it is in this process that one can see not simply memory viewed metaphorically, but metaphors being put to use to enhance the natural capabilities of the mind. Donald Beecher has noted that this alternative understanding of memory can be traced back to Aristotle, who offered a very different view from Plato in his On Memory and Reminiscence:

Contributing to this contrasting view was Aristotle’s realization that memory was fundamentally kinetic, that thought was associative, and that preliminary notions were critical to the recovery of buried chains of ideas according to their proximities and affiliations. He continued to believe that species, images, or phantasms were the fundamental units of thought and memory, but he made them active, exploratory prompts participating in associative networks, by which the mind becomes dynamic and creative. Memory was no longer about storage alone, but reconstructive intellection, no longer a container but a processor vital to the very operations of cognition.34

This more dynamic view is to be found most famously in those celebrated mnemonic structures known as ‘memory palaces’: the ancient Greek poet Simonides, in a legend brought to wider attention by Cicero in his De oratore (written in 55BCE) first noted the potential use of architecture as a means of visualizing and recalling information. Initially, this was to aid in the rather gruesome job of identifying the bodies of the guests at a feast, crushed to an unrecognizable pulp after the banqueting hall’s roof collapsed. Fortuitously, there was one survivor of this catastrophe, the aforementioned Simonides, who had been engaged by the Metaphors of Memory 29 host to entertain the guests with his verses. To the relief of the bereaved he was able to remember the relative positions of the victims at the banqueting table, and – in those distant pre-forensic days – identify the corpses. What no one knew, however, was that the collapse was no accident, but the action of the twin gods Castor and Pollux, who had reacted vengefully to the host’s failure to pay the poet fully for his panegyric. Furthermore, they had spared Simonides’s life by calling him away from the feast moments before the collapse with a message that a pair of twins wished to speak with him. This detail may seem curious, but their presence in the story suggests that the widespread belief that the feats possible with a well-trained memory were the result of supernatural powers has a history as long as the techniques themselves. Simonides – evidently a poet of practical bent – concluded that his memory of the architectural space had allowed him to recollect the positions of the guests, and that by extension one could train one’s memory to follow these spatial cues, thus recording and recalling information at will: a handy skill for the jobbing poet with a lengthy ode to commit to memory. It is with this grisly anecdote that Frances Yates begins her book The Art of Memory, situating the revival of these systems in the Renaissance alongside the rediscovery of the more outré arcana associated with Renaissance Neoplatonism and Occult Philosophy. She continues her discussion with an analysis of Quintilian, who developed this system into a formal strategy for memorizing lengthy speeches:

In order to form a series of places in memory, he says, a building is to be remembered, as spacious and varied a one as possible, the forecourt, the living room, bedrooms, and parlours, not omitting statues and other ornaments with which the rooms are decorated. The images by which the speech is to be remembered – as an example of these Quintilian says one may use an anchor or a weapon – are then placed in imagination on the places which have been memorised in the building. This done, as soon as the memory of the facts requires to be revived, all these places are visited in turn and the various deposits demanded of their custodians. We have to think of the ancient orator as moving in imagination through his memory building whilst he is making his speech, drawing from the memorised places the images he has placed on them.35

Metaphor operates in a dual role here: our storehouse has expanded to become a palace. Not a single room, but a series of interconnected stanzas through which one can pass; the metaphor no longer simply describes the workings of the mind, but is now augmenting it. The strength of each loci as a site to tie image to idea depends on the visual power of each metaphor: the stronger the connection, the firmer it will be anchored in the mind. One can see that stronger metaphors generate more energy, fixing the idea securely in the virtual space of the palace, allowing the rememberer easy recollection of each idea as he passes through the interconnected spaces of his mind. Once we recognize this ability, it is possible to see the computational capacity that such systems possess: metaphors allow our memories to be put to work. 30 Corin Depper

The complexity and fluidity of the memory palace as a system is compounded in the work of the Italian polymath Giulio Camillo, who led a life of scholarship and travel which took him to some of the most powerful courts of Europe. Shortly before his death in Milan in 1544, and with his life’s work still unwritten, Camillo settled down to dictate a sketch of his ideas to a younger patron and temporary amanuensis in order to preserve one of the strangest conceptual structures in an era not short of bafflingly complex cosmological models and systems of classification. The resultant book, L’Idea del Theatro, published in 1550, gives some sense of the range and scope of Camillo’s idea: the Theatre of Memory was conceived of as an attempt to grasp nothing less than the entirety of human and divine knowledge within a conceptual and architectural framework. It is for this reason that Yates places Camillo, whose work had long fallen into obscurity, at the conceptual heart of The Art of Memory. For Yates, the rediscovery of classical systems of artificial memory, often based on complex mnemonic schemes involving architectural metaphors, was a crucial part of the wider rediscovery of supposedly ancient, divine wisdom during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, offering a path to connect all forms of human and divine knowledge in an overarching system uniting Platonic philosophy with Christian mysticism and Cabalistic practice; effectively seeking theological justification in the resuscitation of ‘pagan’ thought. Camillo’s Theatre took the horseshoe-shaped Renaissance playhouse as its model. The question of its precise function, and, indeed, whether it was ever fully implemented, has been the subject of some debate. The historical record suggests that whilst under the patronage of the French King Francis I, Camillo was engaged in building a version of the theatre at the King’s behest. Yates provides evidence that an actual edifice was produced, citing letters to the humanist scholar Erasmus describing an early prototype seen in Venice, and, working alongside her sister, has produced a schematic diagram based on his work.36 In this diagram, the seven pillars of Solomon’s Temple support the theatre, which is then subdivided into six tiered galleries, each resting on one of the seven planets. These galleries are labelled The Banquet, The Cave, The Gorgon Sisters, Pasiphae and the Bull, The Sandals of Mercury, and Prometheus. As she explains, ‘Camillo’s Theatre represents the universe expanding from First Causes through the stages of creation’.37 Phillip Blom has gone considerably further, providing a virtual walk-through of the version of the Theatre Camillo was employed to construct in France, and giving some flavour of what it must have been like to experience:

The first thing Francis I would have realized was that it was he who was standing on stage and looking into the auditorium, instead of taking his customary place in the audience. [. . .] The galleries, however, which surrounded the stage in a semi-circle, were not peopled by expensively clad courtiers or ladies in low-cut dresses out for an evening’s dinner and entertainment, but by symbols, trapdoors and inscriptions, all of which formed a metaphorical order of the world.38 Metaphors of Memory 31

Blom’s vision is undeniably alluring and paints a vivid image of what the King may have seen on first entering Camillo’s edifice. Unsurprisingly, given its wooden construction – and the vagaries of royal caprice – physical evidence of the Theatre has not survived, and knowledge is based on sometimes-contradictory secondary testimonies. However, in her rather lovely reverie on Camilloesque themes, The Search for the Source of the Whirlpool of Artifice: The Cosmology of Giulio Camillo (2006), Kate Robinson places less emphasis on the existence or otherwise of actual physical structures, and, taking the text of L’Idea del Theatro as a guide, sees it as a far more fluid system designed to conceptualize the imagination:

In my first readings of L’Idea del Theatro, I was drawn to the Theatre because I felt as though Camillo was telling a story, not in the way that a narrative painting might tell a story, but in the sense that there were connections between each of the images, across the space of the Theatre, that he intended the reader/viewer to pluck images from across the entire network of the Theatre and use them to reconstruct, reassemble, a meaningful pattern. Camillo was using a multi-dimensional visual language.39

Robinson’s conception of the Theatre is as an open structure into which any form of information can be fed and retrieved; mapping the mind of the high- Renaissance and presenting a way of experiencing the world that shapes and is shaped by a sense that all knowledge can be transformed and transmuted by and through this mnemonic form. The mnemonic theatre is no longer used merely to record something pre-existing, but to shape and create new forms of knowledge. As she explains:

The ‘idea of the Theatre’ was fundamentally a structure of conceptual relationships rather than a building of wood or stone, and it is on that level that Camillo’s work bears most fruit. The theatre is to be understood in terms of time and space – a spatial representation of chronology.40

Therefore, regardless of whether the theatre was constructed, what matters is that in Camillo’s hands, a system of artificial memory became a way of conceiving of the universe in toto; an example of the Renaissance microcosm with the spectator at its heart. Unsurprisingly, however, his work soon fell into obscurity, too unwieldy to be implemented without great cost, and too esoteric to find wide acceptance. In breadth, if not in structure, Giambattista Vico’s The New Science (1725) perhaps comes closest to Camillo’s vision – and would later prove to be a key influence on James Joyce during the writing of Finnegans Wake – but there is no evidence to suggest that the Neapolitan was aware of the work of his Milanese forebear. Indeed, it is only in the twentieth century that one discovers visions and structures that seem, however distantly, to take up the challenge of Camillo. For much of her academic career, Frances Yates was associated with the University of London’s Warburg Institute. Its founder, Aby Warburg, was the eld- est son of a wealthy Hamburg banking family, who, having devolved his familial 32 Corin Depper duties to a younger sibling, devoted his life to tracing the influence of the art of Antiquity on that of the Renaissance. He sought to understand its Nachleben, or ‘afterlife’, as its energies were transferred to the great works of fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe: a process which, to quote the title of a recent exhibition on Warburg at the Courtauld Gallery, sought to discover an ‘antiquity unleashed’. Key to Warburg’s method was the concept of Pathosformel (‘Pathos formula’) to describe how one might trace ‘antique formulas in the representation of human passions in Renaissance art’.41 This focus allowed his work to transcend a straightforward formalism, and to demonstrate by way of visual analogy how historical energies could be understood as operating through essentially metaphoric processes. Giorgio Agamben has referred to the activity in which Warburg was engaged, shifting the focus of Art History away from aesthetic judgement and connoisseurship towards iconography, as the ‘Nameless Science’, and connects his ultimate project with Giulio Camillo’s Theatre,42 in recognition of its scope and breadth, but also in its potential to be misunderstood or ignored by future generations. As he notes, despite the fame of those who followed in has wake (Erwin Panoksky being perhaps the most celebrated) Warburg’s work remains little read, with key texts still unpublished.43 Warburg’s final project before his death in 1929 was an unprecedented attempt to trace these streams of influence across history through a direct visual record. Incomplete at the time of his death, his ‘Mnemosyne Atlas’ is still one of the most remarkable projects of twentieth century historiography. Named after the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses, the Atlas presents a multi-layered visualization of the evolution of Western art. In his recent book, Metaphor, Memory, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, Christopher D. Johnson sketches the shape of the project:

Before us lies a black and white photograph of twenty-four photographic reproductions. Varying in size, the images are arranged in five uneven rows, provisionally mounted on mats, and fastened more provisionally still to a black background. Although they lack captions, and their styles vary considerably, the images can be easily distinguished as belonging to the European Renaissance. Many will also discern in this second-order tableau of paintings, drawings, sculptures, artefacts, manuscript and book pages, a more or less common theme: the death of Laocoön. Less easily deciphered, however, is the rhyme or reason for this photograph of photographic reproductions. Opaque is why some images are privileged by their relative largeness or central position, and why others appear devalued by their smallness or marginal position.44

Johnson’s description of one panel of the 63 that make up the extant Atlas hints at the challenges Warburg’s work offers. Here is a vision of art history that is arranged syncretically, inviting the viewer to generate their own pathways through and across the work. Johnson has likened the Atlas to that other grand, unfinished, historical endeavour of the same period, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project,45 which sought to excavate the history of nineteenth-century Metaphors of Memory 33

Paris through a vast assemblage of fragmentary sources focused on the passages and arcades that criss-crossed the arteries of the city’s grand boulevards. Taking the flâneur, strolling man of leisure, as its emblematic figure, Benjamin’s account of modernity attempted to replicate his ever-flickering gaze. In both cases, the method transcends simple dialectics to create new energies out of previously unimagined juxtapositions. Johnson quotes Benjamin’s 1940 essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’: ‘The true picture of the past flits by. Only as an image, which flashes up in an instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again, can the past be held fast’.46 In much the same way as the early memory palaces could train the mind to understand the world metaphorically, so these modern structures generate new ideas out of juxtapositions and confluences: metaphor might very well be the best means we have to grasp at modernity’s fleeting energies. If metaphors were used initially to fix information in the mind, here an altogether more complex sense begins to emerge. Metaphors are no longer confined to storing old ideas, but can actively generate new forms of knowledge. In both Warburg and Benjamin, images are seen as complexes, working, in a manner that recalls Ezra Pound’s repeated image of the method he applied to his Cantos, ‘ply over ply’. These ideas have continued to exert a fascination for contemporary writers seeking to find new models for thought in the twenty-first century. The last two years have seen the publication of Hari Kunzru’s Memory Palace (written to accompany an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London), which imagines a post-apocalyptic society, reduced to barbarism following the loss of its cultural memory, where the old mnemonic systems are resurrected as an act of resistance, and Simon Critchley’s Memory Theatre, a fictional memoir which adopts Camillo as one of its controlling influences. However, the Nachleben of a very different art provided the focus for an early work by two filmmakers whose subsequent careers would be dominated by the representation of memory. Statues Also Die (1953), co-directed by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, explored the modish popularity amongst well-heeled Parisians for the art of sub-Saharan Africa. In the wake of Cubism’s appropriation of African imagery, this trend led to a thriving trade in African statuary. However, the filmmakers argued that these works, stripped of their real function as religious or ceremonial objects when placed in Western homes and galleries, were effectively killed by this act of deracination: a process which, in its blithe cultural reappro- priation, echoed the excesses of European colonialism. Where Warburg was able to trace an historical lineage that effectively continued the life of Antique art in the Renaissance, this art would never recover its Warburgian Pathosformel. Resnais, who died in March 2014, would go on to trace the contingencies of historical memory through a 60-year career that encompassed both fiction and documentary work. In Night and Fog (1955) he would be one of the first filmmakers to incorporate footage shot in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of Auschwitz, exploring a moment in European history that could both never be forgotten, but could also never be represented. However, it is in a film from the following year, All the World’s Memories, about the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, that one sees Resnais’ most elaborate mental metaphor. Beginning in 34 Corin Depper a dimly-lit, disarrayed storeroom, books and paintings piled precariously, a voiceover comments that man has always needed aide-mémoires to combat the shortness of his memory. Concerned at the prospect of being overwhelmed by this mass of words, it remarks that fortresses have been built to contain them: the library is filmed as if it were a military installation, the camera gliding through its spaces until it discovers the serried ranks of readers poring over the imprisoned volumes. This short sequence embodies the metaphoric shift from medieval to the modern: no longer a haphazard collection of thoughts, but a machine for making knowledge; we are presented, quite literally, with a mental architecture. In Last Year at Marienbad (1961), by contrast, Resnais gave cinema one of the most eccentric memory palaces yet conceived: a baroque hotel of seemingly infinite corridors, each leading to yet another suite of ornately furnished rooms. Working from a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet, this was a palace of forgetfulness as much a remembering: its relentless tracking shots tracing the threads of an impossible affair that may or may not have taken place in a German spa town the previous year. Marker is still best known for a film he completed a year after Resnais’s Marienbad, and which can be considered close cousin to the work: La Jetée (1962). Constructed almost entirely from still images, the film tells the story of a man scarred by the memory of a death witnessed in childhood. However, years later, following an apocalyptic nuclear war, it is this same memory that allows him to travel back in time, only to discover, in an impossible loop of time, the origin of his trauma. The frozen images of Marker’s hero and his lover as they wander through an idyllic pre-war Paris seem to crystallize the emotions, in a cinematic take on Pathosformel which draws its audience back into its own loops of time. Both La Jetée and Statues Also Die could be seen in London during the spring of 2014 as part of A Grin Without a Cat, the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition dedicated to Marker’s work (he died in July 2012, a day after his 91st birthday), and both are readily accessible online, minute fragments in YouTube’s ever-expanding archive of images. Marker, however, did not have a conventional cinematic career in the manner of Resnais, and the exhibition provided ample evidence of the range and scope of his activities, up to and including his experiments as a nona- genarian resident of Second Life. Unlike his near-contemporary Jean-Luc Godard (whose sequence of video-essays Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988–1998), Philippe-Alain Michaud has seen as offering a model of historical thinking that echoes Warburg’s Atlas),47 who has viewed cinema’s fate as intrinsically bound up with a single set of technologies, Marker has tended to view cinema as an idea that can become embodied in a variety of forms. In 1997 he released a work in the then-voguish format of the CD-ROM titled Immemory which offered its users an interactive, albeit oblique, portrait of the artist and his presiding obsessions. Utilizing what may now seems like a remarkably crude visual interface, based on the HyperCard program included with early Apple Macintosh computers, Immemory requires users to navigate through and between a series of images and texts, scanning the pixelated surface for hints as Metaphors of Memory 35 to where to click next. There is no set route through Immemory, no real objective, and the experience can be bewildering and unsatisfactory for those hoping for an immediate data-fix. However, given time and patience, the work begins to work its strange, beguiling power: images bleed into other images, the crude pixilation of 16-bit colour permitting a levelling of visual history that echoes a point made by Johnson in his analysis of Warburg’s work, where the act of re-photographing images similarly erases conventional differences and permits hitherto unknown correspondences to emerge. Immemory may then be seen as an inheritor of the metaphoric tradition passed on from the Mnemosyne Atlas; indeed Isabelle McNeill has traced its origins all the way back to Cicero’s linking of place and memory in his remarks on Simonides.48 However, we may also ask where it leads in our search for new metaphors. It is an irony, of course, that a work on the vagaries of memory should itself fall prey to that most technocentric form of forgetfulness: planned obsolescence. Until recently, it was orphaned from the present for the prosaic reason that very few computers had sufficiently antiquated operating systems in order for it to run. Indeed, a visit to the Whitechapel’s exhibition was also a visit to a mausoleum of redundant technology: in one installation a bevy of ageing Apple Macintoshes lent backwards with lipless grins, images aflicker; Marker was much possessed by death it seems. Camillo, Warburg, Marker: in each instance metaphor is used to create a microcosm in which new worlds may be created. Yet their creations, despite their range and variety, were still circumscribed by the limitations of available technology: the space of a theatre, the expanse of a photographic display, the capacity of a CD-ROM. Memory in the twenty-first century is no longer bounded by these nut- shells, but in seeking to accommodate the infinite space our technology affords, it seems that we need new metaphors if we are to transmute the base metal of data into gilded knowledge. Should we see the internet as a prosthetic to enhance our memory or as its replacement? This is a question to be answered elsewhere, but one thing is for certain, the language we use to describe the actions of our minds will to continue to evolve around us as we seek new images, new models, and new metaphors.

Notes

1. Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neuronal Man, trans. Laurence Garey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 145. Originally published as L’Homme Neuronal in 1985. 2. Stanlislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain (New York: Viking, 2014), 13. 3. John R. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness (London: Granta, 1997), xiv. 4. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (London: Penguin, 2007), Loc. 513. 5. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 116. Originally published in 1945 by Chapman and Hall. 6. Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014), Loc. 187. 7. Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, trans. Paul Vincent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 24–27. First published in Dutch as De metaforenmachine by De historische uitgeverij in 1995. 36 Corin Depper

8. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 29. First published in 1990. 9. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 37. 10. Lina Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 19. 11. Evelyn B. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7. 12. See Peter Walker, ‘Touch Exams and Learning by Rote Are the Keys to Success, Says Michael Gove’, The Guardian, 14 November 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/nov/14/michael-gove-backs-learning-by-rote (Accessed 14 September 2013). 13. See The Mentalist, Season 1, Episode 6, in which protagonist Patrick Jane shows how to count cards by using memory palaces https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uupd8X9DZE (Accessed 12 November 2013). 14. See Sherlock Holmes, Season 3, Episode 3, in which Holmes enters his mind palace to solve crimes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuSOjX7vavc (Accessed 8 November 2013). 15. Simon Chu and John Downes, ‘Proust Nose Best: Odors Are Better Cues of Autobiographical Memories’, Memory and Cognition, 20(4) (2002), 511–518. 16 Kirsten Sheppard-Barr and Gordon Sheppard, ‘Madeleines and Neuromodernism: Reassessing Mechanisms of Autobiographical Memory in Proust’, A/B: Autobiography Studies, special issue on Autobiography and Neuroscience 13(1) (1998), 39–60. 17. Russell Epstein, ‘Consciousness, Art and the Brain: Lessons from Marcel Proust’, Consciousness and Cognition 13 (2004), 237. http://www.psych.upenn.edu/epsteinlab/ pdfs/Epstein_2004_Consciousness,_art,_and_the_brain_Lessons_from_Ma.pdf (Accessed 13 October 2014). 18. Yadin Dudai, Memory from A to Z: Keywords, Concepts, and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 178. 19. Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind (London: Random House, 2010), Loc. 583. 20. Suzanne Corkin, Permanent Present Tense: The Man With No Memory, and What He Taught the World (London: Allen Lane, 2013), xvii. 21. Suzanne Nalbantian, Memory in Literature (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 60. 22. Jason Tougaw, ‘Touching Brains’, Modern Fiction Studies 62(2) (2015), 336–358 (forthcoming). 23. See Yadin Dudai, ‘The Engram Revisited: On the Elusive Permanence of Memory’, in The Memory Process, ed. Suzanne Nalbantian, Paul Matthews and James L. McClelland (Cambridge: MIT, 2010), 38. 24. William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890). See the chapter on memory: http:// psychcentral.com/classics/James/Principles/prin16.htm (Accessed 16 December 2014). 25. Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (London: Vintage, 1998), 17. Originally published by Random House in 1997. 26. See for instance Sarah Kulkofsky, Qi Wang, Martin A. Conway, Yubo Hou, Cagla Aydin, Katrin Mueller-Johnson and Helen Williams, ‘Cultural Variation in the Correlates of Flashbulb Memories: An Investigation in Five Countries’, in Memory 19(3) (2011), 233–240. 27. Maria Konnikova, ‘You Have No Idea What Happened’, The New Yorker, 4 February 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/idea-happened-memory- recollection (Accessed 6 February 2015). 28. Corkin, Permanent Present Tense, xvii–xviii. 29. Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain, 163–165. 30. Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, 223. 31. Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, 25. 32. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Volume I (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1967), 14. Metaphors of Memory 37

33. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 41. 34. Donald Beecher, ‘Recollection, Cognition, and Culture: An Overview of Renaissance Memory’, in Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture, ed. Donald Beecher and Grant Williams (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009), 370. 35. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Pimlico, 1992), 18. 36. Yates, The Art of Memory, 141; 441. 37. Yates, The Art of Memory, 145. 38. Philip Blom, To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting (London: Penguin, 2003), 178. 39. Kate Robinson, A Search for the Source of the Whirlpool of Artifice: The Cosmology of Giulio Camillo (Edinburg: Dunedin Academic Press, 2006), 13. 40. Robinson, Whirlpool of Artifice, 25. 41. Marcus Andrew Hurttig, Antiquity Unleashed: Aby Warburg, Dürer and Mantegna (London: Courtauld Gallery, 2013), 8. 42. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 96. 43. Agamben, Potentialities, 89. 44. Christopher D. Johnson, Metaphor, Memory, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca, NY: Signale/Cornell University Press, 2012), ix. 45. Johnson, Metaphor, 16. 46. Johnson, Metaphor, 17. 47. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Zone, 2004), 289. 48. Isabelle McNeill, ‘Transitional Spaces: Media, Memory, and the City in Contemporary French Film’, in Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (London: Wallflower, 2008), 206. 2 Proust, the Madeleine and Memory Barry C. Smith

When Proust’s narrator, Marcel, eats the crumbs of a madeleine dipped in lime blossom tea it triggers a process of remembering that brings his past to life. At first the narrator describes himself as being struck in a way that captures his attention. He is not sure what this sudden awareness means, but he con- jectures that it was his tasting the madeleine soaked in tea that brought about this startling feeling. He tastes it again. The same feeling occurs. But when he tries a third time the feeling is diminished. After much effortful concentration, Marcel finally comes to realize why the tasting experience is so potent: it is anchored by a long-buried memory that is gradually brought to the surface of consciousness. At this point the narrator recalls his aunt Léonie bedroom, where on Sundays she would soak pieces of madeleine in her lime blossom tea. He remembers the old grey house in Combray, the gardens, the streets and the square of the small town. From this beginning comes the vast outpourings of Marcel’s memories of his past life. Most people know it was a madeleine that triggered this famous remembrance of things past. But how did it do so? By what mental mechanism did the madeleine bring these long forgotten incidents to mind? Marcel had looked at scalloped-shaped madeleines in pastry shops many times before without them eliciting such memories. It was only when tasting the tea-soaked madeleine that it conjured up an episode from so long ago. What was it about tasting the madeleine that explains the power of recall? These days when we speak of the Proust Phenomenon, we are talking about cases where smelling a particular scent seems to take us right back to our grandmother’s kitchen, or a seaside holiday, or some other episode or scene. Such immediate and involuntary recall through an odour-invoked memory raises interesting philosophical and scientific questions. Do odour memories really take us back to how things were, or do they just produce a conviction in us that this is how things were? After all, we can’t go back and check whether our memories accurately match the remembered scene. Perhaps odour memories simply convey an intensely vivid sense of the past as if it was being re-experienced, rather in the way déjà vu makes us feel we have lived through this experience before. If that’s

38 Proust, the Madeleine and Memory 39 not the case, how can odour memories put us immediately in touch with our pasts? Smell has a special capacity to trigger memories – especially emotionally charged memories – because of the direct connections olfaction has with parts of the limbic system involved in generating emotion and memory. Olfaction is unique in being the only sensory system that projects directly to the amygdala without being gated by the thalamus and, it seems that odour memories are long-lasting and less susceptible to interference. Experimental attempts have been made to confirm the validity of the Proust Phenomenon (Chu and Downes 2000; Herz and Schooler 2002) by asking participants to think of a memory involving camping or pop- corn, say, and then testing to see whether a visual, auditory or odour cue makes the memory more vivid. We also know that presenting a congruent odour cue when asking participants to say whether they have seen a visual stimulus before improves performance (Gottfried and Dolan 2003). In other words, presenting visual stimuli with odour cues improves subsequent recognition of those objects. However, if odour memories have this special power to conjure up the past, where are they in Proust’s madeleine episode? The familiar cases of scents that ‘take us right back’ to a past moment stand in marked contrast to the original episode Proust’s narrator describes. First, it is by tasting the tea-soaked madeleine that Marcel comes to retrieve bits of his past. Smell seems to go missing in Proust’s story. Second, Proust’s narrator struggles (over many paragraphs) to identify the heightened awareness, which is at first only identified as an ‘exquisite pleasure’ with ‘no suggestion of its origin’.1 It is only after much effort that the peculiarly charged experience is identified as a memory, bringing to mind the scenes in Combray. Why then does the famous madeleine episode give its name to the Proust Phenomenon, where odours immediately trigger episodic memories? The answer draws both on the careful phenomenological description Proust’s narrator provides and on what we now know from sensory neuroscience. To begin with, what we call tasting involves not just taste, but interactions of taste, touch and smell, and it is smell that makes the largest contribution to experiences we have when tasting. And yet, smell goes missing in our experience, or in our awareness of our experience. So although smell makes an essential contribution to the experiences we have when we put food or drink in our mouths, we are usually unaware of that contribution. For when it combined with taste to produce flavour experience, smell loses its separate identity and the resulting fusion is thought of as a taste. It’s not so surprising that smell goes missing in Proust’s madeleine episode. Most people fail to recognize the centrality of smell in their experience of tasting. That’s because they think of smell as what goes on when they sniff or inhale odours. But humans have two senses of smell and it is the second that contributes most to ‘tasting’ foods and drinks. The two senses of smell are identified by the two pathways by which odours reach the receptors of the olfactory epithelium at the top of the nose and the different functions each pathway serves. The orthonasal route is where odours come in through the nose as we inhale; the retronasal route is where odours reach the nose from the mouth via the nasopharynx. Odours processed 40 Barry C. Smith orthonasally are represented as coming from the environment, and this enables us to detect smoke, predators and potential mates. Odours processed retronasally allow us to assess the quality of what we have just eaten and decide whether we want to continue eating or expel it; though we don’t recognize these experiences as involving smell and usually think of them as tastes. That’s because retronasally produced olfactory responses get mislocated in experience by being referred to the oral cavity. As a result, what we think of an after-taste is in fact an after-smell. We regularly confuse taste and smell, as when we call something sweet smelling, even though sweet is a taste. (For more on these confusions, see Spence, Auvray and Smith 2014.)2 So it is really smell and not merely taste that conjures up the past so readily for Proust’s narrator. But it does so only after the narrator concentrates all his attention on the experiences he undergoes when first tasting the tea-soaked madeleine. It is here that the narrator’s faithful articulation of his phenomenology helps us. There is the sudden awareness when first encountering the flavour of the tea- soaked madeleine of something out of the ordinary, not about the here and now. Marcel realizes that it was tasting the madeleine soaked in tea that brought about this startling feeling. He tastes it again and experiences the same feeling. But when he tries for a third time the feeling drops off a little. This is due, of course, to sensory adaptation, where the intensity of the response drops under constant and unchanging stimulation; something common in our experience of smell. That is why we no longer smell our own homes unless we return to them after a long absence. The reason Marcel’s encounter with the madeleine brings the past to life is that it involves smell playing a key but hidden role in re-creating an episode of experience. It is smell’s link to brain areas involved in emotion and memory that gives aromas the power to invoke emotionally charged memories from our pasts. In this respect, Proust’s original madeleine episode shares an explanation with the Proust Phenomenon we talk about today when we say that smelling a particular scent ‘takes us right back’ to an earlier time. A difference may seem to be that in the latter cases, where one usually feels transported to an earlier time, there is an immediate recognition that one is encountering something from one’s past. However, the similarity is the involuntary nature of the recall triggered by the aroma of the madeleine and the lime blossom tea. Its tug on the conscious mind happens immediately, though it takes Marcel some moments to realize what has produced that effect on him and why this experience of tasting a tea-soaked madeleine should be so numinous. The involuntary effect of an odour memory on the mind in both cases is clear, but Proust’s description of the narrator’s stages of awareness, as he re-tastes the madeleine and gradually uncovers the memory, provides a wonderful confirmation of the elusiveness of odour’s impact on the mind. The crucial feature of the Proust Phenomenon, like that of Proust’s original episode, is how vividly olfactory experiences produce a sense of re-encountering a past moment; a wordless form of contact with a time one didn’t know one had remembered. Understanding what makes such memories possible is invaluable for our understanding of perception and emotion. The extraordinary power of smell Proust, the Madeleine and Memory 41 is that it can retrieve not just a memory of what was previously smelled but visual images of a house, gardens, the trees at Combray. The involuntary recreation of a world of sights and sounds goes far beyond memories of past smells, and this shows that the memory of the scene, like the original experience itself, is multisensory, drawing on the collaborative workings of all of our senses to put us in touch with our surroundings and ourselves. The remarkable thing is that just a faint whiff of an odour that linked us to the emotions of the original scene provides enough of a thread, which, when pulled on, brings out the panoply of sensory accom- paniments that made up the originally experienced scene. Emotionally charged events, full of pleasure or fear, will linger in the memory and the emotion will attach more firmly to the permeating smell of the original event which at the time may have gone unnoticed. It matters not. Smell has this power and will evoke at a later date an intact memory and accompanying feelings. Smell and memory are at the heart of the Proust Phenomenon and at the heart of a young boy’s tasting of the crumbs of a madeleine given to him all those years ago on Sunday mornings by a favourite aunt. It is the novelist Proust’s close attention to the exact details of our psychology that lets him illustrate something about olfaction and memory that we are now just beginning to understand neuroscientifically.

Notes

1. Proust, M. Swann’s Way. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff. In Remembrance of Things Past (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922), 52. Originally published in 1913 as Du côté de chez Swann. 2. ‘Confusing Tastes and Flavours’ Charles Spence, Malika Auvray, Barry C Smith, in Perception and its Modalities, ed. D. Stokes, M. Matthen, S. Briggs, Oxford University Press 2014. 3 Proust Recalled: A Psychological Revisiting of That Madeleine Memory Moment E. Leigh Gibson

Marcel Proust’s reflective autobiographical novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu1 (1913–1927) contains one of the most iconic descriptions of ‘involuntary memory’, or cued recall, in literature. Proust famously relates how vivid memories of his childhood home and surroundings are invoked after sipping a spoonful of tea mixed with soaked crumbs of a ‘petite madeleine’, a sweet buttery French cake, that his mother had provided one cold winter’s day. He recalls that, when visiting his invalid Aunt Léonie in her bedroom on Sunday mornings, she would offer him a madeleine soaked in tea. This memory, seemingly invoked by tasting the same tea-soaked madeleine combination, then brings forth a flood of remembered sights and sounds from his childhood. The received interpretation in the literature, including both general and specialist psychology textbooks,2 seems to be that the ‘odour’ from the tea-madeleine combination cued an immediate and vivid memory from Proust’s childhood days. Indeed, this interpretation spawned a considerable amount of research into odour- cued memory retrieval, where much is made of the superior ability of odours to elicit strong memories, compared with our other senses3 (e.g. Chu and Downes 2000; 2002). These effects can occur over several years: Aggleton and Waskett (1999) tested people’s memories of visiting a Viking museum that used odour cues, on average 6.7 years previously. They showed that specifically experiencing the ‘Viking smells’ improved the detail of their memories. In one of the few experimental studies to use a paradigm with direct relevance to the Proust phenomenon, Chu and Downes (2002) used a ‘double-cueing’ method to test the efficacy of odours in cueing autobiographical recall compared to other sensory modalities: in a neat design, participants were asked to record detail and emotionality of the first autobiographical memory that arose when an odorous object was verbally described. Then a second cue was given: either the original verbal label, or picture of the object, a different odour or the odour of the object. Only the latter correct odour elicited an increase in emotionality of the memory, as well as greater detail. The ability of odours to elicit emotions, whether or not accompanied by strong memories, should not be too surprising because odour cues differ in an important respect from auditory and visual cues: they are likely to indicate relatively close

42 Proust Recalled 43 proximity of the odour source, and thus require a more urgent response from the brain’s evaluative areas, and by and large to four pressing questions: is the odour from friend, foe, food or fire? This may be why, unlike other senses, mammals have evolved neural pathways that connect odour-detecting neurones directly (single-synapse) to limbic (emotional circuitry) brain centres such as the amygdala that are key to threat evaluation (Carmichael, Clugnet and Price 1994).4 As Köster (2005) has pointed out, odours are not palpable ‘things’, and unlike other sensory cues they have no fixed structured presence in time or space, so if they are not in our consciousness as evaluated events, they disappear into the background of constant odour ‘noise’ that our brains must ignore. A recent functional magnetic resonance imaging study showed that odour-evoked autobiographical memories were associated with greater activation of emotional brain circuitry, particularly for earlier memories, than those evoked by words, whereas the latter produced more involvement of brain areas involved in higher cognition, such as executive function (Arshamian et al. 2013). The peculiar facets of odour-evoked autobiographical memories that emerge from research findings have been evocatively summarised by the acronym ‘LOVER’ (Figure 3.1), standing for Limbic-Old-Vivid-Emotional-Rare (Larsson et al. 2014). This last facet, ‘Rare’, is worth further elaboration: Larsson et al. (2014) point out that though it is commonly believed that odour-evoked memories are fairly frequent, they are in fact much rarer than those evoked by verbal and visual material, being recalled less often and less easily. Moreover, Larsson et al. (2014) showed that odour cues are subordinate to visual cues when combined in multimodal cue recall. Thus, closer examination of the experience that Proust relates casts doubt on several assumptions in the received version of the phenomenon; in particular, whether the recall was involuntary and rapid, and whether odour alone was the critical cue.

What ‘immediate memory’?

In fact, the sensations from the tea-madeleine mixture did not evoke a rush of childhood memories. Although Proust did indeed experience a powerful emotional response to this sensory treat (see below), it was not a rush of memories. Rather, the memories took some time to emerge: in the novel, they emerge in textual form over the course of six pages. Proust was confused as to where this emotion had come from, though he knew it was linked to the tea-madeleine taste. He tried to relive the moment with more sips of tea, but gave up on the third attempt:5 ‘It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic’.6 Still no memories, but Proust is keenly aware that the emotional sensation he felt must have some connection to past events. He searches his mind, trying to retrace his thoughts to the tea-madeleine moment: still nothing. After letting his mind wander for a bit, eventually he tries again, thinking intently of that first sip of tea and madeleine: at last, he senses something stirring in his mind, ‘weighing anchor, from a great depth’.7 But then he loses it again. Proust is very clear: ten times he tries to haul 44 E. Leigh Gibson

Figure 3.1 Illustration of the acronym olfactory LOVER covering the core features of an autobiographical memory evoked by olfactory information. Memories triggered by the sense of smell rely on the integrity of the Limbic system and are typically Old, more Vivid, often Emotional, and relatively Rare as compared to autobiographical information evoked by our primary sensory systems Source: Reproduced from (Larsson et al. 2014) with permission from the author.

this memory from the depth of his mind, and is sorely tempted just to drink his tea and think of more trivial matters. Then ‘all of a sudden’ the memory appears to him, and it is of course that childhood moment when his aunt offered him tea and a madeleine. Once the link to that childhood home has been made, a flood of memories of the house, the people and their surroundings emerge, all ‘from my cup of tea’,8 as Proust puts it.

Odour, taste or both?

Proust does not refer specifically to an olfactory sensation, but rather to the ‘taste of the tea and cake’, using the French word goût, which, like the English word ‘taste’, in common usage usually refers to the overall flavour of a food or Proust Recalled 45 drink. The term ‘flavour’ captures the sensory experience that emerges from the combination of taste sensations transduced by the taste buds on our tongue and soft palate, and the odour components of the food or drink detected by the olfactory receptors in our nasal cavities. No doubt Proust was referring to the whole complex interaction of flavours emanating from the delicious combination of a hot tea infusion – no milk, this is France – mixed with crumbs from the sweet and buttery madeleine. Our experience of odour components from food actually in the mouth arises largely from the flow of air into the back of the nasal cavity during swallowing movements, known as retronasal olfaction (see Barry C. Smith’s chapter). This then is different from the orthonasal olfaction that occurs when we sniff odours outside our head, which is the form that is experienced in all those odour-memory experiments discussed above. Moreover, note that the complex tea-madeleine sensation includes, in addition to taste and odour stimuli, thermal and textural stimuli that are critical components of the whole palatable experience, but which are transmitted to the brain via different ‘cranial nerves’ from either taste or smell sensations.9 The ‘melt in the mouth’ sensations from chocolate, and the temperature change on eating ice cream, are key to their palatability (known as ‘dynamic contrast’, i.e. a transformation over time in at least one sensory quality, which in turn may alter experience of another, such as sweetness (Hyde and Witherly 1993); indeed, creaminess itself is largely a textural phenomenon related to fat particle size. Such sensory complexity is fundamental to the appeal of foods, and other sensory experiences (Köster 2009). Complex perceptual interactions are found between tastants (such as salt or sugar) and odorants, and these dominate our subjective experiences of ingest- ing foods and drinks, following profound integration by the brain (Small et al. 2004). Beyond the psychophysics laboratory, we rarely, if ever, experience pure taste stimuli (salt, sweet, sour, bitter, umami (savoury)) in the absence of olfactory stimuli. Indeed, this is a weakness of using pure stimuli in psychophysical research, since (untrained) subjects find the sensations novel and without context. Instead, particular combinations and levels of tastants may frequently be experienced with particular odours, such as, for example, fruit odours together with sweetness or sourness (or probably both). It is perhaps then not too surprising that certain odours can enhance sensations of sweetness (Tieman et al. 2012), or even that sweetness can enhance perception of odours (Green et al. 2012). On the other hand, the finding that pure tastants appear to be perceived as also having an olfactory component probably would surprise many of us (Mojet, Köster and Prinz 2005). Yet, these authors showed that wearing a nose clip substantially reduces the perceived intensity of ‘pure tastants’, such that young adults then rated taste intensity almost as low as older adults with poor olfaction. This suggests that ‘pure’ tastants may have an olfactory component, although it is possible that having blocked nostrils or weak olfaction sets up an expectation of reduced intensity of orosensory experience that results in lower ratings. The most parsimonious explanation for these sorts of findings is that they reflect perceptions that have been modified by a lifetime of experience of associating certain tastants with particular smells. By the time each of us reaches 46 E. Leigh Gibson adulthood, we will have experienced tens of thousands of eating or drinking occasions, giving even the dullest of palates plenty of chance to learn associations between particular tastes and odours when commonly paired together. The basic machinery of this dominance of cultural experience over innate dispositions is described next.

Proust and Pavlov

To understand how fundamental this ‘associative learning’ is, one needs to go back to one of Proust’s contemporaries, from whose work a major part of modern psychology emerged, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. Pavlov observed – and demonstrated experimentally – that dogs salivated not only to the taste, sight and smell of food,10 but also to sounds predicting food’s delivery.11 Pavlov (1927) called this a ‘conditioned reflex’, with the sound known as the ‘conditioned stimulus’ (CS), food as the unconditioned stimulus (US), and salivation, originally the ‘unconditioned response’ (UR) to food, now becomes the ‘conditioned response’ (CR) to the CS. This form of associative learning is now known as Pavlovian or classical conditioning, and is more broadly understood as the brain’s ability to learn that two events are associated. This skill is fundamental to even the humblest of nervous systems: for example, molluscs and insects can easily learn that certain sensory properties of food sources predict whether a food is good or bad to eat (Muller 2006). It is thought that, when the learning is established, the CS elicits some sort of memory, or mental representation of the US, altering behaviour as if the US were present. Actually, this particular form of ‘ingestive’ classical conditioning (cue- consequence learning), evidenced by associating say a taste or odour with the consequences of eating that food, is a special case, because we know that the association can be learned even when the consequence occurs 12 hours later, particularly if it is illness or discomfort. In most other instances, reliable learning needs a much closer contiguity between the CS and US. This latter example is known as conditioned taste (or odour) aversion learning (CTA or COA), which will be familiar to anyone who has become unwell after eating an unusual food.12 It was just such a procedure that was recently used in an elegant series of experiments in rats to show that perceiving an odour as sweet depends on having experienced that odour together with sweetness previously (Gautam and Verhagen 2010). The critical evidence was that those rats that had previous experience of an odour-sugar pairing would, after being made sick following exposure to the odour only, also shun sweet-tasting fluid; rats that did not have this previous experience, but were still made sick after the odour, would happily ingest the sweet fluid. This experiment cannot be done in human beings because, unlike the naïve rat, we do not have control over the human subject’s lifelong experience of odours and tastes. The key stimulus for Proust was this complex orosensory experience comprised of the mixture of warm tea infusion and buttery madeleine cake crumbs. Crucially, Proust admits that he was not in the habit of taking tea, and, whereas he may have had a few madeleines on other occasions, one can reasonably infer that Proust Recalled 47 the combination of the two was for him a rare event indeed, as it was his mother who provided them – perhaps this was even the first time since that famous childhood moment. Pavlov would have had a shrewd idea that the uniqueness of the stimulus and its novelty made it an ideal candidate to elicit strong memories – could Proust have been influenced in his writings by knowledge of his famous contemporary’s work?13

Tea and madeleines as aides-mémoires

It seems a reasonable assumption that some time elapsed between the first sip of tea and madeleine and the memories finally appearing; indeed, Proust may have had time to finish his tea and madeleine. It is therefore intriguing to consider that both these products may conceivably have contributed to the emergence of the memories, not just as sensory links to the past, but through their physiological actions on the brain. A typical 25-gramme madeleine is a sponge cake of which about half the weight is readily absorbable carbohydrate. It is well established that modest doses of such carbohydrate (optimally perhaps 25 grammes, that is, two madeleines), particularly when eaten while fasted, can enhance memory recall, presumably by supplying key structures of the brain with needed glucose (Smith et al. 2011). Although autobiographical memories are not normally assessed in such studies, it may be relevant that Type-1 insulin-dependent diabetics, who struggle to regulate brain glucose availability, tend to have poorer (positive) autobiographical recall than healthy controls (Leung and Bryant 2000). However, research into glucose and memory suggests that the brain region most involved in this facilitating effect of glucose is the hippocampus (Smith et al. 2011), which subserves new and relatively recent memory formation and retrieval, but probably not the autobiographical memories from a distant childhood (Eustache et al. 2004).14 Tea, the infusion of the leaves of Camellia sinensis,15 is a drink shrouded in myth and mystique. There are no doubt endless claims to possible beneficial effects of tea, including the moderately well supported claim for improved cardiovascular health and the weaker claim for protection against cancer (Gibson and Rycroft 2011). Even so, there is some limited support for the idea that tea might improve cognitive function, for example, by increasing alertness (Hindmarch et al. 2000), an effect which does not seem just to depend on caffeine. There is also a long- standing cultural expectation of cognitive benefits, as Charles Dickens (1864) observed in ‘Mrs Lirriper’s Legacy’: ‘My dear, if you could give me a cup of tea to clear my muddle of a head, I should better understand your affairs’.16 Tea is chemically complex, but in recent years there has been significant interest in an amino acid unique to tea called theanine, because of research in both rodents and human beings suggesting that theanine might reduce anxiety and increase feelings of relaxation (Gibson and Rycroft 2011) . Nevertheless, studies of effects of theanine on cognition have produced inconsistent results, and there is no obvious benefit to memory. Still, other promising candidates include the flavonoid components of tea, such as catechins, with some suggestion of positive 48 E. Leigh Gibson effects on memory in rodent studies, and extensive support for such effects of related flavonoid compounds found in fruit (Spencer 2010). However, there is a lack of equivalent research in human beings, at least for tea-derived chemicals, so no firm conclusions can be drawn. Yet, it does appear likely that tea can have relaxing effects, particularly in otherwise challenging situations (Steptoe et al. 2007), so perhaps such an effect would have helped Proust eventually to recall those precious memories, and it is tempting to infer this from his text. Certainly, there is a long-standing belief in Britain that tea can bring emotional and other psychological benefits (Gibson and Rycroft 2011) .

Conclusion: comfort and joy

So what was that emotional response to the tea-madeleine stimulus the instant it reached Proust’s palate? Proust is effusive here: ‘un plaisir délicieux’17 filled him, while the vicissitudes and disasters of life were rendered indifferent and innocuous to him, as if falling in love; he no longer felt ‘mediocre, dependent, mortal’.18 In other words, he experienced an extraordinary moment of comfort and joy. It is pertinent that his mother had provided this treat because she realised he was feeling the cold, but also Proust admits that he had been feeling somewhat depressed after a dull day and the prospect of another to follow. He was in need of comfort, of cheering up, and here was this elixir from his childhood, made for him by his mother, a nursery food/drink to give him succour. Nursery foods make good comfort foods, as do foods (or drinks) that taste sweet and creamy – chocolate being the archetypal example and the most frequently cited comfort food (Gibson 2012).19 It is possible that this reflects an innate liking for that sensory experience that encourages the infant to suckle for breast milk, which is then enhanced by the comforting experience of being at the mother’s breast, as well as by the reinforcement gained from the energy and nutrients the milk provides.20 Thus, Proust’s immediate response to the tea-madeleine combinations was a flood of positive emotions, not childhood memories, as those came later. Neither of those responses was to odour, but to a delicious and perhaps, for Proust, little known multimodal experience that could have provided a sensory link with breast milk as well as a temporal link back to his childhood. Modern neuroscience has shown that an area of cortex in the brain, the insula, which lies adjacent to the primary taste cortex, processes how we feel inside, as well as hurtful emotions and pain (Craig 2009), so appetite, food and emotions can be hard to keep apart. In fact, a well-travelled gut-brain axis does not even need to taste the food to realise its emotional impact: an intragastric infusion of fat prevents negative mood from increasing the desire to eat (Van Oudenhove et al. 2011). Pavlov demonstrated how easily our brains link external and internal events, provided that they are salient for us. One thing is clear: the power of the tea and madeleine moment, as so eloquently expressed by Proust, serves as a warning to those who would try to ignore the subconscious emotional influences on our eating and drinking habits (Köster 2009). Emotions both colour and are coloured by our memories (Nalbantian 2003): they help our times past to guide us through the present. Proust Recalled 49

Notes

1. Originally translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past (Scott Moncrieff 1922), a clever poetic extraction from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30 that seems to capture the essence of the writings perhaps better than the later more prosaic, but arguably more accurate, English title, In Search of Lost Time (Enright 1992). 2. For example, in one general textbook (G.N. Martin, N.R. Carlson, and W. Buskist, Psychology (Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., 2010), 307–308, the Proust phenomenon is used in a boxed section to introduce a useful summary of the evidence that odours can aid memory retrieval as cues to recalling the odour-paired event – a form of state- dependent learning – and more effectively than verbal labels or visual cues, but this is largely a short-term phenomenon. 3. The majority of such studies did not test for effects on actual autobiographical memories, let alone those from childhood. 4. This may explain the observation that reaction times to detect novel odours are considerably shorter than those to familiar odours, whereas the converse is true for visual stimuli (Köster 2005). 5. This is reminiscent of another result Pavlov would have been familiar with, which he called ‘extinction’, i.e. the loss of response (CR) to a CS, when it is repeatedly experienced without the US. 6. Proust, M. (1913). Du côté de chez Swann (Chapter 1, p.52). In M. Proust (Ed.), A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. . . . Translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1922). 7. Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, eds. (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 46. Author’s Translation. 8. Proust, Swann’s Way, 55. 9. Indeed, they can interact in perhaps unexpected ways: for example, a food or drink that is subtly sweet when cool will taste sweeter when warm (L.M. Bartoshuk, K. Rennert, J. Rodin and J.C. Stevens, ‘Effects of Temperature on the Perceived Sweetness of Sucrose’, Physiology & Behavior 28(5) (1982), 905–910. 10. In fact, a colleague of Pavlov’s, Dr Zitovich, had already shown that dogs have to learn to recognize sights and smells of food, so salivation to those stimuli is already an acquired or conditioned response: see I.P. Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex, trans. G.V. Anrep (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927). 11. Initially not a bell, contrary to popular belief, but a metronome, to imitate the sound of the footsteps of the technician delivering the food. However, Pavlov eventually used a variety of ‘conditioned stimuli’, including an electric bell or buzzer. 12. A characteristic of CTA is that it is less likely to be established if the food is familiar – a phenomenon known as ‘learned safety’. 13. Proust could hardly have not known of Pavlov, given that the latter was awarded France’s Légion d’Honneur in 1915. 14. This is contrary to earlier ideas in neuroscience where the hippocampus was seen as the seat of all long-term memories including those from childhood (see Suzanne Nalbantian, Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 142). 15. We often assume that Proust’s ‘thé’ refers to black Indian tea; however, he mentions that the concoction given to him by Aunt Léonie could also be an infusion of ‘tilleul’ (English, Tilia): this is a tea made from lime-tree (linden) flowers, which is recorded as having some medicinal and psychoactive properties (Schwartz 2005). 16. Charles Dickens, ‘Mrs Lirriper’s Legacy’, in the extra Christmas number of All the Year Round (1864), 5. 17. Proust, A la Recherche, 44. 18. Proust, A la Recherche, 44. Author’s translation. 50 E. Leigh Gibson

19. Numerous surveys, as well as experimental studies, have demonstrated that some people (‘comfort eaters’, perhaps a minority of the population) will eat more food, and particularly sweet fatty foods, when experiencing negative emotions (reviewed in E.L. Gibson, ‘The Psychobiology of Comfort Eating: Implications for Neuropharmacological Interventions’, Behavioural Pharmacology 23 (2012), 442–460). Sadly, the recent finding that the more depressed you are, the more chocolate you eat, implies that (Californian) chocolate is not a good antidepressant in the longer term (N. Rose, S. Koperski, and B.A. Golomb, ‘Mood Food: Chocolate and Depressive Symptoms in a Cross-Sectional Analysis’, Archives of Internal Medicine 170(8) (2010), 699–703. 20. Unfortunately, this infant predilection may now be leading many of us astray, as the food industry encourages consumption by adding sugar and fat to products wherever possible – a combination rarely found in nature beyond breast milk. 4 The Persistence of Surrealism: Memory, Dreams and the Dead Jeannette Baxter

What do memories look like? In many ways, this question is the driving force behind some of the most well-known works of Surrealist art and literature. We need only think of Salvador Dali’s soft geography of dripping time-pieces, ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (1931), to recall how Surrealism seeks to give form to the fluid and discon- tinuous nature of memory: ‘The empty beach with its fused sand is a symbol of utter psychic alienation. Clock time here is no longer valid, the watches have begun to drip and melt. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These are the residues of a remembered moment of time’.1 J.G. Ballard’s brief evaluation of ‘The Persistence of Memory’ is useful for at least two reasons: firstly, it reminds us that Dalí’s visions of melting watches were part of Surrealism’s serious creative enquiries into the Theory of Relativity, quantum mechanics and developing theories of space-time in the 1920s and 1930s.2 Secondly, it gestures to Surrealism’s sustained engagement with neuroscience, one that actually stretches back to André Breton’s medical studies under the eminent neurologist, Joseph Babinski, and his first-hand experiences of treating patients in neuro-psychiatric centres during World War One.3 As Breton would go on to write almost half a century later, neuroscience was ‘from the beginning at the heart of Surrealism’,4 shaping creative and critical enquiry (neurological discourse features repeatedly in the ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’), and informing poetic response to the question that so preoccupies the Surrealist imagination: ‘What is it to be human?’

Surrealist neuroscience or the bureau of surrealist enquiries

One of Surrealism’s earliest, and most short-lived, attempts to investigate the question of what it is to be human started life on Friday 10 October 1924, when The Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries in Paris opened its doors to the world.5 We could think of the Bureau as something of a Surrealist neuroscience archive, hide- ously low-tech but serious in its ambitions to record and document the limits and possibilities of human thought. The following press release gives some sense of the Bureau’s intentions:

51 52 Jeannette Baxter

The Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries is engaged in collecting, by every appropriate means, communications relative to diverse forms which the unconscious activity of the mind is likely to take. No one area is specified a priori for this enterprise and surrealism proposes to assemble the largest possible number of experimental data, to an end as yet unclear. Everyone who is prepared to contribute in any way to the creation of a real surrealist archive is urgently requested to make himself known: whether to enlighten us upon the genesis of an invention, to propose an unpublished system of psychic investigation, to allow us to judge striking coincidences, or to expound his most instinctive ideas on fashion as well as politics, etc. [. . .] or he may wish to engage in a free criticism of morals, or finally, he may content himself with confiding his rarest dreams and what these dreams suggest to him.6

The Bureau was headed by Francis Gérard (under the watchful eye of André Breton), and each day two members of the Surrealist group oversaw experiments, and kept a logbook of activities and findings.7 Robert Pepperell’s recent observations that ‘features of experience [that] we often regard as quintessentially human [. . .] are more likely attributable to unconscious processes over which we have little or no control’ are precisely what the Surrealists set out to explore and archive at the Bureau (amongst other things).8 And in order to do so, they employed a variety of methodologies including automatic writing, hypnosis (typically with the poet Robert Denos as the subject), dream interpretation and games, such as the newspaper headline game, which, counter to the enforced censoring practices of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four (see Peter Childs in his ‘Remembrance’ piece in this volume), involved folding newspapers into alternative versions of the headlines in order to reveal ‘hidden meanings latent in the printed page’.9 What was partly at stake in these Surrealist activities was the rescuing of memory from the confines of rationality and chronology in order to open it up to free play, creativity and spontaneity. In this respect, the Surrealists were drawing consciously on certain strands of Henri Bergson’s thinking on memory, reality and the unconscious as set out in Matter and Memory (1896) and An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903). Echoes of Bergson resonate, for instance, throughout the first ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924), as it rejects the ways in which conventional theories of memory re-package unconscious materials, such as the stuff of dreams, in the service of order and reason: ‘Memory alone arrogates itself the right to excerpt from dreams, to ignore the transitions, and to depict for us rather a series of dreams than the dream itself’.10 The Surrealist desire to explore spontaneous memories as they emerged out of ‘uninhibited dictation from dream states’ meant that ‘fragments of memory were strung together without apparent connecting links or rational threads’.11 It also meant that the Surrealists had, in some respects, anticipated neuroscientific thinking. As Suzanne Nalbantian observes, ‘dramatizing the vagaries of memory with sudden and unexpected shifts in orientation’, Surrealism foresaw ‘incongru- ity, discontinuity and uncertainty as three main characteristics of dream states’.12 What the Surrealists would make of more recent developments in popular dream The Persistence of Surrealism 53 technologies, such as Dream:ON, ‘The App to Influence Your Dreams’, is hard to say, although the drive to create the perfect dream (‘taking a relaxing stroll through the countryside, being able to fly, or lying on a sun drenched beach?’)13 never features on the Surrealist agenda. I strongly suspect that Breton et al. would still prefer to simulate their own sleep states after a day spent walking around London with Will Self. Of course, it is in the psychogeographical practices of contemporary artists and writers, such as Self, that Surrealism’s relevance to current conceptions of memory also manifests itself. For the Surrealist poet and artist, the act of walking the streets of Paris – often at night and without an explicit destination – made room for chance encounters with, and diversions into, the past (we might think of Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ (1912), Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), or Breton’s Nadja (1928)). At the same time, however, the Surrealist automatist drift never travelled in just one direction: ‘[. . .] the past was not a previous time to be revisited, a time with a definite “story” that informed the present. Instead, the past was mingled in an ongoing dynamic jumble with the present and future’.14 Bringing multiple times and mnemonic fragments into creative dialogue with one another, the Surrealist model of spontaneous memory is surely familiar to anyone who has accompanied Self on his peregrinations through contemporary physical and psychological landscapes. Moreover, we see in it evidence of what Steven Connor has termed ‘contemporaneous being’: ‘coming into one’s own present, one is always coming into “con-temporal” being, alongside others in time, and alongside the other times that abut on our presentness’.15 With its insistence on the simultaneity of memory, time, reality and lived experience, Surrealism has always, it would appear, been one step ahead.

Automatism: limitations and traumas

It is well known that Surrealism’s coincidence with the rise of psychoanalysis in France meant that the work of Sigmund Freud became something of a touchstone for the Group. What tends to get overlooked in popular histories of Surrealism, however, is the significance of other thinkers, such as the analytical psychologist Pierre Janet, whose term ‘automatic writing’ Breton went on to appropriate and make central to the first ‘Manifesto’:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.16

In actual fact, Breton’s experimentation with automatic writing had begun some years earlier when, together with Phillipe Soupault, he produced a work of unconscious memories, called Magnetic Fields (1920).17 Recorded over six days of collaborative dreaming and sleep simulation,18 Magnetic Fields is undoubtedly striking for the beautiful and unexpected images that emerge out of its pages. Yet, the text’s 54 Jeannette Baxter very composition foregrounds a question that preoccupied the Surrealists and their critics: to what extent can unconscious materials be ‘recorded’ (verbally or visually) on a conscious level without adulteration or alteration?19 Salvador Dalí, for instance, was one of a number of visual artists who were ‘less susceptible to Breton’s faith in a pure psychic automatism that could be embodied unproblem- atically in representation’.20 Dali’s flirtation with automatism was therefore brief, and he turned his attention to developing the paranoiac-critical method, which he defined as ‘the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations’ and which we can best see in ‘The Endless Enigma’ (1938), a landscape of condensed images that offers multiple visions and interpretations.21 Nevertheless, David Lomas notes that, even though automatism had a short life in the visual arts, an analysis of the works of Max Ernst, Joan Miró and André Masson allows us to ‘discover a predominance of surface inscriptions and traces that at best refer to the unconscious, which of itself remains enigmatic and unre- vealed’.22 It is the work of Masson that I want to make some brief closing remarks about here, not least for the particularly disturbing responses that his works give to the question of what it is to be human. Like so many of the Surrealists, Masson had witnessed the horrors of the First World War at first hand. Mémoire du Monde (1974), his literary recollection of the horrific experiences of trench warfare, recalls how, on one occasion, the soldier- artist lay wounded in a trench piled high with corpses and with little hope of rescue. Days later, Masson was eventually rescued, but ‘the psychological trauma that ensued [lead] to his internment in a hospital for mentally disturbed war veterans’.23 For the artist, trauma reasserted itself violently in the post-war years, a return of the repressed that overwhelmed and, according to some critics, defined Masson’s canvases: ‘Masson drew attention to a compulsively repeated iconography of wounding and mutilation that surfaces first in the automatic drawings from 1923 and 1924, noting with hindsight that the male body wherever it occurs, “was never exempt from cuts, wounds, or mutilations”’.24 Whilst violence repeats across, for example, the Massacre sketches of the 1930s, the dead emerge slowly and silently out of dark, tomb-like spaces in paintings such as ‘The Cemetery’ (1923). The potency of this image lies in the way in which it gives form to oscillating tensions between remembering and forgetting, the visible and the invisible, the physical and the psychological. Human body parts (arms, legs, trunks, heads and hands) are not graphically reproduced but displaced into the branches and stems of a soft, anthropomorphic forest which stretches out of the shadows of death towards the warming sun. Masson’s depiction of soft malleable forms against the hard geometry of the partially opened tomb gestures to a landscape of memories that are buried but not quite dead. Indeed, the cemetery’s architecture is unable to prevent the buried from returning, and it ruptures carelessly as a hand-like form, which also looks like a flowering root, just starts to emerge from the ground and announce its return.25 It would appear that the force of history’s anonymous victims (the slaughtered of the First World War) is such that these invisible presences will not be concealed any longer. Official, man- made edifices which are constructed in order to contain historical memory can no The Persistence of Surrealism 55 longer hold because death, Masson’s work insists, will always (and paradoxically) spring back to life and force a confrontation. If, as Kaz Brandt suggests, forgetting (whether intentional or unintentional) is an essential part of what it is to be human, so is the drive to remember that which we have forgotten.26 In the case of the Surrealists, however, the desire to explore, and give some kind of form to, ‘unconscious memories’ is not part of a process of remembering that leads straightforwardly to the past in order to make the ‘unknown known, classifiable’.27 Instead, it is a process of remembering that opens up the experience of what it is to be human to the creative – and often disquieting – energies of getting lost. As Breton reminds us: ‘From childhood memories, and from a few others, there emanates a sentiment of being unintegrated, and then later of having gone astray, which I hold to be the most fertile that exists’.28 If we are to properly bring the historiographies of modernism and neuroscience into dialogue with one another, then Surrealist artists, writers and poets surely deserve to keep company with the likes of Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein and others. More specifically, though, it might not be entirely frivolous to entertain the idea that twenty-first century neuroscience, in all of its technological complexity and sophistication, might have something to learn from Surrealism, not just from its low-tech methodological excursions into dreams, memories and the unconscious, but also its willingness to open itself up to the uncertain outcomes of errancy.

Notes

1. J.G. Ballard, ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, reprinted in A User’s Guide to the Millennium (London: Flamingo, 1996), 87. 2. For more detailed discussions of Surrealism’s interest in Einsteinian physics, see Suzanne Nalbantian, Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (London: Palgrave, 2003) and Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology (Yale: New Haven, 2008). 3. For a more detailed account of Breton’s work with Babinski, see Joost Haan, Peter J. Koehler and Julien Bogousslavsky, ‘Neurology and Surrealism: André Breton and Joseph Banbinski’, Brain: A Journal of Neurology 135 (2010), 3830–3838. 4. André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism – Translation of Entretiens (1913–1952) (New York: Marlowe and Company, 1993), 65. 5. See Polizotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (Boston, MA: Black Widow Press, 2009), 196–197, 200–202, 207–209. 6. Cited in Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997; 1965), 54–55. 7. For a fuller account of the short life of the Bureau for Surrealist Enquiries, See Mark Polizotti, Revolution of the Mind, 196–197, 200–202, 207–209. 8. Robert Pepperell’s ‘Neuroscience and Posthuman Memory’ in this volume. 9. Susan Laxton, ‘This Is Not a Drawing’, in The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game (Nebraska: Lincoln and London), 31. 10. André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924) in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 11. 11. Nalbantian, Memory in Literature, 100. 12. Nalbantian, Memory in Literature, 113. 13. See Dream:On, http://www.dreamonapp.com/. Accessed 5 August 2013. 14. Nalbantian, Memory in Literature, 115–116. 56 Jeannette Baxter

15. Steven Connor, ‘The Impossibility of the Present: or, From the Contemporary to the Contemporal’, in Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, ed. Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (Harlow: Pearson, 1999), 15. 16. Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, 26. 17. As Joost, Haan and Koehler observe, the ‘notion of psychological automatism goes back to the neuropsychiatrist Jules Baillarger around 1850, who had already asked his patients to write down any thought that was coming to their minds, a technique that was then developed further, mainly in Charcot’s laboratory, by Pierre Janet in order to delineate what he called “subconscious fixed ideas”, several years before Freud set up his theory of the unconscious’. See ‘Neurology and Surrealism: André Breton and Joseph Banbinski’, Brain: A Journal of Neurology 135 (2012), 3832. 18. For a more detailed discussion of Surrealism’s early experiments in automatism, see Nalbantian, Memory in Literature, 104–111. 19. Think here of Stacey Pitsillides’ account of the recent cinematic exploration of a version of this question, ‘The Final Cut’, 2004. See Stacey Pitsillides, ‘Death and Memory in the Twenty-First Century’ in this volume. 20. David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 10. 21. Salvador Dalí, cited in Dawn Ades, Dali (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 200. 22. Lomas, The Haunted Self, 10. 23. David Lomas, ‘Labyrinth and Vertigo: On Some Motifs in André Masson and Their Meaning’, in Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers, ed. Elza Adamowicz (Bern: Peter Lang), 86. 24. André Masson from Le Rebelle du Surréalisme (Paris: Hermann, 1976), 33, cited in Lomas, ‘Labyrinth and Vertigo’, 86. 25. For a more detailed reading of this painting see Lomas, The Haunted Self, 43–41. 26. See Kaz Brandt, ‘Forgetting’ in this volume. 27. Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, 9. 28. Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, 40. Emphases in the original. 5 The Brain Observatory and the Imaginary Media of Memory Research Flora Lysen

In 2009, the brain of the most famous amnesiac of the twentieth century was sliced into 2,401 sections. The cutting procedure was streamed live over the internet, where over 400,000 people tuned in to watch a frozen block of cerebral matter turn into thousands of fine sheets of brain tissue. This was the brain of Henry Molaison, a man who could not retain any new memories ever since a part of his brain had been removed in 1953, in an operation meant to relieve him of his severe epileptic seizures. With his memory loss, Henry gained the status of the most important research subject for the study of human memory, a crucial subject for discoveries into procedural, declarative, short-term and long- term memory. Watching the white brain-block come apart, thousands of people were offered a new episode in the infamous case history of ‘H. M.’, a protagonist in every textbook of psychology or neurology. Today, after a life of examination, Henry’s 2,401 brain sections have been fixed, stained, photographed and now constitute the first brain inside the public digital platform of the Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego. Each ten-terabyte-sized photographed section allows visitors to zoom in from the life-size level to the cellular dimension. Thus, the live dissection in 2009 staged the passage of H. M.’s brain from a fleshy organ in a jar to a collection of images stored in a public digital database, navigable with Google Maps technology, accessible both to neuroscientists and non-experts. What is the significance of this public, live dissection of a famous forgetful brain and of public access to digital images of brain sections? Can we see Henry Molaison or understand his memory loss, when zooming in on the outlines of his stained hippocampus on section number 1279 – a sea of blue and grey specks, several nano- metres wide? We, a public of non-expert viewers, accessing the online Digital Brain Library and leafing through thousands of anatomical images? The presentation of memory research in the Brain Observatory does not point to a new ‘metaphor of memory’ (Draaisma 2000), but rather to a new metaphorical imaginary of being able to ‘observe’ and ‘collect’ data on memory from a virtual location, a space that is proposed as analogous to a weather station or astronomical observatory. The observatory brings together tropes of cartography (an atlas of digital brain slices),

57 58 Flora Lysen script and reading (a Google Books library for brains) and technological observation. The Brain Observatory has been announced as the ‘Hubble telescope for the human brain’, and is thus imagined as a space in which cognitive functions such as memory can be detected by the power of magnification. In this way, the Brain Observatory presents the brain as a locus of data that can be seamlessly accessed and examined, obscuring the many levels of representation and translation in the process of cutting, photographing, digitizing and correlating with functional data (Beaulieu 2000).1 As such, one might say that the Brain Observatory is just one of many projects through which the general public is increasingly led to believe – as many authors have observed – that there might be a direct view of ‘the brain at work’ (Borck 2011; Dumit 2004). On this account, we no longer feel the need for metaphors or analogies – with machines, buildings or organisms – to understand the activity of the brain and higher cognitive functions such as memory, because new visualizations of brain activity (understood as the ‘brain-script’ of EEG, or the ‘brain-photography’ of fMRI) are thought to give unmediated access to the brain (Borck 2011). Moreover, such powerful visualizations build upon and contribute to the long history of thinking the self and the brain as consubstantial (Vidal 2009). Here, I argue that we have to rethink the notion of metaphor in the presentation of research into memory, and approach the Brain Observatory through the media archaeological lens of ‘media fantasies’ (Marvin 1988) or ‘imaginary media’ (Parikka 2012) of neuro-scientific research.2 Understanding what particular media have been thought to offer to memory research helps to interpret the dissection of H. M. beyond a spectacle of technological ingenuity and neuro-scientific progress, building instead on a tacit desire and longstanding imaginary of connecting life histories and memories to grey matter, for which the digital database is imagined as a suitable medium. The end of the nineteenth century saw an explosion of imagined devices that enabled a direct access to the inside of the skull and localized, transmitted and visualized human thinking and memory.3 Numerous science fiction stories proposed fantastical methods of capturing and extracting memories from the brain, such as Edward Bellamy’s Doctor Heidenhoff’s Process (1890), Richard Slee’s and Cornelia Pratt’s Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery (1899), Walter Besant’s The Memory Cell (1900) and Vincent Harper’s The Mortgage on the Brain (1905).4 Attending to what have been coined as the ‘media fantasies’ or ‘imaginary media’ in brain research helps us to understand how people attempted to make sense of the possible use of new and ambiguous technologies, devices and apparatuses in relation to memory research. Imaginary media demonstrate ‘the hopes, desires, and imaginaries of mediation’5 in the retrieval and localization of memory in the brain. One forgotten science fiction story, Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery, aptly reveals how science-fiction authors conceived of intricate combinations of existing and imagined media to suggest access to memory. The story creates what media archaeologist Siegfried Zielinski has termed ‘impossible media’, fabulous inventions that cannot be realized, but that can work as ‘hermeneutic machines’6 that effect the understanding and development of actual media and machine-brain assemblages. In Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery, a short novel co-authored by physician Richard Slee and novelist Cornelia Pratt in 1899, a hard-working neurobiologist claims he has The Brain Observatory and Memory Research 59 definite proof that there is a ‘memory center’ in the brain, with cells that can be developed like photographic plates. Dissecting the brain of his deceased wife with a serial section-cutter, Dr. Berkeley creates a long sequence of memory cells that – mounted on numbered slides and examined in order – would unfold like a ‘panorama’ of the woman’s life, a strip of images. The fictional scientist had thus proven that even individual human memories could be developed and that ‘there was nothing hidden that might not be revealed’.7 Methodically examining section after section in the laboratory, Berkeley finds himself increasingly turning into ‘a machine, an automaton’, that can no longer judge his own work: ‘this dark world of fact [. . . ] had become so confusedly entangled with the world of spirit that he knew not which was the real, the authoritative’.8 Memory research becomes a maddening affair that plagues the researcher with a constant fear of being punished for the hubris of learning ‘what only God was meant to know’.9 The novel’s fictitious scientific memory excavation combined a number of existing technologies – sectioning of anatomical specimens, developing photographic plates, magnifying specimens and projecting through a stereopticon – into an imaginary assemblage, a proto-cinematographic media fantasy of memory visualization. A significant element here is the way in which a moving image technology for visualizing memory is associated with mechanical objectivity as well as conveying the particularly emotional and vivid quality of recollections. As an account of the imaginary media of brain research, Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery helps us to understand how various new and established technologies united to create a conception of memory as a ‘fixed’ entity, potentially retrievable, controllable and representable in a ‘vivid’ manner. Moreover, the imagined mix of media helped to conceive of the brain itself as comprised of material sections, images or film- strips that could be developed, visualized and used to understand the faculty of memory. Long before H. M.’s brain was sliced into 2,401 sections, it was already imagined as a potential volume of image slices. Since 2014, the public Brain Observatory has constituted the newest imaginary medium of neuro-scientific memory research, spurring popular headlines such as ‘After Death, H. M.’s Brain Uploaded to the Cloud’ (Hughes, National Geographic website, 2014) and ‘Neuroscience’s Most Famous Brain is Reconstructed’ (Thomson, New Scientist website, 2014).10 The digital platform presents itself as an intricate hybrid of a centralized imaging resource for scientific research and a website for popular engagement with neuroscience. Jacopo Annese, leader of the Brain Observatory, explains the aim of the platform as creating a growing archive ‘that preserves Henry Molaison as a person, a brain, and a project’.11 Along with H. M.’s sections, the Brain Observatory will offer publicly accessible fMRI data, personality and IQ tests and other biographical data, as well as family photographs, interviews with nurses and friends and artistic or theatrical adaptations of H. M.’s life story. Thus, in the observatory, the digitalized brain sections have become the aegis under which all other forms of recording or narrating can be brought in as possible evidence of the brain’s individuality (and possible deviation from a norm). Artistic works and literary reflections are all subsumed within the logic of the ‘virtualized’ brain. Although Annese distinguishes between the expert side of 60 Flora Lysen the platform (with the sections and other test results) and the popular component of the website, the logic of the brain database cuts across this division. Overall, the Brain Observatory is centred on the possibility of correlating a plethora of information that ‘opens the doors to new, unimaginable associations between mental life and brain structure’.12 The digital platform of the Brain Observatory thus follows an on-going history of media that link functional data with anatomy and evoke a mind-in-the-brain (Beaulieu 2000); what is new about the Brain Observatory is the particular way in which the medium of the digital database allows for the oblique connections between, for example, a sepia photograph of a young boy and coloured sections of brain material, or a theatre play about H. M. and photographs of a laboratory.13 Navigating the digital platform can result in particular juxtapositions and associations between data, brought about by a new type of authority that Annese envisions as a ‘brain curator’, who organizes the access to information and designs the ‘choreography that improves the experience of the collection’.14 The case of H. M’s ‘virtualized’ brain asks us to rethink the way that memory and other higher cognitive functions can be presented to audiences, by a medium that allows a new, imaginative fabric of understanding memory as both literally ‘within the brain’ and within the Brain Observatory as observed and preserved in thousands of photographs, drawings and videos. The media fantasy of the digital brain observatory promises a new view of the brain through an infinite number of translations, representations and correlations, yet presented as if one were to ‘simply’ see into a brain-telescope. The Brain Observatory follows the logic of imaginary media in fictional narratives, in which old, new and fantasized technologies are assembled into an imagined whole. The envisioned Brain Observatory is perhaps best described using Haraway’s concept of ‘materializing refiguration’, as an imagined space and physical database in which tropes and metaphors are sedimented – linking ‘stories, desires, reasons, and material worlds’15 – and which brings into being a transparent and accessible site that can be accessed to retrieve information about self and behaviour. The Brain Observatory, in other words, constitutes a ‘metaphor complex’16 of visibility, memory storage, fixity and vividness, cartography and cinematography. Thinking of the construction of the Brain Observatory as materializing refiguration helps to rethink recurrent warnings for metaphors by scientists and science writers. Brain researcher Yadin Dudai has cautioned for what he has dubbed ‘metaphor fallacies’ in memory research, such as the storage metaphor of memory, which might lead people to think, erroneously, that memory is static.17 Metaphors ‘may leak from the metaphorical domain to real world target domain, and lure the investigator into false parallels’.18 Dudai sketches a common bifurcation of a ‘real world’ of objective knowledge and its ‘other’, an outside realm of seductive yet false metaphors that linger at its margins, waiting to seep through the cracks. Similarly, science writer Philip Ball wondered in a 2011 Nature News opinion piece, ‘A Metaphor too Far’, whether ‘we are too eager to find a neat metaphor rather than just explain what is going on as clearly and honestly as we can [. . . ] metaphor should be admitted into science only after strict examination’.19 Scientific publications, in Dudai’s and Ball’s account, should be policed and continually The Brain Observatory and Memory Research 61 exorcized of the presence of popular imagery, metaphors and ‘science fictions’. However, as philosopher Michele Le Doeuff (1980) has argued, it is exactly the ‘imaginary’ – the images and metaphoric modes of thinking that are placed outside an intellectual system – that point to the system’s sensitive points and exposes its fundamental elements of thought. The Brain Observatory shows us how metaphors and tropes can never be excised, but that a metaphorical fabric is wholly subsumed within the media fantasy of the digital public observatory – always present yet hardly observed.20

Notes

1. Anne Beaulieu. “The Space inside the Skull : Digital Representations, Brain Mapping and Cognitive Neuroscience in the Decade of the Brain.” (PhD dissertation University of Amsterdam, 2000). 2. Carolyn Marvin. When Old Technologies Were New : Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 7. Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 46 3. Melissa M. Littlefield, The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 10. 4. Edward Bellamy, Doctor Heidenhoff’s Process. (London: W. Reeves, 1890), Richard Slee and Cornelia Atwood Pratt, Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery (New York: Putnam, 1899), Walter Besant, “The Memory Cell.” In For Britain’s Soldiers: A Contribution to the Needs of Our Fighting Men and Their Families, edited by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne (London: Methuen, 1900), Vincent Harper, The Mortgage on the Brain: Being the Confessions of the Late Ethelbert Croft, M.D. (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1905). 5. Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 46. 6. Siegfried Zielinski, ‘Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola: A Case Study on Athanasius Kircher’s World of Apparatus between the Imaginary and the Real’, in Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium, ed. Eric Kluitenberg (Rotterdam: NAI, 2006), 30. 7. Richard Slee and Cornelia Atwood Pratt, Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery (New York: Putnam, 1899), 212. 8. Slee and Pratt, Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery, 176. 9. Slee and Pratt, Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery, 204. 10. Virginia Hughes, “After Death, H.M.’s Brain Uploaded to the Cloud – Phenomena: Only Human.” National Geographic, January 28, 2014. http://phenomena.national geographic.com/2014/01/28/after-death-h-m-s-brain-is-uploaded-to-the-cloud/. Helen Thomson, “Neuroscience’s Most Famous Brain Is Reconstructed.” The New Scientist, January 28, 2014. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24944-neurosciences-most- famous-brain-is-reconstructed/. 11. Quoted in Rhian Worth and Jacopo Annese, ‘Brain Observatory and the Continuing Study of H. M.: Interview with Jacopo Annese’, Europe’s Journal of Psychology 8(2) (2012), 229. 12. Jacopo Annese, ‘From the Jar to the World Wide Web: Designing a Public Digital Library for the Human Brain’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 38(3) (2013), 223. 13. Beaulieu, “The Space inside the Skull”. 14. Annese, ‘From the Jar to the World Wide Web’, 228. 15. Donna Jeanne Haraway, Modest−Witness@Second−Millennium.FemaleMan−Meets− OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 64. 16. Kélina Gotman, ‘The Neural Metaphor’, in The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain, ed. Melissa M. Littlefield and Jenell M. Johnson (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 75. 62 Flora Lysen

17. Yadin Dudai, Memory from A to Z: Keywords, Concepts, and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 178. 18. Dudain, Memory from A to Z, 178. 19. Philip Ball, ‘A Metaphor Too Far’, Nature News February 23 (2011), http://www.nature. com/news/2011/110223/full/news.2011.115.html. 20. Le Doeuff, Michele. L’Imaginaire Philosophique. Paris: Payot, 1980. Print. 6 Memory and the Fictional I magination: Creating Memories Peter Childs

At the end of Woody Allen’s film Another Woman (1988), the question is asked: ‘Is a memory something you have or something you’ve lost?’ This is a pleas- ing formulation because of the resonance with the idea that a memory may be treasured – a mental keepsake – but also a placemarker for something departed. A memory is perhaps what the mind has left of something the individual has lost; sometimes it is all we have left. Fiction is often exercised by how to represent memory. Underlying this is the question of the nature of memories: what do they seem or feel like. A memory is not a fragment, not a reflection, not an unmediated re-collection of sensory perception, but it might be understood in terms of the play on experience or thought of imagination, which itself moulds information and experience to compose something unique in the individual’s mind. The play of the mind is perhaps clearest to us in dreaming, which Jeanette Baxter discusses in Chapter 4. Though dreams do not lay down strong memories, they do contribute to our mental stockpile and can be confused or combined with memories of waking experience. Memories themselves are also multifaceted, made up of parts that will themselves be remakings of perceptions, abstract thoughts, more memories and so forth. One theory of the purpose of dreaming is that it serves to reconcile new sensations with pre-existing ideas: the dreamer’s mind assimilating new experience or affect, creating a medley of vivid speculations as the mind re-processes both the recent and the familiar. It is arguably the

freewheeling activation of associations, as new memories and old concepts intermingle and mix, that gives rise to the bizarre kaleidoscope of images and ideas that constitute dreams. The dream puns that Freudian psychoanalysts make so much of are often merely the hooks by which a newly created memory brings an old one to consciousness.1

Neither dreams nor memories are composed of an agreed language, but it would be impossible to convey a dream without some system of signs, of symbols and

63 64 Peter Childs their meanings, and words are the most common means used when trying to convey the content or operation of the mind. So, note here the metaphor of the kaleidoscope used in relation to dreams, the suggestion of the mind’s use of play in Freudian dream puns, and also the metaphor of the ‘hooks’ of memory. But what are resonant metaphors for memory? The history of ideas provides numerous examples, and these have varied over centuries of thought from seal- ing wax, through books and theatres, to labyrinths and photographic plates, an enchanted loom and the homunculus to the computer (See Draaisma 2000 for a detailed history). Many of these metaphoric sources are recording devices, but all aim at parallelism: they have a literalism in their nonetheless provocative compari- sons. They are the kinds of metaphor we live by, including the notion of the ‘global brain’ and ‘world memory’ discussed by Stephan Besser (Chapter 8). As Nicholas Carr also observes in his piece, ‘Misled by Metaphor’, we can be tempted by technology into a debilitating understanding of human memory if we equate it with a computer database or the internet, underplaying the role of biology and chemistry in human life. Often our metaphors of memory are constrained by an attention to storage and retrieval, when play, emotion, imagination and other aspects are equally important. A different kind of metaphor appears in one of J.K. Rowling’s extremely popular children’s novels, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In this final Harry Potter novel, Harry is asked to collect a dying man’s memory and play it back later. The memory is in the form of teardrops, and reveals to Harry among other ‘facts’ unknown to him that the dying wizard was in love with Harry’s mother. The premise that memories give access to unalloyed truth is hugely misleading, but the metaphor of teardrops is intriguing. Perhaps we can think of memories in some ways as similar to these salt- and-water secretions from our tear ducts: chemical mixtures, created by some impact on our emotions, that seep or pour from us, possibly joyfully, often unhappily, sometimes unexpectedly. Something we lose from ourselves but which leave traces while they pass away, which is reminiscent of the earlier Woody Allen quotation. From the perspective of the play of memory, perhaps a rich metaphor for memories is the figure of metaphor itself. Like we might say of metaphors, we can observe that there are dead memories, extended memories, mixed memories, and so forth. And, reiterating the theme again of addition and subtraction, metaphors both add and take away from the target for which they stand; sometimes they cannot be explained or recognized, certainly they can be culturally or experien- tially specific, sometimes they seem clearly to involve imagination. Brain-imaging studies appear to show that imagination involves both conceptual and sensory processing. Imagination, the ability to form mental images, sensations and concepts when they are not being perceived by the senses, is not just abstract thought and obviously not just sensation (and there may be debate over which one it resembles more); but clearly imagination plays a role in the creation of memories for most people. By contrast, in Jorge Luis Borges’s story ‘Funes, the Memorious’ a young boy reveals to the fictionalized Borges that following a riding accident he has near-perfect memory of everything he has experienced. The boy now seems incapable of abstract thought, of imagination; and he is even unable to sleep because of his mind’s constant replay of detail.2 For most people, memory Memory and the Fictional Imagination 65 becomes problematic after a few hours or days as recollections become assimilated into a mental landscape – or choose an alternative metaphor here, such as the library or the act of collecting discussed by Sebastian Groes in his piece concerning Walter Benjamin’s ‘Unpacking My Library’ (Chapter 16). Oddly, we might say that Funes has a poor memory, in the sense that for those without eidetic memories, perfect recall, or hyperthymesia, memories are complex amalgams with comparatively few pretensions to accuracy, as opposed to Funes’s unavoidable verisimilitude. Imagination, along with self-interest, comprehension, focus, time, experience and other factors, plays a role in the common operation of memory – thankfully. A selective, playful, imaginative memory is an ordinary memory; a comprehensive memory a problem (see Adam Roberts in Chapter 26). Another everyday metaphor for memory is that of the sieve: the mind is leaky – cribrose – and more and more memories fall through the holes over time. The aspect of time, and its flow, is one key element of memory that dominates a final fictional example, which I would like to discuss at greater length. In Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, the narrator Tony Webster asks ‘Who was it said that memory is what we’d thought we’d forgotten?’3 A typically self-referential sentence in a novel by Barnes, this rhetorical question recalls again the earlier Allen comment about memory’s relation to loss. Throughout the book, Webster likens personal and public history (history is ‘the memories of the survivors’4), postulating that both constitute ‘that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation’.5 In Webster’s personal life he finds, looking back from retirement to his youth, that he wishes he had retained letters or other documentation because they ‘would have been proof, corroboration. Instead, the only evidence comes from my memory’.6 A central argument of the novel is that memory serves the interests of the person who has access to it: ‘what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed’.7 Instead there are ‘approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty’8 and ‘impressions and half-memories’ which Webster thinks may be ‘self-serving’9 and are sometimes recalled in a certain way in order ‘to apportion blame’.10 Memory is positioned as ‘an instinct for survival, for self-preservation’ because it exists as ‘my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time’.11 The novel charts the questioning, if not the revisioning of memories on this basis as fresh revelations put past action and assumption into new light; though life is spent ‘building memories’ to sustain future emotions, the failing of Tony’s life is that he did not ‘look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point’. We think of memory as backward-facing; but, like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of history,12 it is borne ceaselessly into the future and ought to be apprehen- sively Janus-faced, oriented in both directions, looking forward to looking back. Indeed, Benjamin’s winged spirit of history, who is forced to contemplate the ever- accreting catastrophes of the past while blown into the future, is a venge- ful embodiment of the memory of events, compelled to return again and again to trauma, answering Allen’s question in another way: a memory can be something we have that we might wish had been lost. More often, until memory is 66 Peter Childs confronted with counter-evidence it constructs a preferred version of events, ‘the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves’.13 Barnes likens this to the dual experience of time, the objective tick-tock of facts and shared social truths measured by documents and instruments such as the clock, against the subjective perspective of the individual, which Barnes’s novel symbolizes by watches turned inside the wrist to sit above the pulse, a fashion his protagonists share to indicate their schoolboy sense of contrariness. In later life Tony Webster is again struck by the forward flow of time against the reverse course of memory. The feeling that links these together in The Sense of an Ending is remorse: ‘Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made’.14 Remorse for Webster can, however, seem to cause time to ‘reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream’.15 This phenomenon of memory’s patchwork freedom, like a dream’s, is what drives Webster’s memoir: ‘When you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later . . . later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of threads and patches’.16 Webster finds that in later life the ‘familiar memory-loops’ can short- circuit when mislaid recollections are brought to the surface by the mind: ‘the brain will throw you scraps from time to time. [. . . ] I began to remember, with no particular order or significance, long-buried details’.17 Webster imagines these as ‘new affective states reopening blocked-off neural pathways’,18 but the effect is a bite of conscience as he re-discovers suppressed memories he wished to lose: the responsibilities he has for things he had forgotten.

Notes

1. Rita Carter, Consciousness (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2012), 170. 2. An example from real life is examined in Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist. 3. Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011), 69. 4. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 61. 5. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 18. 6. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 43. 7. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 3. 8. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 4. 9. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 30. 10. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 38. 11. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 45. 12. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Knopf, 1969), 257–258. 13. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 104. 14. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 108. 15. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 134. 16. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 115. 17. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 122. 18. Barnes, Sense of an Ending, 131. 7 Misled by Metaphor Nicholas Carr

Two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca used a charming metaphor to describe the way memory shapes intellect. ‘We should imitate bees’, he wrote; ‘we should mingle all the various nectars we have tasted, and then turn them into a single sweet substance, in such a way that, even if it is apparent where it originated, it appears quite different from what it was in its original state’.1 As his metaphor makes clear, Seneca viewed memory not as a mere container but as a crucible. Memory was more than the sum of things remembered. It was something newly made, the essence, even, of a singular self. When we describe memory today, we tend to use a much less flowery metaphor: that of the digital computer. We no longer talk of bees and nectars. We talk of databases and search engines. Indeed, as we’ve grown more dependent on the vast stores of data inside our computers and out on the internet, we’ve begun to blur the distinction between computer memory and biological memory. We’ve come to view the web as an ‘outboard brain’, to borrow a phrase from the writer Clive Thompson,2 which not only extends the scope of our personal memory but can actually replace it. Why rely on the imperfect memory inside our heads when we can Google the precise bit of information we need at the precise moment we need it? In embracing this new metaphor, we may be changing more than just the way we talk; we may be changing the way we behave. Last year, Science published an intriguing paper about the internet’s influence on human thought. Called ‘Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips’, the paper reported on the results of a study by a group of research psychologists, led by Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University, that sought to answer a critical question: Does our awareness of our ability to use search engines to find information alter the way our brains form memories? The answer, they discovered, is yes: ‘when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information’.3 The findings suggest ‘that processes of human memory are adapting to the advent of new computing and communication technology’.4 In one of the experiments, people read 40 statements of obscure facts (such as, ‘an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain’) and then typed them into a computer.

67 68 Nicholas Carr

Half the participants were told the computer would save what they typed, and half were told that it wouldn’t. Afterwards, they were asked to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. The experiment revealed that people who believed the statements would be stored in the computer had a weaker memory of the information than those who assumed that the statements would not be stored. The researchers observed that the participants ‘apparently did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statements they had read’.5 And they offered a broader conclusion: ‘Since search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.’6 We humans have, of course, always had external, or ‘transactive’ information stores to supplement our biological memory. These stores can reside in the brains of other people we know (if your friend Julie is an expert on gardening, then you know you can use her knowledge of plant facts to supplement your own memory) or in media technologies, such as maps and books and microfilm. But we’ve never had an ‘external memory’ so capacious, so available and so easily searched as the Web. If, as this study suggests, the way we form (or fail to form) memories is deeply influenced by the mere existence of outside information stores, then we may be entering an era in history in which we will store fewer and fewer memories inside our own brains. The loss of internal memory wouldn’t much matter if, as our new metaphor suggests, a fact stored externally were the same as a memory of that fact stored in our mind. But the metaphor is flawed. A computer database and biological memory are not the same things. When we form, or, as brain scientists say, ‘consolidate’, a personal memory, we also form associations between that memory and the myriad other memories – of facts, experiences, emotions – contained in our minds. These intricate connections, unique to ourselves, are indispensable to the development of deep, conceptual knowledge. The associations, moreover, continue to change with time, as we learn more and experience more. Biological memory is anything but a database. Its richness lies in its contingency. Seneca’s seemingly quaint metaphor for memory, with its emphasis on the organic, indeterminate process of ‘mingling’, is, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, it seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphor, which equates memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in computers. The essence of personal memory is not the discrete facts or experiences we store in our mind but the endless mingling of those facts and experiences. What is the self but the unique pattern that arises from that mingling? The internet is a wonderful supplement to memory. But if we see it, and use it, as a substitute for memory, we risk losing or at least diminishing something very important about ourselves. Metaphors can be misleading as well as enlightening. Misled by Metaphor 69

Notes

1. Translated by Ann Moss in Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (New York: Clarendon Press, 1996), 12. Originally published in Seneca 1920. 2. Clive Thompson, ‘Your Outboard Brain Knows All’, Wired 15(10) (2007). 3. Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner, ‘Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips’, Science 333(6043) (2011), 776. 4. Sparrow, Liu and Wegner, ‘Google Effects on Memory’, 778. 5. Sparrow, Liu and Wegner, ‘Google Effects on Memory’, 777. 6. Sparrow, Liu and Wegner, ‘Google Effects on Memory’, 777. 8 Calling Gaia: World Brains and Global Memory Stephan Besser

‘See the world we come from. There is no green there. They killed their mother. And they are gonna do the same here’. This is earthling Jake Sully speaking to Eywa, the Gaia-like goddess and balancing force of the ecosystem of the planet- oid Pandora. At a dramatic narrative juncture of the film Avatar (James Cameron 2009), Jake calls on Eywa to intervene in the battle between the Na’vi, the tall and blue-skinned native inhabitants of Pandora, and the military forces of the Resources Development Agency (RDA) from Earth that colonize the planet. Having just learned from a fellow resistance fighter that the fibre-optic lianas of the so-called Tree of Voices provide a ‘direct line to Eywa’, Jake connects his native avatar’s neural queue to one of the threads and starts to talk. He urges Eywa to access the memories of his deceased colleague Dr. Grace Augustine in order to get an impression of the destruction that humans have inflicted upon the ecosystem of their own planet. Against all odds, the distress call is answered. From the depths of Pandora’s jungles Eywa sends herds of dinosaur-like creatures that launch a counter attack and run over the RDA war machine. The ecosystem strikes back and the invaders are sent home to Earth. What can this scene from Avatar tell us about notions and metaphors of memory at the beginning of the twenty-first century? I want to consider the possibility here that a work of popular culture that is fairly mainstream in many different regards can be quite avant-garde in their combination. Transposing various contemporary concerns into a sci-fi environment, Avatar performs an imaginative cross-mapping of three major preoccupations of our time – memory, the global and the neuronal – in a way that eagerly anticipates something that may or may not emerge in the not so distant future: a new form of memory that blends humanist conceptions of cultural and collective memory with bio-technological and cyberneticist visions of the global brain. The emergency call scene shows such a cross-mapping in full effect. On the one hand, Sully’s way of contacting Eywa neatly ties in with Avatar’s representation of Pandora as a giant brain and superorganism bound together by something like a biological version of the internet. As xenobiologist Grace Augustine explains in another pivotal scene of the film, there is an ‘electrochemical

70 Calling Gaia 71 communication’ going on between the roots of the countless trees of Pandora’s jungle, functioning

like the synapses between neurons. It’s more connections than the human brain. Get it? It’s a network. It’s a global network and the Na’vi can access it. They can upload and download data. Memories.

This explains why after Grace’s death her own recollections can be added to the memory networks of the Pandora-‘brain’ as well. On the other hand, the scene also underscores the film’s humanist imagination of the planet’s web of connections as a living archive of personal and cultural memories. When Jake first connects his avatar’s queue to this network he actually hears a great number of voices of deceased Na’vi talking ceaselessly in a garrulous cacophony. In times of distress, these voices of the ancestors provide orientation, guidance and advice for the living; it can even seem that they actually are Eywa, given their frequent identification with the network as such. Connecting to Eywa thus means interacting with the ancestors and, in academic parlance, performing an act of collective memory. How exactly do these tropes of cultural and cyber-biological memory relate to each other, in the film and in contemporary culture? According to Bruno Latour, Avatar is the first Hollywood film about the modernist clash of humans with nature that does not take ultimate catastrophe for granted but opts for ‘a new search for hope on condition that what it means to have a body, a mind, and a world is completely redefined’.1 In Latour’s view, the ‘biological and cultural network’2 at the heart of the film’s narrative signifies Avatar’s inspiring transgression of the Great Modern Divide between nature and culture, humans and nonhu- mans, living beings and inanimate things, making it a sign of hope for the actual planet Earth as well. A similar argument can be made for the movie’s futuristic vision of a new supra- individual memorial structure that brings together cybernetic, biological and humanist discourses on memory and merges them into an alluring representation of a networked future. An important element in this mix is the notion of the ‘global brain’, most commonly defined as an ‘emerging intelligent network that is formed by all people on this planet together with the computers, knowledge bases and communication links that connect them together’.3 This concept has quite a long tradition, including H. G. Wells’s 1937 vision of a ‘world brain’, as well as Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of the ‘noosphere’ and the planetary brain and network fantasies in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge (1982) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984).4 Much like Avatar, which repeatedly casts individual human(oid)s in the role of single nerve cells, Peter Russell in 1982 described human beings as ‘“cells” in the embryonic global brain’ and predicted ‘the linking of the billions of human minds into a single integrated network’.5 Since the rise of the internet in the early 1990s, such fantasies seem even more convincing and have led to various theories about the emergence 72 Stephan Besser of a superhuman global consciousness from the ‘growing worldwide computer networks’.6 According to physicist Gottfried Mayer-Kress, the ‘collective activity of the many individuals and models working on the system’ will yield ‘higher levels of information processing than we ourselves as individuals can attain’.7 Extrapolating from human brains, he sees associative memory – ‘the stimulation of a small number of neurons that can cause the excitation of large areas in the cortex’8 – as a central organizing principle of this emerging global brain. Cyberneticist Francis Heylighen also argues that ‘the web functions like a huge associative memory of society’,9 and has started to work on algorithms that can simulate brain plasticity on the internet: ‘The core idea is that frequently used sequences of hyperlinks are reinforced and eventually collapsed into a single link, similar to the “Hebbian” strengthening of synapses in the brain’.10 In humanist and cultural studies discourses we currently see a similar fascination with the emergence of a ‘global memory’11 through new communication technologies and the transnational exchange of cultural memories. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider for instance describe the formation of a ‘cosmopolitan memory’ that transcends national and territorial boundaries as a result of processes of globalization and the planetary circulation of media representations (Levy and Sznaider 2002). In the same vein, literary critic Michael Rothberg argues that ‘global media technologies make possible a new kind of common memory, via the creation of global media events that all might witness simultaneously’.12 According to Rothberg, this newly emerging global memory is ‘multidirectional’ because the various media representations of events such as the Holocaust or 9/11 will not converge into one version of the past but trigger and produce different ‘network[s] of associations’.13 This notion of multidirectionality in turn recalls Gilles Deleuze’s earlier description of ‘world-memory’ in his book on the time-image in film (see Patricia Pisters, Chapter 25). The memory Deleuze sees embodied in Alain Resnais’ ‘cinema of the brain’, for instance, is not the memory of a single character or a single group, but one that relates to ‘quite different characters as to unconnected places which make up a world-memory’.14 Folding the notions of world-memory and the world-brain into each other, Deleuze proclaims that in cinema ‘the world has become memory, brain, the superimposition of ages or lobes, but the brain itself has become consciousness, continuation of ages, the creation of growth of ever new lobes’.15 Avatar seems highly aware of such discourses of cultural memory and world brains and composes them into a planetary vision of a new form of connectedness. This is much more than just a reiteration of the latest in a long line of technological ‘metaphors of memory’ (Draaisma 2000) that likens the brain to the internet: it is a triune cross-mapping of memory, the neuronal and the global that envisions their profound isomorphism and consubstantiality. By actuating this blending, Avatar puts into practice what Kélina Gotman describes as the work of a loosely defined ‘neural metaphor’ in contemporary culture and science, namely ‘bringing together micro and macro operations at the level of science (the neural body)’16 and cultural and social investments (such as memory and globalization). After all, ‘we are all cells in the great body of the city, and world’.17 Following Latour’s Calling Gaia 73 critique of the modern separation of culture and biology, Gotman suggests that the neural metaphor can join opposites and distinct regimes of knowledge by showing the ‘desirability of an additive and juxtapositional rather than a subtrac- tive and purificatory mode’18 of thinking in the sciences, humanities and popular culture. Purification and subtraction, of course, are always necessary and often easy. Metaphors suggest and mislead, so we must deconstruct their surplus meanings and point to their ideological effects. As Nicholas Carr convincingly argues, the internet is not a neural network and Google not an ‘artificial brain’.19 Talking about the web in biological terms not only glosses over important distinctions between hyperlinks and synapses, neural pathways and fibre-optic cables, but also contributes to the naturalization of technological phenomena: the blending of jungle imagery and high-tech lab aesthetics in Avatar is a good case in point. Moreover, the imaginative cross-mapping of minds and computers might validate the dangerous and debilitating outsourcing of personal and collective memories to databases and machines that Carr and others have described. And does the global brain idea not also promote a ‘problematic’ neurologization of human memory at the expense of social and cultural connections and conceptions of the extended mind? Finally, there are good reasons to be suspicious of the glorification of the divine network in Avatar as a benign memorial super- structure that looks after its children in benevolent ways. Is this fantasy not a deeply ideological misrepresentation of actually emerging technologies of surveillance and control that presently strive to subject people’s minds, brains and bodies to a system of total recall that indeed wants to remember everything, for disciplinary purposes? Surely, more concerns could be added to this list in order to ‘purify’ Avatar – against Gotman’s plea – from its misleading metaphors and imaginative allure. But instead one could also claim that, on the contrary, the film is not courageous and consequential enough in its emphatic imagination of new, posthuman subjects of memory. In the end, Jake Sully’s decisive emergency call to Eywa concludes the film on a profoundly humanistic note. Perplexingly, this call reduces the sublime network to some kind of telephone line and conduit of human agency and resolution; a humanist shortcut to reach a positive ending that fittingly makes use of the Pandora biosphere’s living archive for individual voices and memories. Sully’s native girlfriend Neytiri at first regards Jake’s call to Eywa as futile because ‘our great mother does not take sides, she only protects the balance of life’. The film, however, seems willing to sacrifice the complexity of the Gaia-hypothesis as a theory of self-regulating complex systems20 to a simplistic notion of assertiveness: come on, let’s give it a shot, we can do it! From the perspective of the ‘global brain’ idea this ontological and narrative privilege given to determined human action appears quite dubious. Importantly, the concepts of emergence and metasystem transition at the heart of many visions of the global brain imply that higher level capacities – such as the consciousness of the system as a whole – are by definition not accessible to their constituent parts. Neurons fire or they do not; but they have no way of knowing what emerges 74 Stephan Besser from their interaction. Hence Jake Sully talking to Eywa is like a single neuron talking to the brain it is a part of: impossible. In two other scenes the film seems prepared to acknowledge this limitation of individual agency. These sequences show large groups of Na’vi gathering around the sacred Tree of Souls in an attempt to transfer the minds of Grace Augustine and Jake Sully to Na’vi bodies. The participants in the ceremony sit down, connect their long braids to a network of fibres on the ground and start to move their bodies to the rhythm of a spiritual chant; the individual Na’vi here indeed appear as single nerve cells within in a giant cerebral cortex. However, in order to win the fight against the earthlings, individual action and personal initiative by an American ex-marine seem necessary, against his native girlfriend’s indecision and reservation. In this way, Sully’s distress call to Eywa collapses the complexities of autopoiesis and feedback loops into a simple fantasy of access and agency. The Avatar sequels’ greatest task might thus be this: to push through with imagining new subjects of agency and memory beyond the liberal humanist ones that we already know so well.

Notes

1. Bruno Latour, ‘An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”’, in New Literary History 41 (2010), 472. 2. Latour, ‘An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”’, 471. 3. Francis Heylighen, ‘The Global Brain as a New Utopia’, 2002, accessed 16 January 2015, www.globalbraininstitute.org, 2. 4. For an overview of world brain discourses see Charlie Gere, ‘Brains-in-vats, Giant Brains and World Brains: The Brain as Metaphor in Digital Culture’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 35 (2004), 355–365. 5. Peter Russell, The Global Brain Awakens: Our Next Evolutionary Leap (Palo Alto, CA: Global Brain, 1995), 141. Originally published as The Awakening Earth: The Global Brain (London: Ark Paperback, 1982). 6. Gottfried Mayer-Kress, ‘The Global Brain as an Emergent Structure from the Worldwide Computing Network, and Its Implications for Modelling’, in The Information Society 11(1) (1995), 2. 7. Mayer-Kress, ‘The Global Brain’, 2. 8. Mayer-Kress, ‘The Global Brain’, 5. 9. Heylighen, ‘The Global Brain as a New Utopia’, 4. 10. Francis Heylighen, ‘Conceptions of a Global Brain: An Historical Review’, in Evolution: Cosmic, Biological, Social, ed. Leonid Grinin, Robert L. Carneiro, Andrey V. Korotavy and Fred Spier (Volgograd: Uchitel Publishing, 2011), 284. 11. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, introduction to Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, ed. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 7. 12. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 15. 13. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 16. 14. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galtea (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 113. 15. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 121. Calling Gaia 75

16. Kélina Gotman, ‘The Neural Metaphor’, in The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain, ed. Melissa M. Littlefield and Jenell M. Johnson (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 79. 17. Gotman, ‘The Neural Metaphor’, 79. 18. Gotman, ‘The Neural Metaphor’, 84. 19. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember (London: Atlantic Books, 2010), 174. 20. See Lovelock 2000. Part II Memory in the Digital Age Introduction to Part II Sebastian Groes

Cognitive offloading, the extended mind thesis and the posthuman

If memory is what makes humans special – unique even – and the storage of memories is taken over by machines, are we not outsourcing the very nature of our existence? Or are machines making us smarter by allowing us to extend our minds with the help of new technologies that readily connect us with any kind of knowledge we desire? And, in a context of perpetual bombardment by information and constant offloading of our experience onto social media, how is this changing the formation of memories? Cognitive overstimulation, or ‘information overload’, has an unhealthy effect on memory according to certain neuroscientists. In The Overflowing Brain (2009) Torkel Klingberg argues that, because of the distraction caused by information overload, working memory is impaired, as the distracted brain’s short-term memory is unable to transfer knowledge to the long-term memory.1 As a result we experience sleeplessness, fatigue, a lack of concentration, a weakening of rational thinking in decision-making processes, as well as anxieties about social exclusion, and loss of identity.2 In the light of such phenomena, Part II investigates the particular, lived effects of digital experience on memory. It aims to transcend the intellectual stand-off between, on the one hand, voices that want to celebrate its utopian possibilities, and, on the other hand, apocalyptic critics who prophesy digital brain rot. To focus our thinking about the relationship between the digital and memory, Part II looks into three topics: cognitive offloading, the post-self that is our digital identity after we die (biologically speaking), and e-reading. It engages with and presents new research which aims to give a nuanced perspective on the effects of the digital on memory. Over the past two decades human character has changed, and at the heart of this lie changes in the nature of memory. In The Shallows (2010), Nick Carr argues that both our brain and human behaviour are irrevocably changed by the internet, that the distraction integral to our online experience prevents us from deep thinking, which also affects our capacity for empathy and compassion. George Steiner lamented the fact that the internet gives us the capacity to look up anything so that we don’t need to remember anything anymore.3 In Delete (2011), Victor Mayer-Schönberger thinks through the

78 Introduction to Part II 79 implications of a culture in which no information is discarded and everything – from our most intimate moments, shared on Facebook, to our bank transactions – is accumulated into every bigger data banks: ‘since the beginning of time, for us human, forgetting has been the norm and remembering the exception. Because of digital technology and global networks, however, this balance is shifted. Today, with the help of widespread technology, forgetting has become the exception, and remembering the default’.4 In his popular exploration of the art of memory, Moonwalking with Einstein (2011), Joshua Foer also laments the undermining of memory by our digital culture:

Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us what we are. They are the seat of our values and the source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seems beside the point, but it’s about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have become estranged.5

Such perspectives act as a contemporary incarnation of the humanist battle against forgetting, of which Homer’s Odyssey provides a key early example: ‘Any crewmen who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit, lost all desire to send a message back, much less return, their only wish to linger there with the Lotus-eaters, grazing on lotus, all memory of the journey home dissolved forever’.6 The negative assessment of technology is understandable, but often such conclusions are based on intuitive assertions designed to appeal to our instincts and driven by ideological motives rather than by a careful weighing up of scientific evidence. There is a strong reactionary, technophobe current within popular discourse, which itself has a long history of which Blake’s reference to the destruction of man’s harmonious relationship with nature by the ‘dark Satanic mills’ and the Luddite movement (1811–1817) of textile artisans who protested against machinery that replaced human labour are often cited as examples. Such cautionary narratives have continued, helped by modern cultural production which also warns us against machines taking over, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror TV series (2011–) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015). It is perhaps not surprising that some within the seriously marginalized humanities are rejecting these exciting developments in the sciences. It is interesting to see that many critics see AI machines as competitors of human beings, and not the result of human ingenuity. There is a group of critics who are much more positive about these developments. Donna Haraway’s classic ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1983) noted that modern (wo)man is a hybrid of machine and organism, which allows for a new imaginary that allows for the emancipation of society. According to N. Katherine Hayles, we have become posthuman. She states that we all have been put ‘into a cybernetic system that splices [our] will, desire, and perception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through 80 Sebastian Groes mutating and flexible machine interfaces’.7 Our minds and bodies are aided by machines, so that we’re forced to renegotiate how we define ‘the human’. Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think (2013) shows us that there are many forms of memory, from factual to social and from individual to collective, and proceeds to point out some of the apparent paradoxes which emerge from the study of memory in the twenty-first century. On the one hand, for instance, scientific evidence suggests that ‘if we know a digital tool is going to remember a fact, we’re slightly less likely to remember it ourselves’.8 And yet the inverse is also true: if we know we won’t have access to information in the future we are more inclined to remember it ourselves. The most poignant and interesting thinking lies in this complex detail: even though we may not remember a fact, our brains do remember where and how to retrieve the content. And rather than viewing social networking websites and games as experiences that disperse our focus, some evidence shows that networked thinking and a simulated experience actually boosts our (shared) memory. It turns out, for instance, that surgeons who are avid gamers are also better in the operating theatre; they develop strong motor skills, in which memory plays a key part. Stevan Harnad and Itiel Dror are thinkers who are starting to invent increasingly innovative and subtle ways of approaching the problems with which the digital era presents us. These scientists show that we may offload static definitions of words (factual memory) onto a computer without any problem, but that the intricacy of human associative memory produced by biological memory is very different from Google-based associative searches.9 They also show that our mental capacities are not simply lost because of cognitive technologies, but that they are changing, and that they might well trigger the next step in our evolutionary development.10 These critics embrace and celebrate the human mind’s integration into, and extension by, technology. Philosophers David Chalmers and Andy Clark have developed the Extended Mind Thesis (EMT), which argues that people are:

part of an extended cognitive machine [whereby] body- and world-involving cycles are best understood [. . .] as quite literally extending the machinery of mind out into the world – as building extended cognitive circuits that are themselves the minimal material bases for important aspects of human thought and reason.11

So, what does EMT suggest about memory? We see a complexification of memory, which increasingly becomes collective, shared and thus a relational but also a conditional process. Biological memory is increasingly just one part in the make-up of this distributed cognition, which is aided by non-biological forms of memory. This does not mean that suddenly we become mindless zombies blissfully adrift in cyberspace; instead, it means that we use our minds differently. This is not the first time this has happened: with the shift from oral to written culture in the middle ages, the human mind had to be retrained. Whilst formerly it had to rely on rote learning, it then had to learn how to retrieve archived knowledge via indexing. A similar shift is occurring today. Rather than a focused deep thinking, Introduction to Part II 81 the current context allows us to develop our ability to hold a multiplicity of sets of abstract data in the working memory and retrieve them as meaningful information.12 The average person is able to hold seven pieces of information in the working memory, which is known as ‘chunking’. A study of waiters in Buenos Aires by Bekinschtein, Cardozo and Manes (2008) shows that they are able to memorize eight different orders without writing them down. Due to professional deformation, their memory is above average for this type of task. The waiters’ minds have various spatial strategies in place (memory palaces) that allow them to deliver the correct dish and drinks, which only diminish slightly when guests change places. In the twenty-first century, waiters in restaurants and pubs in the West have an app on their iPhone which they use to take orders; the Bluetooth connection sends your drinks order to the bar, and by the time the waiter has returned your drinks are ready for her or him to bring back to your table. The waiter’s memory is bypassed, and s/he’s there solely for labour and social skills. However, the result is complex, and we need to tread carefully before we make any rash judgements. The outsourcing of our mind has a long history, starting with Plato, who decried writing because it entailed the destruction of memory. We should arrive at a balanced assessment of these processes. For Hayles, ‘the prospect of being posthuman both evokes terror and excites pleasure’.13 To explore cognitive offloading, this chapter takes GPS as its case study. Itiel Dror discusses GPS in relationship to human beings:

In some cases, the technology can even replace the human who is no longer needed. For example, Global Positioning System (GPS) and satellite navigation technology has in many cases taken over what humans have done in the past. These technologies tell us in real time where we are and give us directions where to go, with only minimal human involvement. Thus, operations that were almost totally reliant on human cognition and were the sole domain of human activity are now being taken over by cognitive technology.14

GPS is nothing new. Its precursor is the astrolabe, a technology used to find our way in the world since classical antiquity. The etymological origin of astrolabe is ‘star-taker’, and it uses the firmament to predict local time and the locations of the planets and stars, cast horoscopes, and determine latitude. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on Astrolabe (1391) is one of the first technical manuals for the use of the ‘Astrelabie’. It is a wonderful piece of interdisciplinary thinking, moving from its practical uses to a listing of the longitudes and latitudes of cities and towns. It also contains philosophies that attempt to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies, and a theory of astrology. What is different is that the astrolabe demands input from the mind, whilst GPS systems demand minimal human activity. The novelist and psychogeographer Will Self was part of a new research project led by neuroscientist Hugo Spiers into the extraordinary phenomenon that occurs in the posterior hippocampus of London’s black cab drivers, which is presented here in Chapter 10. The hippocampus allows humans to acquire new knowledge and memories, as well as to navigate through space, but London black cab 82 Sebastian Groes drivers’ hippocampi are unique. The Knowledge, a three-year program consisting of learning by heart the thousands of street and routes in London, allows them to brave London’s infinite labyrinth without the aid of GPS. As a result, an increased posterior hippocampal grey matter volume is acquired in response to increased taxi driving experience (Maguire et al. 2003). However, it is still not known whether this increased navigational ability is due to an increased volume of cells, or if is caused by more connections between the cells. This fascinating fact of human activity effecting structural changes in the brain is called neuroplasticity. Any type of activity literally reprogrammes the molecular structure of our nervous system, and thus has long-lasting consequences for our lives. Professional deformation not only reshapes our bodies, but also our minds. Self was aware of this when he wrote his novel The Book of Dave (2006). This novel features the London black cab driver Dave Rudman, whose depressed, psychotic mind slowly unravels after his wife, Michelle, takes away his son, Carl. The psychologically traumatized Rudman becomes a racist, misogynist and religious fanatic, and the rants he writes down in a book become prophesies in a new Bible for a community that survives an apocalypse 500 years later. In discussion with the neuroscientist who invited the writer to take part in a new experiment, Self made an extraordinary claim about plotting and writing a novel – a process that demands him to keep mental control over 100,000 words: ‘I can feel my hippocampus throbbing’.15 Spiers wanted to find out whether Self’s psychoge- ographizing would make him stand out from the control group of 24 average participants, by investigation of whether there is more activity in his hippocampus. The role of the hippocampus in navigating space was first discovered by neuroscientists John O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel, whose The Hippocampus as Cognitive Map (1978) is a seminal work in the world of neuroscience. In the early 2000s, Eleanor Maguire’s combination of neuroscience with cognitive testing found that the posterior region of the hippocampus is significantly larger in London’s black cab drivers compared to bus drivers who drive fixed routes, and increases in volume with years of experience. To explain the role of the hippocampus in mental mapping, Hugo Spiers explains that his new research investigates the correlation between the levels of a person’s thinking about their route and their aptitude for finding the quickest and shortest route to a target. In Chapter 10, Spiers speculates about Self’s own fascinating conclusion to the experiment, which suggests that there is a correlation between the human mind’s ability to navigate space and its attraction to narrative. In Chapter 11 Ineke van der Ham provides evidence for the fact that offloading technology impairs natural navigational capacities, and investigates to what extent this is actually a problem. She concludes that GPS results in a loss of cognitive function, and can make a person mindless of their environment because this technology inhibits the ability to create mental maps of external space. Yet, she notes there is another side to this technology. For people whose navigational apparatus is impaired, navigational aids can instigate neuropsychological rehabilitation, and lead to social reintegration. This has particular benefits for a world with an ageing population, but also for people whose normal cognitive ability Introduction to Part II 83 is somehow impaired, such as people suffering from epilepsy and anoxia. New technologies undermine the human mind’s natural abilities, yet they also emerge at a moment when we are moving into a new context that benefits greatly from the same technology.

The right to digital death

The authors of Chapters 12 and 13 explore how the digital experience forces us to reconsider traditional relationships between life, death and memory. What happens to our lives after we are biologically dead, but live on, digitally? In Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (2007), Professor of Comparative Media Sciences José van Dijck considers the changing value and meaning of memory when it is mediated by digital tools, and traces how collective culture and individual emotions are changing. Van Dijck also posits a reason for why people are flocking to the digital with such intensity. She states: ‘the anxiety of forgetting is implied in the desire not to be forgotten [. . .] the most important beneficiaries of this software product are your decedents. Immortality through software cultivation appears to be an attractive prospect in which to invest’.16 Van Dijck implies that there is a (perhaps at times unconscious) link between our ability to remember and our desire to not be forgotten, but the irony is that the tools that grant us the illusions of permanence might actually make us forgetful. Who wants to be present forever? Wendy Moncur explores the troublesome, uncanny questions and paradoxes surrounding identity and death in the digital age. Moncur reminds us that now, after our physical lives end, there will be memories, mementos, memorials, reputations and other kinds of memory float- ing in cyberspace. This is the ‘post-self’, which can lead to emotional encounters – imagine receiving auto-generated posts on Facebook by a deceased loved one whose account has not been deleted. It can also lead to fraud, and thus poses new ethical dilemmas and questions about ownership and control over our online lives in an increasingly commodified mediascape. This presents us with new ontological questions: a social media account and a profile picture is no proof of existence, and the implication is that the difference between presence and absence has thus become blurred. Companies such as Digital Passing have sprung up, planning legacies in the digital world, as well as apps such as LegacyOrganizer.17 Do we have a right to a digital death? Should our relatives have the right to take over and/or delete our accounts? This new context evokes a whole new series of ethical dilemmas and debates. In Chapter 13, Stacey Pitsillides continues and extends Moncur’s thinking about identity and death in the digital age. With the exponential increase of Big Data, who curates these information bases? What types of criteria are used to make decisions about what to keep and what to delete? The boundaries between the archives of the living and the archives of the dead blur as more content is potentially added by the deceased’s loved ones, whilst technological interaction with dead people’s accounts and online profiles allows for memories to be recontextu- alized and reinterpreted. Pitsillides also scrutinizes the recent obsession with ‘total 84 Sebastian Groes memory capture’, and life-logging. The company ‘Narrative Clip’ has produced a small camera that takes an image of your surroundings six times a minute, recording your entire life.18 This raises questions about privacy but it also shows a great lack of discrimination: we no longer distinguish between what is and what is not important. Why this desire to store everything, rather than trusting in human memory to make selections? The result is, however, a new form of self. Pitsillides notes:

This mesh of everyday writing may include e-mails, blogs and microblogging, websites, chat logs, profiles, news feeds et al. If you pick apart individual statements they may seem banal but as a collection it forms a deep documentation of the self, which if unified, could form a rich tapestry of the person’s activity tending to their (online) self.

The idea that we can somehow form an authentic replication of a unified human being is the topic of Lottie Moggach’s 2013 novel Kiss Me First. The novel explores the possibility of taking over someone’s identity, digitally. The novel sees an autistic IT nerd and amateur philosopher, Leila, become involved in a dark online cult that covers up suicides by artificially re-creating and perpetuating people’s online lives. Leila is asked to assume Tess’s identity, which is assembled in collaboration with the victim via the collection of her offline and online life. However, this proves a Sisyphean task:

There was so much information to deal with that I found that just recording things on my laptop wasn’t enough. Ideally I’d have an extra screen to work from but I couldn’t afford to buy one, so I ended up writing a chart on a big piece of paper with linking arrows, which I pinned up on my wall next to the photos.19

Leila has to remember Tess’s social relationships with family, friends, lovers; her preference for clothing, food, culture; the main and minor events in her life; her way of writing online messages (including quirky spelling and grammatical errors) via email and those posted on Facebook, etc. But if humans are incapable of restoring a human being, perhaps the algorithmic machinery of the company Eterni.me has a better shot at this.20 Ultimately, Pitsilides champions the ancient Greek phrase epimelesthai sautou, which means ‘to take care of ourselves’. Writing, reading and reflection are key activities for the activation of oneself in the quest for truth. This takes us to the final three chapters of part II.

Navigating knowledge and the ethic of the book

In Chapters 14–16, Michael Burke, Sebastian Groes and Adriaan van der Weel respond to some of the earlier issues raised in this introduction by exploring how reading in the digital age is changing our cognitive capabilities, and, in particular, our memory. There have been widespread concerns about the effect of the digital Introduction to Part II 85 on both reading as a private activity, and also reading cultures more generally. In Proust and the Squid (2007), Maryanne Wolf states:

I do wonder whether typical young readers view the analysis of text and the search for deeper levels as more and more anachronistic because they are so accustomed to the immediacy and seeming comprehensiveness of the on-screen information – all of which is available without critical effort, and without any apparent need to go beyond the information provided.21

In Changing Our Textual Minds (2011), Adriaan van der Weel warns again the dis- appearance of the ‘Order of the Book’ into a ‘digital textual docuverse [which] in turn becomes part of the all-digital array of mediums converged in the WorldWide Web’.22 Nicholas Carr warns of the loss of an ‘intellectual ethic: the ethic of the book’.23 In film studies, Paolo Cherchi Usai’s The Death of Cinema (2001) argues that the digital revolution is drawing us back into a ‘dark age’ in which knowledge is increasingly obscured by the ability of technology to produce images. Our contemporary culture is obsessed with producing and in the process discards and forgets much of what it produces. In light of the idea that GPS makes us less mindful of our environment, we might ask if e-reading has a detrimental effect on memory. There is an overlap with the earlier discussion of our navigational ability, as Mark Changizi notes:

Libraries and books nature-harness us, from the navigation process the physical-library-filled-with-physical-books demands to the reading of the writing itself. E-readers, on the other hand, dispense with this navigation process. Whether it’s e-readers or pretty much anything on the web, the way we get to the information isn’t by spatially navigating our way there, but, instead, by ‘beaming’ directly there like in Star Trek.24

This research is also underscored in work on reading by Ferris Jabr, who also notes that our mapping of knowledge is impaired in a digital environment.25 Research by Anne Mangen at Stavanger University has also shown that readers using Kindles are significantly worse at recalling the plot of novel compared to readers who use paper books.26 Research has shown that reading on certain light-emitting e-readers at night is bad for one’s sleep, as the light interrupts the body’s circadian rhythms.27 We might think then that the reading of physical book will stimulate and re-activate parts of the brain weakened by technology. Professor of Rhetoric Michael Burke addresses this in a multidisciplinary overview of what literary reading does to one’s body and mind. Burke argues that reading creates a dynamic free flow; the reading mind is always on the move, bringing in prior knowledge and emotions into a circuitry of affective cognition. Burke argues for the importance of implicit (non-declarative, unconscious rather than autobiographical) memory for literary reading. Rather than the idea that we bring our own frame of reference to our reading of books, Burke argues that the pleasure we derive from immersive reading 86 Sebastian Groes happens at a much deeper, bodily level, before rational consciousness. The habit of interfacing with prose fiction activates our procedural memory, and plunges us actively into non-conscious, non-linear modes that produce an immersive cognitive circuitry. In his book, Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (2011), Burke notes that the bending and folding of a paperback novel is an important (tactile) affective input for many engaged readers, but adds that the paperback is a ‘moment in time’. Future readers will find seemingly irre- placeable facets in e-readers, which will themselves come to pass, superseded in turn by a different medium of discourse processing sometime in the twenty-first century. This idea is further explored by Professor of Book and Digital Media Studies Adriaan van der Weel who, in Changing Our Textual Minds (2011) gives us an insight into the complexities of reading in the digital age. On the one hand, he notes that we are still living in the age of the Order of the Book, with material, self-contained and unchangeable books still promoting ‘a hierarchical, orderly and linear way of thinking’.28 Virtual media and e-books constitute a new ‘form of cultural transmission: democratic, fluid, tending towards disorder, consisting in endless chunks of textual matter, connected actively and deliberately through links, and passively and potentially through search queries allowing endless per- mutations and recombinations’.29 As Ananda Mitra states:

Those who have the power to create voices in the discursive space of the Internet could also be the ones who produce memory narratives of the digital age. This is a particularly curious position since the technology is problematizing power in the virtual. While the conglomerates such as media giants are attempting to wield power on the Internet, the traditionally powerless individuals are able to carve out a discursive zone for themselves too.30

Adam Roberts’s sf novel New Model Army (2010), for instance, explores the democratizing effects of technology, showing how hierarchical army structures can potentially be broken down through the use of wikis.31 In his section, though, Van der Weel takes a cautionary approach, and comes down against cognitive offloading. He notes that physical books outperform digital books when it comes to retention, and finds that e-reading is a greater departure from our age-old habits than we realize: our ‘literate mentality’ is under threat in many ways. Burke’s Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion gives an effective description of affective cognition by quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wanted literary fiction to create ‘lingering after-effects in the mind of the reader’.32 Fitzgerald is the starting point of Sebastian Groes’ own thinking about how identity has changed in the digital age, when the material objects we associate with ourselves are slowly disappearing into ever smaller devices and cloud computing. Groes unpicks the myth that our world is dematerializing, warning against the e-waste dumping grounds that are emerging across the developing world. However, Groes ultimately rejects the concerns of the apocalypticists by arguing that electronic reading is not Introduction to Part II 87 necessarily an attack on the print book, but that it forms an additional mode that adds a new, rich experience. Groes reframes scientific and technological developments as an exciting, energizing turn towards novel forms of creativity that is part of the accelerating evolution of mankind and civilization. Although the digital seems to force the mainstream novel beyond its adaptive range, stretching the novel to its representational limits, there are new, experimental forms. Literature is forced to find new ways of storytelling that accurately capture our accelerated, multi-level contemporary experience. Early examples include Robert Pinsky’s ‘Mindwheel’ (1984) and Shelley Jackson’s cyber-feminist Patchwork Girl (1995). More recently, we see an interesting marriage of storytelling and new media. Novelist Naomi Alderman created the running app ‘Zombies, Run!’ (2012), with an intricate storyline, and her short story ‘Together’ (2013) ponders a future, hyper-networked world where every thought is broadcast directly through social media. The digital allows creators to works across media. Another poignant example is the magic realist adventure game in five acts, Kentucky Zero Route, produced and published by Cardboard Computer.33 Jennifer Egan’s short story ‘Black Box’ (2012) was first published on Twitter, and traces the adventures of a woman spy through terse, aphoristic messages. Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things about Me (2012) was originally published as a series of 100 lists on Facebook. The ‘I Love Alaska’ (2009) project is a series of short films based on search key words leaked by AOL in 2006, and asks how we can recuperate the human element, individuality, emotions and love in the Big Data age.34 What is striking about these short fictions is that they are written in the present tense, as if any memory of the past has been wiped out, and they thus seem to align themselves with the cautionary critics. However, fictions by this new generation of writers are much more ambivalent; they reject the technophobic attitudes of the apocalyptic thinkers, and create new, hopeful narratives that embrace the new possibilities offered by new technologies, revelling in the various cognitive augmentations and enhancements, whilst ensuring that newly conceived and creative forms of ‘the human’ are preserved for these new, exciting times. This also includes new forms of memory, and reconsiderations of how the mind can be made to work differently, moving ever closer to a collective, distributed and democratic mindset. 9 What’s in a Brain? Will Self

Coming out of a lecture theatre at University College London into rare – for this sodden, sodding year – summer sunshine, I found myself, uncharacteristically, flirting with a young woman who had been sitting in a back row during the proceedings. Sitting there, her pretty, dark, serious face angled down into her lap, her fingers deftly negotiating the loops and strands of her knitting. ‘You were knitting’, I said in a slightly accusatory way. ‘Um, yes’, she flushed, ‘it helps me to concentrate’. ‘I see,’ I pressed on, breathing deeply, happy to be free of the fusty atmosphere of hers and all the other attendees’ concentration, ‘and where’re you off to now?’ I gestured to her overnight bag, which faithfully dogged her shiny red high heels. ‘Oh’, she said gaily, ‘I’m going to Cheltenham for the science festival . . .’ For a few moments I considered an alternative future for myself: one in which I followed the attractive tricoteuse to Cheltenham, and seduced her over individual UHT milk cartons in an all-beige Trusthouse Forte hotel room somewhere on the A46 bypass; I pictured us at receptions full of eggheads eating canapés of quails’ ones, and chewing over with them cold fusion and the whereabouts of the Higgs boson; I imagined the faint disgust that we’d encounter wherever we went – she so young and neat, and good at her knitting, me so old, shambolic and unravelling. ‘I expect that must have been a pretty weird experience for you in there’. A voice intruded into my reverie, and I realized I’d forgotten all about my lissom fantasy lover, and she had been replaced by a much older woman who regarded me quizzically through thick glasses. ‘I’m sorry,’ I played for time while casting around for the high heels, which eventually I spotted, clacking away along the alley. ‘I said’, the older woman reiterated a little testily, ‘that it must have been a pretty weird experience having the contents of your brain shown to all those people in the lecture theatre’. I mulled this over for a short while, envisioning the naked bodies on the candle- wick bedspread, writhing on top of the crackling and popping UHT milk cartons . . . ‘Well,’ I replied judiciously, ‘it was by no means the entire contents of my brain, and frankly, nor was it the weirdest experience I’ve ever had . . .’ And as the older

89 90 Will Self woman continued to scrutinize me from under a slightly threatening grey fringe, the weirdest things that had ever happened to my brain rat-a-tat-tatted through that brain – acid trip peak playing card riffled by an expert dealer . . . When I surfaced from my reverie, the older woman had also gone – possibly to the Cheltenham Science Festival as well, or maybe simply home to a maisonette above a pound shop on Cricklewood Broadway; the possibilities, one might haz- ard, were close to infinite. It was true that the proceedings in the lecture theatre – where Dr. Hugo Spiers, a lecturer in the UCL Department of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences, had been exhibiting an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) generated image of my brain on a large VDU screen, while his colleague, Dr. Bas Groes, a lecturer in the University of Roehampton’s English Department, discussed the relationship between my grey matter and the material of my fictional landscapes – had been fairly strange. But then that was mostly down to them. My role in the gig had been largely passive: I simply sat there while Hugo and Bas, um . . . lectured; sat there like one of Charcot’s mesmerized subjects at the Salpêtrière in Paris, who remained inert while the founding father of modern neurology held forth to a rapt audience that, at one point, included the young Sigmund Freud. This is a story about writers, their brains, and what goes on in them. In a way that’s a rather superfluous remark, because when you come to think about it (in your brain, naturally), all stories are about this; or, rather, all stories are born out of what goes on in writers’ brains, whether those goings on be a premature ejaculation of ultra-high-temperature processed milk, or asking the vicar if he’d like some of the ordinary pasteurized stuff in his tea. But where this story differs is that it’s about a scientific attempt to examine specifically the spatial awareness of one writer’s brain – le mien – and relate this data to his fictional concerns. Like all narratives, this one can be conceived of as a journey from A to B, with various incidents – C, F, possibly L – along the way. What makes that journey rather bedevilling is that the experiment itself consisted in the taking of a journey – so that what we end up with is a journey of a journey about journeying itself. Strap yourself in – it’s going to be a wild, brainiacal ride! I’ve been interested in neurology and neuroscience for a long time. My own novels and short stories are often concerned by strange mental – and by inference brain – states: my characters sink into bizarre dream worlds, or enter parallel ones where everyone else is an ape, or they awake to discover that they’ve acquired new primary sexual characteristics. Either all these oddities have to be thrust forcibly into my readers’ minds – just as Kafka told his ones straight up that Gregor Samsa had metamorphosed into an enormous bug – or you must attempt to give them some sort of explanation that flatters their sense of themselves as well-informed. A search for a rational underpinning to these fantastical imaginings led me, over the years, to A. R. Luria, the pioneering Russian neurologist whose work with brain-damaged Red Army soldiers wounded during the Second World War was encapsulated in two astonishing books: The Man with a Shattered World and The Mind of a Mnemonist. What’s in a Brain? 91

Luria’s neurological thinking proceeded by fairly logical steps: having right in front of him a man with this or that part of his brain shot to pieces, he related this organic deficiency to the functional ones the patient exhibited, and so arrived at insights into the morphology of the human brain. The methodology of the British neurologist Oliver Sacks was slightly different: his books – which have catchy titles like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars – and are equally, insanely readable, take the form of the unusual case histories of people who have suffered pathological brain damage of one sort of another, or who are innately different in the matter of their grey stuff. Idiot savants who can instantly pronounce the square root of an irrational number to umpteen decimal places; stroke victims who have lost all long-term memory and are compelled to live in a loop of time two minutes long; Parkinsonian patients who wake from decades-long comas – these, the outer limits of human mental functioning, are meat and bread to Sacks, and over the years I’ve pretty much shamelessly abstracted and simplified his elegant investigations of these phenomena to provide cod-scientific explanations of my own whacky characters’ weird states of mind. What I’ve been markedly less interested in is the state of my own brain, which is odd, when you consider that over the years I’ve exercised it rather extensively in the jungle gym erected by mind-altering drugs. But then, maybe it’s not so strange after all; having spent nigh on a quarter century going up, down, sideways, and spiralling into psychic tangles of an Escher- like complexity, when I finally abandoned intoxication in all its forms – apart from the solid meat-and-potatoes combo of caffeine and nicotine – I found myself happily married to a sense of my own mental clarity, and even stability. True, all that marijuana seemed to have made linking names to faces and vice versa rather tricky, while my long term memory in general was as reliable as skateboard made from rice pudding – but then wasn’t middle age always thus? So I confined my altered states to the printed page, and plotted what I thought of as an increasingly pedestrian – and more comfortable – path through Dante’s dark wood. Pedestrian both metaphorically and literally, as in my forties I began to take longer and more convoluted walks through the greyish matter of cities – not only my native London, but also New York, Los Angeles, and even Dubai. The walks were a way of getting out of the house, a method of hunting down and gathering up new material for my writing, and – something I could only latterly admit – a strategy for both coping with the frenetic world zipping past my tired eyes, and achieving a more meditative state in the midst of all the peeping, zooming, iPhon- ing hurly-burly. It was into this calm zone that Drs. Spiers and Groes disruptively strode – I was taking part in an event with Bas Groes at the Museum of London to support the publication of his book about London writing when he introduced me to Hugo Spiers. Hugo told me that he was doing a project where he took MRI scans of people’s brains while they were actually engaged in route-planning, and that he thought writers’ brains – and in particular writers who were preoccupied with describing 92 Will Self place – would be an interesting addition to the study, so, would I be prepared to let him and his team look inside my brain? None of this came as a huge surprise to me: when I was researching my novel The Book of Dave, the protagonist of which is a maddened London cab driver, I became aware of research that had been carried out which conclusively proved that there was an area of cabbies’ brains that – as a result of their astonishing memorization of The Knowledge (a comprehensive mapping of London’s roads and buildings) – was considerably enlarged. This was the hippocampus, a very ancient region of the human brain which was probably functioning when our fishy forefathers first sprouted legs and plotted a course on to the land. That the brain should be so plastic as to undergo these changes seemed remarkable – but what was perhaps still more remarkable was that the research also demonstrated that the hippocampuses of cabbies shrank back to normal once they stopped cruising around and asking punters ‘Where to, guv?’ Would my brain, Spiers wondered, exhibit some of the same characteristics, preoccupied as it was by conducting imaginary punters through the streets of a virtually realized London of the mind? But before Hugo could scan my brain, he needed me to do the route-planning tasks that would form the basis of his enquiry. I was a little surprised to learn that these would take place in London’s red light district, Soho, and involve me plotting a series of routes from cafés, to bars, to restaurants to shops. The choice of Soho was because the streets – unusually for London – are lain out in straightforward grid pattern, but I cavilled: Hugo’s research students, Bex and Ella-Mai, told me most of the test subjects had little familiarity with this dirty neck of the dark woods, but I had spent decades lurching, staggering and trolling the streets of Soho; surely this made me an unsuitable case for their treatment? ‘No’, they said, ‘we thoroughly tutor all the others in the Soho street plan, so we’ll simply tutor you less’. Wandering around Soho with young women chivvying me from cafés to bars was a deeply familiar experience . . . albeit that in the past it had mostly taken place at night. After an hour or so of this, Bex and Ella-Mai tested me on my mini version of the cabbie’s Knowledge. The key thing was not so much the course I plotted from, say, the Groucho Club in Dean Street to the men’s urinal in Broadwick Street, but the activity of my brain when I was asked, halfway through the trip, to change my destination to, for example, the Janus sex shop on Old Compton Street. Setting firmly to one side, if you can, the rather perverse nature of these particular coordinates; you need to instead picture me, the following day, being assisted to lie down in the strange sarcophagus of the MRI machine at the UCL Centre for Neuroimaging, about a mile away in Bloomsbury. Again: lying down in clamorous half-light, unable to move, and watching a film isn’t that much of a rarity for me – and I don’t suppose it is for you either. I was met at the Centre by the lithe, darkly handsome Spiers and the ever-effervescent Groes; and while the atmosphere wasn’t exactly seductive – what with the VDU monitors, and the white coats, and the beige linoleum floors – the requirement What’s in a Brain? 93 that I remove my shoes and lie prone, and the presence of ministering females did make an otherwise dull undertaking seem slightly more seductive. There had been concerns expressed that I would feel claustrophobic in the MRI, or even that the prospect of the convoluted whorls of my gyri and sulci – that’s the distinctive ridges and furrows of the cortex – being penetrated by magnetic waves, might give me the heebie-jeebies. But the institutional atmosphere – and the mundane nature of the tasks I was being asked to perform – effectively sedated me. Looking back on it, though, it was fairly weird: the point-of-view of a rather recalcitrant pedestrian was screened in front of me via a carefully positioned mirror; and by using buttons I could instruct my virtual counterpart to advance, halt, and turn to the right or left, or reverse. Once again, it wasn’t so much my forward planning at the start of each task that Hugo Spiers’ team were interested in; it was the activity in the hippocampus when, frustratingly, they told me to change my destination and recalculate the route. Whenever, via headphones, the disembodied voice told my disembodied brain to do this, I had the sensation of being in one of those charged dreams, where you’re just about to have sex/fly like a bird/assassinate David Cameron, but are being annoyingly frustrated to the point where you . . . wake up. The MRI scanner cuts the human brain into 176 different slices – that’s a lot of slices, but then it’s also a lot of brain: thousands of kilometres of synaptic nerves, and so many humps and bumps and ruches of grey gloop, that were they all to be spread out, the thinking I would achieve the dimensions of . . . Soho. The scanner is good on spatial resolution – but pretty poor on temporal. This means that while the overall activity of the hippocampus during the test can be assessed, it’s pretty difficult to nail down the exact moment when I was thinking, ‘Mmm, how do I get to that shop where they sell poppers?’ As a result, neuroscientists talk lovingly of other brain-imaging technologies such as EROS (Event-Related Optical Signal), and PET (Positron Emission Tomography), which, probably because of their kinky acronyms as much as anything else, can provide kinds of information about what’s going on in the gloop. What’s going on – but not our individual thoughts, hopes and desires. Despite centuries now of mechanistic approaches to brain function – and the widespread acceptance that we, more or less, are our brains – scientists are no closer to capturing on camera that evanescent, shape- shifting, poetical phenomenon: self-consciousness. Months later, sitting in front of that bookish audience in the University College of London lecture theatre, Hugo and Bas tried to big-up my brain – as if it needed any encouragement. Projecting images of my glowing brain together with graphs that plotted its activity as against that of other test subjects, they observed that my hippocampus was significantly more active in the planning stages of the tasks I’d been allocated than those of their other test subjects. The conclusions they reached from this were – even to my way of thinking – speculative, at best: much of what they said was ambiguous, but I got the definite impression that they believed there was some correlation between my imaginative novelizing and my thoughtful trolling around the fleshpots of Soho. 94 Will Self

I like to think that, too – else why would I hang out there so much? But when, a couple of weeks later, I met up in a Soho coffee shop with Lorelei Howard, another of Hugo’s research students, she framed the whole project in rather more believably prosaic terms for me. Far from being some unique guru of the spatial, my variation from the statistical mean of their test subjects was not – once various factors had been taken into account – that significant. And besides, the study wasn’t really aimed at saying anything much about the individual, and how he or she route-planned, but in trying to identify the role of two parts of the human hippocampus – the anterior and the posterior – in the separate tasks of establishing a pathway to a destination, and employing basic Euclidean geometry to determine – at any given point – how far away that goal was. Lorelei, who has a rare ability to make very complex ideas easily assimilable by even the most lackadaisical brains, explained that while previous studies had managed to differentiate these separate tasks and allocate one – pathway planning – to the posterior hippocampus; and the other – spatial updating – to the anterior, she thought theirs was the first to present a theory of how they were integrated. All those years of puttering about town with clipboards attached to the handle- bars of their mopeds had allowed trainee cabbies to sop up pathway knowledge the way a GPS system is pre-programmed with maps; but the actual business of spatially updating – so that the cabbie on a job knows he’s a mile from King’s Cross as the crow flies rather than two, despite the fact he’s had to divert to avoid the road works on the Euston Road – is not necessarily anymore evolved in him than any other metal-enmeshed city driver. This made perfect sense to me, and corresponded to an intuitive understanding of how we get to places: we don’t need to maintain a map of the area we’re negotiating, only alter our distance and direction in terms of our eventual destination in response to conditions on the ground. And following this thought on, it struck me that the GPS analogy wasn’t the only one that worked in terms of Hugo and Lorelei’s findings. When I began this piece, I had an idea of where I wanted to get to, and in order to reach that point I planned a sort of pathway from the beginning to the end of the tale I wanted to tell. Of course, as I put down finger upon finger and moved along the twisting lines of my own prose, I made many decisions about where I wanted to go next – yet how far away my eventual concluding sentence was remained fixed in my mind, and this Euclidean insight was ceaselessly being updated. For a novelist, a 3,000 word feature is something of a stroll in the park – but when you get the long hike involved in 100,000 words or more, the same principle applies. Watching Lorelei move the cursor across the screen of her laptop, bringing different bits of my brain into view, it occurred to me that it wasn’t accidental that many of the first narrative fictions took the form of journeys – picaresques, in which their heroes have odd encounters along the way – for perhaps the very structure and functioning of the human brain is implicit in such schemas? What’s in a Brain? 95

It was a big thought, and I managed to hold on to it while I said goodbye to Lorelei, but then, as I left the café and hit Berwick Street market, something about the smells of the fruit and veg, and the Soho girls strutting along the crowded pavements, and the general swagger of summertime London, sent me into quite another reverie . . . something to do with Cheltenham and individual UHT milk cartons, I think. But then that’s the human brain for you: you can examine it all you like, but you never know what it’s going to come up with next. Weird, no?35

Notes

1. Klingberg notes: ‘As advances in information technology and communication supply us with information at an ever accelerating rate, the limitations of our brains become all the more obvious. Boundaries are defined no longer by technology but by our own biology’. Torkel Klingberg, The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. 2. See Sebastian Groes, ‘Information Overload’, Textual Practice, Vol. 30, Issue 1, January 2016. [Forthcoming]. 3. George Steiner quoted by A. S. Byatt in the introduction to Memory: An Anthology, ed. Harriet Harvey Wood and A. S. Byatt (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008), xv. 4. Victor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2011), Loc. 70. 5. Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 269–270. 6. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, 2002), Loc. 5519. 7. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), xiv. 8. Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think (New York: Harper Collins, 2013), Loc. 1777. 9. Leslie Carr and Stevan Harnad, ‘Offloading Cognition onto the Web’ (2009), accessed 14 November, 2014, http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/271030/1/lesdoc2.pdf 10. Itiel Dror, ‘Cognitive Technology’, in McGraw-Hill Yearbook of Science and Technology 2013, McGraw-Hill Editorial Staff, accessed 11 October 2013, http://www.cci-hq.com/ Dror_MH_Cognitive_Technology.pdf 11. Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Loc. 322–32. 12. Klingberg, Overflowing Brain, 56. 13. Hayles, Posthuman, 283. 14. Dror, ‘Cognitive Technology’. 15. Will Self during a private communication in preparation for the Soho experiment. 16. José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age: Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 161. 17. See http://www.digitalpassing.com/ 18. See http://getnarrative.com/ 19. Lottie Moggach, Kiss Me First (London: Picador, 2013), 86. 20. See www.eterni.me 21. Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 225. 22. Adriaan van der Weel, Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2011), 2. 23. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows (London: Atlantic, 2010), 67. 24. Mark Changizi, ‘Do I want my brain in physical books, or in e-books?’, Discover Magazine 28 October 2013, accessed 15 March 2015, http://blogs.discovermagazine. com/crux/2013/10/28/want-brain-physical-books-e-books/#.VQAuq45y1T8 96 Will Self

25. Ferris Jabr, ‘The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper Versus Screens’, Scientific American (2013), http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id= reading-paper-screens. 26. See http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb-less-kindles- paper-study-plot-ereader-digitisation 27. Elaine St. Peter, ‘E-Readers Foil Good Night Sleep’, Harvard Medical School News 5 January 2015, accessed 14 January 2015, http://hms.harvard.edu/news/e-readers-foil- good-nights-sleep 28. Weel, Changing, 193. 29. Weel, Changing, 193. 30. Ananda Mitra, ‘Digital Memory’, Journal of Information, Communication & Ethics in Society 3(1) (2005), 5. 31. See also the comments Roberts makes in an AHRC blog, ‘Saving Our Memory for the Future’, 29 May 2014, http://thememorynetwork.net/saving-our-memory-for-the- future-memory-in-the-digital-age/ 32. See Michael Burke, Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1. 33. See http://kentuckyroutezero.com/ 34. See http://www.minimovies.org/documentaires/view/ilovealaska 35. This article is a reprint from Esquire, Film and Book Special, October 2012, pp. 184–189. We would like to thank Will Self for granting us permission to reprint it. 10 Will Self and His Inner Seahorse Hugo J. Spiers

Introduction

Remembering the past, navigating the present, and imagining the future rely on a brain structure known as the hippocampus (O’Keefe and Nadel 1978; Hassabis et al. 2007; Spiers 2012). Its name comes from the Latin for seahorse, which it looks similar to. It lies buried deep in each hemisphere of the brain. Damage to the hippocampus prevents the formation of new memories and thus has a dramatic impact on the ability to navigate newly encountered environments (Scoville and Milner 1957; Spiers et al. 2001a) or remember what happened in different places (Spiers et al. 2001b; Spiers 2012). There has been considerable interest in the role the hippocampus plays in navigation and spatial memory. This is due to the fact that the hippocampus, and neighbouring brain regions, contain neurons that provide a neural system analogous to a map, compass and coordinate system. Neurons in the hippocampus, known as ‘place cells’, provide a signal that can be likened to a ‘you are here’ marker for every place visited (O’Keefe and Nadel 1978). Each cell generates action potentials when the animal enters a particular part of space, and not in other locations. Action potentials provide the means by which neurons communicate information between each other. In the case of the hippocampus, these action potentials allow the animal to determine where it is located. The collective pattern of action potentials fired by all of the place cells provides a representation of current location in the world. In brain structures that are connected to the hippocampus there exist cells known as ‘head-direction cells’ (Taube et al. 1990). Each cell is active when facing a particular direction relative to the axes of the environment. Because each cell prefers a different direction, they provide a representation in the brain similar to a compass signal. Other spatial cells in the network of structures connected to the hippocampal region increase activity in relation to the boundaries of the environment (Solstad et al. 2008) or create a grid pattern that has been likened to the latitude and longitude that mark out space on a map (Hafting et al. 2005; Buszaki and Moser 2008).

97 98 Hugo J. Spiers

The hippocampus of London taxi drivers

A curious fact about the hippocampus is that the posterior part of the structure is significantly larger in licensed London taxi drivers compared to non-taxi drivers (Maguire et al. 2000; Maguire et al. 2006). Its size has also been found to increase with years of experience (Maguire et al. 2000; Maguire et al. 2006). London taxi drivers, or ‘London Cabbies’ as they are often referred to, are unique amongst taxi drivers in the world in terms of the amount of learning required to obtain a licence to operate. They need to pass a gruelling exam, in which they must be able to recall all the correct streets linking any two randomly chosen points in the 25,000 streets of London. This knowledge is referred to as the ‘Knowledge of London’ and typically takes several years of study. Current evidence suggests that it is the acquisition of this spatial knowledge and its use on the job that causes the taxi driver’s posterior hippocampus to become larger. The writer and psychogeographer Will Self draws on these findings in his book, The Book of Dave (2006). The Book of Dave follows the experiences and ravings of Dave Rudman, fictional misogynistic London cabbie, and a twin narrative set in the post-apocalyptic future, a world where those ravings, transcribed onto sheets of metal, have become a gospel for a new religion. Jane Bernal, the psychiatrist treating Dave, misinterprets his references to a ‘revelatory text’:

I believe he committed it to memory. As you may be aware, brain scans have confirmed that the posterior hippocampus in London cabbies can be considerably enlarged – that’s where the book is buried, and there’s more to it than just his Knowledge.1

In the years since Will Self published this book, research has shown that it is not driving the streets of London per se, or the learning of a large volume of knowledge, that lies behind the change in the hippocampus of London taxi drivers. London bus drivers, who similarly drive all day, do not have a larger posterior hippocampus (Maguire et al. 2006). Doctors who train over many years to acquire a vast medical knowledge show no change in hippocampal size over the course of training (Woollett et al. 2008). Thus, it appears to be the acquisition and daily usage of the spatial knowledge that is responsible for the larger hippocampus. Woollett and Maguire (2011) scanned trainee taxi drivers before and after passing their knowledge exam. Trainees who passed showed a larger hippocampus than before training and compared to controls. Those who failed the exam and gave up showed no change in their hippocampus. Retired taxi drivers have been found to have a smaller posterior hippocampus than full-time working taxi drivers (Woollett et al. 2009). Such work indicates that it is the successful use of this spatial knowledge that causes the posterior hippocampus to enlarge.

Neuro-psychogeography with London taxi drivers

A question that naturally arises from the study of London taxi drivers is: when do they use their hippocampus? Is it active continuously as they drive the city streets Will Self and His Inner Seahorse 99 or only during specific events? Monitoring a taxi driver’s hippocampus while they drive across a city is not currently possible. Brain recording methods require an individual to lie, or sit still in a large apparatus. To surmount this challenge, rather than take the brain measurement out to the streets, Spiers and Maguire (2006) brought the streets of London into the brain scanner. A virtual simulation of central London (‘The Getaway’), created by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, was used to simulate the daily experience of taxi drivers. This virtual simulation allowed experimental control over the experience of navigation and for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to be conducted concurrently during the navigation. Using fMRI it is possible to determine how activity across the brain is changing during the different moments of a task. However, purely analysing brain activity related to what someone is seeing (such as a street junction) or doing (such as turning left) doesn’t allow us to understand the relationship between internal thoughts and brain activity (Spiers and Maguire 2007). For example, someone might decide to turn left because they know the way. Alternatively, they might have turned left as a random choice because they were lost. In order to provide a link between the taxi drivers’ thoughts during travel and their brain activity, Spiers and Maguire (2006) gave the taxi drivers a surprise debriefing immediately post-scan. Such a link between thought and space can be described as a form of psychogeography; linking this psychogeography with neural data could then be termed a form of neuro-psychogeography. In this method, using a verbal report protocol (see Spiers and Maguire 2008), taxi drivers re-watched the movies they had navigated during the MRI scan and described what they remembered thinking at different time periods. These thoughts were categorized according to a protocol (for example, thoughts related to actions or spotting landmarks) and time stamped in relation to brain activity. The resulting analysis revealed a dynamic pattern of thoughts (Spiers and Maguire 2008) and brain activity (Spiers and Maguire 2006), wherein little of the duration of the route was taken up with thinking about the space. Taxi drivers reported spending much of their time coasting along, with undirected thoughts, or inspecting the buildings and traffic. Their hippocampus only showed a consistent increase in activity at the moment when the customer requested they be taken to a destination. Diverse descriptions of the mental experience of route planning were given. For example one taxi driver recalls planning his route:

And that’s all visual in my mind. When I do it here, I zigzag visually, so I do a fast-forward. The nearest you can get to it is very, very … less than a second, very, very fast I go de-de-de-de-de that fits. So in my mind I’m going very fast visually and I’m seeing the streets, not from a plan bird’s eye view, but just forward fast, left, right and it’s done. It’s done as quick as that, but it’s visual. It’s checking – yes, that’s it, that’ll work.

And in the case of another taxi driver:

I’ve got an over-patched picture of Peter Street. It sounds daft, but I don’t view it from ground level, it was slightly up and I could see the whole area as though 100 Hugo J. Spiers

I was about 50 foot up. And I saw Peter Street, I saw the market and I knew I had to get down to Peter Street.

By combining fMRI, virtual reality and debriefing methods, it has been possible to determine which thoughts and experiences might underlie the changes in brain seen in London taxi drivers. Recent research has also begun to show similar patterns in people who are not taxi drivers.

Neuro-psychogeography in London’s Soho

Two drawbacks to the study of taxi drivers in the virtual reality London were that the environment was a distorted creation of the real London, and that the taxi drivers often chose different routes based on personal preference. This meant that it was difficult to compare experiences across different taxi drivers, and that they spent some of the journey puzzled at the odd distortions. To get round both of these difficulties and to explore the relationship between route planning and hippocampal activity in non-taxi drivers, Howard et al. (2014) devised a new approach. In this study, healthy volunteers were trained, like London taxi drivers, to learn the Knowledge of the north of Soho (23 streets and 26 points of interest) with a guided tour. The next day the volunteers were scanned with fMRI while they watched a simulated experience of travelling through the streets of London’s Soho district. The simulation was created using high-definition film shot in Soho. Being London’s red light district, Soho provides a vivid array of landmarks and dark alleys to probe navigation ability. At every street junction in the simulation volunteers had to choose which direction to proceed to get to a destination requested. Most of the time the simulation let them go in the chosen direction, but some of the time it took a detour. Just as for taxi drivers, after scanning a surprise debriefing was also given. Howard et al. (in preparation) found that the volunteers varied in the number of times they described planning their route. Some subjects described planning very little, others planning much of the time. Those who planned a lot showed more activity in their hippocampus than those who planned little (Howard et al., in preparation). Thus, the engagement of the hippocampus appears to depend on the extent to which someone thinks about what the possible streets they might want to take during navigation.

Neuro-psychogeography with Will Self

In addition to creating fictitious London taxi drivers, and many other lurid characters, Will Self has written about his psychogeography, recalling his mental experiences of travels to different places. Given his propensity for thinking about space, it seemed possible that, if scanned navigating the task of Howard et al. (2014), he might think more than the average volunteer about the streets and places when navigating Soho. If this was true then he should show more than an average amount of hippocampal activity. To help test this hypothesis, Will Self took part in the experiment (see Chapter 9).3 Will Self and His Inner Seahorse 101

Our analysis of Self’s post-scan debriefing and his brain activity confirmed both our hypotheses. Will not only described thinking about his route more than the average participant, but thought about it more than any other participant. The activity in his hippocampus was, as predicted, higher than the average subject. One possible explanation for why Will Self and those like him that think more about space may activate their hippocampus is that the process of thinking about space requires activation of place cells that represent the places along the future paths. Recent evidence of recordings in rats is consistent with this notion (Pfeiffer and Foster 2013; Spiers and Barry 2015). It is possible that other writers that consider space in their work might show similarly increased activation in their hippocampus. Self was also able to provide some useful insights into the MRI experience. Most volunteers visiting for MRI scans find it interesting but have little to remark about the process. Self, by contrast, renowned for his capacity for sharply reflecting on his experiences, had much to say. He remarked that while the experience ‘was fairly weird … I had the sensation of being in one of those charged dreams, where you’re just about to have sex/fly like a bird/assassinate David Cameron, but are being annoyingly frustrated to the point where you … wake up’.2 Perhaps too few volunteers would be willing to admit to thinking about such experiences. Will did note that despite the oddness of being in a scanner, having to think about his route felt very similar to the experience of being out in the streets of London. One of the points raised in discussions was that currently neuroscientists have been focusing on a very particular part of spatial experience – navigating from A to B. However, our experiences in space are much broader: browsing shops, mean- dering on a walk, exploring new places never visited before. Future research will hopefully tackle these broader areas of human experience. Another point Self raised was the similarity between navigating space and navigating a narrative:

It struck me that the GPS analogy wasn’t the only one that worked … When I began this piece, I had an idea of where I wanted to get to, and in order to reach that point I planned a sort of pathway from the beginning to the end of the tale I wanted to tell. Of course, as I put down finger upon finger and moved along the twisting lines of my own prose, I made many decisions about where I wanted to go next – yet how far away my eventual concluding sentence was remained fixed in my mind … For a novelist, a 3,000-word feature is something of a stroll in the park – but when you get the long hike involved in 100,000 words or more, the same principle applies. It occurred to me that it wasn’t accidental that many of the first narrative fictions took the form of journeys – picaresques, in which their heroes have odd encounters along the way – for perhaps the very structure and functioning of the human brain is implicit in such schemas? (see p. 94 in Chapter 9)

Interestingly, Self is not the first to consider that navigating narratives may be akin to navigating space. In 1978, O’Keefe and Nadel developed the idea that the 102 Hugo J. Spiers capacity to process narratives arose from a primal spatial processing system in the hippocampus. Surprisingly, only recently have researchers begun to explore how the brain processes information during narratives, and the hypothesis of O’Keefe and Nadel (1978) thus still requires validation. The insights of writers and neuroscientists, combined, will undoubtedly be useful in this endeavour.

Notes

1. Will Self, The Book of Dave. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. 2. Will Self , Esquire magazine 2013. 3. Dr Lorelei Howard helped collect and analyse the data during scanning and debriefing. Dr Rebecca Knight kindly ran the training in Soho. Funding for the project was gratefully received from The James S. McDonnell Foundation, USA and the Wellcome Trust, UK project grant 094850/Z/10/Z. MRI support was generously provided by the team at the Birkbeck-UCL Centre for Neuroimaging. 11 Navigational Aids in Neuropsyc hological Rehabilitation Ineke van der Ham

When we are about to visit a city for the first time, we will probably look up the address of our hotel online, and then plan our route on Google Maps and maybe even consult Street View to get an idea of what the street of our hotel looks like. If we are going there by car, most of us will simply enter the address in our GPS system, which will take us where we need to go. The way most of us find our way in situations like these has changed dramatically over the last decade. The development of electronic palmtops quickly led to route planning applications. The popularity and usability of these applications increased enormously, to the point where such tools are now a standard feature on any smartphone. Yet, before these route planning tools, or navigation assistive devices, became so common, most of us could easily live without them. Paper maps and asking other people for directions did the trick as well. What happens to your cognitive abilities when an app on your phone makes your own mental efforts obsolete? Several psychological experiments have pointed out that external aids lead to a decline in navigational ability (Gardony et al. 2013; Willis et al. 2009). So, if cognitive decline is really noticeable, the next question to ask is whether this is a problem. In search of an answer to this question, it is important to realise that navigation aids have different types of users: those who are able to navigate adequately without those aids, and those who are not. Patient AC falls into the latter category. She is a highly educated woman in her 30s. Cognitively, she functions normally, apart from this one problem: she can suddenly get lost. Imagine you are driving on the highway with your three young children on the back seat. You pass an exit and all of a sudden you wonder: should I have taken that exit, or maybe the next one? This is a fairly common situation, but now imagine you really have no idea where to go: is it just another 500 metres, or maybe 50 kilometres? You start to panic, because you are driving at high speed and have no clue about what to do next, and you worry about your children: are they noticing you are getting very anxious? Can I still take them home safely? This is what patient AC regularly experiences. When she is driving her car, she can suddenly be overwhelmed with a feeling of not knowing where to go next. Given the high levels of stress such a condition obviously

103 104 Ineke van der Ham brings about, this problem was first misdiagnosed as an anxiety disorder. Only when psychiatric treatment did not help was she referred to a neurologist. Then, a small lesion in the right parietal cortex of her brain was discovered, most likely the result of complications during the birth of her third child. This particular area of the brain is very important for the spatial decisions we make when we move around, and explained for highly specific cognitive impairment (van der Ham et al. 2010). In the same study, we examined another patient, WJ, a woman with a brain tumour resulting in severe damage to the posterior part of her right hemisphere, an area that is involved in spatial processing. She had considerable cognitive problems, but complained specifically about the problems she had when walking or biking somewhere by herself. Before she set out, she would get nervous about any potential roadblocks she might encounter. Just the thought of the possibility that she could be forced to cross the street to avoid construction work would discourage her from going out by herself. Improvising even a small detour from her regular routes was nearly impossible for her. Also, she would rarely ride her bike anymore, as the speed of riding it was too high for her to anticipate turns she would have to take; walking was her only alternative. AC and WJ provide illuminating illustrations of the effects of brain damage, in particular to the right hemisphere. It can lead to very selective cognitive impairment, such as in the case of AC. Further experiments with AC showed that she had a particular problem with memorising the order in which she encountered scenes during routes she took. WJ, even though she had several cognitive problems, was impaired in some, but not all aspects of navigation. Tests showed that she had problems in recognising the environment and remembering what turns to take. This high degree of selectivity is very important in the design of appropriate rehabilitation tools: treatment should meet individual needs. The impact of such navigation impairment should not be underestimated. For example, AC explicitly reported feeling very anxious when she did not know how to continue. At 120 kilometres per hour, with three children in the back seat, such situations can cause great anxiety. And apart from anxiety, stroke patients who have navigational problems also rate their quality of life as lower compared to patients who do not experience these problems. A common observation is that these patients rarely go out by themselves because it creates too much stress (van der Ham et al. 2013). AC and WJ are definitely not the only examples of patients with specific impairments. A recent survey in mild stroke patients showed that almost a third of them experience these problems and that these problems remain long after they have physically recovered from their stroke. Moreover, with the increase of the quality of medical care, many more patients recover from stroke, at least to some extent. Also, as the population’s life span is increasing, so is the total number of stroke patients, regardless of the outcome. Therefore, the cognitive consequences of this medical condition should be attended to. GPS assistance is a very promising tool for treatment of navigation impairment. A striking example is patient FV, a man in his 30s with damage to his Navigational Aids in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation 105 hippocampus. He founded and still runs a successful business, but cannot even remember where he parks his car. However, his iPhone is a great help. All day long he makes little notes to remember where he leaves his bike or where he has to go next for a meeting. He can conceal his condition quite well by doing this. Apart from the reminders, he continuously uses the route planner app when driving a car or riding a bike. For most people that would just be convenient. To him, it is a necessity (Ruis et al. 2015). After around six months after a stroke, patients are considered ‘stable’. At this point any cognitive impairment is not expected to change without intervention. Yet, with cognitive rehabilitation procedures, patients can still improve substantially at this point. Modern technology, including GPS, can really make a difference here. The most common and sensible approach is to train people in using specific strategies that will help them to compensate for functions they have lost. For instance, a patient with particular problems in using traditional maps and creating a ‘mental map’ of an environment will most likely benefit most from relying on the intact skill of using information provided by landmarks they encounter in the environment. Such a treatment consists of several steps. The therapist first offers psycho-education by explaining the different strategies and illustrating which particular strategy is most useful for the patient. Tools like virtual reality environments incorporated in ‘serious gaming’ are very promising in this context. Patients can manoeuvre through a realistic environment safely, and do not need the physical strength to walk longer distances. Also, the environments can be manipulated according to a patient’s needs. A patient who is easily overwhelmed might benefit from starting with empty streets with very little visual clutter. Sudden events like unexpected detours can be used to stimulate improvisation while moving through the environment. This way, there is no need to physically get outside, as the cognitive interaction with the environment is most important for positive training results. GPS goes beyond this, as it can be used not only as a training tool, but also to simply rely on in real life, without the demanding task of having to learn new skills. The answer to the question of whether the cognitive consequences of GPS use are a problem seems to be a clear ‘no’ when it comes to people with navigation impairment, as their relevant cognitive skills were poor to begin with. For healthy individuals, the effects should be considered from a different perspective. Studies point out that the use of GPS can make a person ‘mindless’ of their environment (Parush et al. 2007); they no longer create ‘mental maps’ of environments if they only interact with them while relying on GPS. Such mental maps are crucial to navigate space successfully and efficiently, as we use them for many aspects of navigation, such as determining where we are and where our goal location is, and assessing distances and efficient routes between these locations. On the other hand, there are also some benefits to using GPS, as users are provided with more information about an environment. They can locate landmarks and other features of an environment that they would otherwise overlook. Also, they interact with their environment with more confidence and might feel freer to move around unfamiliar locations. In terms of participating in traffic, the general cognitive load can be reduced as well. Drivers can fully focus on the traffic 106 Ineke van der Ham itself, and disregard wayfinding tasks, like keeping an eye on the exit leading to their destination. The variation in navigation ability in healthy people should obviously not be overlooked in this discussion. Everyone knows someone who is notorious for getting lost all the time, or that person who seems to be a walking compass. It is known that factors like gender, age and experience can have a major impact on this process and therefore create large differences between individuals. Some people find it much more difficult to find their way around than others, a distinction mediated largely by strategy use and selection. Good navigators tend to focus more on their environment, regardless of their own position, whereas bad navigators have a natural tendency to interact with their environment in an egocentric, or observer-based, way. Moreover, better navigators are able to identify the most appropriate strategy for a navigation task at hand and consequently benefit from this flexibility (Etchamedy et al. 2007; Liben et al. 2010). A related problem is something named ‘left-right confusion’ – the phenomenon whereby people have difficulties in identifying left and right, which is not a disorder in the clinical sense but a condition a small percentage of healthy people have. For navigation in particular, ageing is a very important factor. As we get older, the volume of our hippocampus, one of the key brain areas for navigation and responsible for the ability to create mental maps, decreases considerably. This leads to an overall change in navigational strategies and abilities in older people. They tend to rely more on an observer-based (egocentric) perspective rather than on an environment-based (allocentric) perspective. In other words, they rely less on their mental map than on their experience in reality. So, older people could also clearly benefit from using GPS assistance. Yet, their age – certainly for the current generation of older people who are not technology savvy – also affects their ability to interact with these technical devices. They process information at a lower speed. Developers of GPS devices could look into creating new features that would help to personalise interaction with the device. As described earlier, people differ in their preferred strategy; it could be helpful to create different settings facilitating both an environment and an observer-based strategy. Several researchers have focused on ageing and recommend adjusting some features of GPS devices to meet the capacities of this population. For older people, one of the key changes would be to calibrate the timing of verbal route instructions better. The instruction to ‘take a left turn here’ should be matched to the time needed to internalise this instruction and act accordingly (Mahmud et al. 2009). As technological possibilities advance further, a more intuitive way of route guiding might be possible. A system in which 2D map information is integrated with live 3D context images into a single image showing your environment in real-time with arrows indicating your route, would allow for this ‘live view navigation’ (Huang et al. 2012). So, even though use of GPS assistance results in loss of cognitive function, there are situations in which it is clearly beneficial. When brain damage leads to Navigational Aids in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation 107 a substantial impairment of navigation ability, GPS and other technical tools like virtual reality can be very useful. This is not necessarily limited to the clinical environment. Also, for healthy people who simply are not very good at navigating, like the elderly, such assistance is worthwhile and may improve safety in traffic as it reduces the total cognitive load. GPS, if properly matched to its user, can be a very welcome tool to improve quality of life. 12 Living Digitally Wendy Moncur

Interwoven lives

Our physical, social and digital lives are all becoming increasingly complex, but also interwoven with one another. Emanating from the same individual, they yet have synchronous and asynchronous aspects. Physical life is perhaps the most straightforward: conception is followed by birth, then at some point by death. In developed countries, death will most likely come in old age (Leadbeter and Garber 2010). The end of physical life is marked by a series of routine processes, including the issue of a death certificate, disposal of the body, and often a ceremony of farewell. There is a lack of precision over the moment when physical life starts and the moment when it ends, in the test-tube embryo awaiting selection for implantation, and in the brain-dead patient kept alive on life support. The moment when human social life – one’s social identity and interaction – begins is also imprecise. Does it begin when a mother first becomes aware of her pregnancy and feels a burgeoning connection with her unborn child, when a baby is born, or when a child makes her first friends? When does it end? Towards the end of physical life, social identity and social interaction can wither, leading ultimately to social death (Mulkay and Ernst 1991; Walter et al. 2012). Hastening of social death can be prompted by the onset of conditions with associated memory loss and personality changes, such as dementia, leading relatives and friends to mourn the loss of the person that they knew despite that person’s continued physical existence (Sweeting and Gilhooly 1997). Conversely, social death may be delayed until long after physical death, as the bereaved maintain continuing bonds with the dead through private and public acts of remembrance (Klass et al. 1996). What of our digital lives? How do they begin? While anchored in our offline physical and social lives, our digital lives may not always be in sync. Digital life may predate the landmark event of birth, in the form of digital ultrasound images of the foetal self, or a sound recording of the baby’s in-utero heartbeat. These images and recordings can even be encapsulated in a bespoke piece of jewellery, ordered from an online boutique. For example, the website etsy.com

108 Living Digitally 109 offers bespoke ‘Sonogram pendant necklaces’ that display a printed picture of the baby from an ultrasound scan, combined with a digital sonogram of the baby’s heartbeat that can be played at the press of a button, illustrating one of many ways in which this digital life may be expressed in tangible and audible form. If shared with family, friends and the wider social network, such content may help to kick-start the baby’s social life, creating a social presence for it before physical birth. Once begun, the digital life quickly becomes a multi-faceted one, representing aspects of an individual’s identity through the user’s real name, and through pseudonymous and anonymous identities that are not necessarily tethered to the individual’s physical identity (Foresight Institute 2013). Taken as a whole, these multiple digital identities create a digital life constructed from the content that the individual creates or participates in, or that references them: photos, blog posts, emails, social media accounts, video, music and more. This content is scattered across multiple physical devices including smart phones, laptops and cloud storage, and multiple internet service providers (ISPs). Some of this content has value: financial, reputational, intellectual, emotional, practical. Online trading accounts (such as eBay) carry financial value from sales and purchases, but also reputational value through vendor ratings. Blogs and videos can have intellectual value. Photos may resonate with emotional significance – a first kiss, a new baby. Emails can contain important practical information. These types of value can persist even after physical life ends. Of course, much content is junk, with no value at all.

A digital ‘off’ switch?

The concept of digital death is even less precise than that of social death. There is no universal off-switch for digital death, no mechanism by which our physical death can be notified to ‘the internet’ as an overarching entity. As a result, we can linger on in cyberspace indefinitely. This inability to terminate our digital life is largely down to four factors, which are considered below: (i) the ease with which we can create content, (ii) the variable terms and conditions (T&C) of ISPs, (iii) the responsive, rather than proactive, nature of legislation and (iv) the complexity surrounding ownership of digital content. It is now far easier to create content than it is thoughtfully to curate it and reduce it to just those items imbued with value worth inheriting. In the past, the cost and effort of producing, sharing and storing analogue content was self-limiting. Buying film and developing photographs, writing letters by hand and posting them, photocopying office memos and delivering them to individual desks: these activities took time and cost money. When combined with the inevitable constraints of available physical storage, this meant that mediated content was limited and also subject to the occasional clear-out. Precious memories were actively curated out of necessity. With cheap data storage, there is no incentive to clear out old digital content, and no quick mechanism by which ‘precious’ digital content can be labelled as precious and hived off to a digital treasure chest. 110 Wendy Moncur

The variable T&C of ISPs makes it extremely difficult for next of kin to ensure that the deceased’s online accounts are all shut down. The average computer user has 26 online accounts.1 Next of kin may not know about all of these accounts. Even if they do, they may not know or be able to guess the passwords. Furthermore, ISP’s T&C may not permit account termination on death, although some of the most commonly used ISPs do have some process for responding to the physical death of an account holder. For example, Facebook will memorialise or remove an account if notified of the account holder’s death by next of kin. Twitter will remove an account, or assist family members in saving a backup of the deceased’s public Tweets on request. On eBay, ownership of trading accounts, user IDs and associated reputations cannot be transferred without the provision of explicit consent by eBay.2 Legislation is beginning to respond to the concept of digital death, but these responses vary globally and tend to be reactive rather than proactive. Article 17 in the EU Data Protection Directive includes the ‘Right to Erasure’. This argues for individuals to have the right to have content deleted at any time during their life or after on request, if it identifies them directly or indirectly. Comparing US states, there is also variation. In the US State of Virginia, legislation is specific in the case of the death of a minor: a personal representative has the power to take over the deceased minor’s online account. In the US State of Oklahoma, the Executor or Administrator of an estate can take over or terminate the ‘social media and certain other digital accounts of the deceased’ regardless of their age. The ability of personal representatives and executors in Virginia and Oklahoma to take over the digital accounts of the deceased foregrounds the question of post-mortem privacy. Digital assets have a ‘peculiarly personal and intimate character’ which is ‘difficult to categorise under current legal norms of property’.3 Advantages of taking over the accounts of the deceased may include gaining insight into their thoughts before they died – this is particularly relevant in cases where teens have committed suicide and there are suspicions of a causative link to online bullying by peers. However, the deceased may well have expected their online accounts and digital assets to remain private: taking over their accounts post-mortem does violate expectations of privacy, and those who take them over may discover previously hidden (and sometimes surprising) elements of the deceased’s life. The complexities created by inconsistent legislation worldwide, and by concerns over post-mortem privacy, are further exacerbated by the distributed nature of data storage, where the digital content associated with an individual may be stored around the world and controlled by multiple ISPs, subject to multiple legal jurisdictions. Even if legislation and ISP T&C were simple and consistent globally, ownership of digital content is often unclear – making it almost impossible to erase an individual’s online identity completely. ‘Ownership’ is unclear because digital ‘content creation and management can often be seen as a collective effort’,4 leading to a kaleidoscopic series of ‘owners’ as an image is shared, edited and tagged repeatedly. A group ‘selfie’ of several teenage girls snapped on the smartphone of one of the subjects, then shared across social media sites, has a single photographer, Living Digitally 111 but arguably multiple ‘owners’ who will expect a copy of it to share, edit and tag as they wish. For all of the complexity described herein, the end of digital life may nevertheless happen quietly, when the living stop searching for the deceased online, with the result that the deceased drifts ever downwards in Internet search rankings, ultimately vanishing from view.

Lingering on in cyberspace: the post-self

If we do linger longer in cyberspace, what does this mean for our digital lives? Does our digital self remain dynamic after our physical death in the short-term? How long can we live on digitally? This extended digital self is a new form of the post-self, a dynamic, socially-constructed identity that remains after death, which has previously been considered in the context of social rather than digital life (Moncur 2014). The post-self – whether digital, social or a combination of the two – has much in common with reputation. It can remain dynamic after physical death, subject to change and based on input by others, both in the form of new content and in additions to the metadata surrounding original content – the data about the data. In the short-term, an individual can have the final say at their own funeral, choose the hymns, pick the photos for the order of service sheet, and even dictate the eulogy (Moncur et al. 2012). Apps that support such agency include LegacyOrganiser,5 which also enables users to record their memoirs and ‘Life defining occasions’. Do you want to send messages from beyond the grave to people in your life that you loved, loathed or betrayed? There’s an app for that too: for example, mygooodbyemessage.com will ‘send your words and emotions to your family and friends after you are no longer able to’. These posthumous interactions can serve to shape the memories that the living hold of the deceased in the formative period when grief is new. Longer term, an individual’s digital life can be expressed with varying degrees of intensity. At its uncanny extreme, emergent services such as Eterni.me6 offer the prospect of an eternal, albeit artificially generated, presence:

Eterni.me collects almost everything that you create during your lifetime, and processes this huge amount of information using complex Artificial Intelligence algorithms. Then it generates a virtual YOU, an avatar that emulates your personality and can interact with, and offer information and advice to your family and friends after you pass away. It’s like a Skype chat from the past.7

This may sound comforting at first glance, but remember that such a service is entirely reliant on available digital content. A dystopian future looms, with your terse and perky Twitter self interacting posthumously with your grieving relatives in perpetuity, recommending interesting links and social commentary. Are chatty digital ghosts really a welcome addition to technological development? LifeNaut.com, originating in the Terasem Movement Foundation, goes a step further than Eterni.me. It offers to store clients’ genetic material, ready for a 112 Wendy Moncur transhuman future where ‘technology may be able to grow you a new body via ectogenesis and your mindfile may be able to be downloaded into it, enabling you to live on indefinitely’.8 The darker outcomes of such products were examined to uncomfortable effect in ‘Be Right Back’, a television programme in the Channel 4 Black Mirror series.9 They have also been the subject of bioethics debates on the rights of contemporary citizens to control their own minds and bodies, even if their choices make them something other than quintessentially human (Hughes 2004). At a more prosaic level, digital media is already being used by the living to sustain the deceased’s post-self. This post-self is a social entity that changes over time. It can be made up of memories, mementos, memorials, reputations and other kinds of memory. For example, digital content created during the life of an individual may contribute to the post-self, repurposed as input to a memorial with a digital element (Moncur and Kirk 2014). The website MuchLoved.com10 is one amongst many online memorial sites which include digital photos and videos of the deceased from when they were alive, and creates opportunities for the bereaved to articulate their memories and affection in an ingoing manner. Similarly, one’s Facebook identity can act as a ‘persistent digital self’ and a ‘vivid everyday presence in mourners’ lives’, with loved ones posting messages to the dead and tagging photos of them – not just to remember them, but also to sustain an on-going conversation with the deceased and with other mourners (Kasket 2012). It is easy to create a digital life, but hard to end it. We are now entrusting so many of our memories to the digital world, placing them within our digital lives. After we are gone, those memories may continue on in a life of their own.

Notes

1. http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/online-fraud-too-many-accounts-too-few- passwords-1089283 2. http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/user-agreement.html 3. Lilian Edwards and Edina Harbinja, ‘Protecting Post-Mortem Privacy: Reconsidering the Privacy Interests of the Deceased in a Digital World’ (10 November 2013), Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, 32(1) (2013). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/ abstract=2267388 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2267388 4. Thomas Olsson, ‘Understanding Collective Content: Purposes, Characteristics and Collaborative Practices’, in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T ’09) (New York: ACM), 21–30. DOI=10.1145/ 1556460.1556464 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1556460.1556464 5. https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/legacy-organiser/id428518774?mt=8 6. Eterni.me 7. http://eterni.me/ 8. https://www.lifenaut.com/ 9. http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/episode-guide 10. http://www.muchloved.com/g_home.aspx 13 Death and Memory in the Twenty-First Century Stacey Pitsillides

Technology has always played a key role in holding onto some of the precious experiences we collect over our relatively short lives, in order to pass them on to the next generation. This can even be linked to communication practices which pre-date language. The connection between external communal memory and symbolic meaning may even have already existed as a practice during Neanderthal times. This was enacted through the shaping or engraving of found objects, like shells. Over time these non-functional or ornamental objects became integrated into many day-to-day practices, signifying the connection between material culture and communication skills (D’Errico and Vanhaeren 2009). As society developed so did our understanding of materials, particularly those most close to hand, like clay. By exploring hand production through the physical transformation of a malleable material into a fixed form, we were able to form an external representation of self and to imagine more specialized uses and meanings for the objects that have been created. This was key in forming both a physical and virtual ‘memory’ of our making and indeed our presence in this world. As human beings continued to learn and develop, so did the complexity of the objects and of the systems surrounding the creation of those objects. The culture of making was also further industrialized with the growth of mass production, which meant more sectors of society could have larger collections of personal objects. However, it could be said that it was during the boom of individualism, consumerism and the development of the global village, which created mainstream capitalist democracy after the middle of the twentieth century, that the objects we chose to own and keep over the course of our lives became one of the defining characteristics expressing ‘who we are’ (Bernays 1971) and thus how we would be remembered after death. The other half of the story is our technological journey to make physical the intangible imprint of our own personal identity and agency within this world. This charts the movement from cave paintings to the development of a reproduc- ible code or written language, to photography, video and other forms of capturing either a person’s presence or their particular perspective on this world. Let us focus on writing. The practice of writing, according to Foucault, is a technology of care – care of the self. Foucault builds this concept on the ancient Greek phrase

113 114 Stacey Pitsillides epimelesthai sautou – loosely translated as ‘to take care of yourself’.1 The various ways of ‘taking care of oneself’ and ‘knowing yourself’ were highly debated in ancient Greek society and considered by philosophers including Plato, Socrates and Epicurus. For Epicureans the interpretation of epimelesthai sautou was strongly linked with reflection and writing:

one of the main features [. . .] involved taking notes on oneself to be reread, writing treatises and letters to friends to help them, and keeping notebooks in order to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed.2

These practices all engaged with the externalization of thoughts and feelings and the ability to actively reflect on them as an external ‘object’ outside the body. The act of reading this externalized document becomes a very different form of interaction with the self across time and obviously, extended on from this, provides a different way of interacting with loved ones after death. Although personal writing was already common in the form of diaries and letters when Foucault was writing this, his statements predate the digital age and social web technologies. If we fast-forward to the twenty-first century we realize that our desire for keeping objects, images and writing about the self has not been quenched. We live in a society that has become defined by writing and documenting: we need only to look at the dominance of social media in contemporary society. Today we are not only surrounded by physical objects that embody rich histories, production processes, tastes and monetary value, but also by an ever-expanding digital footprint documenting our thoughts, feelings and actions online. When we die we will not only ‘live on’ through our estate and in the memories of those we love but on their servers and in their hard disks (Banks 2011). If considered from the Epicurean perspective of epimelesthai sautou, this could be positive, but this rests on having the time, space and capacity to reflect on the archive. This is often difficult with our contemporary time-poor society and ever-expanding collections.

From material culture to digital presence

In today’s society we encounter the dead wherever we go online, and they are more present in our lives than ever before. Just a few clicks and we can access hundreds of documents about the dead, continually refreshing their presence and giving them a role in our everyday lives. Websites offering services that trace genealogy have risen in popularity, as they provide people with relatively quick and easy tools to contextualize their own biographies amongst the memories of generations. The internet could be attributed with returning death to the centre of the community (Walter 2008). However, these memories can be both senti- mentally comforting and, simultaneously, disorientating and confronting. The paradox is that while we desperately long for personal interaction with the dead, they also torment us with their inability to respond – they may only live in that space between our memories and the archives we keep. With this in mind, we must ask what is the role of the dead in today’s society and how do we live among Death and Memory in the Twenty-First Century 115 them, remember them and let their memories live on? If we take this as a given then the dead cannot simply be defined as absence, that is, the lack or loss of a person, but may instead be thought of as being in a process of finding a new place (or places) within our lives.3 This leads us to once again consider the impact of technology on these relationships. How does technology influence and augment our writing, archiving and memory-making processes? Nowadays there is a trend towards a greater proportion of our documented memories existing online. With the advent of e-mail fewer letters were posted; with the advent of social networks teenagers experience fewer calls and voice-based interaction from their friends (Turkle 2011). If this trend continues, significantly more information from and about the next generation will exist online – from birth to death and beyond. Additionally, the boundaries between the archives of the living and the archives of the dead will blur as more content is added after death through the technological interaction of loved ones with dead people’s accounts and profiles online. Does this change the role of memory? If I can access that text message or YouTube video, do I need to remember it? In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (2009), Viktor Mayer-Schönberger discusses the fact that as human beings our technology has always focused on ‘how to preserve memory’, and on new ways of enhancing our flawed human memory. He discusses how historically this was always a necessary goal as it was relatively difficult and expensive to keep archives, however we are experiencing something of a reversal in today’s society, in which we are saturated in memory. It chases us through our lives and through digital platforms that encourage detailed sharing and archiving of the self. He discusses some of the issues with the digital age’s auto-memory and communal archiving, which means that once something about you is captured it is very difficult to erase it. At the same time, Mayer-Schönberger considers the vital role that forgetting actually plays in human society, allowing us to move on and not overly dwell on the past, the freedom to develop and become different people and leave behind some of the more painful and traumatic times in our lives. A cinematic exploration of projecting this relationship between technology, memory and the archive into an alternative future is The Final Cut (Naïm 2004). This film considers what the world would be like if we had the option to implant a Zoe (Greek ‘life’) Chip in our baby’s head, which would record every second of life through the person’s own eyes. Upon the person’s death this chip would then be removed and edited by a ‘cutter’, in accordance with the wishes of the family, and used within a ‘rememory’, a selection of footage from a person’s life reworked into a feature-length film. There is a tension seen throughout the film between the personal memory and the edited, mediated and public rememory, which is curated to show the best parts of a person’s life. The film questions whether this direct mediation supplants the bereaved person’s understanding and personal memory, as we tend to trust the technologically recorded memories more than our own fallible organic ones. There is also a tension shown between the archive life recording and the cutter who has the power to create the narrative from an objective perspective. There is 116 Stacey Pitsillides a scene where one of the cutters innocently reveals a fatal flaw in the system of rememory. She states that ‘we have to make story decisions, otherwise there will be no rememory’. However, by any one person editing the communal archive, they are affecting the way that person is remembered. Within this film the characters use the system of rememory to literally edit their loved ones’ lives posthumously. One character claims, ‘my husband was a great man [. . .] he deserves to be remembered as a great man [. . .] I’ve seen rememories where the cutters were careless; they had no respect for the dead’. This leads us to the question: in our future, who will make these ‘story’ decisions; is anybody qualified to make that choice of the final cut? A rememory is not about the person who is dead. Instead, it gives the living the ability to construct the narrative of their loved one’s life. The life they would have liked for them to have, erasing all the bad memories with powerful images and cinematography, that will remain lodged in their brain and eventually inhabit the place of old ‘real’ memories, creating a person who in death has become exactly who they wanted them to be – both publicly and personally. One character remarks that ‘these implants destroy personal history, therefore all history’. This leads us to questions regarding the authenticity of narrating and telling history in general, personal or otherwise. Someone always has to make the ‘story decisions’: what to tell, what to leave out, how much detail to give? However, what I believe must be analysed here, rather than authenticity, is the question of the role of these new technologies in the way that we remember and forget: how do digital technologies augment our memories, and what is the balance between human and computational selection within each technological framework? There are currently technological trends towards total memory capture, such as the lifelogging movement4 (or more generally e-memory), which aim to capture and save as much information about a person as is technically possible. This move raises important questions for technological development, as well as for our own personal relationship to automatically saving data. The ‘Narrative Clip’ is a camera that takes a picture of your environment every ten seconds, which you then download onto your computer so that your entire life is recorded.5 There are questions about privacy, here, but there is also a strange lack of discrimination whereby we no longer distinguish between what is and what is not valuable. The question we should be asking ourselves is, what is our relationship to the data we are saving and why do we want to remember it? To answer this we must continue to explore the nature of memory and its relationship to the archive, particularly how it extends, even after death, in an affectual way into people, environments and technologies. Curation is an important part of this, especially with the large archives being generated today. However, the questions of how and by whom the curation is done become essentially important.

Tending the archive

In How We Became Posthuman (1999), N. Katherine Hayles describes how when we access an external memory by reading a person’s written thoughts, they are always absent, perhaps even more so online, as the materiality of paper and ink Death and Memory in the Twenty-First Century 117 are missing. What remains is the knowledge that someone wrote it, of an author embedded in the writing. If I am reading N. Katherine Hayles’s writing I can in a sense hear her voice, whether I know her or not. This voice is amplified if I know the writer personally. So this absence to which she refers is filled by our understanding of who that person is and our memory or imagination of what they sound like. Today, when somebody dies, a great deal of writing from and about them is often left open to interpretation and immersion. This mesh of everyday writing may include e-mails, blogs and microblogging, websites, chat logs, profiles, news feeds and so on. If you pick apart individual statements they may seem banal, but as a collection they form a deep documentation of the self, which if unified could form a rich tapestry of the person’s activity tending to their (online) self. The everydayness of and care provided to these archives is reminiscent of the Epicurean principles of ‘taking care of the self’. Foucault gives the example of a letter which

presents a description of everyday life. All the details of taking care of oneself are here, all the unimportant things he has done [. . .] these details are important because they are you – what you thought, what you felt.6

It is this same principle that allows people to feel connected to the identity of their loved ones online after death and engages them in actively updating these archives, continuing the process of care and reflection through writing and reacti- vating that person’s presence in their lives (Brubaker and Hayes 2011; Kasket 2012). Although these archives can provide new and creative ways of engaging with the dead and reaffirming their presence and meaning in our lives, this is not a simple process to navigate. These archives are mostly decentralized, corporate and designed without consideration of users’ dying. As a result we are also often presented with aspects of the archive at unexpected times. These spectres of the archive agitate us – when we least expect it we are confronted with absence and presence simultaneously. An example of this could be a Facebook profile asking us to reconnect with someone who has died or a backdated e-mail sent out after someone’s death. These uncanny experiences make us question our personal understanding of the boundaries of death, making us both uncomfortable and unsure of how to respond. It is clear that the human subject as an autonomous being needs to be readdressed and that although we may still be uncomfortable with this notion of continued presence, we can see examples of it in our everyday lives. This makes room for new conceptions of thinking about the role of the dead in society and the way they affect our lives, including the agency they still have through memory.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’, in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press), 19. 118 Stacey Pitsillides

2. Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’, 27. 3. This concept is part of the theoretical framework of Continuing Bonds, developed within the Death Studies community and currently being used within interdisciplinary research into death online. Particularly, to consider the ad-hoc practices of users online ‘talking to the dead’. 4. Lifelogging (also known as Lifeblogging or Lifeglogging) is the continuous technological capture of a person’s life. The aim of this, often wearable, technology is to build up a complete memory resource of everything, so that the person can refer to it at any time. Through this immense archive the user aims to transcend the faultiness of human memory. This vision has been highly influential and inspired the development of many contemporary technologies and research projects, particularly within the Computer Science discipline, including MyLifeBits from Microsoft Research Labs (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mylifebits/), Living Memory Box from the Georgia Institute of Technology (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=506537), ShoeBox from AT&T Labs in Cambridge (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/attarchive/dart/shoebox/index. html) and Lifestreams from Yale University (http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/ lifestreams.html) (All Accessed 17 October 2014). 5. See http://getnarrative.com/ (Accessed 17 October 2014). 6. Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’, 29. 14 The Oceanic Literary Reading Mind: An Impression Michael Burke

The mind and brain processes of the literary reading mind are most accurately defined as oceanic: the mind is an ocean. This is the essential premise that I put forward in my book Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (Routledge, 2011).1 The statement is of course a metaphor. It follows in a long line of metaphorical apprehensions of the human mind, from Plato’s notion of the mind as a wax tablet to the more modern – some might say reductive – ideas of the human mind as a machine or a computer. The theory of the oceanic literary reading mind maintains that there is a dynamic, free flow of approximately five bottom-up and top-down affective inputs that are active during engaged acts of reading by avid readers of prose fiction. It contends that literary reading does not begin when eyes apprehend the words on the page or end when they leave off, rather, the mind, brain and body are actively reading both before and after the physical act of literary text processing starts and finishes. It promotes the significance of unconscious affective cognition and implicit memory during acts of engaged reading alongside the more conscious cognitive emotion and explicit memory. It taps into the idea of cross- cortical and cross-modal processing in the brain and it models these ever-shifting, dynamic brain processes as oceanic cognition: the flotsam and jetsam of feeling and thought. In many ways, the oceanic mind is a rhetorical mind, a mind ‘on the move’, caressed softly by the ever-shifting framework of kairos: the ancient Greek notion of time, place, manner, content and participants of varied textual and discursive acts. It is a mind that is capricious, dynamic and brimming with original potentials. It floats confidently on the credible narrative of embodied cognition. Conversely, the notion of a computational mind can be said to be a logical mind: bits and bytes, zeros and ones, binary: predictable, repetitious; insistent in its purported exactitude, wilfully disembodied, fallaciously incorporeal. When I was writing Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (henceforth ‘LRCE’) I was interested in one simple question: what happens in the brains and bodies of avid, engaged readers when they sit down to read a work of fiction. In my methodology I applied theory, existing empirical

119 120 Michael Burke experiments from cognitive neuroscience and my own, primarily qualitative testing on 36 student readers from two different academic institutions. My main question led to others. These included (i) what role does emotion play in a cognitive event like literary text processing? and (ii) which kinds of bottom-up and top-down inputs are most prominently involved in literary reading – and how do they interact in meaning-making? In this chapter I will give a concise summary of the main aspects of my theory of the oceanic literary reading mind. I will briefly sketch out my notions of (i) the affective (sign-fed and mind-fed) inputs, (ii) the literary reading loop, and (iii) the key roles that memory and emotion play in engaged acts of literary reading. For fuller explanations of all these concepts, please consult LRCE.2 Engaged, emotive acts of literary reading by avid readers are made up of a number of basic elements. I identify five such elements which I term affective inputs that are active during reading. I initially distribute these into two categories. These are (a) bottom up ‘sign-fed’ prompts, such as literary style and literary themes on the one hand, and (b) top-down ‘mind-fed’ inputs, such as pre-reading mood, the location of the literary reading event and literary reading induced mental imagery (shortened in Figure 14.1 for the sake of convenience to ‘LRI’) that a reader generates during literary engagement.3 I coined the terms sign-fed and mind-fed in LRCE not only to differentiate between bottom-up and top-down inputs but also, with regard to my use of the word ‘sign’, to differentiate between the general perceptual incoming data

Mood

LRI Location

Themes Style

Figure 14.1 The five sign-fed and mind-fed categories active during engaged acts of literary reading that make up the affective inputs Source: From Burke, Literary Reading, 155. The Oceanic Literary Reading Mind 121 of objects in the world on the one hand and language/sign based input on the other. I realised, however, that this mind-fed / sign-fed dichotomy was probably overstated, as the division between what goes ‘up’ as it were and what comes ‘down’ becomes fluid once a reading event is underway.4 This requires a unifying concept that facilitates a blending of the mind-fed and sign-fed. The phrase I settled on, given the emotional weight of literary reading, was affective inputs. One of these inputs, pre-reading mood, seemed more significant than the rest for an engaged affective reading experience to take place; or at least this is what the qualitative data from the experiments appeared to be suggesting. A logical step was to explore this category further. Based on my reading and my data, I conjec- tured that reading as we know it does not only take place when a reader’s eyes are on the page or screen, as one might logically think. Rather, some form of ‘reading’ must also be taking place prior to, just after and even long after eyes-page or eyes-screen interfaces have started or ended. Following from this, the four stages that I proposed were: (i) pre-reading, (ii) (actual) reading, (iii) post-reading and (iv) non-reading. Pre-reading is that window of time just before eyes meet the page/screen. Post-reading is that period just after eyes have left the page/screen. Non-reading is the time in between reading events where a reader could be out for a walk, eating dinner at home or driving to work. As was the case for the five affective inputs, I concluded that these are not detached stages. The act of reading is not monolithic, rather these four phases are interconnected, dynamic, and fluid. They are the four fluvial phases of reading/discourse processing that go to make up what I termed the literary reading loop (Figure 14.2). The literary reading loop and the inherent memory and emotion that reside in those four integrated phases led to the realisation that engaged acts of literary reading by avid readers rely profoundly on memory and emotion; but what kind of memory and what kind of emotion? In psychology, memory is usually divided into short-term (working) memory and long-term memory.5 Long-term memory is then further divided into explicit and implicit memory. Explicit memory is the most acknowledged in cognitive psychology and in reading studies. This declarative, conscious kind of memory is further divided into ‘episodic’ (i.e. largely autobiographical) memory and ‘semantic’ memory. The former pertains to a memory of specific places and events while the latter is more concerned with facts and world knowledge. Implicit memory is non-declarative and unconscious. Instinctively, one might think that it has no place in reading, but it does. In fact, I contend that it plays a crucial role, especially with regard to reading prose fiction. Implicit memory is divided into the two categories of ‘priming’ and ‘procedural memory’. Priming is essentially about non-conscious prompts that nudge you into a certain direction. Priming is persuasion. Within the framework of the affective inputs of literary reading (a) time and place, (b) LRI, and (c) pre-reading mood all have exceptional non-conscious priming potential, as they draw on previously enjoyed (and now unconscious) past reading experiences. Arguably, procedural learning has even more of an effect on engaged acts of literary reading by avid readers. Procedural memory is about habit; about those things that you have done so often that they become almost automatic. Things like brushing your teeth, 122 Michael Burke

Reading

Pre-Reading Post-Reading

Non-Reading

Figure 14.2 The four fluvial stages of the literary reading loop Source: From Burke, Literary Reading, 153. combing your hair, locking your front door when you leave the house. But for avid readers it must also be about interfacing with prose fiction in engaged acts of reading. In light of this, engaged acts of literary reading by avid readers are likely to involve a vast amount of implicit memory. Foregrounding theory appears to support this idea. An avid reader, reading in an engaged manner in full flow, generally reads at ease, at speed and largely unconsciously. It is only when he/ she is struck by a foregrounded lexical or syntactic item, that he/she is stirred to attention, to realisation and to conscious, explicit cognition. In most literary texts this is an infrequent occurrence. If everything is foregrounded, then nothing is foregrounded. It is also such rhetorical/stylistic devices that can prompt episodes of reader disportation, channelling a person from an immersive, non-conscious state to an attentive, conscious one (Burke 2011). The dominant attitude with regard to emotion in mainstream psychology is that it occurs after a cognitive appraisal has taken place. The emotional response comes at the end of a list of conscious, cognitive, higher-cortical activity, along the lines of (a) ‘something has just happened’, (b) ‘that makes me feel good’, (c) ‘I am now experiencing a positive emotion about it’, (d) ‘I’m happy’ . . . ‘And I know it’.6 I call this cognitive emotion: emotive responses at the behest of rational higher cortical processing: the mind first, followed by the body. Conversely, what The Oceanic Literary Reading Mind 123

I term affective cognition is the opposite. In affective cognition, emotive effects are immediate and a sense of what caused the emotion comes afterwards: embodied mind first, rational brain later. What is happening here during such affective cognitive events is that some higher cortical regions are being initially bypassed, resulting in a more direct inclusion of emotive processing areas of the brain such as the amygdala. Such instant emotive gratification is grounded in psychologist Joseph LeDoux’s ‘quick and dirty’ route to emotion that is set out in his book The Emotional Brain (1998). It is his ‘low road’ to emotion, as opposed to the high (cortical) road. This idea is not new: more than 100 years ago the founding father of psychology, William James, was asking himself questions that were similar. For instance, he would reflect ‘am I crying because I am sad or am I sad because I am crying?’7 In a nutshell, the question at hand was, might physiological arousal be able to instigate felt emotion? That is, might the body be before the brain? This, in essence, is my notion of affective cognition (Figure 14.3). In many ways affective cognition works in conjunction with implicit memory. These are two phenomena that one would not necessarily expect to be playing prominent roles in text processing events, but when it comes to engaged acts of literary processing/reading by avid readers, both affective cognition and implicit memory are central. Their non-conscious, non-linear, dynamic nature also gives rise to oceanic cognition.

Cognitive emotion

Affective cognition Explicit memory

Implicit memory

Figure 14.3 The oceanic processing nature of the literary reading mind Source: From Burke, Literary Reading, 159. 124 Michael Burke

It is here with this thought that this short impression of the oceanic literary reading mind has to conclude. In the past we have seen metaphorical claims about mind and brain processes ranging from wax tablets in classical antiquity to machines and most recently computers. All of these are less than adequate. Indeed, no metaphor can ever fully encompass the complex, cross-modal, dynamic processes of the human mind and brain. There is, however, one comparison that arguably comes close: “the mind is an ocean”, which embodies the empirically tested ideas in contemporary neuroscience of cross-modal neural operations and processing, as well as cross-modal, culture and experience-driven brain plasticity. The concepts that underpin this claim are located in the theory of the oceanic literary reading mind. The notion of fluvial mind processes is not mere creative fancy. Leading perception scholar Stephen M. Kosslyn (together with his colleague Olivier Koenig) has suggested in The Wet Mind (1985) that a hydraulic metaphor is what is needed to account for mind and brain processes as this ‘stresses the complex, interactive nature of the brain’s computation, and it encourages us to think about how emotion and motivation can alter information processing’.8 In the succeeding 20 years since 1995 their call has largely fallen on deaf ears as the push goes on in cognitive neuropsychology to find explicit, conscious and computational solutions to encompass and represent how the mind and brain work. This propositional route is misguided. It is an ocean away from what will eventually be recognised as a practicable, metaphorical model to help define mind and brain processes, as only time and tide will tell.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Routledge/Taylor and Francis for allowing me to reproduce a number of my Venn diagrams from my book in this present chapter. 2. Two further phenomena that play a central role in LRCE are (a) the ‘somatic cushion’ that operates in working memory as a somatic buffer region/rehearsal zone for experiences such as ‘felt movement’, and (b) the embodied notion of reader ‘disportation’ that can occur during heightened emotive states of reading. Owing to space constraints neither of these will be discussed here (see LRCE for detailed descriptions). 3. At the end of LRCE I reflect that there should probably be a sixth input, namely, ‘time’, as the time of a reading event – in a similar way to the location of it – is important for stimulating emotive effects during the act of reading literature. Is a book read in the morning, in the afternoon or in the evening? Is it read in spring, summer, autumn or winter? Is it read on Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Hallowe’en or on the anniversary of your dead mother or father? Many of these time-related periods will be important for many avid, engaged readers in attempting to match what they read and when they read it in order to facilitate the greatest emotive engagement potential. 4. For more on how the schematic aspects of certain style figures (like, for example, the rhetorical scheme ‘chiasmus’) can be initially in the mind rather than always initially on the page during specific episodes of engaged literary reading, see Burke 2013. 5. A humanities approach to memory, not explored in my model – but with great potential – is cultural memory. 6. See Lazarus and Lazarus (1994) for more on this cognitive appraisal approach. 7. See also James’s famous article ‘What Is an Emotion?’ (1884). 8. Stephen M. Kosslyn and Olivier Koenig, The Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 447–448. 15 Memory and the Reading Substrate Adriaan van der Weel

From the first celts and arrowheads, technology has been regarded as a welcome servant. Mostly the servant can be trusted, though things do occasionally go wrong. As an all-purpose dogsbody, the digital electronic computer is without doubt the technology of technologies, the servant to outperform all servants. It is invading – or has already invaded – more aspects of our life than any other technology before it, and reaches parts other technologies cannot reach. Its very ubiquity, however, also makes us acutely aware of our dependence on it. Perhaps even more than that other ubiquitous technology, electricity, at times this dependence can make us feel rather uncomfortable, not to say vulnerable. This sense of vulnerability is what inspired the recent exhibition ‘Memory Palace’ in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Porter Gallery.1 It started from a specially commissioned fictional text by the novelist Hari Kunzru, describing a future world in which all digitally stored information has been lost through an event referred to as ‘the Withering’. In fact, in Kunzru’s story, reading, writing and even memory itself are now illegal. After language, writing has in all likelihood been the most influential technology ever developed. As Stanislas Dehaene writes: ‘More than five thousand years ago, the first scribes hit upon an extraordinary potential deeply embedded in our brain circuits: the possibility of conveying language through vision’.2 This extraordinary concept of conveying language through vision has accelerated human cultural evolution to the extent that it has in fact overtaken the speed of biological evolution. It is hard to imagine this pivotal and transformational cultural technology being outlawed, but this is precisely what happens in Kunzru’s story. Writing was first invented as a means to store outside the brain administra- tive information about matters like quantities and ownership that needed to be remembered. Discovered as a means for communication across time and space, the technology caught on like wildfire. In the form of manuscript, printed, and digital text, written sources account for all of the world’s history. That is to say, by common consent everything that happened before it could be recorded in writing is referred to as prehistory. What is more, in the well over 5,000 years since we started to write things down, we never came up with a better way of recording the

125 126 Adriaan van der Weel vicissitudes of life as they happened: of turning them into history. So the result is that every child in the Western world today spends a good few years of their life learning, stroke by painstaking stroke, to make language visible. In the digital era ushered in by the Web, we are scrambling to move our reading and writing to screens and keyboards. In fact most of our screens are keyboards now. As the incidence of smart phones and tablets rises, far-sighted educationalists are suggesting that in this brave new world of digital textuality it may no longer be necessary to learn to write. This is yet more evidence of how technology serves us like a well-trained servant! Indeed, if it works for writing, mightn’t it also work for reading and learning more generally? The same screens that relieve us from the task of laboriously forming characters by hand offer permanent and reliable access to most of the world’s information. In this, our 24/7 connected state, isn’t rote learning beginning to look like a quaintly old-fashioned approach to the acquisition of knowledge? Why burden school children with such antiquated methods of schooling? Brain power freed from the need to memorise can be used for other tasks, such as improving our finding skills. Let’s face it, if this were to become educational policy, wouldn’t it merely be formalising what we’re doing already anyway? How many phone numbers does anyone know by heart? In fact, one of the contributors to ‘Memory Palace’, Maki Suzuki of Åbäke, is on record as saying that the project ‘had made him aware that he no longer bothered to remember the names of people he met, relying on his iPhone to do it for him’.3 But having servants is a Janus-faced phenomenon. The more we rely on them, the more apt we are to become dependent on them, impairing our fitness to do without them. If we tell ourselves that we need text as an aid to memory, we are less likely to practise our power to memorise (which once was a great deal more prodigious than we can now readily believe). In fact, if we stop learning to write by hand, learning through doing, we might actually impair our reading fluency. This is at least what recent Japanese research appears to imply. Even if the researchers don’t actually say it in so many words, they suggest that we are unlikely to become fluent readers unless we learn to write by hand first (Nakamura et al. 2012). Perhaps we need parents to volunteer their children for a conclusive experiment. The case of writing furnishes a good illustration of the embodied nature of human cognition: the way our brains work is decisively shaped and circumscribed by our corporeality. It leads one to wonder whether the close relationship between body and mind might not be also at play in the act of reading (and learning). This is precisely what Dehaene’s account of the development of reading stresses. There is a strong link between reading and the real world: ‘We recognize the written word using a region [of the brain] that has evolved over time and whose special- ity, for the past ten million years or more, has been the visual identification of objects’.4 All of the world’s writing systems make use of the brain’s affinity with naturally occurring shapes. Mark Changizi has called this repurposing of natural shapes ‘harnessing’; he extends the notion to speech and music using real-world sounds (Changizi 2011a). All this underlines the embodied nature of human cognition (Noë 2006; Clark 2011). Memory and the Reading Substrate 127

Not surprisingly, there is a large body of scientific literature that shows that the embodied nature of cognition does indeed mean that the affordances of the reading substrate affect our cognition. Especially where memory and retention are concerned, digital text forms appear to perform less well than paper. Some of the inherent characteristics of digital text are less well suited to the way human memory works. In an excellent survey of recent reading research, Ferris Jabr observes that ‘the sensory experiences typically associated with reading – especially tactile experiences – matter to people more than one might assume’.5 Jabr discusses an impressive amount of scientific literature presenting evidence for the idea that digital text may present cognitive issues. Especially ‘mapping’ issues (suggesting that digital text offers fewer clues to aid navigation and retention) receive a great deal of attention. As Jabr explains, ‘When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain – such as mountains and trails – and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices’.6 Mark Changizi, too, asserts that ‘[i]n nature, information comes with a physical address [. . .] And up until the rise of the web, the mechanisms for information storage were largely spatial and could be navigated, thereby tapping into our innate navigation capabilities [. . .] The web and e-books have upsides physical libraries do not, of course, but they are deeply lacking in spatial navigability’.7 Clearly, if screen-based reading is more physically and mentally taxing in terms of navigation and mental mapping (the so-called ‘cognitive load’) than reading on paper, less mental space may be left for retention. Remarkably, as Nicholas Carr has pointed out in The Shallows (2010), people appear to bring a more scanning attitude to screen reading than to paper reading in the first place. The research Carr cites in this respect (Liu 2005) has since been corroborated by other research. Ackerman and Goldsmith say: ‘[P]eople appear to perceive the printed-paper medium as best suited for effortful learning, whereas the electronic medium is better suited for fast and shallow reading of short texts such as news, e-mails, and forum notes’.8 For this reason, ‘[t]he common perception of screen presentation as an information source intended for shallow messages may reduce the mobilization of cognitive resources that is needed for effective self-regulation’.9 In other words, ‘people seem less inclined to engage in what psychologists call metacognitive learning regulation – strategies such as setting specific goals, rereading difficult sections and checking how much one has understood along the way’.10 It is interesting to speculate on whether this dismissive attitude to digital texts might reflect a perception that they are of inferior value overall. That a lesser value would be attributed to digital texts because of their immateriality is of course not inconceivable. In that case could it perhaps account for our changing ownership relation to text when it is in digital form? As books and their content are increasingly being consumed digitally (in the form of both digital born and legacy materials) they take on one vital characteristic of other media (newspapers, radio, television): their use – and usefulness – are defined in terms of access to the 128 Adriaan van der Weel information they contain rather than ownership of the physical carrier. And if the importance of material ownership of information is indeed dwindling, would mental ‘ownership’ be far behind? All in all, digital reading is a greater departure from our age-old habits than we realise. However, the point of pondering the effects of taking our reading and writing practices into the digital realm is not so much whether the effects of offloading the chores of learning to write or remember on our technological servants are good or bad. Yes, the technologies of first writing and then printing have left their indelible mark on our culture, and yes, they both affected our way of thinking – our literate mentality. So Plato was right to be concerned, in the Phaedrus, about writing, as were those who were concerned about the effects of printing. But should we therefore lament, with Plato, the loss of the classical art of memory? Any concern about the effects of technology is always predicated on the desire that the status quo should not change. But in the face of Plato’s misgiv- ings we can only conclude that we adjusted to that first important externalisation of human memory through writing remarkably well. The changes caused by digital textuality are going to be huge in turn, but they will not spell the end of civilisation either. The point is rather that the changes effected by technology are out of our control. We might of course wish to ponder what we think we cannot afford to lose, but even then I don’t think we have a great deal of choice in the matter: technology runs away with us, even though we ought, as its inventors, by rights to be in charge of it. The discovery of a technology’s uses takes time, and so its effects only become clear long after the invention is first introduced. Such uses and their effects are rarely part of the design. Indeed, it has frequently been remarked that technology demonstrates unexpected and uncalled-for autonomy (Winner 1977; Kelly 2010): the servant turning out to be a sorcerer’s apprentice.11 We can find solace in the fact that neuroscientific research keeps finding evidence of the brain’s extreme plasticity. There is no reason to doubt that we will adapt to the current paradigm shift as well. But there is equally no doubt that it will cause a cultural landslide at least as big as that once caused by the discovery of the power of writing and reading.

Notes

1. The exhibition, curated by Ligaya Salazar and Laurie Britton Newell took place 18 June– 20 October 2013. Transforming novelist Hari Kunzru’s text into ‘a walk-in story’, it was described by its curators as ‘a book in an edition of one’. 2. Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009), 149. 3. Emily King, ‘The Book, but Not by the Book’, V&A Magazine (2013), 64. 4. Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 125. 5. Ferris Jabr, ‘The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper Versus Screens’, Scientific American (2013). http://www.scientificamerican.com/article. cfm?id=reading-paper-screens. 6. Jabr, ‘The Reading Brain in the Digital Age’. Memory and the Reading Substrate 129

7. Mark Changizi, ‘The Problem with the Web and E-Books Is That There’s No Space for Them’, Psychology Today (2011), www.psychologytoday.com/blog/nature-brain-and- culture/201102/the-problem-the-web-and-e-books-is-there-s-no-space-them. 8. Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith, ‘Metacognitive Regulation of Text Learning: On Screen versus On Paper’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 17(1) (2011), 29. 9. Ackerman and Goldsmith, ‘Metacognitive Regulation of Text Learning’, 29. 10. Jabr, ‘The Reading Brain in the Digital Age’. 11. Apart from its appearance in myths from all ages and cultures, the phenomenon is a continuing object of scientific study (and argument), as we witness in the ongoing debates in the flourishing field of science, technology and society studies (STS). 16 Memory, Materiality and the Ethics of Reading in the Digital Age Sebastian Groes

Internet = brain rot

Walter Benjamin’s ‘Unpacking My Library’ (1931) illuminates the loving relationship that can exist between readers and their books. Whilst stocking his shelves, Benjamin speaks of

the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contem- plates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passions borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books.1

Books and collector fuse into a disorderly jumble of mind and matter. The idea of ownership is ambiguous here:

inside him there are spirits, little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector – and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be – ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.2

Benjamin identifies a close, even fetishist relationship between books and readers, between material object and the mind, yet this connection is potentially deeply troubling. This is demonstrated in an incisive passage early on in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), in which the protagonist is first exposed as a fraud. When the narrator, Nick Carraway, enters Gatsby’s impressive, mock-Gothic library, ‘panelled with English oak, probably transported from some ruin overseas’, a ‘stout, middle aged man with enormous owl-eyed spectacles’ tells Carraway that, to his surprise, the books are ‘real’.3 The man gestures towards the book-shelves and states:

Absolutely real – have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. [. . .] It’s a bona fide piece of

130 Memory, Materiality and the Ethics of Reading 131

printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too – didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?4

An implicit point made here is that Gatsby has not actually read any of these books. We realise that Gatsby’s tales about his days as a sophisticated Oxford man, of which the library is a (false) reminder, are just a few of many fabrications. Yet, just as in Benjamin, this again suggests that there exists a direct relationship between a library’s content and our personal history, knowledge and identity. Gatsby’s supposed past is represented by, and his knowledge expressed through, his books; the library is Gatsby’s projection of himself, a bookworm boring his way through endless shelves of knowledge. The drunk, owlish man is not fooled, however: as the reference to theatre impresario, actor and director David Belasco suggests, he already understands that ‘Gatsby’ is Jay Gatz’s greatest performance; he has created an elaborate stage set that allows him to project a more glamor- ous, wise version of himself. This uneasy relationship between physical books and readers deserves renewed investigation in the early twenty-first century, when we are posthuman, the validity of the humanities is questioned and the ethics of reading are back on the agenda. One major problem of the reduced status of a drastically disempowered humanities and the apparent loss of authority of humanism as an ideology that features critical reading as a key skill. Various books have comes out to defend the humanities, and Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewett’s The Humanities and Public Life (2014) make a strong case for the ethics of reading. Brooks states: ‘The ability to read critically the messages that society, politics and culture bombard us with is, more than ever, needed training in a society in which the manipulation of our minds and hearts is increasingly what the world is all about’.5 Drawing on research by Steven Pinker, Elaine Scarry argues that there is a clear link between growing levels of literacy and lessening levels of violence in society – and that the novel form has a clear role to play in this process, by stimulating empathy, a social conscience and a sense of justice through acts of reading. She also notes that novels are cognitive machines that allow us to keep a sense of a coherent, unified self – and memory has a key role to play in immersive oneself into imagined worlds. Scarry calls this the ‘honeycombed pliancy within one’s thought and spirit’ and claims that ‘literature – centuries of literature – has created it, or at least enabled it to remain intact even after we are old enough to have become “completed” persons’.6 We are currently living through a period when, with the many forms of electronic reading taking off in a significant manner (from reading on our computer screens to e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle), our bookshelves no longer contain everything we’ve read. This digital turn potentially creates a de-stabilising rupture in the already fraught, complex relationship between the materiality containing (or referring to) our knowledge, and our identity. We feel less ‘complete’. Today’s technologies are thought to scatter our minds. Critics are warning against the onslaught of the digital on the material, especially when it comes 132 Sebastian Groes to reading. Nick Carr (2010), Adriaan van der Weel (2011), Maryanne Wolf (2007) and Mark Changizi (2013) have all put forward persuasive arguments against e-reading. For many critics, whose responses range from the elegiac to the apocalyptic, the internet equals brain rot. Carr refers, for instance, to the outsourcing of our cognitive processes (memory to Google and spatial navigation to GPS, et cetera). Freud called people prosthetic gods, because they look for ‘palliative measures’ and ‘auxiliary constructions’ to negate the painful limitations of our human condition. This process results in what I call The Age of the Prosthetic Mind.7 This is an immersive, oceanic feeling whereby the mind extends out into, and connects with, the world. More than ever before, we have tools at our disposal to extend our bodies and minds. But critics worry that, rather than turning us into gods, these new ‘tools’ have a detrimental effect upon human nature, and have a regressive effect upon out being. Isn’t the idea, however, that the bookshelves, CD collections and photo albums once gathered in our living room somehow tell our story actually just a little fantasy? Freud noted that the self was always under threat of falling apart, and Lacan revolutionised psychoanalysis by showing there were no coherent images of the self to begin with; from the very start we conceive of ourselves as a corp morcélé – a fragmented body. In the postwar era, postmodern critics stressed the construct- edness of human identity, which could be rewritten at will. Recently, neuroscience too has discovered that the coherent self is coded by the brain, as is explored in the final part of this book. The psychophysiological relationship between our collections and us is complex, as the mind continuously re-consolidates our self and our memories. One might then argue that the physical books on our shelves and those on our e-reading devices will be yoked together by the mind into a continuum of readerly experiences anyway.

E-waste: the new materialities of the digital world

Of course we must draw a distinction between the broad metaphoric idea of a bookshelf as embodying the contents of the mind, and the bookshelf as a purely practical, material tool for storing information, but nonetheless we should question what these new technologies are doing to our identities. The starting point should be the assumption that, despite the idea that the virtual world sees the dematerialisation of experience, the digital world is not built on the ephemerality of the invisible, but on a profound groundedness in materiality, of human bodies providing material labour by stuffing broadband cables into the ground, or extracting metals from the ground to produce computers and mobile phones. One only needs to have a look at a few recent developments to understand the nature of this new materiality of the digital age. Matthew Kirschenbaum has drawn attention to ‘the growing crisis of e-waste (the unsafe disposal and sweatshop recycling, often at third-world dumping sites, of industrially precious components inherent to computing machinery).’8 In The Anthrobscene (2014), Jussi Parikka has investigated the materiality of the digital age, and the new e-wastelands. If you go to Ghana’s capital Accra, for instance, you will find endless open graveyards of Memory, Materiality and the Ethics of Reading 133 computers shipped in from the West, turning places into toxic digital deserts that harm Africa’s children in particular.9 Other countries include Kenya, Tanzania, Thailand and India, amongst others, whose dumping grounds are the future memories of the digital age, and provide a stark rejoinder to the digital utopian- ism of those who see the digital world as a purely virtual space. Besides sending out signals that allow us to communicate over long distances in real time, our mobile phones also contain, amongst other materials, gold that needs to be extracted from mines using manual labour, and batteries whose chemicals will not break down in landfill.10 The Google server ‘farms’, sited in locations from Hamina, on the Gulf of Finland, to Georgia in the USA, consume about half the output of an average power plant, and their carbon footprint stands at 1.46 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.11 That energy needs to be converted after being extracted from gas and oil, and electricity generated by coal, although some data farms are now powered by their own solar arrays. The digital age is deeply material, connecting ideas that flow via human minds together via an intricate network of bodies and the world. This renewed emphasis on materiality also impacts on our conceptualisation of reading. The idealist understanding of literature being solely preoccupied with the mind is itself an incorrect notion, but extends more generally to the fallacious idea that with the rise of the digital our world is dematerialising. What is important to realise, however, is that through history ‘[b]y and large literary critics have been content to see literature as immaterial verbal constructions, relegating to the specialized fields of bibliography, manuscript culture, and book production the rigorous study of the materiality of literary artefacts’.12 In Writing Machines (2002), N. Katherine Hayles argues that in the light of the rise of electronic the literary text has become ‘material-semiotic object’ which gives ‘the same keen pleasure as the print novels [. . .] though through different sensory and kinesthetic modalities’.13 In ‘From Codex to Computer; or, Presence of Mind’ (2002), David Scott Kastan thinks about the transition of Shakespeare’s plays to printed materiality, and how in the digital age new ontological questions arise about authorship, authority and reading. Kastan delivers some hard-hitting counter-arguments to critics of e-reading, and celebrates e-reading just as Hayles does. Against George Steiner’s claim that only the material book has real presence, Kastan argues that ‘[i]f by “real presence” one intends the inescapable materiality by which the text become available for reading, then the computer has no less claim to it than the book; the digital text may be less sensually satisfying, but it is hard to see in what sense it can be thought any less “real”’.14 He also finds that we are too nostalgic for the material book, based on irrational arguments: ‘As we rationalize our resistance to digitization, we reveal the fetishism of our relationship to the book’.15 The real unsettling difference between material text and digital text is that the latter shows there is no ‘original’ in any meaningful sense: ‘what was there before is not what reappears. Calling up the saved text does not actually retrieve what was previously present, but, rather, reconstitutes the data stream, enabling it to be reproduced’.16 E-reading has a different ontology to print, which is always materially present, 134 Sebastian Groes whilst the digital exists only through repeated retrievals. Although you could argue that is only in the act of reading that print becomes meaningful text at all; that this reading process is always a bringing to presence, regardless of whether the text is always already there (the print book) or always available to reconsti- tuted (the e-reader). Wolfgang Ernst pinpoints another problem with presence and reality by noting the disappearing temporal gap between the present moment and the retrieved text:

Let us, memory-politically, not underestimate the ongoing impact of traditional paper archives or present audiovisual archives; the quest for access to such archives makes us feel immediately they are still real. With digital archives, though, there is – in principle – no more delay between memory and the present that the technical options of immediate feedback, turning every present datum into an archive entry and vice versa. The economy of timing becomes short-circuit.17

This circuitry of recall happens so quickly that we hardly notice it, but the point is that the text is there and not there. Electronic text exists through iteration and recursion, which makes our relation to the text different: less certain, slightly more unreliable. We thus see the emergence of technical, perceptual and temporal discontinuities that make our texts dynamic and mutable, but also volatile and unstable. This makes our world feel slightly more unreal. This epistemological alienation is perhaps to do with the stability – and also our perception of the stability – of the information we engage with. Hayles speaks of ‘transcription technologies’, the technology that produces inscription of some sort:

In books words are obvious inscriptions because they take the form of ink marks impressed on paper. The computer also counts as an inscription technology, because it changes electric polarities and correlates these changes with binary code, higher level languages such as C++ and Java, and the phosphor gleams of the cathode ray tube. To count as an inscription technology a device must initiate material changes that can be read as marks. [. . .] Additional examples include film, video, and the images produced by medical devices such as X-rays, CAT scans, and MRI.18

All these material traces made by technology lend themselves to forms of reading and interpretation, and the most interesting work will often acknowledge, and challenge, that inscription technology that it is being produced by/on, in which case ‘it mobilizes reflective loops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as a physical presence’.19 Hypertext on the computer screen is capable of what Hayles calls ‘techno text’ whereby the product carries traces of its production process. The impact of this phenomenon in the material book makes the effect much stronger, however. Van der Weel Memory, Materiality and the Ethics of Reading 135 gives us another reason by arguing that the computer’s typographic possibilities cannot do justice to the richness and precision of typographic expression in material books (see Weel 2011). We could argue that the use of material books as an inscription technology is, at least in some environments, preferable over others because retention is much stronger, making it easier to retrieve encoded information. It is thus not surprising that the material book has recently fought back against the e-reading experience by flaunting its materiality and the production process that gave birth to it, showing it can do things that only the material book can do properly. Following subversive sixties interventions such as B. S. Johnson’s hole-in-a-page in Albert Angelo (1963) and book-in-a-box The Unfortunates (1974), and Marc Sarpota’s Composition No. 1 (1962), we have recently seen Anne Carson’s Japanese style accordion album Nox (2009), Jonathan Safran Foer’s reworking on Bruno Schultz’s Street of Crocodiles in Tree of Codes (2010) and Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! (2014). Against this robust defence of the material book, e-literature also offers new possibilities. E-poetry, for instance, does things that would be impossible in regular typography, so rather than using computers to merely imitate printed type, e-literature potentially opens up a whole new field of literature. Tom Phillips’s experimental revisioning of a Victorian text The Humument (1970–2012) also has an excellent electronic version. This discussion is fraught with problems, but from the perspective of retention and experience, at the moment we can only argue that the study of literary works of art is best undertaken with material books. The psycho-physiological experience of reading a material novel is different from e-reading novels. Here is some anecdotal evidence. In 2012, I conducted an experiment with e-reading on my module ‘The Poetics of Surveillance’, which traces the various modes of observation throughout literary history. All students were loaned e-readers. After a slow start – some students had trouble quickly finding particular passages for close reading exercises – they got the hang of it. We used a relatively early version of this type of e-reader, and it proved a rather clunky device mainly because the navigability was limited. During the debriefing, the results of the experiment were overwhelmingly clear. Although students enjoyed the experience in general and liked reading on the device (not least because it was easy and light to carry around, and allowed them to download the many texts they were studying across modules), they found it difficult to think and refer back to specific pages and passages quickly when discussing a novel in class. When working with physical books one tends to know where to locate a passage (top, middle or bottom, and left or right hand side of the page; towards beginning, middle or end of the novel). My hunch is that having pages on the left and right has something to do with the left and right hand side of the brain having different functions, and activating our navigational capabilities. Neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga (1998) has done some excellent work on the split brain in the organisation of consciousness. The student also had problems making connections with books studied just weeks earlier, which impaired their ability to write comparative essays. Although this is anecdotal evidence, it does underscore the idea that we benefit from the navigational possibilities offered by 136 Sebastian Groes the material book, which uses a kind of ‘concertina effect’ in that it compressed a complex four-dimensional architecture into the pleated form that is the two- dimensional pages of a novel. Literary reading is like pulling the bellows in order to unfold this concertina-ed structure back into the rich cognitive composition. Electronic reading requires us to re-train our minds to read and remember text differently, and the question is if and how that is possible. E-readers do have new features such as highlighting and note-taking, which act similarly to indexing in the Middle Ages, as Corin Depper explores via Mary Carruthers in Chapter 1. The search function also offers new ways of understanding (and re-ordering) the knowledge in novels, as well as the possibility of corpus analysis. These new possibilities are exciting and elicit new forms of pleasure. And arguments against e-reading often come from a privileged, western humanist position, and implicitly counteract the democratising impulses of the dissemination of knowledge that benefit the powerless and poor. E-readers and organisations such as Worldreader offer the possibility of stimulating literacy in developing countries.20 A study researching reading newspapers on different platforms and formats has shown that, although tablets give a more immediate experience, and print generated a stronger level of engagement and emotional intensity, there is no discernible difference in attention levels.21 The problem with e-reading pertains specifically to the study of the novel form as art, which has a very particular 4D architecture, which takes shape as a physical and cognitive process in what we call the imagination. The owl-eyed man in Gatsby’s library anticipated it all. As Fitzgerald later notes about Gatsby, in a passage that has an apparent echo of the opening of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time:

Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.22

The ‘reality’ of the material world (‘the rock of the world’) as a potential expression of oneself is, as Gatsby instinctively understands, itself dependent upon intricate processes of subjective perception, interpretation and the imagination (‘a fairy’s wing’). While Gatsby’s library contains books as a fictional construct of his identity, our Age of the Prosthetic Mind offers more diverse ways of creating realities and more forms for remembering ourselves. This presents us with a provocative truth about our late modern times: although we may sometimes feel we are losing solid ground beneath our feet, outsourcing our minds to digital prostheses (possibly also freeing up our working memory) results in an increasingly accurate reflection of how consciousness and memory work. Benjamin points out that he was concerned with giving us ‘an insight into [. . .] collecting rather than a collection’, and this dynamic process is enhanced by the current the multiplicity of media formats, the temporal complexities, and the simultaneity and non-linearity of the contemporary experience.23 Memory is not a noun, but a verb; memory Memory, Materiality and the Ethics of Reading 137 is not a place but a process of continuous making and remaking. We should see e-reading and e-literature not as an attack on the material book, but as a supple- mentary mode with a new potential that adds another, equally rich, experience to our critical engagement with the world, which can further the ethics of critical reading.

Notes

1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library’, in Illuminations (London: Random House, 1999), 61. 2. Benjamin, Illuminations, 69. 3. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Green Light E-books, 2011), Loc. 668. Originally published in 1925. 4. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Loc. 668. 5. Peter Brooks, Introduction to The Humanities and Public Life, ed. Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewett (New York: Fordham University Press 2014), 2. 6. Elaine Scarry, ‘Poetry, Injury Add the Ethics of Reading’, The Humanities and Public Life, ed. Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewett (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 48. 7. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 22. First published in German as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur in 1930. 8. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2012), 11. Originally published in 2008. 9. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7543489.stm and http://www.theguardian.com/ global-development/2013/aug/09/africa-europe-digital-electronic-waste 10. See for instance http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23377562 11. See http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6e358ae0-da7a-11e0-bc99-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2wJ Hi1gro 12. N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2002), 19. 13. Hayles, Writing Machines, 15. 14. David Scott Kastan, ‘From Codex to Computer: or, Presence of Mind’, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood (London: Pearson Longman, 2008), 732. 15. Kastan, ‘Codex’, 732. 16. Kastan, ‘Codex’, 733. 17. Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 199. 18. Hayles, Writing Machines, 24. 19. Hayles, Writing Machines, 25. 20. See Lynn Nearny, ‘E-Readers mark a new chapter in the developing world’, National Public Radio, 2 December 2013, http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/12/02/248194408/e- readers-mark-a-new-chapter-in-the-developing-world [Accessed 14 October 2014]. See also http://www.worldreader.org/ for information about the Worldreader project. 21. See http://newscommercial.co.uk/cms/resources/neuro-insight-presentation.pdf 22. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Loc. 1439. 23. Benjamin, Illuminations, 61. Part III Ecologies of Memory Introduction to Part III Sebastian Groes

Keeping the human

Part III assesses the relationship between memory and ecology in the twenty-first century, and investigates how climate change has introduced a multiplicity of new complexities into our thinking about time, history and consciousness. It isn’t focusing only on climate change in a narrow sense of global warming, but argues instead that we should situate weather, milieu, geology and ecosystems within an all-encompassing ecology. Memory has a significant role to play in this process, and is the driver of a number of interrelated research questions which are explored here. In what ways is memory affected by the challenges posed by climate change and the threat of human extinction? How is memory involved in the various types of scientific and artistic responses climate change has generated? How can memory be made to be more useful in our conceptualization of climate change, and, perhaps, be used to assuage the impact of climate change, and generate a genuine ecocritical mindfulness in our collective consciousness? We start from the assumption that it is not unlikely that climate change threatens humankind with extinction, or that it will at least severely disrupt our lives. Unforeseen and large-scale ecological phenomena and changes have been manifesting themselves with increasing ferocity. Although some of us will feel the impact more than others – one might think, for instance, of those populations who live in Hurricane Valley in the United States, in the Philippines or in the Somerset Levels – climate change is likely to affect us all. The battle over questions about the scale and speed of climate change’s impact is raging unabated, and it will continue to do so in what seems to be an increasingly fraught, precarious future. From Nassim Taleb to Naomi Klein, many popular critics have been arguing that in the future the only certainty is uncertainty, and that we need to invent models that reduce the riskiness of our current contexts. Here, Claire Colebrook (Chapter 17) speaks of the resurgence of fragility and volatility. Our period feels apocalyptic, and end-time thinking is a major part of our current public discourse and popular imagination. We are living, to borrow a pun from Mark Currie, through ‘tense times’.1 We are confronted with new attitudes and sensibilities, and we see a complexification in our thinking about time and memory.

140 Introduction to Part III 141

Colebrook investigates the popularity of apocalyptic climate change novels and films such as The Day after Tomorrow (Dir. Roland Emmerich, 2002) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). These form a kind of ‘preliminary’ or ‘proleptic’ mourning, whereby we lament our fate and grieve for ourselves as if we were extinct already. This paradoxical logic is centre stage thanks to the Anthropocene, a term coined by Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, in 2002, which suggests there will be a time when mankind has ceased to exist, and that there will be a distinct geological strata of detritus that mankind has left behind. Colebrook unpicks the Anthropocene in detail by arguing that the geological layers and other traces left behind by an extinct mankind are non-anthropocentric inscriptions. Earth is an evolutionary mystic writing pad, or a deep time palimpsest, into which memories are inscribed to be read. But by whom? We are busying ourselves with memorializing ourselves. We have seen a proliferation of, for instance, time capsules that capture the triumphs of our civilization, such as the Voyager 1 and 2 Golden Records which contain sounds and images suggesting the diversity of life on planet Earth intended for extraterrestrial life – or people – who may at one point in the future find them. These artefacts are completely anthropocentric, though: made by humans, to be read by humans. As we have already seen in Part II, conceptualizations of life and death have become much more complex. Greg Garrard (Chapter 19) calls the tense belonging to the Anthropocene the future perfect subjunctive:

If climate change had a grammatical tense, it would be the future perfect subjunctive. We’re being asked to look forward in order to look back upon ourselves today with a sense of shame and embarrassment that we didn’t act sooner and more dramatically. This is a mode we see a lot in apocalyptic fictions.2

Mark Currie calls this paradox ‘anticipation of retrospection’, which is explored in detail in the next chapter on the futurity of memory.3 The novel and other narrative arts have a key role here in understanding what is happening to temporality. In a book, the events we read have already happened whilst the future events we are about to read have a fixed existence in the pages in front of us. Reading thus becomes a rehearsal for understanding temporal paradoxes.4 We are living through many strange temporal complexities. Before Darwin, memory was driven by two intertwined versions of temporality: one was individual, embodied time, which was itself encapsulated by a second, wider framework provided by Biblical time-scales. They were anthropocentric, human-centred, and always harked back to pastoral, Edenic notions. At the end of the eighteenth century, mathematical experiments and climatological simulation began to slowly displace human time, and Darwin’s revolution completed a non-anthropocentric thinking in which climatological time reduced the centrality of humans. Memory has been rethought as well: much more central now are climatological and geological memory, and perhaps cosmological memory, which dwarfs the individual, embodied memory that is part of anthropocentric thinking. In the science fiction epic Insterstellar (2014), crop blight has caused society to regress into a rudimentary 142 Sebastian Groes agrarian community, forcing NASA to look for inhabitable worlds. The pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his crew explore interstellar space, greatly traumatizing his young daughter, Murphy, by leaving Earth. The film’s director is Christopher Nolan, who is obsessed with memory and consciousness, as his break- through film exploring amnesia, Memento (2000), showed. In Interstellar, memory is even more complex. Through temporal compression and time loops, Cooper is able to communicate with his younger daughter through gravitational waves from a future point in time, allowing her to crack the mathematical codes when she is a mature scientist. Earth is evacuated, and Cooper, who has not aged, meets his dying, elderly daughter. The movie captures the various new paradoxes which force us to reconceive human time and memory in the light of climate change, and scientific innovation. One contentious issue is having children in the light of the explosion of the world population. In the West, reproductive technologies are creating a climate which is based on the notion that we all have a right to procreate, whilst in the East having children is a politically, socially and culturally fraught problem. Children also function as memories; having children is a form of solace, nostalgia for our former selves. Greg Garrard reminds us that, in the light of climate change, the figure of the child as embodiment of innocence and hope has become com- promised and ambiguous in today’s world:

In political terms, children represent the future. Children stand for the future; we want to save the planet for our children. But when it comes to climate change, children have an uncomfortable aspect, metaphorically. Human population growth is one of the biggest contributors to growth in greenhouse gasses, so, on the one hand, we invest our political hopes in children, but it actually might be better not having any children at all.5

Governments, industries and business, and the sciences across the globe are building on human invention and ingenuity to promote a global ecocritical consciousness. In Slavoj Žižek’s words: ‘For the first time in history, we, humans, collectively constitute ourselves and are aware of it, so that we are responsible for ourselves: the mode of our survival depends on the maturity of our collective reason’.6 Yet, the arts and humanities, and the creative industries, also have significant roles to play in responding to this crisis by creating spaces where critical-creative facilities can work through these processes. Art can establish strong responses in audiences, combining emotional affect and unconscious strategies that aim to generate a nostalgia that triggers a collective bioethical response. Or, by withholding affect, we supplement emotion that produces a will towards behavioural change, sustainability and an ecological conscience.

The Anthropocene and Weather Weirding: thinking ecology, thinking the end

Via a host of cultural references, Claire Colebrook meditates on the role of memory in works of art that have been speculating about the end of the world. She notes Introduction to Part III 143 that we find, on the one hand, stories with a cautionary moral imperative, and, on the other, texts that lament the path of a humanity too corrupted to redeem itself. Colebrook then turns to pastoral poetry, a form apt for providing solace for loss by imagining the cyclic remembering of the mourned past in each event of natural and seasonal renewal. Moving from Keats to Milton and from W. H. Auden back to Blake, Colebrook shows that climate change is a violent interruption in the western capitalist democracy that uses technology to exploit nature and human labour. Colebrook takes a stands against forms of solace and redemption generated by pastoral nostalgia and its mythologies of loss: climate change is a reminder that we had already forgotten nature. We are experiencing an uneven process that requires a variety of interventions that differ from region to region, but we have to let go of fantasies about resetting the earth. Rather than mourn mankind, we should establish an anti-anthropocentric framework and refocus on a history of deep cosmological time that acknowledges nature’s volatility. Colebrook is also addressing what Robert Markeley calls the ‘disidentification of climatological time’:7

A crucial effect of the technologies of climate change is that our experience has been refocused, or recalibrated, to integrate into our lived experience consensual inferences from ratios of isotopes, compression of layers of ice cores, models of hydrology, atmospheric circulation, large-scale deforestation, and satellite images. In this respect, climatological change registers the complex relationships between qualitative experience and quantitative knowledge, between human history and the Earth’s history. Recycling becomes, in one sense, a sacrificial rite to an ideal sustainability.8

There is a huge gap between the big data and complex predictions of IPCC reports and the everyday, lived reality of individual human beings. Our identities have become confused and contradictory, veering between the attempt to purify ourselves through a total surrender to a radical eco-friendly life-style, which might involve giving up pleasures that make life worth living, and a complete effacement of the human altogether. But mostly we are seeing a hybrid behaviour whereby we are mixing ‘modern’ behaviour (the roof of your house decked with solar panels, driving a Prius) with a persistent atavistic traditions (such as meat-eating). Rather than giving us a forensic assessment of scientific IPCC climate change reports, cold statistics and predictions, climate change scientist Mike Hulme (Chapter 18) gives us a personal line of inquiry, stressing the intimate relationship between climate, weather and humans. Hulme notes that the weather of our (often romanticized) childhood creates (un)conscious structures that determine how we think the weather should perform. This is why the idea of climate change and ecological volatility is so disturbing to us: it unsettles the subliminal structure of comfort of our remembered weather. In the popular discourse this is called ‘Weather Weirding’, in which seasons are knocked out of their ‘proper’, stable sequence; the weather is much more unpredictable than it used to be. Thus, climate change is destabilizing our mental anchors that have come to us via both our 144 Sebastian Groes personal and collective (often mediatized) memories. Hulme puts a provocative question to us: ‘If humans are indeed operating on a scale on this planet that is changing the climate, then are we not able to embrace the novelty that is ensuing and will ensue?’9 Rather than fearing the instability that our changing ecology presents, can we not also see it as a source of new creative possibilities? It is a question which Sebastian Groes engages with in Chapter 21. Greg Garrard also enters this discussion of climate change via a personal and nostalgic meditation on Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales (1952). He notes that nostalgia is not very popular amongst critics because the feeling ‘seems romantically or perversely unwilling to join the march of Progress’. Garrard argues for nostalgia as a radical force because this emotion could trigger the kind of affect that establishes more awareness of our environment. This is necessary, as there are various forms of environmental amnesia in today’s global culture: because climatological time asks us to imagine such vast temporal scales, which are not easy or impossibly to comprehend, we often ‘forget’ our role in climate change on a day to day basis. This is why people are unable to recollect our near future extinction. Yet, this amnesia also manifests itself in a different way: Garrard, acutely aware of that mankind is responsible for causing the extinction of so many other species, quotes a poem by W. S. Merwin, which sees ‘the loss of biodiversity as forgetting’. Garrard ends his piece by returning to the Anthropocene, responding to the film Age of Stupid (2009), which tries to shame its viewer, and presents our inertia from the future point of view of an archivist, played by Pete Postlethwaite, living in 2055. Postlethwaite asks the question: ‘Why we didn’t stop climate change when we had the chance?’ This type of climate activism aims to mobilize our anticipation of posterity to shame us into accepting self-sacrifice. Maggie Gee (Chapter 20) takes a creative writer’s point of view by tracing how her upbringing in the countryside has shaped her consciousness and her fiction. In Gee’s The Ice People (1998) we find ourselves in the year 2050 when a new ice age has set in and people are flocking to Africa – now a refuge with a temperate climate. The contemporary social dynamic has been reversed completely, showing how we need to confront and shed the myths which we use to justify our own behaviour, and which prevent us from a genuine commitment to stopping global warming. Gee’s dystopian The Flood (2004) is constructed out of a series of intensely compelling third person points of view that give a fragmented, kaleidoscopic view onto this anarchic, declining ‘drowned kingdom’.10 The novel assembles a cast of Londoners from across the social spectrum, from a veiled version of Tony Blair (Mr Bliss) and the editors of a gossip glossy (Headstone) to a TV astronomer and a born-again Christian preaching the end of the world. The constant rain contributes to the Dickensian-Orwellian atmosphere of corruption. This future London is the focal point of an inundation, which sharpens social inequalities: ‘The richer city-dwellers [. . .] thought they were safe behind walls and windows, in the nice green neigh- bourhoods, far away from the Towers. But actually nothing was separate anymore’.11 Gee’s creative work meditates on climatological time, giving us ‘an earth eye’s optical illusion’ that allows us to imagine an evolutionary, non-anthropocentric Introduction to Part III 145 perspective.12 ‘Timeless, isn’t it?’ asks one of the characters.13 Yet, dominant is profoundly human vision by projecting mankind into an unexpected future, forcing us all too look back on – to remember – ourselves today with a sense of shame. The Flood ends with an Edenic description of the characters assembling in Kew Gardens during the summer solstice. It gives us a hopeful image of children playing: ‘Dreaming themselves, they are as they wish. All that they ever hoped to be. Here they come now, arm in arms, flowing like water into their future’.14 Gee’s work confronts us with an earnestness and humility that might benefit us and the generations that come after us. The work mixes Stoicism with an unmistakable, affective humanism. In her chapter, Gee argues for the usefulness of the essentialism of nature; we tend to attribute irreducible, core values to the natural world. Paul Bloom notes: ‘When it comes to nature, we want the real thing; we are uncomfortable with substitutes. [. . .] we are searching for actual nature, and our understanding of how important this is to us underlies some of the anxiety that we feel about nature’s loss’.15 Psychological studies by, for instance Peter H. Kahn, have shown that when we are stressed simply looking at a piece of greenery from a window calms us down, whilst televised natural scenes do not. ‘The concern is that, by adapting gradually to the loss of actual nature and to the increase of technological nature, humans will lower the baseline across generations for what counts as a full measure of the human experience and of human flourishing’, according to Kahn.16 E. O. Wilson speculated about this basic, genetically-driven need and ability to have this profound connection with biologic life in Biophilia (1984), arguing for the idea that humans cannot achieve their full potential, meaning and sensibility outside nature. This is not simply to do with living matter alone. For Gee, another important focal point is Gaia (1979), in which James Lovelock develops a holistic theory about the earth’s ecosystems as ‘a complex entity involving the earth’s Biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet’.17 Lovelock’s thesis sees earth as a singular self-organizing organism, which also includes inanimate matter, based on an infinite collaboration between biological forms which all secretly interact with one another. In his seminal book on ecocriticism, Garrard notes: ‘Rather than merely being a rock in space with life clinging to it, the non-living parts of the planet are just as much part of the whole as the non-living heartwood of a living tree’.18 The Gaia thesis has been challenged, however, by, for instance, biologists, who note that, unlike animals, earth has not been subjected to evolutionary processes, but has merely been the stage set. Peter Godfrey–Smith argues that ‘the Earth can form a single interacting system without being at all like an organism’.19 Ultimately, the idea of Earth as a singular, dynamically interactive process is a powerful one, as it reaffirms the idea that we are all in this together. In the final chapter, Sebastian Groes connects various ideas, from the power of subliminality, E. O. Wilson’s idea that our desire for actual nature is encoded into our genes and Colebrook’s focus on climatological time by reading a novel concerned with climatological instability, J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962). 146 Sebastian Groes

In this novel we find ourselves in a future London submerged in water after ‘a series of violent and prolonged solar storms’ has caused the ice caps to melt.20 Lizards, iguanas and alligators rule the world, while most humans have fled to the North Pole. The protagonist, scientist Robert Kerans, however, is not interested joining the refuge for safety in the more stable climate offered by the north pole. Instead, Kerans explores the ways in which conscious life is being taken over by phantasmagoric dreams, brought on by the tropical heat. Kerans plunges himself into what he calls ‘archeopsychic memory’, a form of memory that is carried with us at the level of our genes: ‘The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries to the great sea of its total memory’.21 Groes is interested in Ballard’s rejection of affect and his embracing of a Stoic attitude because it is radical, counter-intuitive gesture that allows us to explore new possibilities in speculative and creative ways. Groes identifies a kind of ‘anti- monumental memory’ in Ballard’s work, which works against both the history of stale, ‘enlightened’ monumentalization and nostalgic, elegiac perspectives of nature and the belief in Progress. Groes prefers the newness, plasticity, improviza- tion and creativity that Ballard’s work emphasizes. Groes’s chapter includes a cat- egorization of contemporary responses to climate change, which together make up the beginnings of a coherent climate change imaginary, despite its seemingly fragmentary nature. This new ecology of the imagination will enable us to understand, and reflect critically on, the often unimaginable processes that are pulling us into an uncertain, precarious future. 17 Time That Is Intolerant Claire Colebrook

First, there was climate change: we might have thought that nature was an infinite resource, or – more Romantically – a figure of eternal and harmonious order that appeared as if in accord with human ideas of morality and progress. It has become apparent for some time now that nature is as historical and finite as every other living system. This has prompted Tim Morton (2007) to argue for an ecology, without nature; ‘nature’ as a timeless and pre-human ground was invented alongside a subjectivity for whom the world was nothing more (and nothing less) than a milieu for the unfolding of meaning. This ‘nature’ has always been proto-human (never ‘objective’ in the way we might imagine), and for this reason can never be grasped as such, precisely because it exists only as that which we presuppose as out of reach. Rather than Kant’s nature that is the consequence of the synthesizing imagination, and that must be posited by science and morality as unknowable but ultimately coherent, climate change prompts us to think about our milieu as anything but eternal, and as offering itself as (to use Bruno Latour’s phrase) a ‘matter of concern’ (Latour 2008). We do not, Latour insists, exist as historical agents against a stable and timeless nature, for nature is part of an overall milieu of composition in which we are affected as respondents to a world that is always unfolded from our practices. When we talk about climate change, then, we need to place the climate of weather, environments, geology and ecosystems within a broader critical sense of ‘climate’ as the presupposed ground that enables us to think of ourselves as agents and individuals. Climate change has become increasingly prominent in public and academic contexts, and is now being figured in modes of preliminary mourning: Maggie Gee’s Ice People (1998), Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) and Chris Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) imagine a world in which the ecology that is so crucial to our being has already been destroyed to the point of altering a very fragile humanity. Gee describes a world of climate volatility in which the earth’s over-heating and then freezing is coupled with a technological disaster of artificial life that overtakes human intentionality; initially helpful pet robots mutate and become part of a broader disaster that depicts human existence at its end. Similarly, Boyle’s Sunshine presents a world at a point of extreme heat-loss desperately trying to regain solar

147 148 Claire Colebrook energy by sending a space mission to explode a new star to re-ignite the solar system. Interstellar unfolds in what is now becoming a typical pattern in the temporal and memorializing structures of ‘cli-fi’: the present is marked by loss, mourning a world that had a future. The film displays and anticipates an intensified present, where climate change has wrought the planet close to uninhabitable; the narrative deploys a complex use of affective memory. The central character, who undertakes a mission through time and space, must at once save the planet for the future, while also remaining faithful to the humanity he has left behind. The film directly confronts an ethics of memory and mourning: without some sense of who we have been we will not be motivated to save the future. Like the genre of post-apocalyptic narratives in general, the end of humanity is rendered all the more poignant for losses that have already taken place. In Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion (2013) the central character, played by Tom Cruise, lives in a depleted world, but manages to hold onto the past by playing – on vinyl – Led Zeppelin’s ‘Ramble On’. It is as though the nostalgia we are already experiencing for a lost world can be imagined into a future where we will still be remembering what we once, properly, were. In all cases events of climate change as preliminary mourning are coupled with techno-dystopias that mourn human industrial hubris: tales of Promethean over-reaching are not new, of course, but what we might now notice is something constitutively destructive about the entire human species, and its project of enlightenment. Whereas Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein sets Victor Frankenstein’s creationist fantasies as at odds with nature and as undoing the scientist’s own life, Gee’s and Boyle’s cautionary moral tales impugn humanity and technology in general, and do not allow nature to emerge or remain unchanged. It is humanity as such, rather than an accidental or supplemental hubris, that is accused. In Oblivion and Interstellar there is still the memory of a once-proper humanity, but the imagined future is one in which a humanity attuned to the world has been eclipsed by a rapacious humanity that (if we are not careful) will be our future. It is only – these narratives implore – by way of remembering who we properly are that we will have a future. We might say that the motif of humanity mourning its own failure is common enough, but what becomes intense in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is a sense of irreversible species destruction that carries whatever is left of nature to an early grave. Futurist science-fiction dystopias have a cautionary moral imperative, pointing out where we might go if certain tendencies remain unchecked; but in what has come to be known as post-apocalyptic fiction, stories that are set in the future are presented less as possible scenarios and more as thought experiments in how we might imagine destruction when it arrives. This is so much the case that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road never details just what event caused the end of the world as we know it. Far from being a morality tale about where we might go if we keep on the same path, this future is not another possible world, but this world as it already is in its profound brutality. It only takes a small thought experiment to see that every world that presents itself as civilized is also a world of barbarism. Rather than warn about a future that might not arrive, texts such as The Road lament a trajectory of humanity that is too corrupted to offer redemption. And it is memory in The Road that is at once the only possible future – where the father and son must voyage through the world holding onto the ‘fire’ – while the past is also a violent and delusional Time That Is Intolerant 149 haunting: memories of the child’s mother only recall her suicide and her anticipation that giving birth was a production of death: ‘My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don’t ask for sorrow now’.22 Memories and dreams are also, at least for the father, a delusional enclosure in a remembered safety that can only yield destruction: ‘When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up’.23 Written well before the widespread popular awareness of climate change, J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World uses the motif of a radically altered climate to expose a general human inauthenticity: it is not climate change that destroys humanity, nor humanity’s specific and accidental relationship to a fragile world that alters the climate. There is something inhuman about all that presents itself in the figure of man; the imagined future world is a remembering and mourning of what we have always been. Far from warning that this might be our final century, the novel plays out a contrast between those human-all-too-human beings clinging to life and its shiny objects, and those more authentic souls who see into a broader life of things precisely by being torn away from the world as we know it. The novel moves towards a submerged planetarium, as though the anthropic globe (the lived world of man and his projects) must give way to a haptic vision:

As long as his eyes were strong enough to sense the distant signals transmitted by the sun, and as long as the iguanas failed to scent him, Hardman would move forward, feeling his way through the forest hand over hand, head raised to the sunlight breaking among the branches.24

The novel’s Adamic conclusion is not so much hope for a new future as it is an erasure of all that we have come to be: ‘So he left the lagoon and entered the jungle again, within a few days was completely lost, following the lagoons southward through the increasing rain and heat, attacked by alligators and giant bats, a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun’.25 Ballard’s ‘second Adam’ discloses something bizarrely sexual about memory: man in the present is both mesmerized and immobilized by the dazzling vision of woman, who typifies both a lapse into self-forgetting and a possible overcoming (or becoming-woman) that would free the self from its myopic enclosure in self- interested survival. ‘Woman’ serves as a way of thinking man’s otherness without him confronting a fundamentally inhuman and inorganic memory. In both The Drowned World and The Road something like the lure of woman acts as a way of covering over a primordial barbarism. In The Drowned World Beatrice does not so much aid in the journey or movement through hell as she acts as a mesmerizing and seductive image, intensifying the novel’s opposition between a world that can be seen and surveyed, and a final light beyond human measure and desire:

He gazed at Beatrice’s elegant profile, at her sleek carmine mouth and lacquered nails, almost bemused by the heady scent of perfume and the brocaded rustle of her gown. After the violence and filth of the past days he felt like one of the dust-begrimed discoverers of the tomb of Nefertiti stumbling upon her exquisite painted mask in the depths of the necropolis.26 150 Claire Colebrook

Woman – as in The Road – is always a lost plenitude that, far from being a paradise we ought to retain, presents the epitome of a human narcissism that has no sense of its own violence. In The Road the father and son travel a world in which the mother of the boy has committed suicide. A sentimental reading of the novel would suggest that a world without women has displaced a once-familial and non-violent civilization blessed with life and nature. But the novel gives the lie to such a possibility precisely in its detailing of the ways in which dreams of paradise and a benevolent nature are, like the lulling lures of Ballard’s drowned world, simply ways of not dealing with the peril of the world: ‘He mistrusted all of that. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death’.27 Such statements should at least gives us pause in reading the dreams of woman as genuine figures of hope for a better world. Worse still for recuperative readings of The Road is the description of the mother’s gift, which is not selfless sacrifice, but a gift of coldness, as though to ‘imagine there’s no woman’ (Copjec 2002) is to abandon the memory of a golden humanity that just happens to be lost:

She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift. She would do it with a flake of obsidian. He’d taught her himself. Sharper than steel. The edge an atom thick. And she was right. There was no argument. The hundred nights they’d sat up debating the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall. In the morning the boy said nothing at all and when they were packed and ready to set out upon the road he turned and looked back at their campsite and he said: She’s gone isn’t she? And he said: Yes, she is.28

I would suggest, then, that we think about contemporary preliminary mourn- ings of the end of humanity not as new ways of thinking about a humanity that has discovered its own destructive tendencies, but as part of a broader tradition of counter-memory. We might like to think that we have lost what once made us human, and we might tend to mourn a past prior to a fragile, drowned or lost world. But if there can be something like climate change it is not because we lost some harmony that once allowed us to live in tune with the world; rather, there is no nature whose benevolence we might mourn, recall and restore (Morton 2007), for it is what has come to be remembered as nature that is the effect of human memory as self-extinction.

It appears to be only recently that climate change has started to operate as a figure for the imaginary of human memory: if nature had once been an eternal backdrop for human history (a timelessness against which time was posited), it was because nature provided figures for a life that would be comfortingly cyclic. What differs in the shift from the imaginary of climate change to the figure of the Anthropocene is that we not only imagine nature as paradise lost (as a Time That Is Intolerant 151 climate destroyed to the point of the loss of all life), but we also figure a world in which the trace of humans remains to be read in the absence of all readers. The Anthropocene, after all, figures a specific mode of inscription and scarring (geological strata of a certain scale), and then imagines that our existence would be readable in the way that we now read past pre-human ages. We know we live in the Holocene because we read the present planet as a sign capable of disclosing a past. In this sense the Anthropocene imaginary can be understood as part of a broader history in which memory, mourning and the indifference and inscription of nature are intertwined. I would suggest that we resist the notion that climate change and human inscription as violence to the earth are radically new motifs. Rather, there has always been a sense – rendered explicit in the history of pastoral elegy – that human existence, as an event of memory and mourning, is constitutively and violently at odds with an indifferent natural time. When this mode of human memory and mourning is re-articulated in the age of human extinction or anticipated human non-existence, what occurs is perhaps for the first time an idea that there might have been a humanity, human time and human memory not at odds with the time of the earth. That is: if we read three major pastoral elegies, W. H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Adonais’, and John Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, we can see the ways in which what is mourned is not only individual death, and not only the disjunction between human finitude and nature’s indifference, but also the impossibility of intuiting nature in any manner that is not always already violently human. To live is to be at odds with a natural time that can only be known, ex post facto, as that which we read violently and blindly as our own. We might take note of this today, and note that the Anthropocene imaginary, where we mourn what we will have done to the planet, implies an impossible counter-scenario where we might have lived in perfect harmony with a nature that might have been ours had we only lived without inscription. We may feel human death and finitude acutely and painfully, but pastoral elegy, especially in its Romantic mode, seems to provide solace for human loss by imagining the cyclic remembering of the mourned past in each event of natural and seasonal renewal. Although Shelley accuses nature of indifference in his mourning of Keats in his ‘Adonais’ of 1821, it is precisely the indifference of nature that provides abundant recompense in its contrast with the inscription of human poetry:

For he is gone, where all things wise and fair Descend – oh, dream not that the amorous Deep Will yet restore him to the vital air; Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.29

The conception of ‘mute voice’ is perhaps a more critical motif than that of the Anthropocene: rather than posit a geological scale as the proper framework and register for disclosing who we have been, we might think of what is not ourselves as a voice that says nothing, or that speaks but with utter muteness. If we think of nature as a figure that will allow us to remember and recall each event of loss 152 Claire Colebrook as part of a broader time of eternal return, then we do so only by the most violent of rhetorical stunts: hailing as victory what is ultimately indifferent to our paro- chial time of survival. Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ makes this relationship between memory, mourning and recompense explicit: beginning with ‘yet once more’ the poem laments Lycidas’s death as it notes both nature’s recurrence of the same seasonal backdrop, year after year, death after death, elegy after elegy, and the history of poetry’s repetition of nature’s cyclic returns: ‘Yet once more, O ye laurels’.30 Milton repeats the gesture of mourning that goes back to Virgil and Thucydides, each poet noting the same nature and the same indifference. By taking up the history of pastoral elegy Milton not only uses the figure of nature as a metaphor for death as a form of renewal, he also presents poetry as an art of memory; poetry contributes to a history of human sense that posits a time of natural renewal rather than a time of truncated human death, but then surpasses natural renewal by maintaining itself as violent inscription through time. Every time a poet writes a pastoral elegy, mourning an unnaturally early death, quoting his precursors, he remembers the same nature, and the same untimeliness: a nature that is evergreen and that is disturbed by human writing, only to be offered up as figurally eternal. Just as the poet has been disturbed by a death that occurs out of time, so poetry in turn cuts into natural cyclic time by forging monuments: ‘And with forc’d fingers crude / Shatter your leaves’.31 Remembering this individual in the present, and then writing in such a way as to tear open nature’s timelessness, allows the poet to connect with a history of previous interruptions. It is precisely by remembering and inscribing the difference between human death and natural renewal that the history of human sense – inscribed in the genre that mourns human loss – becomes timeless. The archive not only mirrors nature’s renewal, each poet adding to nature’s inscription by interrupting nature’s evergreen perpetuity and installing a more powerful time of memory, it also – and no less insistently and repetitively – notes the disjunction between nature’s silent, uncaring, thankless timelessness in opposition to the brilliant singularity of the human imagination that is out of time:

Alas! what boots it with incessant care To tend the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade, And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?32

By the time pastoral elegy was being re-inscribed in the twentieth century, W. H. Auden knew both that poetry ‘makes nothing happen’ and that whatever mirroring ‘we’ perceive in nature is a consequence of projection rather than sym- pathy: ‘What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day’.33 Auden writes before the imagination of climate change becomes a cultural dominant, but he nevertheless writes with the sense of human time and poetics being ‘out of joint’ with an indifferent nature, and with poetry’s history as memory being timelessly reified against the violence of human history: ‘In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark’.34 When climate change arrives as a specific motif, even when it is not explicitly the- matized within pastoral elegy, the sense of violence inflicted by human inscription Time That Is Intolerant 153 and prosopopeia has already been duly noted by Paul de Man: to give a face to nature – to recall, remember and maintain the past into the present – is always necessarily to disfigure and de-face.35 It is not so much that we murder in order to dissect, but that we cover over the necessary murder that occurs when nature is rendered monumental and sentimental by giving nature a life akin to our own. Humans become who they are because of climate change, benefiting from the period of relative stability known as the Holocene, but also generating freedom, progress and the very idea of personhood and humanity by way of a history of technology and inscription that is essentially unsustainable (Chakrabarty 2009). For the first time in geological history it is a single species that operates as a force with inscriptive intensity: there will be a time when humans are not just part of the fossil record but will also have changed what will be readable as a shift in biomass, carbon dioxide levels and radioactive waste. Climate change and the Anthropocene might appear to be game-changing events that would force us to revise the very way in which we think about concepts, and revision. Climate change and the Anthropocene, as concepts, alter the relationship between humans, who might like to think of themselves as going through time in order to become more and more attuned to their world, and the world that seems to exist as the stable and mediated milieu that is the scene and horizon of discovery. Dipesh Chakrabarty, arguing against what he identifies as a common motif in post-colonial theory, cuts history into non-converging timelines: the history of imperialism that extorts labour from other humans is not the same history of the increasingly exploited planet. Even if the world had been a perfectly just society we would still have to confront the damage we have done to the earth, which would have been worse had ‘civilization’ not begun by stealing labour from other humans (Chakrabarty 2013). Freedom, he insists, has relied upon destruction of the earth, and so we cannot align our criticism of imperialism with our lament of the damage done to the climate by human history, which is also a geological history. However, we need to add another layer to this argument that re-connects or remembers the history torn asunder by the thought of deep time: while Enlightenment freedom would not have yielded a green planet, and while a green planet would not have been secured had there been a history that was just rather than imperialist, there is still a necessary connection between barbarism and planetary destruction. The very technology that destroys the earth and that enables human freedom emerges from a division of labour that allows things like thought, technology and the archive. That is, before there can be the technology of fossil fuels that frees human life at the expense of the planet, there must be the development of culture, memory and technology that arises from an expropriating relation among humans. From Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002) to Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time (1998) – and quite outside arguments about climate change and the Anthropocene – there has been a demonstration of the violence of the archive. ‘Nature’ as the stable, cyclic, eternal backdrop for human history and agency occurs only by way of a technology of writing, inscription and memory that in turn relies upon a form of human civility and stability that divides the priests of expertise from those who face the messy labour of ordering the earth for general human consumption. The condition for the possibility of exploiting and appropriating ‘nature’ is a prior violent division 154 Claire Colebrook of labour that enables the history of technology. We should perhaps recall that for William Blake the history of writing is also the history of priestly expertise and enslavement, and a history of forgetting such that nature is the production of an event of deanimation:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve.

And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;

Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;

Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.

And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things.

Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.36

For Blake – but also, more recently, for Stiegler and Adorno and Horkheimer – the supposedly eternal nature that comes to be inscribed by writing, is an effect of inscription and follows from a violent event of priesthood in which expertise and the arts of memory take hold of the means of psychic production. Today, with the supposedly new reality of climate change we need to take stock and reconfigure the ways in which we have narrated human history: no longer a history of progressive freedom that views nature (as Kant insisted we must) as if it were in accord with the human imagination and striving for moral and scientific progress, nature now needs to be seen as that which we unwittingly violated in our dreams of becoming human. If climate change offers itself as a radical wake-up call it does so with something like the force of a return of the repressed. We should not think that in the beginning there was harmony – something like Milton’s paradise in which shared labour could be coupled with abundant natural resources and a civil society of conversation and philosophical reflection. Milton’s paradise is forged by an event of constitutive forgetting: his original Eden where Adam and Eve gather the fruits of the earth, and engage in philosophical disputation, combines an unspoiled nature in harmony with human labour, and a labour in harmony with human memory. Milton presents a time in which the division of labour was neither violent nor distributed between cognition and suffering. Adam and Eve are capable of working and conversing precisely because nature offers itself abundantly for their consumption, and has a cycle of time and renewal in accord with a balanced human existence. In this great moment of pastoral within Time That Is Intolerant 155 an epic concerned with the seeming injustice of what it is to be human – for the very notion of ‘justifying the ways of God to man’ suggests something apparently unjust about existence as such – Milton presents a vision of timeless or eternal harmony that will be disturbed by what might be interpreted as the first violation of nature. One could read Paradise Lost proto-ecologically: in the beginning is a due reverence for nature, a sense of nature’s own cosmic temporality that is violated when Satan implants a notion of exceptional supremacy in the mind of the vulnerable Eve. Consider how Milton describes the timeless scene of nature that discloses and conceals itself; this rhythm of nature is in perfect harmony with the ‘sweet reluctant amorous delay’ of Adam and Eve’s love and labour:

A sylvan scene, and, as the ranks ascend 140 Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view. Yet higher than their tops The verdurous wall of Paradise up-sprung; Which to our general Sire gave prospect large Into his nether empire neighbouring round. 145 And higher than that wall a circling row Of goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit, Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue, Appeared, with gay enamelled colours mixed; On which the sun more glad impressed his beams 150 Than in fair evening cloud, or humid bow, When God hath showered the earth; so lovely seemed That lantskip. And of pure now purer air Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires Vernal delight and joy, able to drive 155 All sadness but despair. Now gentle gales, Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole Those balmy spoils. As when to them who sail Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past 160 Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow Sabean odours from the spicy shore Of Araby the Blest, with such delay Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league

It is perhaps too easy to note that Milton depicts his paradise – here viewed by Satan – as already framed by aesthetic conventions as a ‘sylvan scene’, but the ecological fantasy it expresses is perhaps less easy to dismiss: there was once an abundant nature that, before offering itself to human consumption, offered itself to itself, or seemed to caress and perceive and give life to itself. Nature appears, once, to have borne its own meaning and self-communicating sense: ‘gentle gales / Fanning their odiferous wings, dispense / Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole / Those balmy spoils’. Here, as elsewhere in Paradise Lost, original nature hints at 156 Claire Colebrook its subsequent corruption. The ‘native perfumes’ have a communicative power that is at expressive of nature’s intrinsic meaning and self-relating; the perfumes are fanned by gales that are fragrant only because they have stolen ‘balmy spoils’. This delaying and relaying of the earth’s gifts, as a form of natural commerce, prefigures what will become a hinted-at benevolent colonialism in the trading of spices that seem to offer themselves with inviting odours: ‘Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league / Cheered with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles.’ It is as though nature offers itself, and in doing so stalls and delays its own consumption, a delay and due reverence that Satan is about to disregard ‘Due entrance he disdained, and, in contempt, / At one slight bound high overleaped all bound’.37 Why Paradise Lost, and pastoral more generally, is worth considering today lies in the explicit thematization of the relation between a manufactured nature and a technology of inscription. It is not the case that once upon a time nature existed as a paradise to which we added consumption, and then extended consumption to the point of arriving at nature lost. On the contrary, it is only by way of inscription and production – only by the forms of agriculture that stabilize nature and allow it to appear as if offering itself as abundant – that nature can emerge as innocently fragile and exposed to an overly technological and fallen humanity. One way of thinking about climate change is to repeat the lost paradise motif, and to imagine that there was a time when human life was not violently at odds with its milieu, and that the nature of cyclic stability was a pre-human gift that we happen to have destroyed. This is how Zadie Smith recently wrote of the loss of a nature of seasons: ‘Sing an elegy for the washed away! For the cycles of life, for the saltwater marshes, the houses, the humans – whole islands of humans.=’.38 For Smith there was once a time when we could recognize time passing because of the cyclic return of certain bird-songs and other markers of nature’s own rhythm: ‘What “used to be” is painful to remember. Forcing the spike of an unlit firework into the cold, dry ground. Admiring the frost on the holly berries, en route to school. Taking a long, restorative walk on Boxing Day in the winter glare’.39 Like many before her she chooses to write an elegy, and in keeping with elegy accuses something akin to writing (or relativism and deconstruction) of having blinded us to nature’s reality. Imagining how we of the Anthropocene epoch might explain our willful over-consumption to the future, she writes:

This will no doubt look very peculiar to my seven-year-old granddaughter. I don’t expect she will forgive me, but it might be useful for her to get a glimpse into the mindset, if only for the purposes of comprehension. What shall I tell her? Her teachers will already have explained that what was happening to the weather, in 2014, was an inconvenient truth, financially, politically – but that’s perfectly obvious, even now. A global movement of the people might have forced it onto the political agenda, no matter the cost. What she will want to know is why this movement took so long to materialize. So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we’d just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes – and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat.40 Time That Is Intolerant 157

What, we might ask, is the condition of possibility for the nature of cyclic stability and meaning that Smith mourns in her elegy? Rather than see this nature of the seasons as lost, and rather than see our depleted future as something at odds with a history we can only mourn, it is more accurate to say that nature could only be viewed as a ‘sylvan scene’ because of a history of forgetting. Nature is produced, as stable, abundant, cyclic and eternal, only by way of techniques of appropriation, expropriation, kleptocracy and a violent division of labour and extraction of surplus. The event of climate change is a return not of a sign or scar of a nature we lost, but a reminder of the nature that was always already forgotten in its production as immemorial. In this return of forgetting I would suggest that rather than mourn a lost past or write an elegy for the seasons, and rather than find recompense in mourning, we look to a different strata. There is another temporality and another rhythm of inscription. If we accept that nature is produced as stable, cyclic, harmonious and elegiac precisely by way of the advent of increasingly industrial agriculture that represses nature’s volatility and sees the resurgence of volatility as a single event of climate change, then we might look to another history of deep time in which nature is climate change, or in which climate does not exist. Rather than an environment, or a nature that surrounds, Australian indigenous arts of memory worked with a deep time that recounted a nature of fragility and volatility (Clark 2008). Rather than looking at nature as a backdrop for human memory, Australian Aboriginal poet Lionel Fogarty writes of a planet that restores itself by weep- ing away human history, only then allowing for ‘one’ who might emerge in a ‘crowned country’: ‘This country mine / weeps away falling dews / Leaves them foolish men / but one, who will command the change’.41 This would be possible only with a different time, and an evolution that was not one in which ‘man’ emerges from a background of life, but where humans and earth are both historical: ‘Theory of evolution we developed / things living as original forms of lifes’.42

Notes

1. Mark Currie, About Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University press, 2010), 137. 2. Quoted in Sebastian Groes, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being Green’, 3 February 2014. http://www.sciculture.ac.uk/2014/02/03/the-unbearable-lightness-of-being-green- climate-change-and-the-art-of-memory/, Accessed 7 June 2014. 3. Currie, About Time, 29. 4. ‘Narrative is generally retrospective in the sense that the teller is looking back on events and relating them in the past tense, but a reader or listener experiences these events for the first time, as a quasi-present. [. . .] When we read a novel we make present events that are in the past, and when we live life we often do the opposite: we live the present as if it were already in the past, as if it were the object of a future memory. If in reading a narrative we decode the preterite as a kind of present, the process of one of presentification, whereas in living we use a kind of envisaged preterite to deprive the today of its character as present. Put simply, it is possible that the reading of narrative fiction, in instructing us in the presentification of the past, also robs us of the present in the sense that it encourages us to imagine looking back on it’ (Currie, About Time, 29–30). 5. Groes, ‘Green’. 6. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), 331. 7. Robert Markeley, ‘Climate Science’, in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, ed. Bruce Clarke (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 72. 158 Claire Colebrook

8. Markeley, ‘Climate Science’, 71–72. 9. Groes, ‘Green’. 10. Maggie Gee, The Flood (London: Saqui, 2012), Loc. 1530. Originally published in 2004. 11. Gee, The Flood, Loc. 1253. 12. Gee, The Flood, Loc. 1135. 13. Gee, The Flood, Loc. 1539. 14. Gee, The Flood, Loc. 4688. 15. Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works (London: Vintage Digital, 2011), Loc. 3357. Originally published in 2010. 16. Peter H. Kahn, Jr, Rachel L. Severson and Jolina H. Ruckert, ‘The Human Relation with Nature and Technological Nature’, Current Directions in Psychological Science 18 (1) (2009), 37. 17. James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 10. First published in 1979. 18. Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 173. 19. Peter Godfrey-Smith, ‘The Ant and the Steam Engine’, London Review of Books 37(4) (2015), 19. 20. J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 21. 21. Ballard, The Drowned World, 44. Originally published in 1962 by Victor Gollancz. In an interview, Ballard states: ‘I wanted to look at our racial memory, our whole biological inheritance, the fact that we’re all several hundred million years old, as old as the biological kingdoms in our spines, in our brains, in our cellular structure; our very identities reflect untold numbers of decisions lying behind us in the past like some enormous largely forgotten journey’. J. G. Ballard in interview with Brian Hennessey, ‘J. G. Ballard’, Transatlantic Review 39 (Spring 1971) (60–64), 62. 22. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 57. 23. McCarthy, The Road, 189. 24. J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 173. 25. Ballard, The Drowned World, 175. 26. Ballard, The Drowned World, 150–151. 27. McCarthy, The Road, 15. 28. McCarthy, The Road, 56. 29. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetry and Prose of Shelley (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 507. 30. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 120. 31. Milton, Complete Poems, 120. 32. Milton, Complete Poems, 122. 33. W. H. Auden, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 89. 34. Auden, Selected Poems, 90. 35. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia, 2013), 100. 36. William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, in The Works of William Blake (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 183. 37. Milton, Complete Poems, 282. 38. Zadie Smith, ‘Elegy for a Country’s Seasons’, New York Review of Books, 3 April 2014 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/apr/03/elegy-countrys-seasons/. 39. Smith, ‘Elegy for a Country’s Seasons’. 40. Smith, ‘Elegy for a Country’s Seasons’. 41. Lionel G. Fogarty, Dha’lan Djani Mitti: Collected Poems (Cambridge: Salt, 2011). 42. Fogarty, Dha’lan Djani Mitti. 18 Climate Change and Memory Mike Hulme

‘We are familiar with statements by elderly people, such as ‘The winters were colder and the snows deeper when I was a youngster’. So reported American meteorologist J.B. Kincer in one of the earliest scientific papers to draw attention to the worldwide climate warming underway in the 1920s and 1930s.1 Kincer’s report highlights the ‘when I was younger’ claim typical of the more elderly cohorts of nearly all societies in conversation with younger generations. In this conversation, the conclusive clause – almost universally, and certainly with recourse to a comparative or even superlative adjective – goes: ‘the summers were sunnier’, ‘the winters were colder’, ‘the ice was thicker’, ‘the rains more reliable’, ‘the seasons more predictable’. Interpreting the veracity and significance of such anecdotal claims is not always easy; human memories of past weather are inevitably selective and malleable (Harley 2003). Yet, the ubiquity of such claims nevertheless tells us something very important about the relationship between climate and the human mind. These memories of past weather reveal how we expect the atmosphere to perform; the past is our normative guide to the future. Summers should be sunnier than they are today; winters should be colder; the rhythm of weather should follow a more discernible seasonal cycle. Our recollection of past weather exerts powerful influences on our interpretation of present weather and on our apprehensions about future changes in climate. We have high expectations of our climate. We expect climate to perform for us, to offer us the weather around which we can reliably work and create and within which we can safely relax and re-create. Yet we know too that climate is fickle, with a will and a mind of its own. It offers us not only days of tranquil- lity and repose, but also the storms and dangers that our ancestors encountered over countless centuries and that continue to afflict us today. And so we love our climate, whilst simultaneously fearing it. We celebrate its power to evoke strong emotions in us, whilst also bemoaning its unpredictability or fearing its future behaviour. As explained by the Japanese philosopher, Watsuji Tetsuro:

A cold wind may be experienced as a mountain blast or the cold dry wind that sweeps through Tokyo at the end of winter. The spring breeze may be one

159 160 Mike Hulme

which blows off cherry blossoms or which caresses the waves [. . .] As we find our gladdened or pained selves in a wind that scatters the cherry blossoms, so do we apprehend our wilting selves in the very heat of summer that scorches down on plants and trees in a spell of dry weather.2

Climate offers material benefits for all human cultures: the rain, wind, sun and warmth that waters, powers and feeds our lands and machines. Climate also offers resources for our aesthetic and spiritual imaginations: the clouds and sunsets which inspire our poetry, the seasonality around which we develop rituals. Yet these abundant benefits often seem precarious. In Lucien Boia’s words, ‘The history of humanity is characterised by an endemic anxiety [. . .] it is as if something or someone is remorselessly trying to sabotage the world’s driving force – and particularly its climate’.3 Constancy of climate is rare. And the precariousness of climate has often been invoked in explanations of the collapse of civilisations since climatic stability is presumed to be a prerequisite for the stability of civilisations. But the insecurity which accompanies climate is also a powerful driver of human innovation. New technologies, practices and systems are created to build social resilience in the face of capricious climates, whether these be smart flood defences, weather forecasts or insurance systems. So within the idea of climate is held in tension the human experience of constancy and change. On the one hand, climate captures the regularity and reliability of the extra-planetary drivers – solar radiation and orbital characteristics – which give the security of seasonal structure and rhythm to the weather. As Nick Groom explores in his book The Seasons, ‘the [weather] calendar can provide reassurance; its rituals and rhythms can still help us to understand the natural world in more “natural” ways’.4 Yet on the other hand, the idea of climate also affords the possibility that this regularity might be disrupted or threatened by intervening forces: whether the rapid violence of volcanic eruptions or the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011) of greenhouse gas accumulation. Under the influence of such intrusive forces, climate’s weather becomes scrambled and somehow fails in its duty to perform. There is something very personal, too, about the way our minds work with the idea of climate. While meteorologists define climate using the statistical average of weather measured over a period of at least 30 years, for most people climate becomes reified through a rather unstructured assemblage of remembered weather. My personal climate, and therefore my expectation of how weather should behave, accumulates through my life story. My memories of earlier weather intrude into my present experience and interpretation of the skies. For example, I remember as a five-year old feeling a primordial fear of drowning as incessant summer rains flooded our suburban garden. I remember as a six-year old being battered and bruised by a violent April hailstorm on the cliffs of Devon. I remember as a 16-year old the sun-drenched summer of 1976. And imagined memories of past weather also reach me through re-told stories of my father’s and grandfather’s childhoods: the deep snows of 1947, the idyllic summers of farm-life in the 1930s. This is weather captured not as purified statistics, but as indexed memories and Climate Change and Memory 161 evocations of fears and desires. The idea of climate therefore becomes an ineffable multi-sensory account of my past in which ‘imagination, place, culture and history engage with the physicality of heat, cold, wind, sun and rain’.5 From the perspective of the mind then, a change in climate – ‘climate change’ if you wish – becomes a dislocation of such weathered memories. The idea of climate change disorients our memories, many of which are profoundly attached to past weather, and unsettles our expectations about the future. It begins to unsettle our belief that we know how the weather of the future should be. The threat of climate change arises more from a scrambling of our memories – and a subsequent disorientation of our expectations of the future – than from any diminution or destruction of a material resource. After all, unlike other ‘environmental problems’ climate change is not the result of the pollution or destruction of a physical space. Weather is not being destroyed in the way that, say, in the 1980s stratospheric ozone was being depleted. Indeed, weather never gets destroyed or depleted in the way that fish stocks or forests may be; the world will never ‘run out of’ weather. Weather is an infinitely renewable, even if unpredictable, resource. Understanding climate as an unstructured assemblage of remembered weather perhaps explains why we are reluctant to embrace novel climates, new assemblages of weather (Hulme 2010). Our experience of weather is always backward- looking as we try to connect the present moment with a remembered past. It is why we are captivated by the refrain ‘the warmest day since . . .’, ‘the worst flooding since . . .’ Today’s weather can only be made sense of through reference to the past, whether this is an instrumentalised past as in the meteorologists’ statistics or, more powerfully, in our own remembered and memorialised past. This meeting in the weather of present and past is what I seek to explore in my weather writing, inspired by my immersion in weather at a time and in a place. I offer one such expression in the poem below called ‘The Day Ahead’. This was written at seven o’clock in the morning of a late spring day, 25 May 2009. I had risen early and was sitting at the bottom of my urban garden in the city of Norwich, a garden flush with the fresh green of May. My past intruded into the stillness and purity of the early morning weather . . .

The Day Ahead The world is new in this unaccustomed dawn, The sun rising surreptitiously in the east as if taking me unawares. In this New World the birds hold sway, The city silenced, We humans merely wondrous observers of a cultured Eden. The patient enduring sun warms my body and lightens my heart Inviting me to sit and observe. ‘Learn from me’, it says. ‘I do not fret. And each day’s morn I come to you again.’ 162 Mike Hulme

Two swallows frolic across the empire of the sky Oblivious to the carbonated air which holds the deepening beams of heat from a sharpening sun. Above, unchallenged blue is tinged with misty white. A gentle zephyr fondles my welcoming skin. Two senses now, Heat and chill both claim their ascendency over me. The intrusions of the day force their jarring notes upon me: The rise and fall of an apologetic siren, The turbulence from a distant propeller, The encroaching roar of rubber on road. Time itself starts to stake its claim upon the day The New World fades and its spell is loosened. I move to earlier times when this virgin world offered herself to me: The purified stillness of a Saharan dawn, The childish ecstasy of an emblazoned Scottish harbour, The giant hedgerows gleaming with dew in silent sensual Sussex splendour, Innocent childhoods when all was agelessly inviting. Returning, I can see the day ahead, I can feel its growing pulse As the sun adopts its more familiar pose. The old world claims me for its own. All will stay the same, but all will change. But still, there is tomorrow, when the sun comes to me, to you, to us, again, Freshly minted and offering the same simple joys. Be there to welcome it. And be there.

Notes

1. J.B. Kincer, ‘Is Our Climate Changing? A Study of Long-Term Temperature Trends’, Monthly Weather Review 61 (1933), 251. 2. Watsuji Tetsuro, Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bownas (New York: Greenwood Press, 1961), 5. 3. Lucien Boia, The Weather in the Imagination (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 149. 4. Nick Groom, The Seasons: A Celebration of the English Year (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), 29. 5. Mike Hulme, ‘“Telling a Different Tale”: Literary, Historical and Meteorological Reading of a Norfolk Heatwave’, Climatic Change, 113(1) (2012), 20. 19 Memories of Snow: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Re-Reading Greg Garrard

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell- tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.1

The 1952 audio recording of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales is, for all my family, an object of nostalgia. The nostalgia of the lyrical memoir itself is obvious enough: it harks back to a childhood of guttering gas lamps, paper bags bulging with humbugs, and moustachioed men puffing on pipes as they take their ‘constitutional’ along the ‘Swansea prom’. Thomas’s prose self-consciously ampli- fies the immemorial quality of the story:

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, [. . .] before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.2

For me, A Child’s Christmas in Wales is also a landscape of memory, evoking, amongst other places, Cwmdonkin Drive, where my surfer friend Andy lived, and the Sandfields, ‘the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow’, where my daughter Holly went to

163 164 Greg Garrard primary school. But most of all, Thomas’s richly euphonious recording has resounded for me on every Christmas Eve of the last 30 years, in places as diverse as a damp, cold, Swansea, through the tropical fug of Kingston, Jamaica, to Ottawa, Canada, whiter and colder than South Wales could ever have been, at 30 below. What snowy childhood Christmases meant to Thomas, and what his warmly comic recollection of them have meant to us in changing climes – and a changing climate – seems to have little to do with the meteorological 30-year average through which, as Mike Hulme says, a scientist can begin to define and understand Swansea’s ‘climate’. While nostalgia has long fascinated literary critics, they have frequently found fault with it. Linda Hutcheon’s assessment is typical:

The simple, pure, ordered, easy, beautiful, or harmonious past is constructed (and then experienced emotionally) in conjunction with the present – which, in turn, is constructed as complicated, contaminated, anarchic, difficult, ugly, and confrontational. Nostalgic distancing sanitizes as it selects, making the past feel complete, stable, coherent, safe from ‘the unexpected and the unto- ward, from accident or betrayal’ – in other words, making it so very unlike the present.3

Because it locates beauty and harmony in the past, nostalgia seems romantically or perversely unwilling to join the march of Progress. In truth, our Christmases are too snowy or not snowy enough, and far too commodified, indulgent and emotionally fractious to bear even the slightest comparison to Thomas’s genial scenes of slumbering uncles and modest plenitude. As the critic Raymond Williams points out in The Country and the City, writers have always looked back to better days.4 Williams pictures nostalgia as an escalator going back into the past: let Dylan Thomas take you back to 1920s Swansea and there you’ll find writers of an earlier epoch recalling their childhood idylls. Before you know it, you’re back with Theocritus in the third century BCE.

Environmental amnesia and the ‘new normal’

Nostalgia may foster delusion, allowing us to evade discomforting realities past or present, but our capacity to adapt to changed circumstances brings risks of its own, especially where environmental alteration and degradation are at stake. Following the tragic deaths of 19 firefighters in an Arizona wildfire on 1 July 2013 (four days ago as I write this piece), the New York Times reports that scientists think huge fires caused by hotter, drier conditions are the ‘new normal’ in the American West. The article quotes Professor Stephen Pyne of Arizona State University:

The natural conditions, particularly climate, the land-use changes that interact with it and how we add or subtract fire, those are the three parts of the fire triangle. Almost all of those are pointing in the same direction – bigger, more damaging fires.5 Memories of Snow 165

But are even the ‘natural’ conditions natural? Anthropogenic climate change and pre-existing decadal oscillations are both thought to contribute to the new normal wildfire regime in the West. Time is a great naturaliser: in the future, practices and institutions will adapt and children will grow up knowing nothing different. Perhaps they will ask themselves years later whether the world burned for six days and nights when they were 12, or 12 days and nights when they were six. Rapid environmental change and the remarkable human capacity for adaptation conspire with reduced attention to the natural world to induce dangerous individual and cultural amnesia. This syndrome includes what Richard Louv calls ‘nature deficit disorder’ in Last Child in the Woods:

Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. The disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities.6

Mitchell Thomashow’s Bringing the Biosphere Home seeks to reverse the trend Louv identifies, by fostering ‘biospheric perception’, including an enhanced sensitivity to different timescales. Thomashow warns that ‘We pay more attention to the passing of digits on the hands of a watch than we do to subtle changes in the landscape, migration schedules, or the sprouting of weeds’, and proposes exercises to attune us to seasonal, ecological and geological timescales.7 So it seems apt that W. S. Merwin’s environmental elegy ‘Losing a Language’ should figure the loss of biodiversity thought the trope of forgetting:

nobody has seen it happening nobody remembers [. . .]

here are the extinct feathers here is the rain we saw8

Merwin’s poem deploys a nostalgic rhetoric of lost creatures and obsolete words (think: thylacine, auroch, baiji) to force us to recollect extinction. Perhaps nostalgia can take radical, critical forms as well as assuaging or enervating ones?

The temporality of climate change

The Earth’s climate has never been stable or wholly predictable, so environmental- ists’ warnings of ‘climate chaos’ are, in an important sense, mistaken. On the other hand, it is tempting to think of anthropogenic climate change as implying ‘better’ or ‘worse’ weather, like the Scottish comedian who commented sardonically: ‘Global warming? About f***ing time!’ In practical terms, climate change will involve ‘win- ners’ and ‘losers’ because regional and decadal variations, at present very difficult to predict, will dictate the weather that actually occurs. The quicker climatic and biotic systems are altered by changes in the greenhouse effect (radiative forcing), the more 166 Greg Garrard losers there will be. Culturally, though, what we will experience is a changed relationship to change, because if climate is what we expect and weather is what we get, the truth is that we longer have much idea what to expect. Hence the assumption that climate change is all about the future rather than the past. The number that summarises the current state of anxiety about our future climate is our best estimate of ‘climate sensitivity’: the increase in global mean temperature caused by a doubling of the concentration of CO2- equivalent gases in the atmosphere. Combine this estimate with a projection of future emissions and you get a sense of how the Earth’s climate will change in the next century. Complex simulations on supercomputers model future climates; climate negotiations have so far failed to protect ‘our children’ (an imaginary child being the accepted figurative representation of the future in political discourse); and of course climate fiction is overwhelmingly futuristic. The film Age of Stupid (Fanny Armstrong 2009) tries to embarrass viewers by representing our inaction from the baffled, outraged perspective of a future archivist, played by a lugubrious Pete Postlethwaite, who wonders, looking back from 2055, ‘Why we didn’t stop climate change when we had the chance?’ Climate activism mobilises our anticipation of posterity to shame us into present self-sacrifice. In fact, climate projections are based on data from past changes as well as models of the future. Moreover, our failure to respond quickly to the threat of climate change is not explained best by ‘stupidity’ or narrow self-interest but by inertia, be it technological, demographic, political or, indeed, cultural. David Nye’s Consuming Power shows how, ‘as Americans incorporated new machines and processes in their lives, they became ensnared in power systems that were not easily changed’.9 America’s ruinously excessive ‘culture of consumption’ is neither a moral failing nor a purely ideological commitment, but the outcome of a very particular history dense with choices, constraints and conflicts. Here, too, normalisation holds sway, although nostalgia remains a potent force:

A child born into a world filled with automobiles takes them for granted and learns to see the world ‘naturally’ at 60 miles per hour. Yet we have many testimonies to the dislocation people felt in the early nineteenth century when they found themselves moving at 20 miles per hour on one of the new railways.10

Paleoclimatic reconstruction is essential to climate projections, and the history of technological transitions in the past shows why it is so hard to decarbon- ise our energy systems at the requisite pace. The history of literature, too, may come to seem relevant to the ecocritical analysis of climate change, which has so far focused mainly on contemporary fictions that address the gap between knowledge and action (Garrard 2013; Kerridge 2014). What might be done, as a small-scale example, with my nostalgia for Thomas’s nostalgic A Child’s Christmas in Wales? Memories of Snow 167

Tessellated climate narratives

The ‘law of Prägnanz’ in Gestalt psychology claims that we seek to reduce reality to the simplest possible form. In visual perception, we will pick out a simple image before coming to see a more complex one that the marks on the page might compose. A simple, regular figure is likely to be perceived as distinct from a complex or chaotic ground. Ordinarily we will consider Thomas’s simple, harmonious story the natural ‘object’ of analysis, and my memories of listening to it merely the autobiographical (back)ground. But what if we reverse figure and ground, like the famous Gestalt image of a vase that switches spontaneously into two faces in profile? Or indeed recognise Thomas’s Christmases and my own as irreversibly interwoven or tessellated, like M.C. Escher’s etch- ings of birds and fish? There is no text without a reading, and every literary climate is experienced under the real weather conditions in which we read or hear it. Now we recall that one Christmas was actually so unlike another as we heard, once again, how Miss Prothero, who ‘said the right thing, always’, ‘looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and [. . .] said, “Would you like anything to read?”’11 During my decade in Swansea, there were only two white Christmases (1990 and 1993), and I was away for both of them; mostly I remember rain. Indeed, an industrious pedant might well find the winters of 1920–1926 somewhat less frigid than they are in Thomas’s memory. In December 2011 in the Cotswolds, though, the snow ‘came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees’ just as in Thomas’s recollections. Four of the last five winters in the UK have been unusually cold and snowy,12 convincing British Conservative buffoon- in-chief Boris Johnson that ‘something appears to be up with our winter weather, and to call it “warming” is obviously to strain the language’.13 As Hickman’s blog indicates, scientists better acquainted than Johnson with the distinction between weather and climate have hypothesised a link between our run of white Christmases and the rapid thawing of Arctic sea ice. When we listen to Dylan Thomas in a blizzard-bound cottage today, there is a flickering unease: is this just like the ‘dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards’14 of Swansea a century ago, or did we cause it? Hulme points out, rightly, that ‘for most people climate becomes reified through a rather unstructured assemblage of remembered weather’ and that climate change ‘begins to unsettle my belief that I know how the weather of the future should be’. But the scientific and the personal narratives may be interwoven in still more profound, surprising and discomforting ways, because knowing we have changed the Earth’s climate forces us to re-read the past as well as the future. The snowbound winters of Thomas’s childhood Christmases in Wales occurred, it turns out, just as the downward global temperature trend since the Middle Ages abruptly reversed.15 What for Thomas and his contemporary listeners was a reference point of remembered winter normality is, for science, the beginning 168 Greg Garrard of the end for natural climatic change. What we now know, and can never by any means unknow, is that the difference between our various Christmases, to which Thomas always contributed his rich voice and wise humour, and the ones he narrates is, to some unknowable degree, the consequence of anthropogenic climate change as well as changes of our own abodes. What’s more, since my transnational family is only ever reunited by jet air travel, a family Christmas is always a carbon-costly Christmas. So the climatic difference, discerned only in retrospect, was one to which we, infinitesimally but still disproportionately, contributed. To shift Christmas mythologies for a moment, it is as if the Ghost of Christmas Future turned out to have all the Ghosts of Christmas Past chained to his bony ankle. ‘Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be’. It’s a joke old enough to have its own nostalgic patina. It is true, though, of the new ironies that afflict memory since climate change pervaded our cultures of nature. We need nostalgia: it’s an emotive type of biospheric perception that helps us counteract the amnesic drift of the ‘new normal’. At the same time, though, what we remember was not – is no longer – normal itself. Thus from now on, Dylan Thomas’s harmless nostalgia for an age of innocent consumption and un-denatured snowstorms will be tessellated with memories of the weird winter weather and increasingly guilty pleasures of every Christmas we’ve listened to him. It is a disquieting kind of nostalgia indeed.

Notes

1. Dylan Thomas, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’, http://www.bfsmedia.com/MAS/Dylan/ Christmas.html 2. Thomas, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’. 3. Linda Hutcheon, ‘Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern’, http://www.library.utoronto. ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html. 4. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth, 1985, 1973). 5. Felicity and Kenneth Chang Barringer, ‘Experts See New Normal as a Hotter, Drier West Faces More Huge Fires’, New York Times, 1 July 2013. 6. Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Updated and expanded. ed. (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2008), 34. 7. Mitchell Thomashow, Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002), 204. 8. Margaret W. Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th ed. (New York and London: Norton, 1996), 1745. 9. David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA: London: MIT Press, 1998). Kindle, Loc. 34. 10. Nye, Consuming Power, Loc. 107. 11. Thomas, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’. 12. Met Office, ‘Fact Sheet 5: White Christmas’, http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/ pdf/a/q/Fact_sheet_No._5.pdf. 13. Leo Hickman, ‘Boris Johnson Says Snow Casts Doubt on Climate Change Science’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/jan/21/boris-johnson- snow-climate-change. 14. Thomas, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’. Memories of Snow 169

15. Thomas F. Stocker et al., ‘Climate Change 2013. The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-Abstract for Decision-Makers’, (Groupe d’experts intergouvernemen- tal sur l’evolution du climat/Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-IPCC, C/O World Meteorological Organization, 7bis Avenue de la Paix, CP 2300 CH-1211 Geneva 2 (Switzerland), 2013), 6. 20 Writing Climate Change Maggie Gee

What is special about human memory? A visitor from another galaxy might find memory encoded everywhere on earth, in the living and the non-living, in the geological layer-cake of rocks and the shifts of shore-lines as well as in the colonies of plants that mark where a spore has blown or a seed-capsule drifted. Planetary memory is everywhere, and we know the memory of non-human animals helps shape their lives. But in our limited understanding now, human beings seem to be the only species perpetually driven to record their memories and transmit them into art. Memory is linked to climate change for me both through the human activity of making art and through the encoding of past time in nature. Art is memory. I might tell myself that I choose only to write fiction about the present and the future, but the truth is, looked back on from a few years hence, a book will become a record of my consciousness at one particular moment as it slips into the past. If you believe, as I do, that all living things have their own form of consciousness, what differentiates human beings is the extent to which we record it, not as a by-product of survival like the fantastic paper nests wasps build from wood pulp and water, but for its own intrinsic purposes. Artists seem compelled to record the world they see. Take the British Isles. In Anglo-Saxon riddles, in Chaucer, in Shakespeare, in William Blake and Dorothy Wordsworth and William Wordsworth and John Keats, in Virginia Woolf and Laurie Lee and E. J. Scovell, in Ted Hughes and Jean Sprackland, there is a sharply detailed record of British fauna and flora and the evolution of country into town. Poetry is our living memory of what was. Shakespeare’s imagery is so vital and various because he lived among such a wealth of animals, birds, plants. He could not have known that the city of his time, where domestic and farm animals still lived closely with humans and where fields and woods were never far away, would be replaced by the bigger, more ster- ile, lonelier city of the twenty-first century with its constant futile drive towards monoculture. But Shakespeare’s accidental memorialising of his teeming present has become part of our knowledge of Elizabethan history and thus of the very different England we inhabit today.

170 Writing Climate Change 171

I have been writing about threatened nature all my life, probably because I grew up in the country – first Dorset, then Worcestershire, then Sussex – with parents who had no car, were fanatical walkers and took us camping. Then, as a late adolescent, I moved to the city, so part of me still feels the loss. When for 18 months of my adult life I kept a diary, I was surprised to find how much of it was spent recording urban nature – the trees coming into leaf in the park, the flowers in the tiny front gardens of my London suburb. My Kensal Rise neighbours were Spanish and Portuguese migrants who were missing the reds and oranges of Iberia, West Indians who were expressing their longing for the lusher vegetation of home, or British working class gardeners echoing their ancestors who gardened to make bearable the loss of the fields they worked before the industrial revolution. At the centre of my work – like the ‘unwavering band of light’ at the heart of every living being imagined by Kurt Vonnegut’s imaginary artist Rabo Karabekian1 – is a long looking back to my own childhood when there was always more sky and fewer buildings. Where does climate change fit into this? I have been writing about it for nearly 30 years, since 1985, when I mentioned it in a novel called Light Years, a love story set against the seasons, composed of 12 sections for the months and 52 chapters for the weeks. Which sounds orderly enough, but actually the book describes a world of fragile beauty where things are slipping out of kilter because of human activities. The first germ of the novel was memory. The fictional hero, Harold, who shares my real-life birthday, copes with his marriage breakup by going back to the place where he (and I) were born, the Dorset coast. There, in the past I lent him, with the help of some popular guides to plants and animals, Harold consoles himself with a renewed knowledge of the many living species I grew up with. As the year heats up there is acid rain and the air over Europe becomes thick with pollution; August, the hottest month of the year, is unnaturally hot, and leads us on to a section set on a sulphurous, boiling Venus, a metaphor for what the earth might become.

Dog-days. Still getting hotter. Every night of the year, the sky over Paris, London, Frankfurt is faintly orange. Thousands of tons of fossilized sunlight are being burned. The air thickens with carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen. In August, great flashes of lightning split the orange from top to bottom. The little humans pray for rain. When it comes, it is acid rain. A third of the German forest is dying, The insects have lots of dead wood to bore. In England, not very much is noticed. Dog-roses wilt in their proper season, hore-chestnut fruit grow tiny horns, thistles turn into plugs of pale fur. Venus, the closest planet to Earth, was once much more like us. It did have water, once. A little too close for comfort, now. The yellow clouds are sulphur. Under that, carbon dioxide. The surface is hot as fire.2 172 Maggie Gee

In the end my lovers are reunited – in a benign version of London Zoo and a winter that will soon turn into spring, a metaphor for a restored world where human beings can live as one species among many. But this reconciliation could not have happened without the knowledge of himself and the planet that Harold gains by going back to Dorset and reliving my own memories of nature, just as I myself walked the coast while I researched and wrote Light Years longhand in six spiral notebooks. Shell Bay, Purbeck, Dorset. My first memory, the substrate or blank tablet on which my subsequent life has been written, is the long white shining beach down which I run, aged two or three, towards the enormous sea. For some reason a matte, multiply-indented piddock shell stopped me in my tracks, amazed. Its twin, picked up weeks ago in Kent, sits by me now as I write, a small pale time traveller. Climate change is more central in my novels Where Are the Snows (1991), The Ice People (1998), and The Flood (2004). But I have never thought ‘I ought to write about climate change’. Novelists and poets don’t, on the whole, want to write down their ‘oughts’; they don’t want to be dutiful, they want to defy the parental voices in their heads. The deep origin of writing is not in the groomed self that adopts moral positions: it is in the wild self which registers love and fear. My first conviction that climate change was happening came later than Light Years, through my visceral attachment to the recent past. Every year my Japanese quince tree bloomed by the frog pond in very early spring: first tiny tight balls of red on black twigs, then perfect, simple round flowers with curved petals and yellow stamens. Some time in the 1990s the quince bloomed too soon, in December of the old year, not the new. And it did so again – not every year, but often enough for countless ordinary gardeners like me to see the seasons were changing. I remembered the glacier at Gletsch, in the Swiss Valais, which I saw when I was 13 or 14 years old – a monumental presence to clamber on the edge of, dust and bright turquoise blue in the cracks, leading up to blinding white. I wrote about that day in my memoir My Animal Life: my over-riding memory is of running with my friend near the foot of the glacier and having the blissful illusion that we could run for ever. Five decades later, the tongue of frozen water has shrunk until it is several kilometres away from Gletsch. I thought about my daughter Rosa, born in 1986 – she was an urban tomboy who loved playing in snow and mud, but I have one photo, a favourite, of her in a swathe of roadside buttercups on the way to one of the weekends we used to spend with her great-great aunt in the Ashdown Forest. Would my daughter as a young, hopeful adult still be able to experience the diverse world of ice and sun, forests and rivers that I myself remembered? Through her I found the love and the fear that I needed. Where Are the Snows (1991) was a novel that linked the capitalist excesses of Thatcher’s 1980s to a global warming that I carried forward into an imagined twenty-first century. The Flood (2004), partly inspired by the widespread European floods of 2002 and 2003 and partly by the prelude to the illegal war on Iraq, was Writing Climate Change 173 another vision of the consequences of global warming and the paralysed inertia of human beings in the face of it. When there are floods around the opera-house, gondolas are laid on so the rich don’t lose their pleasures. The poor, marooned in their tower-blocks, do less well. The Ice People (1998), written between those two, is a very different novel. It shows the acute global warming of the ‘Tropical Time’, the first decades of the twenty-first century, going into swift, unexpected reversal as a new ice age looms. Human technological civilisation is unable to cope and the population crashes to more sustainable levels. The idea for the novel came from Geneviève Woillard’s 1979 study of the pollen record, ‘Abrupt end of the last interglacial s. s. in north- east France’,3 which proves how rapidly, in the Pleistocene period, temperate trees were replaced by spruce, pine and birch. It was followed by a growing number of scientific studies in the 1980s and 1990s that changed the prevailing model of slow, steady climate change to one of much swifter and less predictable shifts – worse for the health of human beings but, frankly, better for novel plots. Art draws on individual memory, but personal knowledge and belief need to be tested against shared knowledge. Science has access to a longer, harder kind of memory; it can investigate geological strata, ice cores and fossil pollens. The earth remembers everything if we know how to look. Then science can collate statistics and make predictions. It would be stupid to ignore it – I read New Scientist every week, have long followed James Lovelock4 and try to keep abreast of the condensed versions of the IPCC reports and the Royal Society’s many deliberations and statements about climate change. This is where the head confronts the heart. In the longer view, over the millennia, climate change looks quite different. What follows is a simplification of a complex subject, but the broad outlines remain true. When I found out that ice ages last, typically, 100,000 years, and temperate periods like this one are far briefer planetary fevers lasting typically less than 15,000 years, I was disconcerted. Life has survived far hotter periods than this one. As we are currently around 12,000 years through the present interglacial, one conjecture is that today’s human-aided global warming might be preventing earth’s temperature from tipping back towards ice. That contrarian conjecture underlies The Ice People’s fictional reversal of global warming. It’s obviously a thought experiment. But a few grimmer truths in that novel hold – climate change can come much faster than most people imagine, and civilisations of excess tend to crumble. Human beings are art-making creatures because of a broader human characteristic, the urge to transform. Fishing, farming, mining, building, burning – ever since the Neolithic revolution we have been transforming the planet, and now we have megacities, industrial-scale agriculture, the giant footprints of global energy firms. My novels dramatise the unintended consequences of all this human activity, and most of my comedy is about people who do not understand what they are doing and never see the bigger picture. Right outside the window, pressing its face against the glass, here’s climate change, whispering ‘Remember me; remember me’. 174 Maggie Gee

Notes

1. Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (St Albans: Panther, 1975), 205. 2. Maggie Gee, Light Years (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 210. 3. Geneviève Woillard, Nature 281 (1979), 558–562. 4. James Lovelock, founder of the Gaia theory and author of, inter alia, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), The Revenge of Gaia (2006), and The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (1979). 21 Against Nostalgia: Climate Change Art and Memory Sebastian Groes

An ecology of the imagination

Climate change raises new intellectual and ethical questions for artists and writers. Do they have an obligation to engage with, and represent, a major global issue such as climate change, and the threat of our extinction? Do they have the responsibility to harness their powers of imagination and force their audience to think about their role in the possible extinction of mankind? Should they move and/or shock us into more (self-)awareness and long-term behavioural change? How can they make us remember to behave more responsibly towards the ecosystem we inhabit? Can one work of art ever successfully address concerns of global proportions? Should we lament the death of the human race, or should we embrace, and immerse ourselves in, the fearful realities that could act as a potentially productive and transforming power that will re-direct our understanding of ourselves as (post)humans? Questions about what kind of response to give to our (potential) extinction, and what role memory and the imagination play in the understanding of the processes we are currently living through, are as complex as they are important. As this chapter has shown, responses have been eclectic. As Robert Markley argues, the complexities make a straightforward, unified artistic response difficult.1 It is not surprising that Tom Cohen remarks that ‘What has been absent to date is any shared or possible climate change imaginary’.2 I would like to make two interrelated points. First, the absence of a unified, shared response is a strength rather than a weakness as it mimics a diverse, evolving, diversifying ecology of the imagination that connects us to past forms of stability via literary and cultural traditions. Second, despite the eclectic response to climate change in art, there are a number of emergent lines of creative inquiry, which together form a tentative climate change imaginary, outlined in the paradigm below. The strength of this model lies in its networked nature and plasticity, in its rhizomic branching out, both in form and content. What unites all these responses is that their creative dynamo is memory. The below paradigm gives an overview of cultural responses to climate change fiction, divided up into responses that use end-time thinking, and work set in the present that meditates more generally on ecology and nature. The apocalyptic

175 176 Sebastian Groes strand is subdivided into two different sensibilities, and eco-realism is divided up in subgenres. Together they make up ‘Cli-fi’:3

Categories of Ecocritical Art and ‘Cli-fi’

1. (post-)Apocalyptic Fantasy, Sci-fi, Dystopia a. Emotive, hysterical epic: Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000); The Day after Tomorrow (Dir. Roland Emmerich, 2004); The Age of Stupid (Dir. Fanny Armstrong, 2009); Beasts of the Southern Wild (Dir. Behn Zeitlin, 2012); Interstellar (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2014). b. Stoic : George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty Four (1949); John Christopher, The Death of Grass (1956); J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962); Brian Aldiss, The Hothouse (1961); Soylent Green (Dir. Richard Fleisher, 1973); Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006); Maggie Gee, The Flood (2004); Antony Gormley, Exposure, 2010 (2010); Melancholia (Dir. Lars von Trier, 2011); Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (2009); Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project (2003); Nostalgia for the Light (Dir. Patricio Guzmán, 2010). 2. Ecocritical realism a. Farce/comedy: Ian McEwan, Solar (2010). b. Post-pastoral novel: Jim Crace, Arcadia (1992); John Burnside, Living Nowhere (2003); Martin Amis, London Fields (1989). c. Non-fiction/Nature writing/cinema: Grizzly Man (Dir. Werner Herzog, 2005); An Inconvenient Truth (Dir. Al Gore, 2005). d. Eco-memoir: David Vann, Legend of a Suicide (2009); Helen MacDonald, H is for Hawk (2014).

The (post-)Apocalyptic Fantasy strand also includes Hollywood (post-)apocalyptic disaster epics, such as The Day After Tomorrow (Dir. Roland Emmerich, 2004), I Am Legend (Dir. Francis Lawrence, 2007) and more recently Beasts of the Southern Wild (Dir. Benh Zeitlin, 2012), Elysium (Dir. Neill Blomkamp, 2013) and most recently Darren Aranofsky’s Noah (2014) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). These are cautionary moral dramas, which I call ‘Apocalyptic-Hysterical’ because they aim to shame and shock us into changing our behaviour through emotive and didactic guilt-tripping narratives. These post-apocalyptic worlds are designed to repel us, to shock us into the realisation that what we, and the generations that will come after us, are about to lose is valuable and important enough to prevent this loss. These writers aim to create an aesthetic of shock and awe, and establish an imagined, collective mourning that propels us into radical and long-term change. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and The Age of Stupid (Dir. Fanny Armstrong, 2009) are border- line narratives as their voices sometimes slip into this hysterical, didactic mode. In the other camp, we find apocalyptic work that, as Claire Colebrook suggests, laments a trajectory of humanity that is too corrupted to offer redemption. Colebrook points us towards Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic work, including Oryx and Crake Against Nostalgia 177

(2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009) as well as Maggie Gee’s The Ice People (1998) and The Flood (2004). Together with works such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), these novels form just one layer in the archaeology of Anthropocenic thinking about the end of the world. I call this form the ‘Apocalyptic-Stoic’ type because they withhold judgement and emotional blackmail. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) and novels such as Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s triptych Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days and Counting (2007) belong to this group. This art often presents us with figures that embody the fear of our regressive selves that emerge after the decline of man. In the case of McCarthy’s The Road, we see the emergence of a new Stoic sublime that establishes a post-memorial, amnesiac world triggering a desire for our ‘normal’ world in the reader. By making us imagine and feel the texture of a posthumous, ghostly and affectless world in which man is seemingly meaningless, we come to a kind of Orwellian ‘doublethink’: we inhabit our present moment as a future memory that will be lost. A curious temporal loop emerges that propels us into action. We can only preserve our selves as a future memory by changing our behaviour in the present. Another example of this Stoic sublime is Antony Gormley’s Exposure, 2010 (2010), a sculpture in the midst of the vast emptiness of the Dutch polders. We see a lonely, solemn giant weighting 60 tonnes squat on a dike under the endless sky- scapes, looking out over the inland sea and reclaimed land. The Netherlands offer one of the most artificial landscapes on earth. Salvaged from submerged wetlands and the sea, it perfected its water works through the harnessing of technologies such as the windmill and land reclamation. Hardly anything in the Netherlands remains untouched by human hands; never was the machine more omnipres- ent in the garden, to allude to an early ecocritical idea of Leo Marx (1964). The sculpture was also dubbed Giant Man Patiently Awaiting Climate Change. The artifice and manipulability of the natural world inspired Gormley’s sculpture, which ‘reacts over time to the changing environment. One of the known environmental changes that is happening is the rising of the sea level through global warming. [. . .] Over time, should the rising of the sea level mean that there has to be a rising of the dike, this means that there should be a progressive burying of the work’.4 Gormley wants a new vision of art:

What I am asking for is a reassessment of what art is and how it works. I am questioning the linear trajectory of art history as part of western development, recognising that all art exists in the sense of a continuous present. We are now in a position to acknowledge that those stages in an evolutionary past that would, in previous times, have been thought of as primitive, are coexisting in this era and are not superseded – and actually the use of the fetish and the totem as reference points for a model of art are enormously useful.5

On the one hand, Gormley suggest that our conception of time, history and memory should be much more complex than the linear, progressive notions of time that existed during the Enlightenment, with its fetishisation of Progress. On the other, his work avoids wallowing in the mythologies of loss that are based on 178 Sebastian Groes the literary tradition which argues that the world is constantly losing more of its innocence. Exposure, 2010 embodies these complexities. The scale of the sculpture suggests that humans have outgrown this now tiny earth; mankind is too much present. It’s a monument to the precariousness of life, but there is a sense of shame, as the crouching suggests. It has a massive footprint, yet simultaneously the figure is transparent and light. From a distance we see a human figure; up close we are left with abstraction: climate change needs a global perspective. It dramatizes nature versus artifice, and the human versus the posthuman. The human form was turned into a geometrical system with the help of digital technologies and algorithms, generating a postmodern sublime. It exploits affect: the viewer sup- plements emotion on behalf of this ghostly, lonely presence; we cry out for our collective future. This contradictory sculpture does not offer easy interpretations: mankind’s future is difficult to read. The sculpture dramatizes memory. The giant turns its back on Dutch landscape and history. Its size suggests an engagement with evolutionary deep time, and climatological temporality. The skeletal construction points to the bones of an extinct mankind, and alludes to the time of humans as a geological layer in the archaeology of our world, that is, the Anthropocene. The giant is a fossilised future memory. Exposure, 2010 embodies a forward-looking retroactivity. It evokes the existential question: Who, if mankind will become extinct, is the subject of this future memory? What meaning is there to our lives if there won’t be humans to remember it? The popularity of the Apocalyptic Fantasy can be explained partly through the role memory plays from an evolutionary perspective – contemporary memory debates often exclude the idea that memory must have evolved by design. The psychologist James S. Nairne has shown that memory systems retain information for ‘fitness’, that is, for strategies that could ensure our individual survival as well as that of our species. Nairne undertook retention experiments by investigating the different categories of ‘fitness’: survival, navigation, social exchange, kin and family, and reproduction. Research suggests that when looking at verbal labels (that is, words), survival processing enhances retention much more than any other categories: ‘survival processing produces excellent retention – better, in fact, than virtually all known encoding techniques’.6 At the same time, Nairne suggests that evolution has coupled any experience that involves learning lessons for survival to emotional arousal, so that retention for survival is associated with a high emotional association. Climate change fictions which have spectacular narratives about survival thus make use of a double strategy. They trigger the storage of survival techniques and knowledge in our minds, making use of heavy emotional arousal. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Maggie Gee’s The Ice People hit most of the above retention buttons: they are stories about people trying to survive whilst travelling with, or in search of, their kin. What is interesting about these fictions is that they are deliberately unaf- fective, unemotive. These fictions exploit evolutionary psychology. The human mind automatically associates these fictional survival narratives with emotional Against Nostalgia 179 arousal. We don’t need to be helped to feel empathy when it comes to survival narratives.

Ecocritical realism: Ian McEwan’s ship of fools

These Apocalyptic responses are not the only ones, however. There is a group of fictions which think ecology but are set in the present. We find a satirical- sceptical type in Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010), a comic novel about a gluttonous and womanizing Novel Prize winning scientist, Michael Beard, who, by accident, becomes a competitor in cutting edge research that could solve global heating. This satire points out that our potential extinction is caused by a combination of man’s selfishness and a lack of self-awareness that together result in individual and collective amnesia. Slavoj Žižek has noted that in order to cope with our prospective extinction, ‘our collective ideology is mobilizing mechanisms of dis- simulation and self-deception which include the direct will to ignorance’.7 Beard embodies this paradoxical, yet profoundly human characteristic.8 McEwan’s novel thus partly indicts man’s behaviour, but he also excuses and celebrates Beard’s behaviour. If we have to give up human pleasures and other qualities (such as our limitedness, ability to enjoy sensual pleasures, our human fallibility and our forgetfulness) that make us human, what’s the point of living anyway? McEwan’s novel also puts some faith in our ability to use our critical and creative faculties to find solutions to climate change; science and art have a role to play in equal measure. Yet, in Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006), Elizabeth Kolbert argues that creativity and cleverness may not be enough this time. Kolbert notes that humans weren’t able to settle until the climate became itself more settled, 10,000 years ago. ‘People built villages, towns, and, finally, cities, along the way inventing all the basic technologies – agriculture, metallurgy, writing – that future civilizations would rely upon. These developments would not have been possible without human ingenuity, but, until the climate cooperated, ingenuity, it seems, wasn’t enough’.9 The implication is that climate change will once again unsettle the world and human lives on a global scale, and that ingenuity is likely to be insufficient for ensuring our survival. It is not surprising, then, that McEwan turns to London as pinnacle of civilisation and human ingenuity; the capital acts as a map of our shared history and memory that allows us to predict the future:

These days, whenever he came in over a big city he felt the same unease and fascination. These giant concrete wounds dressed in steel, these catheters of ceaseless traffic filing to and from the horizon – the remains of the natural world could only shrink before them. The pressure of numbers, the abundance of inventions, the blind forces of desires and needs looked upstoppable and were generating a heat, a modern kind of heat that had become, by clever shifts, his subject. The hot breath of civilisation. He felt it, everyone was feeling it, on the neck, in the face. Beard, gazing down from this wondrous, and wondrously dirty, machine, believed in his better moments that he had the 180 Sebastian Groes

answer to the problem. At last, he had a mission, it was consuming him, and he was running out of time.10

This passage is laced with irony and paradoxes, not in the least because the vantage point to gain this insight about our fate can only be gained from a machine that is a huge contributor to climate change. The aeroplane is the modern ship of fools, the mythical vessel carrying a cross-section of society sailing blind and oblivious towards their destruction. Greg Garrard has expressed his disappointment with Ian McEwan’s climate change comedy: ‘In an atmosphere of escalating political activism, environmen- talists and ecocritics – literary critics with an environmental orientation – dared to hope that McEwan’s climate change novel would be a pivotal, if not decisive, influence on public opinion’.11 One can understand Garrard’s frustration: we don’t have time for incremental, piecemeal change, and probably need a much more violent revolution of the mind to establish sustainable change in human behaviour. In defence of McEwan, we could perhaps say that Solar is a unique, original and counterintuitive novel, which thus diversifies the ecology of the imagination. Yet, we must not overestimate the power of art, misrepresent the nature of its operations in the first place, or be under the impression that one single novelist can create a global behavioural sea-change. Kazuo Ishiguro notes, wittily: ‘I didn’t ever buy into this idea that with your literary style you could cause a revolution or that it could bring down the establishment by doing something with the infinitive or by not having commas’.12 The question of whether art can make us morally better has long drawn convincing arguments from sceptics. Literature is a slow medium. It takes time for its ideological viruses to take effect. One of the key problems that McEwan’s novel points out is the fallibility of human memory:

How fogged and monochrome memory was against the living moment. When he was away from her [his current partner, Melissa Browne] he could only recall in shadowy play, or was too busy to attempt to recall, the full vibrancy, the plain and overwhelming fact of her. He forgot the particular touch of her mouth and tongue, her frame, and the way she held herself to dissolve their difference in height, the fit of her fingers between his [. . .]. And this was merely the realm of sensation. How she looked, sounded, tasted – familiar, of course, all of it, but only now that she was here, right in his grasp. Memory, or Beard’s memory, was a second-rate device.13

Memory is vital in our experience, but it is also deeply fragile and flawed. To think that artistic representations will be able to effect global psychological and political change is to grossly overestimate the power (and uses) of art. It is only direct experience (of nature’s sublime qualities, of ecological disasters) that will awaken an ecological consciousness and awareness in us all, but probably only temporar- ily, and probably too late. It is an ‘honest’ and sobering assessment, but also one that refuses to let go of our humanity. Against Nostalgia 181

Ecocritical realism: nature writing

We find other sub-genres within ecocritical realism. In mainstream literature we find a mixing of genres (sci-fi, dystopia, romance, epic). The last chapters of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) are set in a near future New York where climate change is definitely felt, but not in a dramatic fashion: ‘The concert day was “unseasonably” warm: eighty-nine degrees, with angled golden light that stabbed their eyes at intersection and stretched their shadows to absurd lengths. The trees, which had bloomed in January, were now in tentative leaf’.14 David Mitchell’s work too has a long-standing relationship with the ecocritical imaginary, from Ghostwritten’s weird weather and the effects of dystopian commodification in Cloud Atlas (2004) to a petro-collapse in 2042 that causes global ecological disaster in The Bone Clocks (2014). Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011), Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) and Brian Kimberling’s Snapper (2013) are part of this trend. The short story collection I’m with the Bears (2011) contains stories by Atwood, Rich, Helen Simpson and Toby Litt, amongst others. Another collection, edited by Gregory Norminton, is Beacons: Stories for Our Not So Distant Future (2013), with work by Alasdair Gray, A. L. Kennedy, David Constantine, Joanne Harris, amongst others. In all these works, it is the loss of both individual and collective memory that is at stake, but there is also a new fascination with temporal complexity in, for instance, Jay Griffith’s ‘The Spiral Staircase’: ‘Memory turns in spirals, like a staircase, like the double helix of DNA, like whorls of galaxies. As he carried her, he remembered not only her near-death but also her conception’.15 There is also a marked interest in the post-pastoral novel, in which new forms of human connectedness are explored. Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006) ‘explores the complex riches of the human brain, a networked ecology that mirrors the networked ecology of all life, including birds, the core parts of whose brains are still contained within our own’.16 In Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2004) we find such images of connectivity too:

Davey sat and thought, staring out across the flood-plains towards the distant city, the flush pink electric on the clouds above it, the warm coral strain of the human animal. The long grids of light stretched out towards sea. All over the world there were grids like this, spreading like nerve-centres of streaming electrons, and people moving in overlapping circles who suddenly found that their fingers touched.17

In John Burnside’s Living Nowhere (2003) we trace various characters living in the postindustrial steel-mill town Corby. In the midst of the bleak landscape and eruptions of violence, they feel dislocated, nostalgically longing for a return to a homely, Edenic place in which they can regain some wholeness. The protagonist, Francis, is haunted by his friend Jan, who is brutally murdered, sparking an epic journey from town to town, until he realises: 182 Sebastian Groes

It really was as if Jan had been trying to tell him something, all those years ago, something about loss, and about the impossibility of really losing anything, and, even if it was all too easy, even if it was a child’s fantasy of how everything was connected to everything else, at the most basic level of primary physics, it made sense, suddenly, to think, not of spirits, but of heat, not of the afterlife, but of some kind of transfer, a continuum of warmth and light in a world where the dead left behind trace elements, waves, local areas of brilliance or noise or heat, to be used or inhabited by others, to be made use of, one way or another, to be, quite simply continued. It was a good thought: not a comforting one, necessarily, just a starting-point, a way of seeing.18

Everything is connected, shows Burnside. Powers, Gee and Burnside subscribe to Lovelock’s Gaia thesis, seeing the earth perhaps not as a biological organism, but certainly as a singular, interacting system. It is the novel form which simulates this dynamic yet enclosed system. We also find a resurgence of nature writing and filmmaking, in which Werner Herzog has consistently featured as a central figure. And we have seen a more didactic approach in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2005). Most conspicuous is the emergence of a strong new genre, the ‘eco-memoir’. David Vann’s semi- autobiographical novel Legend of a Suicide (2008) is a complex investigation of life, the traumatized self and memory. The novel tell the story of Roy, whose father commits suicide when he’s a young boy and who is abducted to the wilderness of Alaska: ‘Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from the memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that’.19 The novel shows that the return to a memory destroys any notion of natural order, truth, opening up a space for reinvention and possible restoration. Jay Griffith’s travelogue Wild (2006), the bird-watching soldier in Iraq of Jonathan Trouern-Trend’s Birding Babylon (2006), Tim Dee’s Four Fields (2013), Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines (2012) and Robert Macfarlane’s work also contribute to this genre, as does Helen Macdonald’s brilliant memoir H is for Hawk (2014). Nature is no longer, nor possibly ever was, some kind of ur-place which provides an anchor for memory and human identity, yet still nostalgia lingers, running deep through the lives of these protagonists.

Archeopsychic memory: J. G. Ballard’s anti-monumental memory

J. G. Ballard’s Apocalyptic Stoic The Drowned World (1962) offers a different, even less comfortable answer to climate change compared to some of the above fictions. Ballard’s subversiveness lies in his rejection of narrative strategies that are designed to make us feel guilty, or to trigger catharsis aimed at bettering our ways. Rather than nostalgically or joyfully retrenching archaic, obsolete fantasies about humanistic ideals, Ballard’s work argues that we should accept and embrace the processes we find ourselves in. Against Nostalgia 183

In The Drowned World we find ourselves in a future world submerged in water after ‘a series of violent and prolonged solar storms’ has caused the ice caps to melt.20 Lizards, iguanas and alligators once again rule the world, while most humans have fled to the North Pole. In London, where only the tops of the tallest buildings are still inhabitable, the protagonists live in the penthouse of the Ritz hotel. The scientist Robert Kerans, his love interest Beatrice Dahl, and his rival Dr Bodkin are conducting tests whilst waiting to be evacuated. Due to the change in the ecological system, though, their conscious lives are increasingly being taken over by phantasmagoric dreams. Ballard explores how our mental landscape might alter when climate change has happened, and, rather than rejecting the feelings of danger and terror part of the new psychology that has taken hold, Kerans willingly plunges himself into what he calls ‘archeopsychic memory’:

These are the oldest memories on Earth, the time-codes carried in every chro- mosome and gene. Every step we’ve taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories – from the enzymes controlling the carbon dioxide cycle to the organisation of the brachial plexus and the nerve pathways of the Pyramid cells in the mid-brain, each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in the face of a sudden physico-chemical crisis. Just as psychoalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs. The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries to the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurons and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.21

Ballard gives us a fascinating, paradoxical idea: from a vantage point in the future, climate change will make us also sink back into the archaeology of what seems to be our collective, Jungian unconscious. These submerged neural memories and emotional machineries are not necessarily unconscious but ‘nonconscious’. They are inaccessible to psychoanalytic techniques, yet still are brought to the surface by changes in the climate. The molecular biological point of view we occupy takes place at the level of our genes, and connects with deep, evolutionary time. This is a posthumanist position: western European anthropocentric humanist ideology is rejected, and the Anthropocene is accepted as simply just another passing phase in the history of planet earth. Whereas the ‘normal’, human reaction would be to seek security in humanist structures, Kerans revels in the new dreams and psychology, which have an effect not unlike a psychotropic drug: ‘Epochs drifted. Giant waves, infinitely slow and enveloping, broke and fell across the sunless beaches of the time-sea, washing him helplessly in its shallows. He drifted from one pool to another, in the limbos of eternity, a thousand images of himself reflected in the inverted mirrors of the surface’.22 The novel ends with 184 Sebastian Groes

Kerans fleeing the last patches of civilisation towards the jungle where he will be killed by the crocodiles and giant bats, ‘a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun’.23 The idea of memory being encoded at the level of genes has been studied. It is not that autobiographical or episodic memories are embedded into DNA, but changes in the make-up of the DNA can certainly have a major influence on the lives of people. Epigenetic research into children conceived and born during the ‘Hunger Winter’ (the Dutch famine of 1944–1945) of the Second World War has shown that growth was influenced by of the extreme lack of food: ‘It now appears that the limited food intake of mothers who were pregnant during this period altered the genetic material of embryos in the early stages of development. The effects of this can still be observed some sixty years later. These alterations are not changes in the genetic code, but a different setting for the code which indicates whether a gene is on or off’.24 After the famine has passed, the mutation of the DNA continues to alter metabolism, compensating for the food shortage, and this is why the ‘Hunger Winter’ generation suffer more frequently from obesity and cardio-vascular diseases. Ballard’s experimental, subversive ‘logic’ is based on an affectless poetics, which is related to the tradition of Stoicism, which works against an empathetic, sentimental engagement with our world. The Ballardian hero does not lament the past, like the other, ‘normal’ characters. The Kurtzian figure Strangman, for instance, is still obsessed with the world as it once was, and asks Bodkin: ‘You must have many sentimental memories to recapture, of the great palaces and museums’.25 Kerans understands that sentimentality and revelling in memory is useless. By avoiding wallowing in sentimental images of the past, Ballard suggests that we have the chance to establish a deeper connection with history, to see ourselves in the ‘deep time’ of planetary evolution. This Stoic lineage starts with the Roman tradition of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, but we see it resurface in the Romantic period with Goethe and in the thinking of (late) modernists such as Samuel Beckett. Stoics emphasise the importance of self-denial and self-control, and celebrate the pervasive ideology of professionalism as a committed and efficient concept of service and duty. It also offers a detached model of social justice: emotion and empathy must be rejected because the passions result in a loss of self-control and a loss of dignity. The Stoics understood the presence of emotions in evaluation and judgement, but they also realised that emotion results in a self made vulnerable to external forces that will therefore be beyond rational control. Emotion is regarded a source of human error, self-deception, unreliability and misjudgement. Stoics aim at a condition of affectlessness and detachment that achieves an aloof universality. Stoicism is also a very pragmatic way of thinking about the world: ‘The beauty of pragmatism is that it enables one to make judgements based on supposed consequences, which always lie in the future and are thus immediately unverifiable. [. . .] Stoicism was a primitive form of pragmatism, in that one knew in advance that the value of duty would always overrule that of pleasure, and strenuous virtue that of lazy indolence [sic] or apathy’.26 Against Nostalgia 185

Another key figure in this tradition is Friedrich Nietzsche, who urges us to embrace our fate, over which we don’t have control (amor fati). With his idea of ‘monumental history’ Nietzsche also criticised the idea that monuments – let’s say the statue of Lord Nelson on London’s Trafalgar Square, the Statue of Liberty in New York or the Arc de Triomphe in Paris – provide people with a national historical consciousness, which monuments celebrate and legitimise. In The Drowned World, Strangman is unable to let go of this memorial consciousness and loots the bounty of our present world by pumping dry Leicester Square, thus implicitly returning to fantasies about a glorious imperial London founded on colonial exploitation. Building on Nietzsche, narratologist Paul Ricœur develops the notion of ‘monumental time’, which belongs to ‘the figures of authority and power that forms the counterweight to the living times’ and which sets our ‘professional and social life within monumental time’.27 Ricœur points to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), in which the chiming of Big Ben is exposed as an oppressive force associated with privileged white, male politico-economic power, embodied by Clarissa’s husband, the politician Richard Dalloway. This chronological clock time rationalises, regulates and manipulates the nation’s daily life and consciousness, constantly yanking it back into the present moment. Dalloway wants to escape from such eternal impositions by being at one with her consciousness and body: ‘What maintains her fragile equilibrium between moral time and the time of resolution in the face of death [. . .] is her love of life, of perishable beauty, of changing light, her passion for “the falling drop” [. . .] Whence her astonishing power to rebound from memory, to plunge “into the very heart of the moment”’.28 Ballard also has a similar subversive drive, which I would term ‘anti- monumental’, intimately related to the iconoclasm of the sixties. In Ballard’s post- Anthropocene London there is no chronological clock time to imprison us into the present, nor are there monuments to trap us into the memory of the nation state. Kerans is liberated from the tyranny of clock time, and more importantly, from monumental history and monumental time. The Drowned World offers another response to our potential extinction: a rejection of the backward looking, sentimental mind, in favour of a Stoic, forensic consciousness which embraces the (collective) unconscious; Ballard opens the human mind up the creative, experimental imagination. Another angle on this difference between emotive and Stoic responses to climate change comes from psychologist Daniel Kahneman. In his bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Kahneman juxtaposes two systems of thinking: intuitive, emotional fast thinking versus the rational, stop-and-think version. The book contains fascinating research on how our psychological state makes us perceive the world wrongly, whilst the statistical, mathematical approach yields a much more profound, objective view of the world. Kahneman also brings to the fore the ‘focusing illusion’: ‘Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it’.29 In order to challenge the idea that people in more agreeable (temperate to warm, like California rather than Norway) climates are happier, Kahneman explores to what extent climate 186 Sebastian Groes is an important factor in the happiness and well-being of people. It turns out that people living in harsh climates, when asked to relate happiness to climate, think people living in agreeable climates are happier, even though this is not the case. This is because it is a leading question that suggests that ‘agreeable climate equals happiness’. The question obscures numerous other factors of well-being: ‘The focus illusion can cause people to be wrong about their present state of well-being as well as about the happiness of others, and about their own happiness in the future’.30 By devoting Part III to climate change, this book is creating a focus illusion that increases the visibility of this topic, and contributing to injecting new ideas into the critical discourse, so that we think and remember climate more – and remember to save our memory for the future.

Notes

1. Robert Markeley, ‘Time: Time, History, and Sustainability’, in Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, ed. T. Cohen (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 45. 2. Tom Cohen, introduction to Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 18. 3. Dan Bloom, ‘Thanks to TeleRead and NRP, “Cli-fi” is now an official literary term’, TeleRead website, 28 May 2013. See: http://www.teleread.com/around-world/cli-fi-is-a- new-literary-term-that-npr-blessed-and-approved/ (Accessed 5 October 2014). 4. Anthony Gormley, Exposure, 2010, http://www.antonygormley.com/projects/item-view/ id/275. 5. Antony Gormley, ‘Art’s Lost Subject’, The Guardian, 13 February 2013, http:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/feb/13/antony-gormley-climate-change-art (Accessed 12 October 2014). 6. James S. Nairne, ‘Adaptive Memory’, Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 53 (2010), 12. 7. Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 997. 8. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End-Times (London: Verso, 2011), 327. 9. Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 186. 10. Ian McEwan, Solar (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), 109. 11. Greg Garrard, ‘Solar: Apocalypse Not’, in Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Sebastian Groes (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 123. 12. Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘The New Seriousness: Kazuo Ishiguro in Conversation with Sebastian Groes’, in Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 247. 13. McEwan, Solar, 167. 14. Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (London: Corsair, 2011), 335–336. Originally published in 2010. 15. Jay Griffiths, ‘The Spiral Staircase’, in Beacons: Stories for Our Not So Distant Future, ed. Gregory Norminton (London: OneWorld, 2013), 232. 16. Charles B. Harris, ‘The Story of the Self: The Echo Maker and Neurological Realism’, in Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, ed. Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), 232. 17. Maggie Gee, The Flood (London: Saqi, 2012), Loc. 1246. Originally published in 2004. 18. John Burnside, Living Nowhere (London: Vintage, 2014), 362–363. First published by Jonathan Cape in 2013. 19. David Vann, Legend of a Suicide (London: Penguin, 2009), 209. First published in 2008 by University of Massachusetts Press. Against Nostalgia 187

20. Ballard, The Drowned World, 21. 21. Ballard, The Drowned World, 44. In an interview Ballard states: ‘I wanted to look at our racial memory, our whole biological inheritance, the fact that we’re all several hundred million years old, as old as the biological kingdoms in our spines, in our brains, in our cellular structure; our very identities reflect untold numbers of decisions lying behind us in the past like some enormous largely forgotten journey’ (J.G. Ballard in interview with Brian Hennessey, ‘J. G. Ballard’, Transatlantic Review 39 (Spring 1971), (60–64), 62). 22. Ballard, The Drowned World, 110. 23. Ballard, The Drowned World, 175. 24. ‘Traces of Dutch “Hunger Winter” in genetic material’, The University of Leiden News, 10 January 2011 http://www.news.leiden.edu/news/dutch-hunger-winter.html 25. Ballard, The Drowned World, 91. 26. Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor (London: Bodley Head, 2009), xiv–xv. 27. Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, trans. McLaughlin, K. and D. Pellauer (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1985), 106. Originally published as Temps et Récit, vol. 2 by Editions du Suil, 1984. 28. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 110–111. 29. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London and New York: Penguin, 2012), 402. 30. Kahneman, Thinking, 404. Part IV Memory and the Future Introduction to Part IV Sebastian Groes

Between memory, imagination and the future: prospective memory processing

Part IV explores the role of memory and the imagination in future thinking. With the shift away from classical thinking about memory as the retrieval of fixed information about the past towards a modern conception of memory as a process of constant re-ordering and re-interpretation of information, we are also forced to ask new questions about the temporality of memory. The past infuses and is inseparable from the present moment, so that the present is profoundly shaped by memory, whilst our relationship to the past is constantly reconditioned by present contextual associations. But what about the relationship between memory and the future? We have already seen in Part III how climate change is posing increasingly complex questions about the relation between our past, present and future. Part IV explores this intricacy further via a group of highly theoretical thinkers which includes a narratologist, an evolutionary biologist who specialises in AI, a technology futures analyst, a Professor of Film Theory, a science fiction writer and an experimental philosopher. This part starts from the counterintuitive assumption that memory is not just for looking backward, but that it is also a tool we need in order to plan for, and make predictions about, the future. Memory is not just about the past (retrospective memory), but is also geared towards the future (prospective memory). Our ability to reconstruct the past through memory has a direct relation to our capacity to construct a hypothetical future. Memory enables us to plan ahead. In order to make choices (like, say, whether the hunt for an animal is likely to result in food for the tribe, or whether a traffic jam on our way to work yesterday will makes us change our route today), we need memory as a database that allows us to predict outcomes accurately and successfully in the imagination. Memory is thus heavily reliant on a characteristic that sets humans apart from animals, namely, imagination, which we use to project a present situation, question or decision- making process into an imagined future based on knowledge accrued in the past. Chimpanzees and some birds have this capacity, yet humans manage to grasp an astounding number of concepts simultaneously, and therefore have more ‘short

190 Introduction to Part IV 191 cuts’ for cognition. This capacity develops around the age of five, when we acquire language, and it is the complexity and detail of our ability to plot and plan that make us unique. Since 2007, neuroscientific experiments have provided a different angle on the relationship between memory, imagination and the future. It turns out that many of the same mechanisms and regions of the brain involved in remembering are also ones used to imagine the future. These mechanisms have been named ‘the default network’ (Szpunar et al. 2007) and are the subject of much research and theoretical speculation. Neuropsychologist Daniel L. Schacter is one of the key researchers who has developed a theory of prospective memory processing, focus- sing on the frontal lobes of the brain which regulate memory for future actions. This does not mean that the human mind is able to predict the future, as in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story in Minority Report (2002), where so-called psychic ‘pre-cogs’ have foreknowledge of crimes. Whereas retroactive memory relies on subjects being prompted to remember, prospective memory involves self-initiated retrieval processes to carry out future intentions – people have to remember to remember executing certain actions (Glisky 1996). Research has shown that, when we remember something with the future in mind, our retention is boosted – which chimes in with the research into survival narratives and memory discussed in Part III. Here is an example from research into prospective memory: Klein and his team asked separate groups of participants to think of one out of three camping stories. The first involved imagining a future camping trip, the second remembering a past camping trip, and the third involved imagining a typical campsite without reference to the past or future. During the retrieval exercise, participants needed to indicate how various likely items (such as rope and a tent) were part of their self-invented stories. After some time, the candidates were asked to retrieve from memory the list of items associated with their story. It turns out that participants with a simulated memory of a future camping trip remembered more items than the other participants. Simulated experiences are remembered extra well (Szpunar et al. 2013), and different simulated versions of the future can benefit behaviour and help make decisions, such as what strategy to use when we encounter a conflict at work. Schacter has also not only been discovering that there are striking similarities between remembering and simulating the future, but that both are important for using one’s imagination and for situating oneself in time. Amnesiacs with hippocampal damage, for instance, revealed significant impairments when they were asked to imagine novel experiences (Hassabis et al. 2007). Patients with Parkinson’s disease exhibit failures when asked to imagine future scenarios, but they perform well when asked to imagine atemporal events (like interacting with people, but without any movement in time). These patients suffer from failing chronostesia, which is the ability to be aware of subjective time. Another fascinating find is that recent positive experiences are ‘associated with increased subjective ratings of re-experiencing for past events and “pre-experiencing” for future events’.1 And this has impact on one’s identity: ‘“self-defining memories” – past events of great importance that shape and individual’s sense of identity – are 192 Sebastian Groes manifested similarly in the construction of self-defining future projections, i.e. imagined future events with great importance for self and identity’.2 This phenomenon will be explored in greater detail in Part VI. The consensus amongst these investigations of the future of memory is that ‘a key function of memory is to provide a basis for predicting the future via imagined scenarios and that the ability to flexibly recombine elements of past experience into simulations of novel future events is therefore an adaptive process’.3 Other perspectives on the relationship between memory and the future have seen a similar shift in point of view since the postwar period. On a collective, societal level, we used to think that our society’s future was simply a linear extension of the past. Enlightenment thinking was based on Progress, which assumed that the world would continue much as it used to in the past. After the Industrial Revolution, we thought we could even make our future lives better; we could establish Progress, and much of the effort to create progress depended on taking away risk. During the twenty-first century, however, many of the linear, causal models of this type of thinking were undermined and made way for new theories that focused on the many uncertainties and instabilities at the heart of the universe. Einstein and Heisenberg feature centrally in our complexification of conceptions of time, which have undergone remarkable changes. Similarly, with modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett, and the postmodernist writers who followed in the later twentieth century, we have been given stories that have subverted conventional notions of causation, linear time and Enlightenment ideologies. Indeed, all these thinkers railed against a rationalism that had its origins in thinking underpinning the classical civilisation of the Greeks, and the idea of causality based on the idea of the unilinear chain, which was the basis for understanding the physical world, as well as establishing a social contract. Just as a stable climate was required, risk and instability were required to create a stable society and to control the future. But as our recent history has become a succession of calamities, freak accidents and strokes of luck, we should acknowledge the fundamental unpredictability of our modern world. Contemporary technology allows us to reduce the risk and better the outcomes from chance events like earthquakes, hurricanes and terrible diseases like smallpox in a way our ancestors would long for. Yet, the same technology allows new infectious diseases, political and religious extremism, and financial disasters to make their way around our planet in swift and unpredictable ways.

Shrinking horizons, disappearing futures

One key book that explores such instability is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan (2007), which shows that the financial world has grown into a very insta- ble system. A seemingly minor event on one end of the world can trigger huge consequences on the other end, such as bringing down the economy of a small country. Our ever-increasing and empowered human population means that more and more highly improbable events will actually take place, due to the Introduction to Part IV 193 sheer number of events we all trigger. Taleb sees his Black Swan theory justified by recent events, from the 9/11 attacks to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and from the 2007 economic crisis to volatile weather. We seem to find ourselves in an increasingly unstable world, with climate change, globalisation, and a volatile economy. In such a context, then, memory and history are less useful, as the store of knowledge we have at our disposal cannot be used to predict the future anyway. There is also the fascinating notion of the ‘technological singularity’, which inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil describes as

a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversible transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.4

In a way, Kurzweil’s ‘prediction’ is a reality we have lived with since at least the period when the advent of writing allowed the acceleration and aggregation of our sociotechnical culture, 10,000 years ago. But now our horizon is shrinking and the future is disappearing exponentially faster, and the nature of our technological revolutions makes it impossible to predict the form and content of lives in even the next 20 years. Although Back to the Future Part II (Dir. Robert Zemeckis) predicted some technologies correctly, in 1989 we would hardly have believed that 26 years later we’d all walk around with a pocket-sized computer that allows us to ring others, navigate cities, measure our blood pressure, tell the weather and give us any information we desire. It is increasingly difficult to look over the horizon of our current knowledge, and our ability to predict the future is diminished. Thus, one might argue that the roles of memory and history also have a less important role in our contemporary culture: our knowledge and the databases of the past (both at the level of the individual as well as socially at a global level) are less useful because linear, causal projections have made way for exponential models. If we accept that our comfortable tendency to focus on the known detracts from the fact that it is the unknown that deserves our attention, this makes our world deeply fragile and our lives profoundly precarious.

Memory and futurity

Part IV explores these new uncertainties and foregrounds the futurity of memory. Futurity is defined as ‘the time ahead of us, the future times that we can sense coming [. . .] Futurity constitutes the present space of the future, which can be seen today as the future’.5 The problem is, then, that it is the present situation, shaped by the past and our memories, that determines our sense of the time ahead of us. The future is always the present future, which is dominated by specific narratives and ideologies. This is what Jessica Bland brings to the fore in her chapter: apocalyptic predictions blind us to alternative future possibilities, and she suggests that we revisit and rethink our episodic memory of the past so that we can re-vision 194 Sebastian Groes the future. Fiction has a great role to play, here, because it is able to imagine alternative worlds which are not ruled by the dominant ideologies of ‘the real world’, as Adam Roberts stresses. We explore how our relationship to the future has become more conditional and contingent. We’re fully aware now, in the digital age, that our living present will be a memory in the future. Whenever I upload a picture onto Facebook, the moment I hit the ‘post button’, that image is already an archived memory, moving just as fast into the past as it drops away towards the bottom of my computer screen, increasingly displaced by newer news. However, simultaneously, we understand that this memory should also be approached as the residue of our lives we can reread in the future. When returning to the archive of our posts, we can bring that apparently fixed memory back, and reread, recontextualise and reinterpret it, or repost it in a new context. New technologies allow us to alter, update and recontextualise our memories of the past in the future, which makes our engagement with these images open and flexible, but perhaps also more relative and provisional. In many ways the digital experience matches ever more closely how memory works in our head. In Chapter 22, Mark Currie reinforces that the futurity of memory is a complex, counter-intuitive concept that brings out tensions in our thinking. He investigates how memory, especially in narrative fiction, can escape clear-cut temporal categories by arguing that memory can function, or be experienced, as a kind of curious hybrid of past, present and future. Currie gives us a philosophical meditation on the ‘impossible’ idea that future events have already taken place by investigating how stories (especially in printed form) embody that idea. Memory is usually thought of as retrospective, yet Currie shows how the novel introduces an intellectual complexity to conventional unilinear causal conceptions: ‘[T]he unfolding temporal sequence of the story is a simulation produced by a semiotic sequence that is already complete in advance. We find in narrative in general, exactly the comingling of futurity and completion, virtuality and actuality and contingency and necessity’. The point is that a story forms a kind of imaginary space, radically different from our experience in/of real life: in the novel there exists an ‘objective existence of the future in the sequence of words that simulates time flow in fiction, and it provides the reader with a temporal perspective that cannot exist in life, where the future is virtual and inaccessible as a matter of definition’. Joanna Bryson (Chapter 23) picks up on Currie’s points about memory as an integral part of a simulation of the future and notes that our knowledge of our past, from an evolutionary point of view, is not so much about the past, but a tool that lets us make decisions that will allow us to survive; memory serves as the basis for prediction or planning the future. Bryson goes on to points out that our mind’s welding together of the past, present and the future has a social function, as it provides the imaginary framework for a stable civilisation:

The fact it is so hard to remember narrative, the fact we do it so badly, almost certainly means that narrative is not what memory was originally evolved to record. It has all the marks of a retrofitted kludge we have invented, a capacity Introduction to Part IV 195

to reconstruct a past. Constructing a past may not seem or even be as useful as choosing a future, but it does have a role. [. . .] Arguably, the entire related concept to narrative of identity has similarly been invented to allow societies to self-regulate.

By availing ourselves of the many different levels at which memory operates, memory provides individuals and communities with a conceptual framework for thinking about how morality and social constraints are inscribed into the body politic, for example remembering laws and moral boundaries, one’s duty to one’s fellow citizens and country. Memory is thus a profoundly ethical instrument. In Chapter 24, technology futures analyst Jessica Bland offers an insight into how technology impacts on the prospects and world view of today’s new generations. Growing up during the economic crisis, in a world of climate change and full of freak accidents, she notes that for her generation born in the mid- eighties ‘the burden of this rolling crisis sits on our shoulders: what are we going to do to disrupt the path towards pervasive instability?’ The end-time thinking prevalent in public discourse makes Bland feel as if she’s a character in a novel, whose gloomy future already exists. The sense of ‘authorship in the grand narrative of my life has been removed’, she notes. To regain a sense of agency, Bland explores three ways to think about, or ‘through’, the future – forecasting, foresight and fiction. She wants to create tools that allow her generation to reimagine the future outside the grand global catastrophe narrative and to contribute to a viable and valuable future. That will require two things: first, creativity and creative, playful spaces, and second, the altering of our memory: only through a modification of the memory and a re-imagination of play – by prising open our singular perception of the past – can we create dynamic, plural and protean futures for the generations to come. ‘In a world where the future feels like it is already written, could we harness the power of episodic memory to help us take charge of the future?’ asks Bland, who gives us a tentative model of how such a process would work. Patricia Pisters (Chapter 25) follows up on these contributions that connect the past, present and future by showing that our conceptualisation of the future is based on the expectation of a cyclic return of the past. By referring to examples from modern and contemporary cinema, Pisters argues that now we are experiencing a shifting temporality of memory. Looking at our present culture from a collective, data-based level, she argues that ‘we increasingly conceive memory from the point of view of possible futures’. This is partly to do with the emergence of Big Data and algorithmic patterning: the database logic demands an ‘endless series of new combinations, orderings, and remixes of its basic source materials, which on a temporal scale matches the characteristics of the third synthesis of time, the serialisation and remixing of the past and the present from a point of view of the future’. Whereas the usual rootedness of our perception in the past leads to the acceptance of one possibility of reality, we now see a universal ungrounding of perception and temporality that emphasises a plurality of future possibilities: ‘memory no longer functions as a stable ground or source that allows 196 Sebastian Groes us to extrapolate or extend a logical future’, which is one of the ideas that unites this part. SF novelist Adam Roberts (Chapter 26) continues the exploration of the non- causal, anti-rationalist thinking about memory in a sprawling chapter that he starts off by thinking, like Joanna Bryson, about the role of memory in evolution, and the role of evolution in memory. In our present, Roberts shows that new research challenges ‘the traditional view of memory formation as a direct flow from short-term to long-term storage’ and that we now know that many ‘different components of memory emerge at different times after the event to be memorized has taken place’. This is partly to do with the creation of prosthetic minds by external storage systems, which draws Roberts into the Extended Mind Theory of Clark and Chalmers. Like Currie, Bland and Pisters, Roberts explores ‘the literature of future possibility’, such as Borges’s ‘Funes the Memorious’ and Philip K. Dick’s ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’, but he also invokes work by G. K. Chesterton and Milan Kundera. This leads Roberts to explore the idea that at the moment technology allows us to aspire to some kind of all-knowingness, a total recall which poses new questions about cognition. For Roberts, a complete memory would probably render life unliveable, yet this imagined perfect memory would enable us ‘to recall not just the things that had happened to us, but the things that happened to everyone and everything with which we came into contact’. Simultaneously, we’d need to reconsider the classical ‘division between “real” memory, the memory of artifice (films we have seen, books we have read) and actual artificial memory itself’. This is one of the cognitive revolutions we are living through at the moment. Part IV finishes with a chapter by philosopher Dan Hutto, who puts forward provocative ideas about enactivism, an embodied form of cognition that suggests that there can be basic forms of human mind without content. Hutto starts with an exploration of ideas found in classical philosophy, which represented memory as the retrieval of fixed content from memory palaces. Memories identified with mental items in individual minds and acts of remembering are, at their core, conceived of as inner mental processes occurring within individual minds; the content of memory was seen as objects captured, for instance, in specific images – essentially a non-narrative way of thinking about memory. Hutto introduces narrative as a way of undermining that established way of thinking about memory: stories are used to link different bits of information and make them coherent, yet there is, as we all know, a high level of manipulation taking place. Another implication is that the storification of bits of information should move our analysis away from the content of memory to how memories are produced as a process; also from memory as an embodied process taking place within individuals to a more collective, shared narrative. Hutto then proceeds to make a case for a new way of viewing memory, with an emphasis less on content than on the importance of narratology in culture, with which we come full circle back to Mark Currie’s chapter. Memory should be seen, according to Hutto, as a ‘discursive achievement, the mastery of narrative skills’. Introduction to Part IV 197

Ultimately, the chapters in Part IV address a key paradox of late modernity, in which two opposite narratives present opposite ideas. On the one hand, we see a strong presence of apocalyptic thinking that makes it seem and feel as if the des- tiny of ourselves and the fate of the world is already written. On the other hand, there is a new emphasis on the unpredictable nature of our world, which promises more instability and perpetual change. The contributors argue that we should harness our imagination to find new creative spaces of play to cultivate a multiplicity of possible, alternative futures. This partly depends on acknowledging our changing understanding of, and attitude towards, memory. If memory operates and acts the same as predictive simulation, we should use the dynamism and mutability of memory so that we can reorder and reinterpret the past with a view to force a reconsideration of the world to come. If we want it to be, the future is wide open. 22 The Trace of the Future Mark Currie

To the ordered mind, memory does not exist in any easy or natural relation to the future. These are concepts, or activities of the mind, with manifestly different orientations, that point in opposite directions along the line of time: one points towards the past, and is concerned with the recovery of what has been; the other points forwards, concerned with what is to come. Their opposition draws upon the asymmetry of time, which confers fixity and actuality on past events and regards the future as open, virtual and susceptible to our efforts of will. This means that our sense of the contradiction between memory and futurity is connected to other tensions in our conceptual system, between certainty and uncertainty, necessity and contingency, or fixity and freedom. Here is a disordered mind, Charles Arrowby, the slightly crazy narrator of Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, thinking about the conjunction between memory and the future:

The idea of killing Ben had not entirely left my mind. It was as if, contrary to reason and more calm reflection, a deep trace had been left in my mind, like a memory trace, only this was concerned with the future. It was a sort of ‘intention trace’, or what might exist in the mind of someone who could ‘remember’ the future as we remember the past. I am aware that this scarcely makes sense, but what I felt here was neither a rational intention nor a premonition nor even a prediction. It was just a sort of mental scar which I had received and had to reckon with. I refrained as yet from planning. I vaguely envisaged the moment of ‘battering through’ as a scene of legitimate self-defence. And I searched for a blunt instrument.6

In this example, the contradiction between memory and futurity is at its most pronounced. There are many ways in which we can put the words memory and future into the same phrase (future memory, memory in the future, to make a memory for the future) without contradiction, but a memory of the future is, as Charles says here, contrary to reason. We do not need Aristotle’s declaration that ‘memory is of the past’, nor a formulation such as Paul Ricœur’s, that the ‘temporal mark of the before thus constitutes the distinctive feature of remembering’,

199 200 Mark Currie to know that it is ‘the contrast to the future of conjecture and expectation’ that gives memory its character.7 When Charles talks of the future as a memory trace, he seeks to confound this most basic characterisation and to confer on the future the full substantiality of a past event. The ‘intention trace’ here is, explicitly, not a rational intention, nor a premonition or a prediction, but rather a ‘mental scar’, and so a quasi-physical mark of what is to come. It is not only that the virtuality of the future is confused here with the actuality of a past event. There is also a disturbing commingling of contingency and necessity, a loss of rational agency, a passivity and a fatalism that we often connect with the delusive justifications of a criminal act, such as murder. The notion of the trace of the future, then, is a kind of madness, a failure of sense, because memory is ‘of the past’. Yet there is something important to say about the context of this statement in a novel. It may be that sense fails here at a psychological level because Charles fails to distinguish between what is already complete, and so can be the proper content of memory, and what is to come. Within the storyworld it is impossible for Charles’s mind to bear this scar of what is still to come. But if we think about what it is like to read these sentences in a novel, a certain sense imposes itself, because a novel is, for a reader, a universe in which this apparently impossible commingling of futurity and completion is not only possible but constitutive of its temporal structure. In a novel, the future is already there, and the question of whether Charles does or does not kill Ben is inscribed unalterably in the written sequence of marks. To take this view, a reader must suspend the normal sense-making operations such as those that deem it impossible for Charles to remember the future, and recognise instead a kind of sense that Charles’s statement makes of the relation between the reader’s world and the storyworld. A narrator who talks in this way about the trace of the future unwittingly commentates on the conditions of narrative in general, in which the unfolding temporal sequence of the story is a simulation produced by a semiotic sequence that is already complete in advance. We find in narrative in general, exactly the commingling of futurity and completion, virtuality and actuality and contingency and necessity that Charles regards as a failure of sense, so that as he points to the irrationality of a memory of the future in psychological terms, he also indicates the founding condition, the impossible possibility, for the novel, where what lies ahead is already inscribed as a trace. In fact the novel offers us various ways in which a memory of the future, or a trace of what is to come, makes rational sense. The most glaring of these is the notion of the second reading, in which the reader returns to the novel with a more or less vague recollection of the full story, and therefore remembers what lies ahead (See also Waller in Chapter 38). This is a possibility that depends on the objective existence of the future in the sequence of words that simulates time flow in fiction, and it provides the reader with a temporal perspective that cannot exist in life, where the future is virtual and inaccessible as a matter of definition. This example tells us that what we mean by ‘future’, in relation to the sequence of events in a novel, is not really the future at all, by virtue of the fact that it has already taken place, and can therefore be remembered. This can be said of most The Trace of the Future 201 of the other ways in which a ‘memory of the future’ can seem to make sense in a novel. The modern novel, for example, favours the device of prolepsis, or flash- forward, in which the focus of a narration takes an excursion forwards into the future of a story to narrate it out of turn. In this way, it can install in the present of narration, a future moment from which that present can be viewed in retrospect, or which gives it a significance that it would not have when lived in the normal human mode of time flow, in which presence is ineluctable and the future cannot be visited. Once again, the novel is doing something impossible which derives from its foundational condition or representing time as something that is complete in advance. If it is true that the modern novel is somehow disposed towards prolepsis, it is also true that its flash of the future is a possibility inherent in the novel’s form. In the most traditional first person narrations, for example, the narrator is located after the end of the represented sequence: if the narrator flashes into view, so does the future; if not, the trace of that narrator can nevertheless be found in the very retrospect of every narrative sentence, as a mark of the future in the present. This is not mysterious or problematic. It is basic for the novel that the default mode of narrative is the recapitulation of past events, and therefore that the future of the story means something different from the absolute future of human experience, which cannot exist as a memory, cannot be visited out of turn, and indeed cannot arrive. In other words, the ‘trace of the future’ only seems to make rational sense in a novel because the future to which it refers is not ontologi- cally futural at all, but just an ill-timed intrusion from a subsequent bit of the past. The connection between the ‘real’ future and a narrative future does not end here with the reassertion of rational sense. It is in fact easy to see that this basic condition for narrative – that the future already exists – is part of the way that philosophers have always thought about time. When Augustine was looking for a model on which to understand the flow of time, he chose the recitation of a psalm, and when Husserl wanted to discuss the internal consciousness of time’s passage, he used the act of listening to a melody as his analogy. In both cases, the movement of discourse is used as the example of how time flow is experienced in the mind, and in both cases the discourses are in some sense written. As for narrative, so for the psalm and the melody, the future is somehow already there. Both of these thinkers talked in terms of the present bearing some trace of the future, in that it would produce in the mind some expectation of the future of the sequence, or that the future would bear the physical mark of what is to come. Augustine used the moment of dawn as his example, which bears within it the inkling of the light of the arriving day; Husserl talked of every moment as a structure of reten- tions and protentions, and therefore of presence as something constituted by the traces of what has been and what is to come. It would seem that the properties of a written discourse, where the focus of attention moves along the sequence of words or sounds that are determined in advance, have an important role in the conceptualisation of time more generally. If writing, broadly conceived to include psalms and melodies, can act as a model of time, it is a model in which the future is given the full substantiality of the past, in which the future is written, even if we haven’t reached it yet. These notions advance the view that narrative might 202 Mark Currie be more involved than we realise in our conceptualisation of time, and also that the contradiction inherent in the idea of a memory of the future might actually derive from a more basic commingling of futurity and completion that is always at work in the mind. A significant body of modern and contemporary thought about time gives special place to the idea of the impossible, or of some illogical commingling of contradictory temporal positions. Bergson, for example, thought that there could be no direct perception of the present that did not involve an act of memory at the very moment of its happening:

Every moment of our life presents two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on one side and memory on the other. Each moment of life is split up as and when it is posited.8

This split in the consciousness, between perception and reflection, casts memory as a kind of distance. The component of reflection in every living moment bears all the marks of a memory without the critical one of temporal posteriority:

And yet it does not present to us something which has been, but simply something which is; it advances pari passu with the perception which it reproduces. It is a recollection of the present moment in that actual moment itself. It is of the past in its form and of the present in its matter. It is a memory of the present.9

The position that Bergson is taking here is very close to that taken by Charles Arrowby. He seems to take Aristotle’s basic proposition – ‘Memory is of the past’ – and alter it, or divide it, so that a memory can be of the past in its form while still referring to the present. What is to prevent us from saying the same thing about the future? If we can divide the concept of memory in this way between form and content, might we not remember something that is envisaged as a future event? This approach has to be contrasted with that of a thinker like Paul Ricœur, who takes Aristotle’s proposition as an authority under which his whole study of memory is conducted. For Ricœur, it is precisely ‘the contrast with the future of conjecture and expectation and with the present of sensation (or perception) that imposes this major characterization’.10 He sticks instead to the stipulation that the ‘temporal mark of the before thus constitutes the distinctive feature of remembering’, and so to the Aristotelian view that there is memory ‘when time has elapsed’.11 For memory to have form at all, there must be a mark of anteriority, but between this Aristotelian view that memory is of the past, and the Bergsonian view that the mark of anteriority can be purely formal, the whole contrast between the substantiality of the past and the ‘future of conjecture and expectation’ comes into question. Consider, for example, the notion of the future anterior. This is a tense structure, commonly named as the future perfect in English, which refers to an event in the future which is anterior to some even more distant future from which it is viewed. The Trace of the Future 203

So for example, in the relation I will have done ‘a’ before I do ‘b’, ‘a’ is anterior to ‘b’ even though both events are in the future. Here, the mark of anteriority is conjectural, so that there is no difficulty in separating the form of anteriority from the notion of an actual past. The future anterior gives us a grammatical form for the commingling of futurity and completion that I have been describing as a condition for narrative time, and which I suggested, a moment ago, might derive from some more basic operation in the mind. If we dig around in contemporary philosophy, it is striking that this grammatical form has acquired a considerable importance as what Žižek calls the ‘great Lacanian motif of the futur antérieur of symbolization’.12 The notion of symbolisation here refers to an operation of the mind that projects forwards to a position of knowing for the purposes of understanding the present in retrospect, to imagine a future from which the present is apprehended retroactively. It follows that anteriority can be a property of past, present and future events, and the notion of symbolisation indicates that this anteriority happens no more in discourse than in the interior of the subject. Žižek claims that this Lacanian motif has its origins in Hegel, and the notion of a position at the ‘end of history’ from which the whole of history forms into a coherent narrative – a position that never comes, but which must be envisaged in a future perfect mode. It is exactly this envisaged endpoint of absolute knowledge that appeals to Lacan in his account of the aim of analytical treatment: ‘the aim of treatment is to achieve the same “future perfect” of accomplished symbolization’.13 Though I cannot demonstrate it here, this notion of the future anterior, as a formulation that attributes anteriority to events wherever they are located on the timeline, seems to propose, rather like Bergson, that memory has a form that lends itself to anticipation as much as to recollection, and that constitutes the component of reflection in any given perceptual moment. We can begin to see here that the madness of Charles Arrowby’s memory trace of the future forms something of a bridge between the basic conditions of written narrative and a tradition of philosophical thinking about time. The irrationality of what Murdoch’s narrator proposes – the impossibility of a remembered future – are in fact foundational in many modern accounts of time that emphasise its trace structure. The trace structure of time is based in the ancient view that presence has no being other than its relations with past and future, but in modern accounts there is a tendency to emphasise that the form of pastness is a condition of presence itself. As Martin Hagglund puts it: ‘Given that the now can appear only by disappearing – that it passes away as soon as it comes to be – it must be inscribed as a trace in order to be at all’.14 The consequence of this view is a temporal jumble, of a kind that characteristically seems to remove the essential properties of pastness, presence and futurity that also underlie Charles’s crazy vision:

The ‘past’ cannot refer to what has been present, since any past was itself divided from its beginning. Likewise the ‘future’ cannot refer to what will be present but designates a relentless displacement inherent in everything that happens.15 204 Mark Currie

As a result of this cluster of issues, we find the topic of memory everywhere when we think about the future, and most of these feature in the other contributions in this section of the book: the notion of the present as a memory for the future, of memory as survival of the trace into the future, of memory as a kind of synthesis of past, present and future, and memory as the basis for prediction or planning. Special place must be reserved for the most impossible of these combinations, the notion of a future event that has already taken place, and it is this foundational impossibility that is writ large in narrative. For this reason, the topic of narrative surfaces throughout the discussion of futurity, valued as it is for its everyday labour in the reconciliation of impossible contraries.

Notes

1. Daniel L. Schacter et al. ‘The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imaging, and the Brain’, Neuron 76 November 21 (2012), 680. 2. Schacter et al., ‘The Future of Memory’, 680. 3. Schacter et al., ‘The Future of Memory’, 688. 4. Ray Kurtzweil, The Singularity Is Near (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2008), Loc. 483. First published in 2005. 5. Jean-Paul Martinon, On Futurity: Malabou, Nancy and Derrida (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), xi. 6. Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (London: Vintage Books, 1999), 145. 7. Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 58. 8. Henry Bergson, Key Writings (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 147. 9. Bergson, Key Writings, 148. 10. Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 15. 11. Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 16. 12. Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 509. 13. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 509. 14. Martin Hagglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 18. 15. Hagglund, Radical Atheism, 17. 23 Simulation and the Evolution of Thought Joanna J. Bryson

Our culture often describes memory as if it were all pastoral reverie—a safe and quiet form of entertainment allowing us to revisit events and places, lovers, families, and friends. Memory acts as a low-tech alternative to novels and video games, used to keep spirits up. In traditional narrative, memory serves to remind characters of their devotion to each other, or other obligations. Like other forms of entertainment, reverie might occasionally by chance lead to reflection, insight or self-knowledge. Sometimes this is facilitated by technology, such as film, or the memories of others casting a new light on previous events. In more contemporary writing, some authors dwell on a more traumatic form of this reverie that psycho- therapists call ‘negative rehearsal’—the self-castigating narrative revisitation of past mortification—or worse, of own wrong-doing—that accompanies depression and leads to a spiralling devaluation of self-worth. But memory is much more than a narrative patchwork quilt we occasionally pull over our heads. Memory is the stored form of everything we have ever learned. And when I say ‘we’ here, I mean it very broadly. Conventionally, memory is what an individual has learned, everything from co-ordinated action (such as the ability to catch a ball) to the English language or arithmetic, from trivia to our own names to literacy—absolutely everything that separates our current self from our new-born state. Or even our foetal state, since we now know new-borns carry memories of their mother’s accents heard in the womb, and use these to choose (when given a choice) who to spend more time observing (Kinzler, Dupoux and Spelke 2007). Unconventionally, memory is much more even than that. Our capacity to learn language, not shared by other species, is something our ancestors evolved (Fitch 2005). It is stored in our genes to be passed on to our children. Without that memory in our DNA, our memories of English would be almost useless. Dogs, birds, and chimpanzees can learn a few hundred labels for objects and actions; they may even invent new terms. But no other species has been able fully to exploit language’s powerful productive capacity. Humans can express thoughts of any length and complexity, by embedding new clauses in a sentence. If these thoughts are written down, even the most elaborate might eventually be communicated to a sufficiently motivated reader.

205 206 Joanna J. Bryson

If we call our DNA part of our memory as well, then everything about us—how many legs we had when we were born, how many fingers, how large our brain, the colour of our eyes, the colours we can see—is some kind of memory stored by chemistry and the laws of physics, distributed across our species. This is something explored by Sebastian Groes in his reading of J. G. Ballard’s work in Chapter 21. With every living organism we share a common memory about how to make a thing like itself; that can replicate itself in nearly every environment present on our planet. With every other human being we share as well the memory to make a very special kind of animal—one that stores vast troves of further knowledge in books, on paintings, inside silicon, and even in oral culture. As amazing as our culture is, and as fantastically as it is now exploding in size, it is not clear that its information compares to the chemical memories resulting from billions of years of evolution that exist in a web of knowledge that life has evolved about what is the most likely way to take energy and minerals and create more copies of the ability to make more copies—despite all the changes that get thrown at us: the asteroids, the volcanoes, the ice ages. Most of these other things that know how to replicate, most of this other life, doesn’t have individual memories like ours. The vast majority of it is single-celled, with no neurons at all. The evolutionary transition to multi-cellularity is itself an open question, a high-profile mystery of biology (Szathmáry and Maynard Smith 1995; Ågren 2014). Though given the trillions and trillions of single-celled organisms on our planet, perhaps the multi-cellular organisms are just a mistake—a low-probability but interesting flash in the pan that are so far managing to support themselves and diversify in interesting ways. The same question could be asked about the special apes we are, these musical simians that only about ten thousand years ago, after splitting off from the other apes millions of years earlier and running around with big heads and stone axes for at least one and a half million years—just ten thousand years ago (plus or minus 2,000 years) started writing, building cities, planting seeds and proselytising about their origins to those to whom they were not related (Whitehouse et al. 2014). Was that an accident or an inevitable transition that will happen again and again on planet after planet once life evolves? Would it happen even faster on planets of fourth-generation stars, with even more complex elements available as raw materials? More importantly, can the transition to dominance by cultured animals be stabilised? A few decades ago we achieved the theoretical capacity to destroy all mammalian life on our planet by using just ten percent of our collective nuclear war chest (Ehrlich et al. 1983). Are we lucky this hasn’t happened (yet), or does the creation of such a technological capacity generally require the stability of governance that prevents its exploitation? What is the reason for culture—this potentially dangerous turn in life’s set of capacities? At least, what is the evolutionary niche of cognition (Laland et al. 1996)? It seems that individual cognition evolved for planning—for example, for navigation. The kind of memory needed to develop new skills and detect patterns (which is most of what our brains do) seems to exist mostly as ‘snapshots’, or in humans, of brief episodes (Pöppel 1994; Bryson 2009). The most basic kind of learning is simply associating a context with an action (Dickinson 2012). We see Simulation and the Evolution of Thought 207 this across all sorts of species, from Pavlov’s dogs to sea slugs. But to navigate requires a string of such associations—a set of possible affordances for every location, of directions and consequences. Finding the sequence you want requires searching through a vast map of possible paths—including the ones that lead in circles back to your origin (Levy 1996). You can think of each memorable location as a node in a network, a knot in a web, where every route out of it is a possibility—a possible future. The process of choosing one path, one string of actions out of that net is called planning (Simon 1972). In children, the capacity to plan what you might do tomorrow emerges at the same point in development as the capacity to remember what you were doing yesterday, and that perhaps you wanted something different then than what you want now (Russell et al. 2010). This is a huge achievement for a child. The effortless mental time travel of their parents is a mystery for them; how can we discuss a time when we had or will have what we do not have now, how can not having be anything but wanting? The stories we tell children illustrate the flow of past to future, the picking of a single string from a web of possibilities, the hazards of picking the wrong one, the difficulties and potentials of returning to the same intersection again at a later time to try another way. Somehow, sometime we grasp all this—it begins to make sense. Narrative memory is more like planning than we usually realise, although most of us know it is difficult and imperfect. Our memory has the nodes of the web, many as general (semantic) knowledge no longer linked to episodes, plus a few snapshots, a few flashbulb moments that were so outstanding in some way that we have never managed to process them entirely away into a cluster of semantic knowledge. We try to reconstruct the path that brought us through the net we know to the flashbulb episodes we recall. We think we are reading a story from a book, but we are not. We are confabulating, reconstructing a memory out of what has stuck in our heads (I explore this further in Chapter 40). The fact it is so hard to remember narrative, the fact we do it so badly, almost certainly means that narrative is not what memory originally evolved to record. It has all the hallmarks of a retrofitted kludge we have invented, this capacity to reconstruct a past. Describing a past may not seem or even be as useful as choosing a future, but it does have a role. In many human societies, precedence is used to establish priority such as ownership, which in turn allows us to reduce conflict over resources (Taylor 2014). Arguably, the entire related concept to narrative of identity has similarly been invented to allow societies to self-regulate (Hobbes 1651; Lebow 2012). Order in a sense may also be what we are establishing with our personal reveries, whether pleasant or damning. Perhaps we are helping our own minds establish a social place for ourselves, avoiding unnecessary conflict with others, searching for advantages and knowledge, recalling other aspects of our own identity that we might be able to exploit or avoid in the future. Sometimes pulling a patchwork quilt over our heads and dreaming might be the right thing to do just now, as well as a thing that helps us do the right thing the next day. Whether that quilt is our own recall or the narrative fictions of others, learning from the safety of a story is one of the great benefits of being human. 24 Imaginative Anticipation: Rethinking Memory for Alternative Futures Jessica Bland

Our final century?

There is a well-known story that describes the twenty-first century as our final century: global ageing and youth populations simultaneously explode exponentially; geopolitical complexity grows to the point that there isn’t a conference table big enough to sit round; and energy, water and food will be so scarce by 2050 that no one can remember the days of careless consumerism. In Our Final Century (2004), Martin Rees offers a scientist’s warning about the threats to humanity in the twenty-first century:

even if global warming occurs at the slower end of the likely range, its consequences – competition for water supplies, for example, and large-scale migrations – could engender tensions that trigger international and regional conflicts, especially if these are further fuelled by continuing population growth.1

Another scientist recently ended his play about the unprecedented planetary emergency in the twenty-first century with the line ‘I think we’re fucked’.2 The challenge of avoiding this catastrophic squeeze on our planet’s resources is bestowed on an emergent generation of the technology savvy in their late twenties and early thirties. This generation graduated during the 2008 economic crisis that exacerbated the apocalyptic climate; they’ve grown up with instant, constant and relentless access to the front line of natural disasters and violent uprisings through internet video news. Yet, they look on from the side-lines as international climate change negotiations fail again and again. The burden of this perpetual crisis weighs heavy on their shoulders: what are they going to – or what can they – do to change the path towards this seemingly unavoidable but unequally distributed and unjust instability? As part of this generation, I find the oddity of growing up with a story of doom is that, like a character in a novel, there is a feeling that the future pages of your life have already been written – as Mark Currie explored in Chapter 22. Personal details are missing, and there is no sense of who I will marry, what kind of work I will do or where I will live. From this perspective, the future is open and full

208 Imaginative Anticipation 209 of possibilities, creating the (imaginary) sense that somehow I have the power to forge my own life trajectory. But, at the same time, I see one of the curious paradoxes of our time emerge: in the light of earth’s expiry date, any sense (misplaced or otherwise) of authorship of my life narrative has been removed. I feel like a bystander waiting for a future that is already written. And, with it, I lose some of my sense of agency when I consider my future, and, more perniciously perhaps, my desire to change it is diminished. For sure, my generation is better off than those that grew up a century before us. The First World War violently removed much of individuals’ autonomy. That generation, and the one that followed them, was dominated by supporting highly structured military efforts. Their identity came from national allegiance and culture was more about conformity than lifestyle choice. My generation is called to arms not as army recruits, but as innovators. Through invention and intervention, and by making use of technological innovation, we are tasked to save our ailing institutions of power and the rapidly dating social infrastructure. At the same time, the helplessness fostered by end-time thinking pushes us away from thinking about the future as something we can change, and, thus, from the possibility of thinking of ourselves as innovators. It often feels as if the creative space that is needed is inaccessible. We need the tools to reimagine the future outside the grand global catastrophe narrative. We need to reconquer the future, not so we can all be Steve Jobs, but so we can turn it into a place worth living for the next generation.

A futures framework: forecasting, foresight and fiction

There are three different ways we talk about the future: forecasting, foresight and fiction.3 Humans use data from the immediate past to forecast the near future. Through collecting and analysing ever growing volumes of information, forecasting tools have become increasingly sophisticated. The accuracy of three-day weather forecasts in 1981 is now achieved seven days in advance. And there is a crop of new internet-based analysis tools. Quid.com will tell you where the next technology trend will come from. Recorded Future can predict the day that a riot will start. Both these ventures rely on access to vast numbers of online resources – company annual reports, media outlets and local social networks. Forecasting works by using past patterns to make precise predictions about similar patterns in the future. It is the most abstracted, mathematical kind of thinking about the future. This is where companies using computers to make predictions from big data analysis, like Quid.com and Recorded Futures, will make the most difference. More coarse-grained descriptions of trends are used to give us an idea of what the future will look like without attempting such precise predictions. Foresight, as a discipline, has been part of corporate and government strategy since the middle of the twenty-first century.4 Foresight analysis usually begins with a description of ubiquitous drivers of change. These include factors like population growth, changes in environment, geopolitical tensions and increasing access to 210 Jessica Bland new technologies. An exercise then continues by imagining different ways the drivers of change could play out and interact in the future. This leads to a series of plausible future scenarios: some with, say, universal internet access and a democratic utopia, and others where local politics dominates and the internet is divided into walled gardens of power. No particular scenario is expected to actually happen. The aim of such work is to prepare for the unexpected, to develop resilience to potential changes. Foresight exercises use plausible futures as a tool, helping make decisions today, which are also mindful of the changes tomorrow might bring. Science fiction, but increasingly also mainstream literary fiction, explores deep uncertainties about the future: it imagines major disruptions to current trends, and distances itself from the most plausible future scenarios. Sometimes these fictional futures motivate the leap of faith needed to develop innovations that end up changing lives. An exciting fictional life can motivate the realisation of a particular idea in reality; literature can act as a rhetorical device by providing an attractive narrative for investors, designers and potential consumers alike.5 Arthur C. Clarke wrote a detailed proposition for a communication satellite in 1945, 12 years before the Soviet Sputnik and 20 years before the first commercial communication technology.6 His article was read by Robert P. Haviland, who wrote the internal memo that would lead to US Navy pursuing a manned space station. Douglas Adams’s fictional Guide to The Galaxy7 is inextricably tangled with the real life developments of the eBook, and the iPad.8 Narration is a tool for changing the future, for triggering and realising human desire. Accepting the indeterminacy of the future allows us the playful space to imagine stories about the ways the future might play itself out. In this creative space, where the future definition of objects and systems is not fixed, inventions are born: ‘semantic uncertainty [. . .] may lead to new attributions that may then be instantiated in new kinds of artifacts or agents’.9 All great ideas begin life as fictional objects in the imagination of their inventor, or, at least, as a new combination of existing ideas.

Rethinking memory for imagining alternative futures

How we remember plays a role in how we think about the future. Joanna Bryson (Chapter 23) reminds us that ‘the capacity to plan what you might do tomorrow emerges at the same point in development as the capacity to remember what you were doing yesterday’. This makes sense in terms of day-to-day forecasting. Remembering where the traffic jam was yesterday helps with planning the journey to work tomorrow. There is a very basic way in which memory affects our comprehension of the future. This dynamic relationship between the past and the future could also deliver more imaginative visions of the future. This is because the way that we use memories to predict the future is a much more complex process than simply recalling a set of facts from the past. The father of memory classification, neuroscientist Endel Tulving, first distinguished between episodic and semantic memory in 1972.10 Semantic memory allows us to recall facts: for example, the proposition Imaginative Anticipation 211 that ‘there was a traffic jam yesterday between Adder and Better Streets’. Episodic memory is the ability to consciously recollect previous experiences from memory – the colour of the car in front of you, how late it made you and that Cutter Road was clear and would have made for a quicker route. Episodic memory is used to construct stories about the past. It is a very similar biological process to imagining; every time we remember an event we put together the scraps of sights, sound and emotions differently, much like the way we construct an imaginary world. Tulving’s theory has been disputed over the years. But the distinction between memory of fact and memory of experience has become part of the accepted wisdom in neuroscience.11 Reviewing his work in 1997, Tulving said

Although mental time travel is clearly related to memory, it is interesting that in very few of the countless articles, chapters and books that have been written on the topic of memory have researchers paid attention to the conscious act of remembering personal experience [. . .] We propose that the ability to mentally travel through time is an expression of the episodic memory system of the brain and that this ability is not shared by other systems of memory.12

Nick Carr (Chapter 7) highlights the plasticity of biological memory: it is ‘anything but a database’, he notes. Memories are written and rewritten, associated with constantly changing concepts, emotions and contexts. They are of course constrained by their place in the past; there is no sense of the ‘conjecture and expectation’ that Mark Currie attributes to the unknown future in his section. Modifying memory is re-imagining the past, but not altering it. In a world where the future feels like it is already written, we could harness the power of episodic memory help us take charge. Therapists have begun to purposefully modify memories. As Martijn Meeter discusses (Chapter 42), treatment for patients suffering from traumatic memories modifies the way they recollect those events. Could we create a therapy that helps us reimagine our future, to start to own the rights to the creative space that uncertainty about the future gives us? What would this futures therapy look like? A more creative foresight method might do the trick. Taking the template from twentieth-century foresight, this exercise would need to start with a sense of the trends and drivers of change in the future. These would then be translated into more visceral and material ideas, in parallel with the group of personal experiences that make up episodic memory. These designs would then be arranged and rearranged into different stories about the future. There are already projects experimenting with this. United Micro Kingdoms, a recent Design Museum exhibition, is a design fiction13 imagining four future counties or micro-Kingdoms in the UK, each with a different realisation of political, social and technology trends.14 It made it fun to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon arguing over which world we would like to spend our future in. To become more than just fun, to become properly empowering to the user, similar exercises in the future will need to help participants immersive themselves in these futures, ultimately with the chance to imagine their own. New Atlantis 212 Jessica Bland was created in early 2015 as an immersive theatre show in London’s docks, where the audience are part of a group of agents in 2050 guiding humanity through the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century.15 The production was small and ran for only one week, but the ethos behind it fits more closely with the idea of us all as agents of change. Even if New Atlantis and United Micro Kingdoms did not result in immediate action, they introduce plural, mutable futures that can be shaped and modified. Such imaginations are an antidote for our often stubbornly singular visions of the future.

Notes

1. Martin Rees, Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity’s Survival: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century? (London: Arrow, 2004), 110. 2. Stephen Emmott, 10 Billion (London: Penguin, 2013), 196. 3. Nesta, Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow: A Modest Defence of Futurology (London: Nesta, 2013). 4. Angela Wilkinson and Roland Kupers, ‘Living in the Future’, Harvard Business Review May Issue (2013). 5. Caroline Bassett, Ed Steinmueller and George Voss, Better Made Up: The Mutual Influence of Science Fiction and Innovation (London: Nesta, 2013), 38. 6. Arthur C. Clarke, ‘Extra-Terrestrial Relays’,Wireless World October Issue (1945), 305–308. 7. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (London: Pan Books, 1979). 8. Bassett, Steinmueller and Voss, Better Made Up, A11. 9. David A. Lane and Robert R. Maxfield, ‘Ontological Uncertainty and Innovation’, Journal of Evolutionary Economics 15 (2005), 26. 10. Endel Tulving, ‘Episodic and Semantic Memory’, in Organization of Memory, ed. Endel Tulving and Wayne Donaldson (London: Academic Press, 1972), 381–403. 11. Daniel L. Greenber and Mieke Verfaelle, ‘Interdependence of Episodic and Semantic Memory: Evidence from Neuropsychology’, Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 16(5) (2010), 748–753. 12. Mark A. Wheeler, Donald T. Stuss and Endel Tulving, ‘Toward a Theory of Episodic Memory: The Frontal Lobes and Autonoetic Consciousness’, Psychology Bulletin 121(3) (1997), 331. 13. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (London: MIT, 2013). 14. http://www.unitedmicrokingdoms.org/ 15. http://www.enlightenmentcafe.co.uk/ 25 Memory Is No Longer What It Used to Be Patricia Pisters

In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze develops a philosophy of time that allows three different conceptualizations of memory: memory conceived from the present, memory from the past and memory from the future.1 According to Deleuze, in any human being there is always an interplay between these different ways of conceiving memory and time more generally. On a more collective cultural level, however, I propose that we have moved into new dominant way of understanding memory: In the twenty-first century we increasingly conceive memory from the point of view of possible futures. In contemporary cinema, as well as elsewhere in culture, memory is no longer what it used to be. Deleuze departs from the idea of a passive (unconscious) synthesis of time. On the basis of what we perceive repeatedly in the living present, we recall, anticipate, or adapt our expectations in a synthesis of time, which Deleuze calls in Bergsonian terms ‘durée’ (‘duration’).2 This synthesis is a passive synthesis, since ‘it is not carried out by the mind, but occurs in the mind’.3 The active (conscious) synthesis of understanding and recollection are based upon this passive synthesis that occurs on an unconscious level. Deleuze distinguishes different types of passive syntheses of time that have to be seen in relation to one another and in combination with active syntheses. The first synthesis Deleuze distinguishes is that of habit, which he describes as the true foundation of time, occupied by the living present.4 In the first synthesis of time based in the present, the future is an automatic habitual anticipation, and the past is a passive sensory-motor recollection, also known as ‘procedural memory’: we do not need actively to recall how to move our body to walk up the stairs, to bring food to our mouth, to run for a bus, and so on. So memory conceived from the first synthesis of time (which has the present as firm foundation of the body) is automatic recollection in a stretch of duration, a stretch of the living present. In cinema terms one can think of the classical action hero, John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart, who knows how to overcome obstacles he finds on his path. Stylistically the images follow a logical cause-effect narration in a cinematographic style that follows the continuity editing rules of classical Hollywood, giving us the impression of a seamlessly told story: from one

213 214 Patricia Pisters moment to the next, we always know where we are in relation to the present. The flashback is always a recollection that is called for by a moment in the present, and is clearly distinct from that present (cinematographically this is often marked by a dissolve or fade out to another moment back in time). In general, memory in the first synthesis is a habitual form of recollection in a present that continuously passes. But this first synthesis of the passing present is grounded in a second synthesis of memory as such, or ‘pure past’ in general, as Bergson would have it: ‘Memory is the fundamental synthesis of time which constitutes the being of the past (that which causes the present to pass)’.5 In the second way of passively synthesizing time, the past as pure past (as the co-existence of layers of the past) is the dominant temporal form. In this second form of temporal order, the past appears unannounced and forcefully, as in Proust’s involuntary memory caused by the madeleine. Or as in modern cinema after the Second World War, where characters seem unable to act in a habitual way, trapped by the traumas of the past that keep on returning. Through her encounter with a Japanese man in Hiroshima, the French woman of Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais 1959), for instance, relives her love affair with a German soldier, while at the same time the collective memories of the war are repeatedly recalled. So in this second form of temporal synthesis the past is not automatically embodied, but appears as the effect of a sudden or traumatic encounter, a trigger in the present that opens up (several) layers of the individual (episodic) and collective past. Different layers of the past move to the present where their virtuality merges with the actuality of the present. The logical order and style of classic cinema has now given way to an irrational logic where past and present form crystals of time. The future in this temporal order is based on the expectations from the past, the expectation of a cyclic return of the past. In Hiroshima Mon Amour the future is a dimension of the past, and the trauma of forgetting. In several instances, it is said that the war and other disasters will be repeated in the future, which is based on the idea that we will forget, and everything will start all over again based on the forgotten model of the past: ‘2,000 dead bodies, 80,000 wounded, within nine seconds. The numbers are official. It will happen again’, the woman says in voice-over over images of a reconstructed Hiroshima.6 Also, in the love story, the future is raised as a function of memory and forgetting, as the man says, ‘In a few years when I have forgotten you, I will remember you as the symbol of love’s forgetfulness. I will think of you as the horror of forgetting’.7 The woman, too, when she recalls her first love, trembles at the fact that the intensity of such shattering love can be forgotten, and a new love can be encountered again. In particular, after the Second World War the past in general becomes a cultural obsession, and the typical form of post-War cinema translates this in a form of cinema where the past has an irrational force.

Memory from the future in the database logic

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, and even more intensely after the attack on the Twin Towers, a new world order has also changed our relationship to time: in Memory Is No Longer What It Used to Be 215 politics and culture, polling, profiling, pre-emption, prediction and prevention are symptomatic of our obsession with the future. This can be understood by considering the third way of repeating and differing, of synthesizing time: ‘The third repetition, this time by excess, [is] the repetition of the future as eternal return’.8 In this third synthesis, the foundation of habit in the present and the ground of the past are ‘superseded by a groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which turns upon itself and causes only the yet-to-come to return’.9 In this third synthesis, the present and the past are dimensions of the future. Because the future is always speculative, there is never the foundation and ground of the past or the present, but always multiple options. The third synthesis is the time of (endless) serial variations and remixes of pasts and presents, remixed from a future perspective. As Deleuze suggests at the end ‘The Brain is the Screen’, cinema is only at the beginning of its exploration of audio-visual relations, which are relations of time.10 This suggests the possibilities for new dimensions of time in the image. Contemporary cinema is predominantly based in the third synthesis of time, marked by serializations of possible scenarios. Focusing only on the temporal dimensions of these images, it becomes evident that the future plays an important role, expressing itself on many levels. In Minority Report, crime prevention is based on crimes that are about to happen, predicted by savants with the power of predicting the future. The main character in Source Code acts with increasing knowledge of the future, every time he relives a variation of the past. If we think of Inception, it is possible to argue that the whole story is actually told from a point of view of the future. At the beginning of the film the main characters meet when they are in old age. At the end of the story, we return to this point, indicating that actually everything was told from this future moment of old age and even the moment of their death. Here, the future structures the narration. Melancholia also starts with flash-forwards of scenes that we will see later in the film, and of course, the whole story is based on an apocalyptic vision of the future. Many other variations can be given to show that a different temporal order of repetition and difference, eternal return, and serialization with much more complexity, typical of the digital age, has definitively made its way onto the cinema screen. So memory no longer functions as a stable ground or source that allows us to extrapolate or extend a logical future (as the cyclical repetition in Hiroshima Mon Amour still suggests). This explodes conventional forms of causality and reason; the pathways which lead to the future are inherently unstable. Contemporary digital culture is driven by databases, from which, time and again, new selections are made and new narratives can be constructed, in endless series. As Lev Manovich explains, this does not mean that the database is only of our time: the encyclopaedia and even Dutch still lifes of the seventeenth century follow a kind of database logic.11 It is just that with the seemingly endless storage and retrieval possibilities of digital technology, databases seem to become a dominant form of organizing and shaping culture. And it allows very explicitly for endless series of new combinations, orderings, and remixes of its basic source materials, which on a temporal scale matches the characteristics of the third 216 Patricia Pisters synthesis of time, the serialization and remixing of the past and the present from a point of view of the future. With respect to cinema as a form of cultural memory itself, we can see there are endless variations of films that are remixed and mashed up in many different ways, recreating as such the past from a later moment of time (the future). Cloud Atlas (Tom Tykwer, Andy and Lana Wachowski 2012) is another case in point. In the film the characters in different layers of time are played by the same actors, implying that they are variations of the same persons. The framing story is told from a point of view of the future, when Tom Hanks and Halle Berry as Zachry and Meronym, on another planet, are telling all the previous stories to their (grand)children. But what is also particularly interesting is that each memory – each of the six stories in a deeper layer in time – is told from a point of view of the future, and is recalled by a character from the future through a particular mediating technology: letters, a book manuscript, or a film. Each previous layer of time unfolds in the next layer through these memory devices. Of course there are still classic images that operate under the logic of the rational cut, continuity editing, and the integration of sequences into an organic, Aristotelian whole and are based in the first passive synthesis of time. And the post-war cinema form also find new directors whose work is grounded in the second synthesis of time reigned by the incommensurable or irrational cut of the coexisting layers of the pure past.12 But, arguably, the heart of cinema has moved into a database logic connected to the third synthesis of time. It is an impure image regime, because it repeats and remixes all previous image regimes as well as its temporal orders, but ungrounds all these orders because of the dominance of the third synthesis. Memory is not (only) based in habitual recollection, nor does it speak for itself in unexpected ways. Memory is increasingly remixed and reordered from future points of view.

Notes

1. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), 70–91. 2. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 70. 3. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 71. 4. In his cinema books, Deleuze distinguished classical pre-war cinema as ‘movement images’ and modern post-war as ‘time-images’. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989). I argue that the ‘brain-screen’ of cinema in the digital age can be distinguished as a third mode of cinema as ‘the neuro-image’. See Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 5. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 80. 6. See also the published scenario and dialogues written by Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 25: ‘Deux cent mille morts. Quatre-vingt mille bles- sés. En neuf seconds. Ces chiffres sont officiels. Ca recommencera’. 7. See also Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour, 83: ‘Dans quelques années, quand je t’aurais oubliée [. . .] je me souviendrai de toi comme de l’oubli de l’amour même. Je penserai à cette histoire comme à l’horreur de lóubli’. Memory Is No Longer What It Used to Be 217

8. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 90. 9. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 91. 10. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain Is the Screen’, in The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 372. 11. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2001), 212–280. 12. Deleuze, The Time-Image, 277. The most clear example Deleuze gives of an irrational or incommensurable regime of time in post-war cinema is Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais 1961). One can also think of Fellini’s 8½ (1962) and Roma (1972). 26 ‘We Can Remember It, Funes, Wholesale’: Borges, Total Recall and the Logic of Memory Adam Roberts

Memory costs. In a biological science sense, this means that large brains are expensive organs to run; and in order for evolution to select for them there must be an equivalent or more valuable pay-off associated with the cost. In the case of homo sapiens that pay-off is our immensely supple, adaptable and powerful minds; something that could be run on anything cheaper, biologically speaking, than the organ. This is because consciousness and self-consciousness depend to a large extent upon memory; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that consciousness and self-consciousness rely upon a sense of continuity through time, which is to say, upon memory. Memory is what we humans have instead of an actual panoptic view of the fourth dimension. We know all about its intermittencies and unreliabilities of course—indeed, the discourse of memory from Freud and Proust on has delved deeply into precisely those two quantities. My focus here happens to be on neither of those two qualities, but I don’t disagree: memory is often intermittent and unreliable. It’s also the best we’ve got. When evolutionary scientists talk about the ‘cost’ of something, they have a particular sense of the word in mind. James G. Burns, Julien Foucaud and Frederic Mery have interesting things to say about the costs associated with memory (and learning) specifically: ‘Costs of learning and memory are usually classified as constitutive or induced’. The difference here is that ‘constitutive (or global) costs of learning are paid by individuals with genetically high-learning ability, whether or not they actually exercise this ability’:

As natural populations face a harsh existence, this extra energy expenditure should be reflected in reduction of survival or fecundity: energy and proteins invested in the brain cannot be invested into eggs, somatic growth or the immune system. Hence, learning ability is expected to show evolutionary trade-offs with some other fitness-related traits.1

218 Borges, Total Recall and the Logic of Memory 219

‘Induced costs’ touch on the idea that ‘the process of learning itself may also impose additional costs reflecting the time, energy and other resources used’:

This hypothesis predicts that an individual who is exercising its learning ability should show a reduction in some fitness component(s), relative to an individual of the same genotype who does not have to learn. [. . .] Questions regarding the induced costs of learning and memory are not only restricted to the cost of ‘how much’ information is processed, but also to ‘how’ they are processed.2

Intriguingly, the latest research (‘from both vertebrate and invertebrate behavioural pharmacology’) challenges ‘the traditional view of memory formation as a direct flow from short-term to long-term storage’. Instead, ‘different components of memory emerge at different times after the event to be memorized has taken place’.3 Memory, in other words, has always been part of an unforgiving zero-sum game of energy expenditure. It is possible to hypothesise that the general reduction in memory ability as people get older (when we all tend to become more forgetful and less focused) reflects a specific focalisation of energy expenditure at the time of greatest reproductive fitness. We can all think—though I’m dipping now into pop evo-psych—of how women tend to find forgetful men unattractive: how much trouble a husband gets into, for example, if he forgets a wedding anniversary or a birthday. But this is one of, I think, only a very few instances where human technological advance directly interferes with the much longer term evolutionary narratives. For the first time in the history of life we have access to a form of memory that doesn’t cost—or more precisely, that costs less and less with each year that passes whilst simultaneously becoming more and more capacious and efficient. Indeed: not only do we have access to this memory, we are all of us working tirelessly to find more intimate ways of integrating this memory into our daily lives. I’m talking of course about digital memory. I’m presently sitting in a coffee shop in Berkshire. In the top pocket of my shirt I am carrying a palm-sized device that grants me instant access to the totality of human knowledge, as archived online. Everything that humanity has achieved, learned and thought can be ‘remembered’ by me at the touch of my fingers on the glass screen. Everybody in this crowded café carries something similar. It is no longer even a remarkable thing. It may be that Moore’s Law is the single most significant alteration to the environment within which human evolutionary pressures operate. As that Law rolls inexorably along, we come closer to that moment when cost itself will no longer present an obstacle to total memory. By ‘total’ I mean: the circumstance where everything that we have done, experienced, said or thought is archived digitally and virtually, and can be accessed at any time. Digital memory is exte- rior to the brain (at least it is so at the moment); but like an additional hard-drive being cable-plugged into your laptop, it augments and enhances brain-memory and brain-function. Which London taxi driver need learn the ‘knowledge’ when 220 Adam Roberts sat-nav systems are so cheap? Or to put it another way: the existence of a cheap sat-nav instantly transforms me, Joe-90-like, into a sort of super black-cab-driver, with instant access not only to every quickest route through the London streets, but the whole country and indeed the whole world.4 This is one small example of a very large phenomenon.

The purpose of the present lucubration is to speculate about what this continuing trend might mean for ‘memory’. To do so I’m going to discuss the representation of ‘memory’ in various examples of literature of the fantastic (I prefer ‘science fiction’ as a catch-all term, but not everyone agrees with me). I do this because I am old-fashioned enough to think of SF as the literature of future possibility. Those texts are: Borges’s ‘Funes the Memorious’ (originally published as ‘Funes el Memorioso’ in 1942); Philip K. Dick’s ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’ (1966) and the two movie adaptations of that text, both called Total Recall (1990 and 2012). But before I can get to the literary readings, I need to digress to make clear the nature of the philosophical debate with which the argument of this paper is align- ing itself. It is called the ‘Extended Mind Thesis’ (EMT), and it believes that the human mind need not be defined as exclusively the stuff, or process, or whatever that is generated inside the bones of the human skull. Here is David Chalmers:

A month ago I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain [. . .] The iPhone is part of my mind already [. . .] [in such] cases the world is not serving as a mere instrument for the mind. Rather, the relevant parts of the world have become parts of my mind. My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me [. . .] When parts of the environment are coupled to the brain in the right way, they become parts of the mind.5

Chalmers is here quoted from the foreword he wrote to a book-length elaboration of this idea: Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. I find it very persuasive, but not all philosophers of mind do. Jerry Fodor, for instance, has attempted several times to dismantle Clark’s argument. For example, in a review-essay published in the London Review of Books, Fodor takes a heuristic trot through one of Clark’s thought-experiments. Imagine two people, Otto and Inga, both of whom want to go to the museum. Inga remembers where it is and goes there; Otto has a notebook in which he has recorded the museum’s address. He consults the notebook, finds the address and then goes on his way. The suggestion is that there is no principled objection between the two cases: Otto’s notebook is (or may come with practice to serve as) an ‘external memory’, literally a ‘part of his mind’ that resides outside his body. Fodor asks himself: ‘so could it be literally true that Chalmers’ iPhone and Otto’s Borges, Total Recall and the Logic of Memory 221 notebook are parts of their respective minds?’6 He answers, no. I don’t take the force of his objections. So for instance:

[Clark’s] argument is that, barring a principled reason for distinguishing between what Otto keeps in his notebook and what Inga keeps in her head, there’s a slippery slope from one to another [. . .] That being so, it is mere prejudice to deny that Otto’s notebook is part of his mind if one grants that Inga’s memories are part of hers. [. . .] But it does bear emphasis that slippery-slope arguments are notoriously invalid. There is, for example, a slippery slope from being poor to being rich; it doesn’t follow that whoever is the one is therefore the other, or that to insist on the distinction is mere prejudice. Similarly, there is a slippery slope between being just a foetus and being a person; it doesn’t follow that foetuses are persons, or that to abort a foetus is to commit a homicide.7

But this really is to miss the point. The analogy (since Fodor forces it) is not that Clark is arguing that the brain is ‘rich’ and the notebook ‘poor’, as if these were the precisely the same thing; but rather that they both have something in common—as ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ have money in common—the difference being only that one, the brain, has lots of this (call it ‘mind’) and the other, the notebook, has very little. That seems fair enough to me. Fodor goes on to deliver what he takes to be a knockout blow:

The mark of the mental is its intensionality (with an ‘s’); that’s to say that mental states have content; they are typically about things. And [. . .] only what is mental has content.8

But lots of the data on my computer is ‘about’ things; indeed, arguably, the arrangement of petals on a flower is ‘about’ something (it’s about how lovely the nectar is inside; it’s about attracting insects). Fodor is surprised Clarke doesn’t deal with intensionality, but I’m going to suggest it’s a red herring and move on.

Surely it’s not that Inga remembers that she remembers the address of the museum and, having consulted her memory of her memory then consults the memory she remembers having, and thus ends up at the museum. The worry isn’t that that story is on the complicated side; it’s that it threatens regress. It’s untendentious that Otto’s consulting ‘outside’ memories presupposes his having inside memories. But, on pain of regress, Inga’s consulting inside memories about where the museum is can’t require her first to consult other inside memories about whether she remembers where the museum is. That story won’t fly; it can’t even get off the ground.9

Fodor, on the evidence of this, has never heard of the concept of a mnemonic. Or is he denying that the mnemonics I have in my mind are, somehow, not in my mind ‘on pain of infinite regress’? 222 Adam Roberts

I’ll stop. This may be one of those issues where reasoned argument is unlikely to persuade the sceptical; and if reasoned argument can’t, then snark certainly won’t. The most I can do here, then, is suggest that the principle be taken, at the least, under advisement; or the remainder of my thesis here will fall by the wayside. It seems to me that the following extrapolations of contemporary technological development are, topologically (as it were) equivalent: (a) a person who stores gigabytes of personal information (including photos, messages and other memorious material) in their computer or iPhone; (b) the person who uses advances in genetic technology biological to augment the physiological structures of their brain tissue to enable them to ‘store’ and flawlessly access gigabytes of memorious data; (c) the future cyborg who integrates digital memory and biological memory with technological implants; (d) the individual whose memories are entirely ‘in the cloud’, or whatever futuristic equivalent thereof is developed. And actually this (it seems to me) is not the crux of the matter. The extraordinary increases in capacity for raw data storage is certainly remarkable; but as mere data this would be inert, an impossibly huge haystack the sifting of which would take impossible lengths of time. The real revolution is not the sheer capacity of digital memory, but the amazingly rapid and precise search engines which have been developed to retrieve data from that.

III

That the ‘novel’ is a mode of memory is hardly a thought original to me. What is more striking, I think, is what happens to that notion in an age when science fiction increasingly becomes the cultural dominant. As early as 1910, G. K. Chesterton’s What’s Wrong With the World ponders the paradoxes of predicating ‘memoir’ on futurity:

The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his great- grandson. Instead of trembling before the spectres of the dead, we shud- der abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin: ‘Late on a winter’s evening two horsemen might have been seen—’. The new story has to begin: ‘Late on a winter’s evening two aviators will be seen—’. The movement is not without its elements of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.10 Borges, Total Recall and the Logic of Memory 223

That few science fiction novels are actually written in the future tense doesn’t invalidate Chesterton’s observation. A novel notionally set in 2900 narrated by an omniscient narrator in the past tense interpellates us hypothetically into some post-2900 world. Science fiction adds a bracingly vertiginous sense to memory. In Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah (Putname NY: 1969), Paul Atreides—the prophet/ messiah leader of the inhabitants of a desert planet—is blinded. According to the rather severe code of his tribe he must be sent into the wilderness to die, but he avoids this fate in part by demonstrating that he can still see, after a fashion. His prophetic visions of the future are so precise, and so visual, that it is possible for him to remember past visions he previously had of the present moment, and use them, though he is presently eyeless, to navigate and interact with his world. The way memory operates here, as a paradoxical present memory of the past’s future, is the perfect emblem of science fiction’s tricksy dramatization of memory. There are science fiction tales of artificial memory, enhanced memory, memory that works forwards rather than backwards; of robot memory and cosmic memory. And given the genre’s predilection for fantasies of total power, it does not surprise us that there are SF fables of total memory. That said, it is a story not often bracketed with ‘Pulp SF’—Borges’s ‘Funes the Memorious’—that is typically deployed when notions of ‘total’ memory are discussed. And he stands as a useful conceptual diagnostic to the thesis I’m sketching here. It’s a trivial exercise translating Borges’s hauntingly oblique narrative into the language of Hard SF. What might the world look like in the case where digital memory is so capacious, and so well integrated into our daily lives, as to give us functionally total memories? This, to be clear, is not to posit a world in which we carry around in our minds the total memory of everything—that would indeed be a cripplingly debilitating state of mind. But our present-day incomplete memories don’t work that way either. We remember selectively. Indeed, the circumstances (let’s say, for example, post-traumatic circumstances) in which we are unable to deselect certain memories is a grievous one, such that people who suffer from it are advised to seek professional psychiatric help. So, given that we use our memories selectively, and are comfortable remembering (sometimes straining to remember) what we need when we need it, the future I’m anticipating would only be a sort of augmentation of the present state of affairs. You would go through your life with your entire previous existence accessible to you at will. Would this be a good thing? Or do you tend to the view, fired perhaps by the Funes-like consensus that total memory would be in some sense disastrous, that it would not? ‘If somebody could retain in his memory everything he had experienced’, claimed Milan Kundera, in his novel Ignorance (2000), ‘if he could at any time call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings: neither his loves nor his friendship would resemble ours’.11 Funes himself dies young, after all; as if simply worn out by his prodigious memoriousness. We might conclude: all our efforts are focused on attempting to make our ‘memory’ better. Now that technology has overtaken us we should, on the contrary, be pondering how we can, most creatively and with what spiritual utilitarianism, make it worse. 224 Adam Roberts

I shall register the obvious objection. Since total recall would crowd out actual experience with the minute-for-minute remembrance of earlier experiences, we would have to be very selective in the ways we access our new powers. The question then becomes: what would our processes of selection be? How robust? How reliable? What if we put in place (as my thought-experiment digital future certainly enables us to do) a filter that only allows us to access happy memories? Would this change our sense of ourselves—make us more content, less gloomy, happier in our lot? Would this in turn really turn us into Kunderan alien beings? The problem becomes ethical: it is surely mendacious to remember only the good times. The ‘reality’ is both good and bad, and fidelity to actuality requires us to balance happy memories with sad ones. This, however, depends upon a category error, embodied in the tense. Where memory is concerned, reality is not an ‘is’; reality is always a ‘was’. Memories feed into the reality of present existence, but never in an unmediated or unselective way. Indeed, current research tends to suggest that something like the opposite of my notional filter actually operates in human memory—that as we get older we tend to remember the unhappy events of the past over the happier ones. The bias that ‘total memory’ would in some sense be damaging to us strikes me as superstition. Funes’s imaginary experiences are a poor match for the sorts of thought-experiments to which his name has been, latterly, attached. Christian Moraru toys with describing Funes’s situation as one of disorder, but then has second thoughts: Disorder may not be the right word here since Funes’s memory retrieves a thoroughly integrated systematic, and infinite world. Taking to a Kabbalistic extreme Marcel Proust’s spontaneous memory, one present fact or detail involuntarily leads in Funes’s endlessly relational universe to a “thing (in the) past” and that to another, and so on. Remembrance reaches deeper and deeper and concurrently branches off, in an equally ceaseless search for an ever-elusive origin or original memory.12 He goes on:

With one quick look, you and I perceive three wineglasses on a table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 20, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he has seen once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were these memories simple—every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so on. He was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had ever had. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction has itself taken an entire day.13

Moraru finds in Funes’s memory ‘a trope of postmodern discourse’, which he defines as ‘representation that operates digressively, and conspicuously so, Borges, Total Recall and the Logic of Memory 225 through other representations’.14 He is interested in the ‘interrelational nature of postmodern representation, its quintessential intertextuality [that] in saying itself says the other, as it were, re-cites other words, speaks other idioms, the already- and elsewhere-spoken and written’.15 Actual memory does not think back to drinking wine in the sunshine and thereby recall not just the wine and the sunshine but the individual life-stories of each and every grape that was grown in order to be pressed into the juice that eventually fermented into wine. On an individual level that would be magic, not memory. But there is a sense, a technological-global sense, in which Moore’s law is pointing us to precisely that collective social and cultural conclusion. The real message of ‘Funes’ is not that a complete memory would render life unliveable (lying in a darkened room, taking a whole day to remember a previous day in every detail, dying young). The real message is: a perfect memory would be transcendent. It would enable us to recall not just the things that had happened to us, but the things that happened to everyone and everything with which we came into contact. This, of course, has no brain-physiological verisimilitude, but it speaks to a deeper sense of the potency of memory. In memory we construct another world that goes beyond our world. Imagination can do this too, but for many people imagination is weaker than memory; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that imagination manifests itself most powerfully in memory, in the buried processes of selection and augmentation. Not for nothing do we dig- nify processes of recollection beyond the simplest as memory palaces. Transcendence is not the same thing as reliability. My second science-fictional point of reference is Philip K. Dick, a writer most famously associated with the radical fallibility—the potential artificiality—of memory. The Philip K. Dick story ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’ sports one of the truly great SF story titles, I think; and poorly served by its two Hollywood movie adaptations, both of which opted for the title Total Recall. Dick’s protagonist, the flinchingly-named Douglas Quail, can’t afford the trip to Mars he earnestly desires. So he visits REKAL, a company that promises to insert into his brain the ‘extra-factual memory’ of a trip to Mars as a secret agent. The story then explores a narrative ambiguity: is the superspy adventure an artificial memory, or has the REKAL process accidentally unearthed real memories of Quail as a government assassin? In the original story, Quail returns to REKAL to have a false memory of detailed psychiatric analysis inserted in order to restore his psychological balance and prevent any further urge to visit REKAL. This return visit uncovers deeper ‘actual’ memories (or else implants them) in which Quail remembers being abducted by aliens at the age of nine. Touched by his innate goodness these aliens decide to postpone their invasion of Earth until after his death. This means that, merely by staying alive, Quail is protecting the Earth from disaster. He is, in one sense, the single most important individual alive. Dick’s main theme is not just that memory is unreliable—hardly a novel observation—and not even the more radical idea that ‘real’ and ‘artificial’ memories have an equal validity as far as the process of remembering goes. It’s actually that ‘real’ and ‘made-up’ memory in competition in the mind nonetheless 226 Adam Roberts tend to gravitate back to narratives of ego inflation. What I always remember is that I am the centre of memory, that the events and persons of the universe are arrayed about me. The same circumstance does not normally obtain in matters of moment-to-moment perception (megalomania excepted) because this involves us in intersubjectivity in a way that memory does not. Or more precisely, memory is a particular and involuted form of intersubjectivity, where the two subjectivities interacting are present-me and past-me. The movie adaptations of this story are, in a way, even more interesting. Both jettison Dick’s complicated conceit of memory, ambiguously real or artificial, layered upon memory in favour of a simpler narrative line, better suited to the visual medium in which the story is now being told. Quail thinks himself a nobody, a mere construction worker. He goes to REKAL to be given artificial memories of a more exciting life. These memories trigger authentic memories of his actual life as a spy. In both films (though to a lesser degree in the earlier of them) the strong implication is that he has a true identity and it is this latter. The bulk of both storylines is then given over to the cinematic storytelling of his spy-action adventures. What’s so fascinating about this is the way both texts portray memory (something by its nature recollected after the event) as a vivid and kinetic ongoing present set of experiences. Neither movie has its protagonist sitting in a chair remembering being a spy; both, rather, show Quail running, fighting, shooting and getting the girl in the cinematic present. Since we all know how memory works (and that it doesn’t work this way) it seems plain that some strange dislocation is happening in the level of representation of the text. We are shown Quail living his quotidian life; we are shown that life transformed seamlessly into his artificial memories of being a spy. In both movie versions a hinge-scene is staged where an individual attempts to intervene into the action-adventure shoot-up adventure Quail’s life has become. These individuals both tell Quail that the world he is currently experiencing is not real; and that if he perseveres in its fantasy it will kill him. Quail is offered a pill, a token (it is claimed) of his willingness to give up the dream and return to the real world. In both films Quail suspects a ruse and refuses the pill in the most violent way imaginable, by shooting the messenger who carries it dead. This, to be clear, is a special case of a more general SF trope. There is no shortage of texts that develop the idea of a virtual reality or drug-created alternate reality that runs concurrent with actual reality—the Matrix films are probably the most famous iteration of this, but there are scores of examples from science fiction more generally. Linked to this is the ‘dream narrative’ trope, where John Bunyan or Alice explore a continuous but fantastical timeline that is revealed, at the story’s end, to have been running in parallel with actual reality through the logic of dreams. In both the case of ‘virtual reality’ (VR) and ‘dreaming’ it’s an easily comprehensible logic that moves from actual reality into the alternate reality and back again. The Total Recall movies, though—and the story on which they are based—do something more dislocating. Memory is not an alternative parallel reality in the way that VR or dreaming is.16 Nonetheless these texts treat it as Borges, Total Recall and the Logic of Memory 227 though it is. Remembering something that happened previously is elided with experiencing something now. This is to drag the events remembered out of the past and into the immediacy of the present; or perhaps it is to retard the experience of the present into something always already recalled. This may look like a trivial misalignment of narrative logics, or perhaps only the limitations of the representational logics of cinema. Think of the visual cliché: a character is shown on-screen ‘remembering’: wavy lines flows across the image and a dissolve-cut takes us to ‘the remembered events’. But Total Recall short- circuits this convention: memory happens in the present, as on-going narrative. This in turn means that the distinction between present and past, the distinction which it is memory’s main function to reinforce, vanishes. Memory is no longer of the past, or even rooted in the past; it is refashioned as a technological artifice (‘REKAL’) that configures ‘memory’ as the continuous present, and augments that present-ness by making the happening-now into a continuous adrenalized onward rushing (running, fighting, escaping, plunging on). This, I think, is the implication of a twenty-first century Funes. A technologically actualised ‘total’ memory might well destabilise the authentic ‘reality’ of the remembered experience; it might mean that we get to set out own selection algorithms for memory recall, such that we only recall those memories that make us happy, or paint us in a good light—that, for instance, reinforce the sense we have of ourselves as action heroes rather than boring nine-to-five-ers. It might mean that we erode the difference between ‘real’ memory, the memory of artifice (films we have seen, books we have read) and actual artificial memory itself. This is the old threat of Postmodernism, exhilarating and alarming in equal measure: the notion that simulacra really will come to precede the things they copy. But I’m suggesting something more. Total memory, as Funes tacitly and Total Recall explicitly says, will transcend the past. It will break down the barrier between past and present, and reconfigure it as a more vital now. It will subsume the particularity of memory and render it wholesale.

Notes

1. James G. Burns, Julien Foucaud and Frederic Mery, ‘Costs of Memory: Lessons from “Mini” Brains’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 278 (2011), 925. 2. Burns, Foucaud and Mery, ‘Costs of Memory’, 925–926. 3. Burns, Foucaud and Mery, ‘Costs of Memory’, 925. 4. I could explain the reference to ‘Joe-90’ here, an allusion that speaks to my particular age and generational memory. But to do so would undermine the main point I’m making here. Google will tell you. 5. David Chalmers, foreword to Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ix–x. 6. Jerry Fodor, ‘Where Is My Mind?’, London Review of Books, February 12 (2009), 13. 7. Fodor, ‘Where Is My Mind?’, 13. 8. Fodor, ‘Where Is My Mind?’, 13. 9. Fodor, ‘Where Is My Mind?’, 13–14. 10. G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1910), 24–25. 228 Adam Roberts

11. Milan Kundera, Ignorance [2000] trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 12. 12. Christian Moraru, Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 21–22. 13. Moraru, Memorious Discourse, 22. 14. Moraru, Memorious Discourse, 22. 15. Moraru, Memorious Discourse, 22. 16. Not to derail the train of thought, here, but I may need to say a little more about dreaming. It is probably true that ‘dreams’ present themselves to us most commonly as memories of dreams—and often incomplete or fugitive memories at that. More, it is a common claim that dreams themselves are constituted of mashed together and mixed-up memories of things that happened the previous day or days. (Wittgenstein wondered if ‘the plot of a dream is a strange disturbance of memory that gathers together a great number of memories from the preceding day from days before that, even from childhood, and turns them into the memory of an event which took place whilst a person was sleeping’ [G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman (eds), C.G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A.E. Aue (trans.), Wittgenstein: Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology: Preliminary Studies for Part II of the Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell 1982), 84]—such that our memory of a dream is a memory of a composite of memories. My case, though, is that narratives like the Pilgrim’s Progress or Alice notionally at least reproduce the experience of a dream as it is dreamt, not as it is recollected afterwards.) 27 Remembering without Stored Contents: A Philosophical Reflection on Memory Daniel D. Hutto

A familiar picture of memory

Memories have long been compared with archived items that can be faithfully retrieved by minds, as if they were the sorts of thing that exist in a kind of internal mental storehouse. Down the ages memories have often been conceived of as images – proxies of items encountered by the senses – which are received, sometimes suitably augmented, retained and later retrieved by minds. This familiar picture of memories has a long and influential history, finding perhaps its earliest and most eloquent expression in St. Augustine’s Confessions.

And so I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory, where are stored the innumerable images of material things brought to it by the senses. Further there is stored in the memory the thoughts we think, by adding or taking from or otherwise modifying the things that sense has made contact with and all other things that have been entrusted to and laid up in memory . . . when I turn to memory I ask it to bring forth what I want . . .1

Whether St. Augustine meant to take this storehouse analogy as a figurative device or a literal proposal about remembering is a matter for scholars. What is clear is that other thinkers, inspired by the same analogy, regarded it as the serious basis for philosophical theories of mind and knowledge. The storehouse analogy is the centrepiece of early modern British empiricist thinking about what minds, in essence, are and how they become furnished by sensory experience. The empiricists held that simple ideas – impressions of sensory experiences – are created in us, serving as proxies for sensations – colours, textures, tastes and the like – which the inner proxies resemble. Such sensory-based ‘ideas’, representative images, are retained in our minds by memory, and sometimes augmented and extended by processes of association, enabling reflection and imagination. This empiricist ‘theory of ideas’ trades on the assumption that memories are object-like stand-ins for sensorially experienced external things; memories are mental traces with special properties in that they resemble features of the sensory

229 230 Daniel D. Hutto experiences from which they are derived. On this model, to remember always involves ‘having memories’, where memories are identified with mental items in individual minds and acts of remembering are, at their core, conceived of as inner mental processes occurring within individual minds. Many working in today’s sciences of the mind would not endorse the letter of this empiricist doctrine. Empiricists ‘tended to literally [sic] view ideas as images’.2 Thus, for them, ideas represent in the way images do, by resembling what they stand for. This theory of how mental items represent has been largely rejected in favour of a rationalist proposal, hailing from Descartes, according to which ideas represent after the fashion of words, ‘without having any similarity with the things they represent’.3 Much contemporary thinking about minds also diverges from empiricism in regarding computation and not association as the primary mechanism for connecting ‘ideas’ and thus building complex representations. Even so, something of the old empiricist model – and in particular the storehouse model of memory – survives in today’s information-processing idiom and its way of understanding memory. Updated and overhauled, there is an important link between the way mainstream cognitivism understands minds and the way the empiricist tradition, championed by figures such as Hume, did so. Fodor (2005) neatly highlights that connection:

For Hume, as for our contemporary cognitive science, the mind is preemi- nently the locus of mental representations and mental causation. In this respect, Hume’s cognitive science is a footnote to Descartes’, and ours is a footnote to his.4

Representational-cum-computational information processing accounts of the mind provide the storehouse model of memory with a new theoretical grounding. In its freshly updated form some cognitive scientists take this picture of memory very seriously. Indeed, it seems it enjoys the status of being the received view, at least going by popular sources. For example, Wikipedia reports that:

In psychology, memory is the process in which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved. Encoding allows information that is from the outside world to reach our senses in the forms of chemical and physical stimuli. In this first stage we must change the information so that we may put the memory into the encoding process. Storage is the second memory stage or process. This entails that we maintain information over periods of time. Finally the third process is the retrieval of information that we have stored. We must locate it and return it to our consciousness.

Other more scholarly encyclopedic sources authoritatively tell us that ‘Memory’ labels a diverse set of cognitive capacities by which we retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes (Sutton 2015).5 Sutton’s talk of ‘retained information’ should be treated with care. For in earlier work he Remembering without Stored Contents 231 sounds a cautionary note about taking computational models of memory at face value. He observes that:

the ‘memories’ of our computers furnish only ludicrous analogies for human remembering. The point of the information storage systems which permeate our life is to retain static items, unchanged unless manipulated [. . .] and so the archival caricature of the cognitive scientific view of memory must be displayed, questioned and lampooned.6

Yet despite Sutton’s warning, it is fair to say that the ‘archival caricature’ still captures something important at the heart of the way some contemporary philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists understand memory. For some thinkers it seems beyond question that remembering is essentially a matter of receiving, encoding and retrieving stored contentful information about particular events or episodes. The intuition that remembering must involve some such process runs very deep; for some it can seem as if there is no other possible way to explain acts of remembering. The reasoning is familiar:

Every time I find myself wandering down an aisle in the grocery store, trying to remember what it is I am there for, I am trying to recall something from memory – a state with a content, for example, sherry vinegar. The sherry vinegar is not in my head, but a representation of it seems to be, for how else to explain the eureka moment when I realize I am standing precisely in front of what I came to the store to purchase?7

A tale of sound and fury

What is the ultimate basis of the conviction that there is no other credible way to explain remembering apart from assuming the existence of stored contents? Is it sponsored by some general truth captured by the storehouse analogy – a truth that is beyond doubt or challenge? Or is it an established fact, shown to be true a posteriori by our best cognitive scientific theories – theories whose truth thereby justifies faith in the storehouse model? If we isolate any intuitive support that the familiar picture may lend to the conviction, assessing the pure information- processing account of memory in its own terms, there seems no compelling reason to accept the latter’s proposals about stored contents. This is because the information-processing account encounters a dilemma when it comes to filling in the necessary details of its story about received information and stored contents in a scientifically convincing way. That there is a problem with the standard story may not be immediately obvious given that it only seems to call on the well-established idea that minds fundamentally manipulate information. And that, after all, is, many suppose, primarily what minds do. Nevertheless, there is a problem with such stories, and it lies in the gap between the notion of information that defenders of information-processing 232 Daniel D. Hutto theories of memory must call on in order to make their account scientifically respectable, and a different notion of information that must be invoked in order to make good on the idea that contentful memories are retained and retrieved. Put simply, insofar as the notion of information deployed in these accounts is nothing other than the notion of information-as-covariance, then that notion of information at play simply does not equate to the everyday notion of information-as-content. What’s the difference? The notion of information-as- covariance is a ‘notion involved in many areas of scientific investigation as when it is said that [. . .] the number of tree rings in a tree trunk carries information about the age of the tree’.8 This is a perfectly scientifically respectable notion of information. But it would be a great mistake to confuse or conflate it with another notion of information – information of the properly semantic or contentful sort. Information understood in the latter sense is the sort of thing I might supply to you when I make report about the age of a particular tree. I might convey such information in the form of a contentful message, saying, for example, ‘The oak in my yard is 120 years old’. These two notions of information are logically distinct (see Hutto and Myin 2013).9 Which notion is at play in the updated information-processing story about memory? For the story to work, it seems there can be no single, straightforward answer to this question. Recall that the story tells us that information is picked up via the senses. That this acquired information is then modified through a process of encoding, but this is done in such a way that allows for the later retrieval of the received information. Apparently, whatever information is, it is something that can be acquired by the senses, survive manipulations of subpersonal processes and take a form such that it has the kind of content that is easily reportable by persons. Yet once it is acknowledged that there are two logically and conceptually quite distinct notions of information at play, it becomes difficult to see how this story can be told in a consistent and scientifically convincing way. For example, if we assume that in sensing and perceiving we only respond to information in the environment, where responding to such information amounts to nothing other than responding to states of affairs that lawfully covary with other states of affairs, then it is hard even to understand how such information might be ‘picked up’ or ‘extracted’ from the environment so as to be ‘stored’ in minds. Those all-too- familiar metaphors seem quite inappropriate if information is understood in the scientifically unmysterious, pure covariance sense. Saying that one state of affairs ‘carries information’ about another, and that some organism or cognitive system might exploit such correspondences to its advantage – indeed that it might develop complex means of doing so over extended periods of time – is quite different from proposing that such information is ‘acquired’ via the senses. Indeed, we lack an understanding – in any literal sense – of how the latter is even possible. And even if we put aside this worry and allow that contentless information might be somehow ‘acquired’ through perception, the standard story raises questions at the next step. For what could it mean to say that contentless information is encoded and stored? Use of the ‘code’ metaphor is rife in the sciences of Remembering without Stored Contents 233 the mind. A parade case is the way it is invoked frequently in the neurosciences. As Thompson observes:

A neurobiological example can help illustrate these ideas. Certain kinds of cortical neurons are often described as feature detectors because they respond preferentially (fire above their base rate) to various types of stimuli, such as edges, lines and moving spots [. . .] Such neurons are said to ‘represent’ features of objects and to make that information available for further processing by various systems in the brain.10

The idea that neurons ‘encode’ and ‘represent’ is connected with the familiar idea that perceptual mechanisms act as crypto-analysts ‘As many contemporary philosophers see it, sensory systems are like decoding machines. An encoded signal is the tangled result of two different variables: the code used by the sender, and the message she wishes to send.’11 How should we understand this talk of encoding and decoding ‘messages’? Despite its widespread popularity, attempts to seriously explicate the nature of neural or mental ‘codes’ and their encoded contents are few and far between. Goldman gives an honest appraisal of the situation:

There is no generally accepted treatment of what it is to be such a mental code, and little if anything has been written about the criteria of sameness or difference for such codes. Nonetheless, it’s a very appealing idea, to which many cognitive scientists subscribe.12

Things might be different if we had convincing theories of how non-contentful information becomes contentful in order to fill in these gaps. But as things stand, despite decades of ingenious attempts, no successful explanation of how mental states acquire their putatively ‘representational content’ through purely natural – informational, causal or biological – processes has yet emerged. In the light of this, it is observed, more and more frequently, that ‘the naturalizing intentionality research program bears all the hallmarks of a degenerating research program [. . .] [It] has run up against principled obstacles it seems unable to surmount. Far from being technical, the problems just mentioned are fatal’.13 Without a bridging theory of content those telling the information-processing story of memory have no choice but to conflate two logically distinct notions of information in the telling of their tale. They are caught on the horns of dilemma. If they chose the first horn, if ‘code’ talk serves to do no more than highlight that the neural or perceptual states are reliably correlated with specific worldly features, the notion is scientifically harmless enough. In that case it calls on nothing more than the notion of information as covariance. But if so, that notion of information is not of the right kind to support the idea that sense perception supplies the mind with informational contents that can be encoded and decoded. If they choose the other horn, if sense perception does supply contentful information, and if it somehow supplies contentful information of a kind that can be 234 Daniel D. Hutto later decoded, when retrieved or remembered by persons, then we are lacking the scientific account of how this works. Without considerable further backing, the updated storehouse model of memory – whatever its intuitive attractions to some – cannot be regarded as established scientifically revealed truth about what remembering involves. The storehouse analogy may well be just that, and not anything like a literal depiction of what goes on when we remember.

Beyond the familiar picture

When we look at remembering in its natural setting, it is in no way ‘obvious’ that memories are inner mental items or that memory is a process that occurs within individual minds. Remembering, as we know it, is an active, world-relating, person-involving achievement. To remember requires making relevant and resonant connections to past events. There are various ways this might be enabled and achieved – processes involving stored informational contents is just one possible theoretical account of what might be involved, and as we have seen it is not an account without problems (Moyal-Sharrock 2009; Myin and Zahidi 2015).14 How else might we understand the basis of remembering? Here it helps to note that remembering comes in a variety of forms. Simpler kinds of memory, widespread in the animal kingdom, might simply involve having the capacity to re-enact embodied procedures, often prompted and supported by external items – as, for example, in the way rats use local landmarks to aid them in recalling how to run a maze. Memory of this sort is a kind of knowing what to do in familiar circumstances. It is surely not necessary to posit stored mental contents in order to explain the dispositional basis of such capacities – such know-how need not be grounded or mediated by knowledge, but can be laid down through habit and past experience (Barandiaran and Di Paolo 2014).15 Nor for this sort of memory is there any reason to suppose that the situation is importantly different with human beings; often we too may be very rat-like in the embodied and enactive ways that we remember. Yet what of the most sophisticated forms of memory, those involving the recall of particular events or episodes, whether with attendant imagery or not? Remembering of this sort always requires actively reconstructing what happened in the past and positioning oneself with respect to it. Surely these are content- involving forms of memory. These are acts of remembering ‘for which questions of truth arise’ – those in which it makes sense to ask if a person remembers correctly or not. Yet arguably, the contents in question are not recovered from the archives of individual minds, rather they are actively constructed as a means of relating and making claims about past happenings. Again, arguably, the ability does not stem purely from our being creatures who have biologically inherited machinery for perceiving and storing informational contents, rather this is a special competence that comes only through mastery of specific kinds of discursive practices. Our biologically inherited capacities enable us to benefit from culturally scaffolded engagements with others – engagements that in turn develop and Remembering without Stored Contents 235 extend our cognitive capacities in open-ended ways, enabling new modes and ways of thinking. In short, from this perspective, mental contents are not products of biologically basic, individual minds. The alternative account of socio-culturally scaffolded minds that denies this fits with the empirically well-established finding that being able to actively reconstruct the past in ways of interest to those who can ask about the truth or falsity of memories requires yet another kind of discursive achievement, the mastery of narrative skills. Not surprisingly there are tight links between having autobiographical memory and being able to spin an adequate narrative. Mastery of such narrative abilities is far from automatic or easy: developmental psychologists describe a prolonged process by which children begin to master the skill of being able to reconstruct the past by narrative means. Do these proposals break faith with cognitive science? No. The alternative view of what remembering is, involves and requires is being actively developed by those attracted to radically non-representational enactive and embodied accounts of mind – accounts that assume cognition is not all of a piece, and not always and everywhere content-involving (such as Thompson 2007; Chemero 2009). An implication of this emerging framework for thinking about minds, when extended to memory, is that successful acts of remembering should always be understood as cognitively extensive; to remember is to be connected in cognitively appropriate ways with the right external events. To remember is to actively reconnect with past happenings, and this is a process that involves constructing contents and it may involve having attendant sensory imagery, but all of this can be understood without assuming the existence of anything like stored contentful proxies or stand-ins.

Notes

1. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Francis J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006), Book 10, VIII. 2. Marcelo Dascal, ‘Hobbes’s Challenge’, in The Prehistory of Cognitive Science, ed. Andrew Brook (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 73. 3. Dascal, ‘Hobbes’s Challenge’, 77. 4. Jerry A. Fodor, Hume Variations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8. 5. John Sutton, Remembering as Public Practice: Wittgenstein, memory, and distributed cognitive ecologies (Mind, Language and Action: Proceedings of the 36th international Wittgenstein Symposium. (2015)). 6. John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4. 7. Lawrence Shapiro, ‘Review of Radicalizing Enactivism’, Mind 123(489) (2014). Emphases added. 8. Pierre Jacob, What Minds Can Do (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 45. 9. Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, (2013)). 10. Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 52. Anthony Chemero, Radically Enactive Cognitive Science. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 236 Daniel D. Hutto

11. Mohan Matthen, Seeing, Doing and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5–6. 12. Alvin I. Goldman, ‘A Moderate Approach to Embodied Cognitive Science’, Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3(1) (2012), 73. 13. Uriah Kriegel, The Sources of Intentionality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–4. 14. Daniele Moyal-Sharrock,Wittgenstein and the Memory Debate’ (New Ideas in Psychology 27, (2009)). 213-227. Erik Myin, E. and Karim Zahidi, ‘The Extent of Memory: From Extended to Extensive mind’, (Mind, Language and Action: Proceedings of the 36th international Wittgenstein Symposium. (2015)) 15. Barandiaran, X.E. and DiPaolo, E.A. ‘A genealogical map of the concept of habit’. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. (2014). doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00522 Part V Forgetting Introduction to Part V Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery

Why does the human mind forget so easily? We hate not being able to remember a trivial fact, the title of a song during a quiz; we feel it on the tip of our brain, but cannot bring it to mind. Is there is some kind of biological, evolutionary use for our forgetfulness? What does it mean for humans and social relationships if Alzheimer’s can wipe out an identity in no time? How can we recuperate the humanity of an amnesiac who is able to retain his experience of the world for only 20 seconds? This part grapples with a growing fear of forgetting in contemporary society, which can be understood in terms of two interrelated causes. At the start of the twenty-first century, there is a growing public awareness of the impact of an ageing population, not just on the sustainability of society as it has been understood and produced, but on the individual’s sense of their own identity. Most of us have seen and been affected by some form of deterioration of the mind as it wreaks havoc on families. The second cause is in the major cultural shift identified in Part II: we are living in a digital age, in which the impact of human memory loss is set in a context in which everything is remembered by machines. New technologies alter our understanding of memory, holding out the promise of a society in which nothing is forgotten, while possibly undermining human memory. In Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger notes a total reversal in the relationship between memory and forgetting:

Since the beginning of time, for us humans, forgetting has been the norm and remembering the exception. Because of digital technology and global networks, however, the balance has shifted. Today, with the help of widespread technology, forgetting has become the exception, and remembering the default.1

This part acknowledges the very real fears of those who see in the outsourcing of memory to digital technology a major shift in what memory means for society and identity, but seeks to move beyond them by exploring the implications of the reversal Mayer-Schönberger describes here. This new context allows us to problematize the relationship between memory and forgetting, which emerge as inextricably intertwined concepts, not absolutes. The cultural and technological

238 Introduction to Part V 239 shifts that form the roots of our contemporary fear of forgetting also present an opportunity to restate what is important about the ability to forget, and its positive functions, from working through psychological trauma to creating a certain flexibility in terms of future expectation. The writers in this part remind us that forgetting is an aspect of the human mind that we should investigate and celebrate alongside memory itself.

Amnesiacs ‘R’ Us

One of the finest thinkers of the twentieth century, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn, once said: ‘I belong to a profession whose business it is to protest against forgetting – but which also knows that memory is complex and sometimes dangerous’. We must, as scholars, be aware of our the necessity and ethical duty to remember painful histories and events, both to learn lessons from the past and also to correct injustices. Peter Childs evokes Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four, in which the totalitarian state operates through an organized and industrialized process of forgetting, by which material embodiments of the past running counter to a particular narrative are constantly identified and destroyed; Heather Yeung and Thomas Coker explore the central importance of an ethics of memory to an ethics of war. Over the past decade, however, after the waning of postmodernism, we have seen a shift away from a discussion of memory as cultural and collective towards an obsession with individual, biological forgetting. This change becomes clear by looking at the changing representation of amnesia. Postmodern culture is populated with amnesiacs: Martin Amis’s Other People (1979) and Yellow Dog (2003), Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), Johnny Mnemonic (William Gibson’s story of 1981 and the film of 1995), Total Recall (Philip K. Dick’s 1966 short story and Paul Verhoeven’s film of 1990) and the Bourne Identity series (2002, 2004, 2007, 2012). Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000) made use of an innovative, non-linear narrative to inhabit the perspective of a protagonist whose memory lasts the length it takes a polaroid picture to develop; a year later, Radiohead continued their shift away from a conventional rock band set-up with Amnesiac (2001). As the last two hint, such work was less interested in exploring literal manifestations of memory loss than in deploying the amnesiac as a metaphor for a human condition in which the individual is no longer able to situate themselves coherently and organically within a historical long view because conventional processes had broken down. Such work was often playful, provocatively celebrating the idea of forgetfulness as a dynamo for self-reinvention. A defining characteristic of the postmodern period was its thinking about time, history and memory. Critics characterized the postmodern period by its loss of historical depth, and by an experience dominated by a perpetual present. Fredric Jameson famously noted that it ‘is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place’.2 Jameson also noted that 24-hour news broadcasting and the general acceleration of late capitalist history was creating 240 Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery a ‘perpetual present’. Not only was the postmodern condition ahistorical, but newness was impossible, trapping us into an endless recycling of past discourses. This perpetual present both produced, and was produced by, social and cultural amnesia; globalization created an energetic, dynamic exchange of people, culture and ideas at the same time as it levelled cultural depth and richness. Jameson and others, such as the Marxist critic David Harvey, saw the postmodern experience as a breakdown of traditional meaning-making processes, of the traditionally stable relationship between signifier and signified; the organic structures that once allowed us to root ourselves in history are lost and we become ahistorical and atemporal. The amnesiac as metaphor thus embodies a tension between the destructive and productive aspects of this process as they define individual identity. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work responds to this tension in terms of a distinction between two different types of memory:

Neurologists and psychophysiologists distinguish between long-term and short-term memory [. . .] The difference between them is not simply quantitative: short-term memory is of the rhizome type, and long-term memory is arbo- rescent and centralised (imprint, engram, tracing, or photograph). Short-term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or immediacy to its object; it can act at a distance, come or return a long time after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity. Furthermore, the differences between the two kinds of memory is not that of two temporal modes of appre- hending the same thing; they do not grasp the same thing, memory, or idea. The splendour of the short-term Idea: one writes using short-term memory, and thus short-term ideas, even if one reads or rereads using long-term memory of long-term concepts. Short-term includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome. Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization) traces and translates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from a distance, off beat, in an ‘untimely’ way, not instantaneously.3

Here Deleuze and Guattari develop their own articulation of the individual’s relation to culture and society; short-term and long-term memory are qualitatively different, in a way corresponding to Jameson’s distinction between postmodern forms of existence and their predecessors, but both co-exist within the functioning of memory as a whole. This co-existence allows us to explore how postmodern ‘amnesia’ itself draws on the individual’s situatedness within a particular context. In Tangled Memories (1997), Marita Sturken notes:

The postmodern condition has often been theorized as a context in which all sense of history is lost, amnesia reigns, and the past is vandalized by the pastiche forms of the present. [. . .] I argue that postmodernism’s relationship to the past is not ahistorical or amnesiac. Although memory’s relationship to original experience is difficult if not impossible to verify, this does not makes Introduction to Part V 241

memory any less crucial. [. . .] Cultural memory is produced and resides in new forms. Indeed, it can often be disguised as forgetting.4

As Orwell shows, cultural memory depends on the selective repression of subversive events, ideas and discourses by more dominant, more comfortable narratives; Raphael Samuel makes this point in relation to Thatcherite memorial and historical procedures in Theatres of Memory (1994). Whereas the archive was treated in metaphorical ways by Foucault and Derrida (the ‘archaeology of knowledge’ and ‘archive fever’), we now understand the archive ‘as part of a very real, very material network of power over memory’.5 Similarly, the metaphoric, postmodern figure of the amnesiac is constructed through a selective attention to the present and past, to what is remembered and what is forgotten. In Mark Currie’s work we find, another, even stronger, rejection of the Jamesonian ‘perpetual present’ thesis:

I’m not sure I agree with Jameson when he concludes [. . .] that the function of news media is ‘to help us forget’ or create a ‘perpetual present’. The speed with which events are consigned to the past could more convincingly be analysed as a flight from the present, as an impatience to narrate current events, to hurry everything into the past while it is still happening. This makes it a new way of remembering, of archiving, that actually displaces the experiential present tense with a historical self-consciousness. Historical self-consciousness does not then mean the same thing as historiographic self-consciousness: it is the sense that one is a narrative, or that one is part of a narrative of history, so that the present is experienced as if always already narrated in retrospect.6

For Currie, the postmodern narrative consciousness is not defined by amnesia, but by an obsessive, process of perpetual archiving, that is, the perpetual creation of memory and the collection of the self, in new forms. We see here again an awareness of the material processes through which the postmodern experience is created and maintained, along with the recognition that forgetting and memory cannot be separated; just as, in cultural memory, what is remembered is defined by what is forgotten, Jameson’s perpetual present is produced through the perpetual creation of memory.

Remembering amnesia

In the creation of the amnesiac as metaphor we find, too, an intertwining of memory and forgetting. Fictional representations of amnesia carry within them both the productive and destructive potentials of the concept, which cannot be separated. In recent examples, we see a shift towards a more literal representation of the condition, which retains postmodernist aspects while emphasizing its tensions. Nolan’s Memento draws on the creative potential of amnesia as emphasized in previous works. The protagonist’s inability to form new long-term memories is represented through short scenes which are soon revealed to be arranged in 242 Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery reverse chronological order. We begin at the moment of narrative resolution, then, seemingly witnessing the success of the protagonist in overcoming his condition and avenging the death of his wife. The narrative propels us, however, towards the past, towards the revelation of the tragic consequences of this condition. The film operates within a postmodern context, but tries to recover some truth. This process continues in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) and Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007), both featuring amnesiac protagonists whose search for the truth of their past, and a more general sense of authentic experience, parallels the novels’ conspicuous refusal to define them as simply metaphorical cyphers. In the new century, the growing interest in, and concern about, people suffering from age-related diseases such as Parkinson’s and dementia has become the topic of mainstream films such as Away from Her (2006), The Savages (2007) and Amour (2012). In literature we find examples in Lisa Genova’s Still Alice (2007), Alice LaPlante’s thriller Turn of Mind (2011), and Michael Ignatieff’s Scar Tissue (2000). A prescient literary novel that anticipated this wave of interest in the new challenges of forgetfulness came with J. Bernlef’s Out of Mind (1984; 1988) in which an immigrant suffering from Alzheimer’s finds his sense of reality slowly unravelling. Starting off in well-structured, long paragraphs which slowly fall apart into shorter thoughts, Maarten Klein ends up in a care home, where his increasingly broken down thought patterns are rendered in ellipses, depicting the narrowing of life, until Klein’s personality disappears completely:

All around you the last remnants of humanity are being played out . . . a grin on a stubbly old man’s mug returns every second . . . don’t look at this human clock face any longer . . . better stroll for a bit but they have weighted his legs . . . for your own good . . . we no longer weigh anything here.7

Bernlef’s modernist novel shackles the reader to the ruins of Klein’s consciousness, rather than having a third person narrator chronicling his decline from the outside. We see here how the contemporary understanding of amnesia moves beyond opposed conceptions of a pre-modernist faith in an authentic, truthful depiction of reality and a postmodernist focus on the subjective and textual. Narrative breaks down and falls silent, but we remain aware of a reality outside of what is seen, and of the tragedy inherent to this awareness. The narrative shows the anxiety and claustrophobia of Klein’s condition, but also represents the disas- sociation taking place on many levels. As we start to remember amnesia in terms of lived experience, beyond metaphor, we are confronted by what we have previously forgotten, and can no longer forget. At the same time, we must understand that forgetting itself cannot be forgotten, and that each act of remembering is in some sense incomplete, shadowed by its necessary other.

New amnesias

Here, Larry R. Squire and John T. Wixted identify another shift, in scientific understandings of memory, in the 1950s, Introduction to Part V 243

when profound effects on memory were reported following a bilateral medial temporal lobe resection (the removal of the inner structures of the temporal lobe) carried out in the patient known as H. M. [. . .] Early descriptions of H. M. can be said to have inaugurated the modern era of memory research and strongly influenced the direction of subsequent work. Most significantly, this work identified for the first time a particular area of the brain as important for memory’.

Neuroscientific and other research has made it easier to investigate more accurately these phenomena of oblivion; this may well be said to have contributed to our growing unwillingness, or inability, to treat amnesia and amnesiacs as metaphors. We also saw, in Part II, how the question is now being posed of whether twenty-first century life makes us more forgetful, in a more literal sense open to investigation by such new research – whether, under the influence of cognitive technologies, our memory capacity changes as well. While these questions have been raised from the perspective of memory, this part concerns itself with forgetting. How it is at times necessary to forget, and yet, how there is also an irrational fear of forgetting or of being forgotten; its impact, both positive and negative, on our relationships with others; it is at times seemingly paradoxical necessity, alongside memory, as a formative and constituent factor of our progress in the world. In Chapters 12 and 13, Wendy Moncur and Stacy Pitsillides explored the digital afterlife of our online selves extending beyond our physical death. To this notion, we can add a corresponding new danger that has entered our lives, of ‘double death’: before our body expires, our mind and memory may die. Identity is shaped by memory, but also by what we forget; we are how we remember ourselves, but are equally shaped by what we discard. The contemporary obsession with stopping the ageing process still mainly targets the body, rather than the mind. To the earlier obsession with fitness, we can now add the logic of Botox and plastic surgery. If to age is to inhabit a new present self into which memory of a former self is inscribed, this obsession is driven by a desperation to inhabit a new and distinctive form of the perpetual present, from which traces of our existence as temporal, material bodies must be excised. A crow’s foot becomes a hateful trace that mourns our former self, a line of loss. Signs of ageing, as a proleptic reminder of death and oblivion, offend us. Our digital culture dictates that we are forbidden to age, our past selves and past appearances forbidden to become simply a memory. Neuroscientific research on the amnesiac brain locates memory and forgetting within the same biological space. The contemporary amnesiac subject embodies this biological perspective on memory and forgetting, but at the same time emphasizes our understanding of the body in terms of a pathology defined by forgetting. The promise held out by digital technology is of the transcendence of this space. Evgeny Morozov’s To Save Everything, Click Here (2013) criticizes the attempted total memory capture project of Microsoft Engineer and author Gordon Bell, whose project since the late 1990s has been to archive ‘ever single detail of his time on Earth’, through such means as an automatic, wearable 244 Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery

‘Sensecam’, the scanning of his handwritten notes, and the archiving of emails and GPS coordinates, asking:

Is there a project more emblematic of solutionism than Bell’s quest to transcend the limitations of human memory? To the solutionist, forgetting cannot be allowed to serve any productive purpose; it’s a bug – never a feature – and the sooner it’s fixed, the better. For Bell, forgetting is painful, perhaps even dirty and sinful, whereas wearing a Sensecam is extremely liberating and empowering.8

The technological solutionism Morozov discusses here builds on one possible interpretation of our new understanding of amnesiacs, an implicit pathologi- zation of forgetting in particular, and of the human body more generally. As Douwe Draaisma has pointed out, since the mid-twentieth century, the dominant metaphor for memory has been the computer, which not only provides ‘specific metaphors like “over-writing” or “back-up memory”, but is at the same time the background against which such metaphors take on meaning’, acting as ‘an extensive “semantic field”, a network of very diverse associations which can be activated by linking them via metaphors with the semantic field of the memory’.9 This semantic field mingles with that of the pathological, forgetting brain. The new context we find ourselves in is deeply complex. Many biotech companies are stepping in to find solutions against diseases related to the ageing brain, attempting to find drugs that reverse memory loss. Michael J. Sandel conjures up the potential ethical dilemmas:

Some who worry about the ethics of cognitive enhancement point out the danger of creating two classes of human beings: those with access to enhancement to technologies, and those who must make do with their natural capacities. And if the enhancement would be passed down the generations, the two classes might eventually become subspecies—the enhanced and the merely natural. But worry about access ignores the moral issue of enhancement itself. Is the scenario troubling because the unenhanced poor would be denied the benefits of bioengineering, or the enhanced would somehow be dehumanized? [. . .] The fundamental question is [. . .] whether we should aspire to it in the first place.10

Forgetting in evolution

The question that troubles us, here, is the question of our shared humanity, and of its relation to memory and forgetting, and the body and technology. If, in the digital age, we often find a straightforward equation of memory with technology and of forgetting with the body, this should not trouble us so much as give us the opportunity to rethink the distinctions we have made in the past between such concepts. Technology has the potential to both enhance and undermine human memory, as we have seen. Neuroscientific research emphasizing pathologies of Introduction to Part V 245 memory in the human brain also emphasizes forgetting as a material process inherent to our biological functioning, complementing those thinkers who have emphasized forgetting as an essentially human trait. Douwe Draaisma developed his reading of the computer as metaphor of memory by noting that:

The memory of the computer is too good. Its infallibility is its principal short- coming. Human memory is an instrument which, if the need arises, lies and deceives. It distorts, sifts and deforms, takes better care of some things than others. Unlike the computer memory it disobeys commands.11

He went on to discuss what he calls the ‘miracle of forgetting’ in his book Oblivion (2010); forgetting, he writes, is as crucial to memory as memory itself. Indeed, Cicero’s tale of Simonides demonstrates that for every Simonidean ars memoriae there will always be the counter movement, an embrace of forgetting over memory, of an ars oblivianis. It is important, here, to understand that our conception of human memory is, always, partly a metaphor or narrative – a construction achieved through a wilful forgetting of contradictory aspects – and to shape it in the full knowledge of this understanding. This forgetting is a necessary part of orienting ourselves towards the future, to an active response to the complex situation we find ourselves in. We may ask, then, from an evolutionary point of view, what function does forgetting have? Forgetting is forwardlookingness, shifting our present minds from the past to thinking about what lies ahead, as necessary to planning ahead as memory. In Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), Gerald Edelman notes that our memory contains not only errors of forgetting but that ‘it must contain errors (changes in entropy) or mutants in the system to be a selective one – to be able that is to respond to unforeseen environmental events’.12 Forgetting punches holes in the rigidity of our memory patterns and expectations of what lies ahead, and allows for the possibility of imagining other, alternative futures.

The evolution of forgetting

Larry R. Squire and John T. Wixted begin this part with a reformulation of this idea, claiming that the ‘fundamental fact’ that ‘the experience we have can modify the nervous system such that our mental life and our behaviour can be different than they were in the past’ is at the root of both the study of memory and of its prominence in any discussion of what it is to be human. Squire and Wixted’s focus is on remembering but, as they point out, the modern era of the study of memory was inaugurated through the study of the operations of forgetting, allowing researchers to identity particular areas of the brain as important for memory. We see in their opening claim also how memory and forgetting cannot be separated; forgetting is crucial when taking an evolutionary perspective on memory as something that allows experience to modify our mental life and behaviour. Adam Roberts ended his meditation on ‘total memory’ in Part IV with the idea that the experience of total recall would be ‘transcendent’, that it ‘will break down 246 Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery the barrier between past and present, and reconfigure it as a more vital now’. To this we might add that such a notion of transcendence includes, as its condition, existing boundaries. The transcendent experience of memory depends upon an overcoming of the pathways and barriers laid out in selective forgetting. The Proust Phenomenon, as discussed by Leigh Gibson and Barry Smith in Chapters 2 and 3, is useful here; Marcel’s transcendent, ecstatic moment of remembering draws its emotional force from the forgetting that preceded it. Morozov responds to Bell’s claims to a Proustian lineage by noting that Proust’s narrator’s longing for the past relied more on Marcel’s inability to return to this past than on his powers of recall. The novel is, on one level, about the narrator’s development as artist; it is by filling in the gaps of his memory through acts of creative imagination that he is able to make sense of his past. In her section, Karen R. Brandt takes a clinical look at forgetting by juxtaposing unintentional forgetting to intentional forgetting, a conscious attempt to eliminate information from memory. Brandt discusses research on directed forgetting, which suggests that instructing people to forget certain information shows that such items – especially the bad ones – are not easily forgotten and are still encoded into their memory. Brandt concludes that ‘we are good at forgetting, but by no means perfect’, which offers a surprising counterpoint to the prevailing notion that we are by no means perfect at remembering. Brandt ends her piece with a brief meditation on life and identity in a society with an ageing population prone to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. Catherine Malabou writes that such pathologies of the brain invite us to consider ‘the suffering caused by an absence of suffering, in the emergence of a new form of being, a stranger to the one before. Pain that manifests as indifference to pain, impassivity, forgetting, the loss of symbolic reference points’.13 Crucial here is the idea that ‘the synthesis of another soul and body in that abandonment is still a form, a whole, a system, a life’; ‘the formation of a survivor’s identity, a never before seen existential and vital configuration [. . .] A brain damaged identity which, even as an absence from the self, is nonetheless well and truly a psyche’.14 In allowing us to perceive conditions which disrupt previously stable categories, ‘advances in neurobiological research point to the need to think through a new relation of the brain – and hence also the psyche – to destruction, negativity, loss, and death’. The new relation we see emerging between memory and forgetting is useful here. Peter Childs begins his section by focusing on the often political nature of forgetting through the concept of the memory holes in Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four (1949), focusing on the importance of selective and material processes of forgetting in culture. Childs continues his exploration of the shaping of representations of the past by showing how different conceptions of time across culture shape ideas of forgetting. Making a link between Central and East African societies and Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead (2006), Childs meditates on the existence of a third spatio-temporal mediation between the supposedly distinct categories of the living and the dead: the memory of those who have died but who still have a place in the memory of the living. In blurring the boundaries between life and death, and memory and forgetting, our Introduction to Part V 247 contemporary age offers the possibility and challenge of creating new categories and subjectivities, in-between; Childs reminds us that if we look at how memory and forgetting have been intertwined throughout history in their cultural production of one another, we will find models for Malabou’s new forms of being. Sound poet Holly Pester develops this theme in her analysis of poetry and artistic performance’s relation to forgetting, while further blurring distinctions between the body and technology. Starting from the ‘curious divide’ between reading from printed texts or reciting from memory, Pester argues that the ‘cricked of neck poet, delivering their poem as if for the first time each time from the page, nodding along to every printed unit is behaving mechanically analogous to the moment of composition’. Discussions of Extended Mind Theory (EMT) elsewhere in this book have argued that remembering something through reference to external objects, such as Clark and Chalmers’s notebook, is fundamentally similar to the act of remembering something by calling a fact to mind. Pester offers a counterpoint here by claiming that such components of cognitive scaffolding as ‘the totem of the A4 printout’ can be said to enable forgetting. Given the difficulty in winning over critics of EMT, this approach may be more productive. Rather than starting from the body and brain and claiming that external objects can be understood in similar terms, Pester’s emphasis on forgetting allows us to begin from those external objects and claim that the body is similar. The relationship between the vocalized performance of a poem and the poem- text is a complex and changeable one, and a certain ‘gift’ of memory loss allows for the experience of the poem to be as if new each time. The live performance of the poem, writes Pester, becomes a ‘habit of the body’, something that can be conditioned with the motor memory that the practice of reading cultivates, as Burke shows in Chapter 14. Heather Yeung similarly begins from the notion of forgetting as a function of art. Her section sets Robert Pinsky’s claim that ‘poetry is, among other things, a technology for remembering. Like the written alphabet and the printing press and the digital computer, it is an invention to help and extend memory’ against Catherine Malabou’s identification of ‘a necessary dialectic at the foundation of neuroplasticity, where “the foundation of each identity is a kind of resilience”’. Marabou, along with Draaisma, opposes the fallibility of human memory and cognition in general to the functionalism of the digital computer, but raises the stakes on both sides through a critique of the ‘neuronal ideology’ at work in the emerging conception of the brain in terms of a network. Drawing on Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005) (itself drawing heavily on by Deleuze and Guattari’s work), Malabou claims that

neuronal functioning and social functioning interdetermine each other and mutually give each other form [. . .] to the point where it is no longer possible to distinguish them. As though neuronal functioning were confounded with the natural operation of the world, as though neuronal plasticity anchored biologically – and thereby justified – a certain type of political and social organization.15 248 Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery

Resistance to this process means taking into account that the neuroplasticity ‘is also the capacity to annihilate the very form it is able to receive or create [. . .] situated between two extremes: on the one side the sensible image of taking form (sculpture or plastic objects), and on the other side that of the annihilation of all form (explosion)’. Yeung mediates on how this dialectic can be discerned within our response to avant-garde art; a poem is (or should be) as much a technology for forgetting as it is for remembering. This imperative to confront what Yeung calls ‘the ungrounded fear that, in forgetting, a lack of “self” occurs’ brings us back to the question of the contemporary amnesiac. How can we begin to narrate amnesia in a way that does justice to the oscillation between memory and forgetting inherent to biological memory? Jason Tougaw’s opening of his chapter with the questions ‘How to narrate the life story of an amnesiac? What aspects of identity remain when memory fails?’ hints at the difficulties inherent to such a task. His decision, in responding to these questions, to give equal weight to fictional and nonfictional contemporary narratives is telling. One of these narratives is Suzanne Corkin’s biography Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesiac Patient, H. M. (2013), which documents the famous neurology patient from a perspective defined by, as Tougaw puts it, ‘an awareness that an ethical commitment to improving the lives of amnesiacs requires careful differentiation between memory and identity’. As Tougaw points out, Corkin’s book works against the reductive pitfalls involved in discussing the life of the man Squire and Wixted credit with a shift in our understanding of memory, and who has, as we have seen, come to displace the metaphorical, postmodernist amnesiac; Corkin writes that ‘it became my mission to make sure that [Molaison] is not remembered just by brief, anonymous descriptions in textbooks’. In doing so, Corkin give us another perspective on the parallel distinctions made between memory and forgetting, and self and its breakdown. To overcome such distinctions is an ethical and political imperative; Tougaw notes that Corkin and her fellow biographer Alix Kate Shulman’s recognize in their subjects ‘enduring aspects of identity’, demonstrating that

an amnesiac’s intimates have the capacity to mitigate the isolation and suffering that comes with severe memory loss, shaping social relationships that offer continuous opportunities for social interactions that validate the aspects of identity that endure for the particular amnesiac in question.

The fictional texts discussed by Tougaw similarly point to a productive tension between memory and forgetting in the creation of identity, while in a sense refusing the narrative resolution that would settle the ongoing oscillation between the two. These texts ‘play with the idea that amnesia may be preferable to remembering’ while acknowledging ‘the suffering that comes with amnesia’, their ‘distinctive and highly original forms of narration following directly from their ambivalence about retrieving lost memory’. Alison Waller looks at this forgetting- remembering nexus from a narratological point of view by tracing how memory and amnesia relate to the construction of one’s identity in the contemporary Introduction to Part V 249

Young Adult novel. Forgetting, especially during the early stages of one’s life, warns Waller, ‘is especially perilous, since the teenage protagonists are in the process of laying down those memories that will supposedly define them into adulthood and old age’. Inextricable questions of what to remember and what to forget are particularly relevant to these protagonists, for whom a self-consciousness about the selective formation of one’s identity is heightened. The fear of forgetting is, for the teenager, multi-layered; an undefined future self wavers and shifts according to their experience of the present, which must be understood in terms of potential future memories. A fear of age, of death, of not being remembered, becomes a cultural rather than personal or familial trope in the imperative to remember embodied by the war memorial. The essay by Heather Yeung and Thomas Coker takes as its starting point the Scottish poet Hamish Henderson’s phrase ‘These were our own / there were the others’, which expresses in its second half the ever-present imperative to forget that accompanies war remembrance’s injunction to remember. This dynamic, war’s ‘ethics of memory’, is as old as Simonides’ epitaph to the Spartans on the site of the Battle of Thermopylae. Writing at a moment that comes 100 years after the Great War, we are prompted towards a reconsideration of the ethics of cognition and memory and revaluation of the role of humans in the twenty- first century. Technology, here too, cannot be categorized as an aid to memory or as a catalyst for forgetting; the shift from Homeric warrior-figure to ‘warrior geek’, operating through an increasing dehumanization, with satellite, drone and other disaffective technologies at its forefront, involves a questioning of the ethics of war and a questioning of the soldier’s affective relationship to those technologies. Yeung and Coker end by asking us how ‘then, is it possible, with the centenary of the Great War looming as we write this, to remember responsibly? And how far and wide must this net of appropriate remembrance be cast?’ The writers in this part have left this question open, and can only add to an understanding of what responsibility means in this context: an awareness of the finite nature of this net, of the boundaries set by what is forgotten, which define what it means to remember. 28 Remembering Larry R. Squire and John T. Wixted

Memory is a large topic, growing out of the fundamental fact that the experiences we have can modify the nervous system such that our mental life and our behaviour can be different than they were in the past. The study of memory ranges widely – from cellular and molecular questions about the nature of synaptic change to questions about what memory is: whether it is one thing or many, which brain systems support memory, and how those systems operate. We will consider in particular the structure and organization of memory with a focus on brain systems. The idea that functions of the nervous system can be localized was well accepted by the end of the nineteenth century. Yet these ideas concerned mainly sensory-motor functions and language and did not speak to the topic of memory itself. In the early twentieth century, an influential programme of research in the rat concluded that memory is not localized but is distributed through the neocortex (the outer layer of the cerebral hemispheres of the brain of mammals involved in higher functions such as sensory perception, attention, memory, and action), such that each region contributes equivalently to the whole (Lashley 1929). Memory was thought to be distributed and well integrated with intellectual and perceptual functions, and no particular brain region was thought to be dedicated to memory function. All of this changed in the 1950s when profound effects on memory were reported following a bilateral medial temporal lobe resection (the removal of the inner structures of the temporal lobe) carried out in the patient known as H. M. (Scoville and Milner 1957). This experimental surgery successfully relieved H. M.’s severe epilepsy, as was intended, but it also resulted in severe and debilitating forgetfulness, which occurred against a background of apparently intact intellectual and perceptual functions. For example, the patient could copy a complex drawing as well as controls, suggesting that his ability to perceive visual information was intact; and he could continuously rehearse (and then repeat back) a string of five or six digits as well as controls, suggesting that his ‘working memory’ was also intact. But when his attention was diverted, he soon forgot the drawing and the digits. Early descriptions of H. M. can be said to have inaugurated the modern era of memory research and strongly influenced the direction of subsequent work.

251 252 Larry R. Squire and John T. Wixted

Most significantly, this work identified for the first time a particular area of the brain as important for memory. H. M.’s bilateral lesion included the hippocampus, amygdala, and the adjacent parahippocampal gyrus. The immediate question was of which structures within this large surgical removal were responsible for his circumscribed memory impairment; that is, which structures and connections within the human temporal lobe have dedicated memory functions? These matters became understood gradually during the 1980s following the successful development of an animal model of human amnesia in the nonhuman primate (Mishkin 1978). The important structures proved to be the hippocampus and the adjacent entorhinal, perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices, which make up much of the parahippocampal gyrus (Figure 28.1). (Anatomically related structures in the thalamus and hypothalamus in the diencephalic midline, an area not part of H.M.’s lesion, are also important for memory, but these will not be discussed.) Damage limited to the hippocampus itself causes moderately severe memory impairment, but the impairment is greatly exacerbated when the damage extends to and includes the parahippocampal gyrus (as was the case with H.M.) (Zola-Morgan, Squire and Amaral 1986; Rempel- Clower et al. 1996). In all cases, the disorder is characterized most prominently by an impaired ability to form new memories (anterograde amnesia), but also by difficulty in accessing some memories acquired before the onset of the impairment (retrograde amnesia). Memories acquired shortly before the occurrence of a brain lesion (such as during the previous year) tend to be more impaired than memories acquired in the distant past. Thus, the structures that compose the medial temporal lobe memory system are essential for the initial formation of enduring long-term memories as well as for their maintenance and retrieval for a time after learning. The fact that very remote memory tends to be preserved after medial temporal lobe damage indicates that these structures are not the ultimate repository of long-term memory. Once the important structures of the medial temporal lobe had been identified, the question naturally arose of whether the different structures have specialized roles. An early view held that the hippocampus plays an especially important role in spatial memory (O’Keefe and Nadel 1978). This idea was based on the common finding that rodents with selective hippocampal lesions are severely impaired in spatial learning tasks, such as learning to navigate a maze. However, subsequent work involving humans and monkeys with selective hippocampal lesions demonstrated pronounced spatial and nonspatial memory impairment. For example, patients with hippocampal lesions were impaired in their ability to recognize words that had appeared in an earlier list – a task with no obvious spatial component (Reed and Squire 1997). Findings like these suggest that the hippocampus plays a broader role in memory encoding and consolidation (the gradual process by which a temporary, labile memory is transformed into a more stable, longlasting form). Another popular idea about specialization of function within the medial temporal lobe was based on a long-standing psychological distinction between familiarity and recollection (Atkinson and Juola 1974; Mandler 1980). Familiarity Remembering 253

HIPPOCAMPUS CA1

CA3

OTHER DIRECT ENTORHINAL CORTEX PROJECTIONS

PERIRHINAL PARAHIPPOCAMPAL CORTEX CORTEX

UNIMODAL AND POLYMODAL ASSOCIATION AREAS (frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes)

Figure 28.1 The medial temporal lobe memory system. Top: Schematic view of the memory system, which is composed of the hippocampus and the perirhinal, entorhinal and parahippocampal cortices. In addition to the connections shown here, there are also weak projections from the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices to the CA1-subiculum border. Bottom: Ventral view of a human brain (upper left) and a monkey brain (upper right) and a lateral view of a rat brain (lower centre). The major cortical components of the medial temporal lobe are highlighted and outlined. The hippocampus is not visible from the surface and, in the human, lies beneath the structures of the medial temporal lobe. Its anterior extent lies below the posterior entorhinal and perirhinal cortices, and the main body of the hippocampus lies beneath the parahippocampal cortex. In the rat, the parahippocampal cortex is termed the post rhinal cortex. Abbreviations: dg, dentate gyrus; ent, entorhinal cortex; ph, parahippocampal cortex; por, post rhinal cortex; pr, perirhinal cortex; S, subicu- lar complex Source: Adapted from Figure 2 in Larry R. Squire and John T. Wixted, ‘The Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory since H.M.’, Annual Review of Neuroscience 34 (2011), 259–288. 254 Larry R. Squire and John T. Wixted involves knowing only that an item has been previously encountered (for example, when you recognize a face but cannot recall who the person is), and recollection involves recalling specific details about the prior encounter (such as recalling where and when you met the familiar person). Initially, a number of findings were interpreted to mean that hippocampal lesions selectively impair the recollection process but leave memory based on familiarity intact (Brown and Aggleton 2001). In addition, neuroimaging studies were often interpreted to mean that recollection-based decisions generate elevated activity in the hippocampus, whereas familiarity-based decisions generate elevated activity in other medial temporal lobe structures, particularly the perirhinal cortex (Eichenbaum et al. 2007). However, subsequent studies found that bilateral hippocampal lesions in humans have comparable effects on recollection and familiarity, and neuroimaging studies found that both familiarity-based and recollection-based recognition generate elevated hippocampal activity when both kinds of memory are strong (Song et al. 2011; Smith, Wixted and Squire 2011; Song, Jeneson and Squire 2011). Thus, the specialization of function within the medial temporal lobe does not seem to be informed by this distinction. Because the functions of the different medial temporal lobe structures do not apparently divide up along the lines of spatial versus nonspatial memory or recollection versus familiarity, we must look elsewhere to identify functional differences between the structures. An important consideration is the fact that the inputs to each structure are quite different (Squire 1986; Suzuki and Amaral 1994). For example, the perirhinal cortex receives the majority of its cortical input from areas supporting visual object perception. Thus, the perirhinal cortex may be particularly important for forming memories of visual objects. Similarly, the parahippocampal cortex receives significant input from areas supporting spatial processing (for example, the ability to perceive that objects A and B are closer together than objects C and D). This area may therefore be particularly important for forming memories about the spatial locations of objects. A growing body of evidence is consistent with these ideas (Buffalo et al. 2006; Staresina et al. 2011; Liang et al. 2013; Staresina et al. 2013). That is, the functional specialization of different medial temporal lobe structures is sensibly related to the domain of information they process – information that is carried to these structures from upstream regions supporting different kinds of perceptual processing (Wixted and Squire 2011). Within the medial temporal lobe, the hippocampus is the ultimate recipient of convergent projections from the entorhinal, perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices. Thus, the hippocampus itself is in a position to play a role in the encoding and consolidation of all aspects of an experience (its visual, spatial, auditory and olfactory qualities, as well as other contextual information). These anatomical facts can therefore explain why damage to the hippocampus results in broad memory impairment that covers all modalities and extends across multiple domains. Current studies are using new genetic methods in mice and other techniques to analyse the separate contributions of specific connections and cell types within the hippocampus (Yassa and Stark 2011; Xu Lieu et al. 2012). Remembering 255

The memory impairment associated with medial temporal lobe lesions is narrower than once thought, because not all forms of learning and memory are affected. The first clue came in 1962 when H. M. was found capable of acquiring a motor skill (mirror drawing) over a period of three days, though he could not recall these periods of practice. While this finding showed that memory is not unitary, discussions at the time tended to set aside motor skills as a special case representing a less cognitive form of memory. The suggestion was that the rest of memory is of one piece and is dependent on medial temporal lobe structures. Yet during the subsequent years, it was discovered that motor-skill learning is but one example of a large domain of abilities that are independent of the medial temporal lobe. An early discovery was that perceptual and cognitive skills – not just motor skills – are intact in patients like H. M. Thus, memory-impaired patients acquired at a normal rate the skill of reading mirror-reversed words, despite poor memory for the words themselves (Cohen and Squire 1980). This finding led to the proposal of a brain-based distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge referred to knowledge available as conscious recollections about facts and events. Procedural knowledge referred to skill-based information: knowledge expressed through performance rather than recollection. Soon after this discovery was made, the phenomenon of priming was also found to be spared in amnesia (Tulving and Schacter 1990; Warrington and McCarthy 1987; Schacter and Buckner 1998). Priming refers to an improved ability to detect or identify stimuli based on a recent encounter with the same or related stimuli. For example, memory-impaired patients could (like healthy volunteers) name recently presented object drawings 100 milliseconds faster than new drawings, despite having poor memory for the drawings themselves (Backer Cave and Squire 1992). Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the independ- ence of priming and ordinary memory ability was that severely amnesic patients can exhibit fully intact priming for words while performing only at chance levels on conventional recognition memory tests for the same words (Hamann and Squire 1997). Another important insight was the idea that the neostriatum (a subcortical region of the brain that includes the caudate nucleus and putamen), and not the medial temporal lobe, is important for the sort of gradual, feedback-guided learning that results in habit memory (Mishkin et al. 1984). For example, memory-impaired patients learned tasks at a normal rate when the outcome of each learning trial was determined probabilistically, and performance therefore needed to be based on a gut feeling rather than on conscious memory of past events (Knowlton et al. 1996). Work with experimental animals was also the source of new insights, including the discovery in the early 1980s that the cerebellum is essential for delay eyeblink conditioning,16 a kind of learning entirely preserved after hippocampal lesions (Clark and Squire 2000; Christian and Thompson 2003). Still other types of learning, which involve attaching a positive or negative valence to a stimulus (as in fear conditioning), depend on the amygdala (Ledoux 1996). Given the variety of tasks explored in these 256 Larry R. Squire and John T. Wixted studies and the number of brain structures implicated, an account of memory based on a two-part dichotomy (declarative versus procedural) began to seem too simplistic. Accordingly, the perspective eventually shifted to a framework that accommodated more than two memory systems. At that time, the umbrella term ‘non-declarative memory’ was introduced with the intention of distinguishing between declarative memory (which refers to one memory system) and other types of memory (in which several additional systems are involved) (Squire and Zola-Morgan 1988). Figure 28.2 illustrates this idea.17 Declarative memory is what the term ‘memory’ signifies when we use it in everyday language. The stored representations are flexible and thought to be accessible to conscious awareness. Declarative memory is representational; it provides a way to model the external world and is either true or false. In contrast, nondeclarative memory is neither true nor false: it is dispositional and occurs as modifications within specialized performance systems. Thus, the various memory systems can be distinguished in terms of the different kinds of information they process and the principles by which they operate. These systems work in parallel to support behaviour. For example, an aversive event in childhood (such as being knocked down by a large dog) can lead to an enduring declarative memory of the event itself (dependent on the hippocampus and related structures) as well as a long-lasting, nondeclarative

Memory

Declarative Nondeclarative

Facts Events Procedural Priming and Simple Non associative (skills and Perceptual Classical Learning habits) Learning conditioning

Emotional Skeletal Responses Responses

Medial Temporal Lobe Striatum Neocortex Amygdala Cerebellum Reflex Diencephalon Pathways

Figure 28.2 Organization of mammalian long-term memory systems. The figure lists the brain structures thought to be especially important for each form of declarative and nondeclarative memory. In addition to its central role in emotional learning, the amygdala is able to modulate the strength of both declarative and nondeclarative memory Remembering 257 fear of dogs (a phobia, dependent on the amygdala) that is experienced as part of the personality rather than as a memory. The hippocampus and related structures in the medial temporal lobe have a time-limited role in the formation and storage of memory. Two lines of work underlie this idea. First, damage to these structures typically spares remote memory and impairs more recent memory in a temporally graded fashion. In humans, hippocampal lesions affect memory for up to a few years after learning. In experimental animals (usually rats or mice), similar damage impairs memory for up to 30 days after learning (Squire and Bayley 2007). Thus, long-term, stable memory develops more slowly in humans than in experimental animals. Discussion in the field continues about the possible special status of spatial memory and autobiographical memory in humans and the idea that these forms of memory might depend on medial temporal lobe structures as long as memory persists (Moscovitch et al. 2006). Yet there are reports of patients with medial temporal lobe lesions in whom remote spatial and autobiographical memory has been spared (Squire and Bayley 2007). The second line of work involves studies of experimental animals that track neural activity or structural changes in the hippocampus and neocortex after learning. For example, expression patterns of activity related genes like c-Fos describe gradually decreasing activity in the hippocampus after learning and parallel increases in activity in a number of cortical regions (Frankland and Bontempi 2005). These findings and others describe the increasing importance of distributed cortical regions for the representation of memory as time passes after learning (Restivo et al. 2009). Similar findings have been obtained in neuroimaging studies; for example, when volunteers attempt to recall news events that occurred anywhere from one to 30 years earlier (Smith and Squire 2009). The idea is not that memory is literally transferred from the hippocampus to the neocortex. Memory is always in the neocortex, but gradual changes occur to increase the complexity, distribution and connectivity of memory representations among multiple cortical regions. At the same time the role of the hippocampus gradually diminishes. One way to view this process is to suppose that a time-and-place-specific new memory (a so-called episodic memory) is represented initially by an ensemble of distributed changes in the neocortex and by changes in the hippocampus (and anatomically related structures) as well. The neocortical ensemble is viable so long as the episode is maintained within active memory. However, when one’s attention is directed elsewhere, a problem arises. How can the unique distribution of sites that represent this new memory be revivified by unaided recall or after the presentation of a partial reminder? The notion is that remembering becomes possible because medial temporal lobe structures, by way of their widespread, divergent connections to the neocortex, effectively bind together the distributed neocortical sites that together constitute the new memory. This connectivity supports the capacity for remembering during the consolidation process until the connectivity among the relevant cortical sites becomes strong enough to represent a stable memory without the support of the medial temporal lobe. 258 Larry R. Squire and John T. Wixted

A long-standing idea, which has received renewed attention in recent years, is that retrieval of memory provides an opportunity for updating or modulating what was originally learned and even the possibility of severely disrupting it (Nader et al. 2000; Loftus 2005; Lee 2009; Dudai 2012; St. Jacques et al. 2013). The process by which a long-term memory transiently returns to a labile state (and then re-stabilizes) has been termed reconsolidation. Although it is clear that memory can be modified or distorted by memory retrieval, questions remain about the conditions under which memory can actually be abolished. Some studies in experimental animals report that a reactivated memory can be impaired but that the disruption is transient (Lattal and Abel 2006). Other studies in animals report that only recent memories (ones that are one or seven days old, but not 14 or 28 days old) can be impaired after reactivation (Milekic and Alberini 2002). Consolidation presumably requires some relatively long-lasting form of communication between the medial temporal lobe and the neocortex. One proposal for how this could be accomplished is through the phenomenon of neural replay. Recordings of neural activity in rodents showed that firing sequences of hippocampal neurons during waking behaviour are then spontaneously replayed during subsequent slow-wave sleep (Wilson and McNaughton 1994). Later it was found that hippocampal replay was coordinated with firing patterns in the visual cortex, which is consistent with the idea that a dialogue occurs between hippocampus and neo-cortex (Ji and Wilson 2007). This coordination could be part of the process by which recent memories eventually become consolidated remote memories. Interestingly, disrupting replay activity in rodents during a rest period (filled by quiet wakefulness and slow-wave sleep) following spatial learning impairs later memory for the task (Ego-Stengel and Wilson 2010). These studies with rodents led to conceptually similar studies with humans. For example, volunteers memorized the locations of card pairs on a computer screen while being exposed to a particular odour (the smell of a rose). Later, odour re-exposure, specifically during slow-wave sleep, increased hippocampal activity (measured by neuroimaging) and lessened forgetting of the card pair locations following sleep (Rasch et al. 2007). In another study, the hippocampus and para-hippocampal gyrus were active while participants learned routes in a virtual reality environment and were active again during subsequent slow-wave sleep (Peigneux et al. 2004). The degree of activation during slow-wave sleep correlated with memory performance the next day. Studies like these have been interpreted to mean that consolidation results from the reactivation of newly encoded hippocampal representations, specifically during slow-wave sleep (Inostroza and Born 2013). An important question is whether neural replay and the consolidation process are specific to slow-wave sleep or whether these events might occur whenever the brain is not actively encoding new memories, such as during quiet wakefulness (Mednick et al. 2011). In rodents, neural replay can occur during wakefulness (Karlsson and Frank 2009). Moreover, in a neuroimaging study with humans, coordinated hippocampal-cortical activity occurred during a rest period that Remembering 259 followed learning, and this activity predicted later memory performance (Tambini et al. 2010). Accordingly, an intriguing possibility is that the neural replay activity proposed to underlie memory consolidation may occur whenever the brain is in a quiet state (not just during slow-wave sleep). Where are memories ultimately stored in the brain? A variety of evidence has converged on the view that the different aspects of remembered information are stored in the same regions of the brain that initially perform the processing and analysis of that information. According to this view, remembering a previous experience consists of the coordinated reactivation of the distributed neocortical regions that were activated during initial perceptual processing (Renzi 1982; Mishkin 1982; Squire 1987; and Damasio 1989). While the memory is still new, this reactivation of distributed cortical activity depends on the hippocampus and other medial temporal lobe structures, but once memory is fully consolidated, reactivation can occur within the neocortex itself. Each neocortical region operates within a specific domain and stores only the features of an experience – such as visual, auditory or spatial information – that belong to that domain. Thus, as proposed by psychologist Karl Lashley long ago, memories are distributed throughout the neocortex (Lashley 1929). However, contrary to his view, memory is not uniformly distributed. Some areas are more important for storing the visual aspects of an experience, and other areas are more important for storing other aspects. An implication of this view is that neocortical lesions that selectively impair perceptual processing in a particular domain (such as the perceptual processing of colour) should also cause correspondingly specific anterograde and retrograde memory impairment within the same domain. This circumstance is illustrated by ‘The Case of the Colorblind Painter’, a case described by the neurologist Oliver Sacks (1995). An accomplished painter was involved in an automobile accident at the age of 65, which rendered him colour-blind. The disability was striking: he could discriminate between wavelengths of light, even though the different wavelengths gave rise to the perception of various shades of grey rather than the perception of different colours. Because his condition was acquired (it was not congenital), it was possible to interrogate not only his ability to form new colour memories, but also the status of previously established memories that had once included the subjective experience of colour. The case description leaves little doubt that the patient’s experience – both going forward and looking back – was now completely (and selectively) devoid of colour. Although he retained abstract semantic knowledge of colour, he could neither perceive nor later remember the colour of objects presented to him (anterograde impairment). In addition, he could not subjectively experience colour in his earlier (and once chromatic) memories. For example, he knew that his lawn was green, but he reported that he could no longer visualize it in green when he tried to remember what it once looked like. Note the difference between the effect of this cortical lesion on memory and the effect of bilateral medial temporal lobe lesions. With respect to remote memories that have already been fully consolidated, medial temporal lobe lesions have 260 Larry R. Squire and John T. Wixted little effect. In contrast, focal cortical lesions can selectively abolish one feature (like colour) of a long-consolidated memory. With respect to new experiences, bilateral medial temporal lesions lead to severe anterograde amnesia (no subsequent memory for a recent experience). In contrast, focal cortical lesions of the kind suffered by the painter prevent the encoding and retrieval of only one aspect of the experience (colour in his case). Because the processing of colour in the painter’s neocortex was impaired, his experience of colour was eliminated in both perception and memory. Selective deficits in long-term knowledge of the kind suffered by the painter are not limited to perceptual experience. Semantic knowledge (knowledge about objects, facts and word meanings) is also stored in neocortical regions that can be selectively damaged (Warrington and McCarthy 1987). Thus, damage limited to lateral regions of patients’ temporal lobe (close to, but not including, medial temporal lobe structures) can disrupt previously stored information – such as what an animal looks or sounds like. Such patients have difficulty naming pictures of animals and providing information about them. Other patients with damage to the parietal cortex can have difficulty identifying small manipulable objects (like spoons and brushes) and knowing how to use them. Neuroimaging studies support the findings from lesion studies and show that the properties of objects, together with how they are perceived and used, influence which brain areas store long-term knowledge about their identity (Martin 2007). The information in the preceding sections helps illuminate some of the memory deficits associated with normal ageing and dementia. One of the most common experiences associated with normal ageing is the decline in memory function. Often, the memory difficulty is characterized as poor ‘short-term’ memory. In its common usage, a short-term memory problem means having trouble remembering recent experiences (such as when someone tells a story for the second time without remembering having told it before) while at the same time having no trouble remembering events from decades ago. Older adults who exhibit these symptoms are having difficulty encoding and consolidating new memories, while memories that were acquired and consolidated long ago are easy to retrieve. These changes in memory ability are related to changes within medial temporal lobe structures. In experimental animals, the dentate gyrus within the hippocampus is most sensitive to the effects of ageing (Small et al. 2004). Studies in humans have reported between one and two percent annual hippocampal atrophy in non-demented adults older than 55 years (Jack et al. 1998). Aerobic exercise can reverse age-related volume loss by one to two years (Erickson et al. 2011). Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, is a progressive neu- rodegenerative condition. It is a distinct condition, not an acceleration of the normal ageing process. The first targets of the disease are the entorhinal cortex and the CA1 field of the hippocampus, which explains why memory is especially affected in its early stages (Hyman et al. 1984; West et al. 1994). The rate of hippocampal volume loss is at least 2.5 times greater in Alzheimer’s disease than in normal ageing (Jack et al. 1998). The disease progresses to involve intellectual functions quite broadly. The neocortex becomes involved (though sensory and Remembering 261 motor areas are relatively spared) and patients develop difficulty with language, problem solving, calculation and judgment. Semantic dementia, another progressive disorder, begins elsewhere in the brain and is associated with a different pattern of symptoms (Hodges and Graham 2001). This condition prominently involves atrophy of the anterior and lateral temporal lobes (Levy et al. 2004; Patterson et al. 2007). Unlike patients with Alzheimer’s disease, these patients have severe loss of previously stored and long consolidated semantic knowledge (that is, loss of conceptual knowledge about objects, facts and word meanings). Yet their ability to form new memories can be relatively spared. Thus, patients could recognize which drawings of animals they had seen recently but failed at tests of conceptual knowledge about the same items (Graham et al. 1997). Not just the name of the item is lost – the concept itself is degraded. The understanding of memory has changed in ways that might have seemed revolutionary to Karl Lashley when he searched for sites of memory storage in the brains of rats (Lashley 1929). All that has been learned about the structure and organization of memory and about brain systems is the result of basic, fundamental research, mostly in rodents, monkeys and humans. Although we did not review it here, much has also been learned from studies of the cellular and molecular basis of memory, an enterprise that has depended heavily on mice as well as invertebrate animals like Aplysia and Drosophila. As this work continues, one can expect not only new insights into how memory operates but also improved understanding of human health and disease, including improved ways to diagnose, treat and prevent the diseases that affect memory.18

Notes

1. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009), Loc. 62–70. 2. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York and London: Verso, 1992), ix. 3. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 15. 4. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 16–17. 5. Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 195. 6. Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1998), 97. 7. J. Bernlef, Out of Mind, trans. Adrienne Dixon (London: Faber, 1989), 127. 8. Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist (London: Penguin, 2013). For more examples of similar projects and technologies see Stacey Pitsillides’ essay in this volume. 9. Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas About the Mind, trans. Paul Vincent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 155. 10. Michael J. Sandel, ‘The Case Against Imperfection’, in Human Enhancement, ed. Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 74–75. 11. Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, 155. 262 Larry R. Squire and John T. Wixted

12. Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (Basic: New York, 1992), 206. 13. Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 18. 14. Malabou, Ontology, 18–19. 15. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 9. 16. Delay eyeblink conditioning is a form of Pavlovian conditioning in which a conditioned stimulus (such as a tone) is presented and remains on until the unconditioned stimulus (such as a puff of air to the eye) is presented. The two stimuli overlap and co-terminate. D.A. McCormick et al., ‘Initial Localization of the Memory Trace for a Basic Form of Learning’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 79 (1982), 2731–2735. 17. For earlier versions of this diagram, see Squire, ‘Mechanisms of Memory’. 18. This work appeared originally in the 2015 Winter Issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 29 Directed Forgetting Karen R. Brandt

Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all1 — Friedrich Nietzsche

Introduction

Imagine you are driving to work on a Wednesday morning and as always you park your car in the local multi-storey car park. At the end of another long working day, you make your way back to the car park, keen to get home and begin relaxing into your evening. Without a second thought, most of us will easily locate our car and happily drive off home. But how did we successfully locate our car so easily? And more importantly, how did we remember to look for our car in the spot it was parked in today and not yesterday or even last week? This effortless process we barely take note of not only illustrates how we can dismiss irrelevant information but also highlights the importance of forgetting in human memory. So how do we forget information? Are some items easier to forget than others? What are the different conditions under which we are successful at this process and what happens when this process fails? And finally, why is forgetting a growing issue in our modern society?

Forget me not

There are two types of forgetting: unintentional forgetting, when we forget information naturally, and intentional forgetting, when we deliberately attempt to eliminate information from memory. The earliest researcher interested in unintentional forgetting was Ebbinghaus (1885–1913), who researched the rate of forgetting following list learning and found that the rate of forgetting was greatest immediately following the learning phase. That is, forgetting occurred mostly within the first hour following learning and then the rate of forgetting slowed down substantially levelling off after eight hours. This forgetting effect has been replicated on numerous occasions and suggests that if we are going to forget information, it occurs relatively soon after learning it.

263 264 Karen R. Brandt

Another early researcher interested in what type of information we forget was Bartlett (1932), who investigated this phenomenon using stories. Bartlett suggested we use schemas to guide our memory in reconstructing events and tested this assumption with a story called ‘The War of the Ghosts’ (Bartlett 1932). What was particular about this story was that it did not follow any conventional storyline; that is, it did not fit any story schema. When students were asked to recall the story, Bartlett found that despite the short delay between learning and recall, the story had substantially changed. Of most importance to note, the story had become more coherent and conventional, and this was achieved both by omitting information that did not make sense and by including new information to make the recall of the story more rational. This replicated effect demonstrates the importance of schemas in memory and that material that is not schematised is more prone to being forgotten. More recent research has explored how schematisation affects forgetting by looking at how students’ awareness of the knowledge they gain changes over time (Dewhurst et al. 2009). This work has demonstrated that straight after learning, students can recollect rich episodic details such as specific comments that were made about the material. However, if this knowledge is tested after weeks/ months, these acute details are mostly forgotten and replaced with a more generic conceptual representation of the material learned. The process of schematisation is believed to underlie this change and this research has further demonstrated that schematisation is facilitated by repeated testing. So repeatedly studying material really does help learning by decreasing the chance that it will be forgotten. Taken together, the research on unintentional forgetting has demonstrated that forgetting mostly occurs within the first hour after learning, that material that is not easily accommodated within pre-existing schemas is more readily forgotten and that the process of schematisation makes us forget the details but remember the gist of the knowledge we have gained.

To forget or not to forget?

Why might the process of forgetting be a useful tool? We all have memories we would rather not have; that first break-up, those embarrassing moments we regret and would gladly omit from our memory once and for all. So can we intentionally forget information and how good are we at this process? Bjork (1972) explored intentional forgetting by presenting words to participants and following each word was a cue either to remember (TBR) or to forget the item (TBF). On a subsequent memory test, he found that TBR items were recalled more than TBF items thereby demonstrating that we are in fact capable of forgetting under instruction. The mechanisms thought to underlie this Directed Forgetting (DF) effect are selective rehearsal of TBR items and active inhibition of TBF items. Of interest, however, was the finding that the TBF items were still recalled above chance level, indicating that despite the instruction to forget, these items were still encoded to some extent into memory. These DF effects were even found when the TBR and TBF cues were presented after the entire list of words had been learnt, demonstrating that these effects are not due to task difficulty in terms of Directed Forgetting 265 switching between trying to remember or trying to forget items. Thus we are good at forgetting, but by no means perfect. This raises the question as to whether some people might be better at forgetting than others and whether certain information is more easily forgettable. To address the first question, research has focused on populations that might have an extra impetus to forget. For example, people who possess a repressive coping style (repressors) have been found to minimise and dissociate the level of negativity they are experiencing as a coping mechanism (Derakshan and Eysenck 1997). The process of forgetting in repressors is therefore of interest, as one would predict they would be particularly good at forgetting negative information given their defensive coping style. Indeed, in comparison to a control group, repressors forgot significantly more negative TBF items, whereas no such differences emerged for positive items, supporting the view that repressors were especially adept at sup- pressing negative information (Myers and Derakshan 2004). However, the wish to forget negative information, and particularly negative experiences, is something we all share, regardless of whether we form part of a clinical group or not. Research looking at emotional memory in healthy population groups has demonstrated ample evidence that emotional information (whether positive or negative) is more likely to be remembered than neutral information (Hamann 2001). The question arises, therefore, if something is easier to remember, might it be harder to forget? The simple answer to this question is no. Most research has either failed to find DF effects for emotional items or has found that these effects are of similar magnitude as those for neutral information (Nowicka et al. 2011; Yang et al. 2012). In addition, although a recent study found enhanced DF effects for emotional words, this effect was due to emotional words being easier to remember, not harder to forget (Brandt et al. 2013). Taken together, the research on intentional forgetting has demonstrated that we can in fact intentional forget information even if this information is particularly easy to remember. However all that is forgotten is not lost, as despite explicitly trying to forget material, parts will remain within our memory, somewhat bad news for those embarrassing moments.

Forgettable, that’s what you are

The elderly often complain about poor memory and forgetfulness. Given the phenomenon of an ever-increasing ageing population, what evidence is there that the elderly have poorer memory than the young? Do they in fact tend to forget more information and if so what might be the cause of this? With regards to unintentional forgetting, the evidence suggests that the elderly forget substantially more information than the young and this effect has been found to occur as early as one hour after learning (Wheeler 2000). Importantly, this enhanced forgetting remains even when processing speed and working memory are matched between the elderly and the young (Zimprich and Kurtz 2013). Hence the greater forgetting in the older population is not due to this group taking longer to learn and process material. 266 Karen R. Brandt

However, are the elderly as good as the young at forgetting material under instruction? The answer is yes and no. Earlier research concluded that when compared to a young group, older participants were just as good at forgetting when directed to do so (Zellner and Bauml 2006). However, the older group comprised any participant above the age of 60, and recent evidence has suggested that this age criteria may no longer be appropriate in our modern ageing society (Aslan and Bauml 2013). Specifically, when comparing forgetting between the young, the young-old (ages 60–74) and the old-old (ages 75–96), this research found similar forgetting rates between the first two groups but found that the old-old group were so inefficient at forgetting, that they showed the same level of memory performance between TBR and TBF items. This suggests that intentional forgetting is a late-declining ability and this research demonstrates the importance of sub-dividing older participants into different groups when investigating memory and forgetting. Given that much older participants demonstrate enhanced forgetting, what might be the cause of this effect? Research has found that activity in the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal lobes predicts successful memory formation in young adults (Kirchhoff et al. 2000) and that this activity is decreased in older participants (Gutchess et al. 2005). In addition, recent research using fMRI sought to address such activity changes for remembered and forgotten items between young (20–39), middle (40–59) and old (60–79) participant groups (Park et al. 2013). Furthermore, this research sought to clarify whether any change in brain activity was associated with a positive (increased activity for remembered over forgotten items) or a negative memory effect (decreased activity for remembered over forgotten items). Results demonstrated that whilst memory performance was identical between groups, there was an activity decline from the young to the middle-aged group for both positive and negative memory effects and a further decline from the middle to the old group for the negative memory effect only. In addition, the age decrease in neural activity was located within the occipito-temporal-parietal regions of the brain. This research demonstrates that most age-related memory activity differences occurred between the young and the middle-aged group, thereby suggesting that the decline occurs fairly early on within our life span. Taken together, the research on forgetting in the elderly demonstrates that they are more likely to forget information unintentionally. In addition, up to a certain age, the elderly are as efficient as the young at forgetting material when deliberately trying to do so, however after the age of 75 this propensity decreases substantially. Finally, the cause of this greater forgetting in the elderly appears to lie in decreased neuronal activity across all major lobes of the brain.

Conclusions

Without the ability to forget, our minds would be cluttered with needless and unwanted thoughts and facts. The research on unintentional forgetting demonstrates that we forget the details about learned material rather quickly and instead Directed Forgetting 267 retain the gist of our knowledge. However this fact does not appear to impede our everyday lives; not many of us remember the details we learned in the Highway Code to pass our driving test and yet we are able to drive successfully without impediment on a daily basis. Furthermore, unintentional forgetting actually benefits us by eliminating memories that are no longer relevant to us, including those that could impede our ability to function; thank goodness we do not remember the location of each parking space we’ve ever parked in! Importantly, forgetting is not always an unintentional process; we are rather good at forgetting when directed to do so, and some people are more efficient at this process than others. However, research has demonstrated that all is not always forgotten so the bad news is that some of those unwanted memories will stick around for a while longer, but the good news is that the longer we live, the more likely we are to forget them! Regardless of our intent, the act of forgetting is a most necessary affair.

Note

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), 10. 30 Remembrance in the Twenty-first Century Peter Childs

Remembrance:

1. The action of remembering something. 2. The action of remembering the dead, esp. in a ceremony.

In modern secular Western cultures, remembrance creates a link between the living and the dead, most often placed in a ceremonial context of remembering those who died in the service of country. The ‘national memory’ is therefore a repository of emotional, social, and cultural importance. It is also political. What is remembered and what is archived affect understandings of not just the past but also the present and the future. Most famously in literature, this is exploited in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the remembrance of the past is tightly controlled and constantly revised. The fallibility of personal memory makes this revisionism all the more possible, allowing individuals to doubt their own recollections against the misinformation provided by the Party as ‘official evidence’ to constantly rewrite the ‘national memory’. The gaps of personal memory are mirrored in the novel by memory holes: small chutes leading to a large incinerator. Here are consigned all scraps of contradictory evidence as the collective memory of the past is rewritten to show the Party in the best light. The novel’s protagonist Winston Smith is himself employed to operate a censorship of past events by revising old newspaper articles in order to serve the interests of propaganda. Also, in order to control the corroborating evidence of any personal memory, the Party forbids citizens to keep written records of their lives, and decrees that any photographs or documents be sent into the memory holes. The Party’s ultimate goal is to be able to rewrite the memory of each of its citizens. Thus it seeks to control the story of the past as a way to control the present. Aside from twentieth-century examples of totalitarian oppression, one historical source for Orwell’s depiction of the memory-hole may have been the ancient Roman practice of Damnatio memoriae, which translates as ‘condemnation of memory’. This was a decree by the Senate that a dead person, usually an emperor, traitor or discredited member of the nobility, must not be remembered. The decree

268 Remembrance in the Twenty-first Century 269 stretched to the widest attempt to cancel every trace of the person and so its aim was clearly to erase an individual entirely from public memory and discourse. The practice may seem extreme but continues to this day in various forms, for example as publicly disgraced individuals are left out of future accounts of social life or national narrative – removed from public remembrance or glossed over in the artefacts of the media record. Memory is both universal and culturally specific. Everyone has a memory but all humans understand memory in relation to their time and culture. In the traditional beliefs of some Central and East African societies, there is a third ontological state between the living and the dead. In this third time and place are a category of spirits called the Sasha, who are those still remembered by the living. Sasha, or Sasa in Swahili, are distinguished from the Zamani, the revered population of general ancestors no longer personally known to anyone living. When the last person who knew a predecessor dies, that ancestor leaves the Sasha for the Zamani. Unlike in the West, in these societies the future is far less important than the past, such that African time can be called not just helical but primarily two-dimensional. John Mbiti writes: ‘The linear concept of time in Western thought, with an indefinite past, present, and infinite future is practically foreign to African thinking. The future is virtually absent because events which lie in it have not taken place, they have not been realized, and cannot, therefore, constitute time’.1 There is no belief in progress, but the future can constitute ‘potential’ time in which the cycles and rhythms of nature will extend themselves, as in birth after pregnancy or harvest after planting. The length of months or years can also vary according to the events that take place within them – the number of days holding less importance than the activity (such as sowing). Time is thus organic not mechanical – relative, not fixed. Finally, death is not a termination but a turn in the cycle, as the living become the departed, their spirits transmigrating or reincarnating. In part, these concepts of remembrance are utilised by Kevin Brockmeier in his novel The Brief History of the Dead (2006), whose chapters alternate between two parallel worlds: one narrative set in a posthumous metropolis called the City and another in mid-twenty-first century US and Antarctica. It is soon apparent that people can suddenly disappear from the City, never to be seen again, while fresh arrivals bring news of life on earth. When a biological virus spreads across the globe, the population of the City at first begins to grow exponentially and extra buildings appear to accommodate them. However, this is soon reversed as the lethal virus spreads rapidly through the world, and the City’s population peaks, then decreases, because the number of inhabitants of the City remembered by survivors on earth dwindles. The final inhabitants of the City are those remembered by a scientist in Antarctica who is the last living woman on earth. Drawing on African belief, Brockmeier thus identifies the crucial boundary between life and death as not the point of dying but the point of dying from all living memory, crossing from the Sasha to the Zamani, the limitless graveyard of the human archive. This interestingly contrasts with the belief in Greek mythology that death was incomplete until life was forgotten: in texts such as Virgil’s Aeneid shades were said to be required to drink the waters of the river Lethe to forget their earthly 270 Peter Childs existence and pass on, according to the theory of metempsychosis. The idea that the dead, in general or in specific circumstances, may not have fully passed from the world of the living underpins so much Western history and culture, spanning ancient folklore and urban myth as well as traditional religion and contemporary literature. In Brockmeier’s story, the recent dead are kept alive by the thoughts of those who knew them, fading away with the passing of the last person who remembers them. However, The Brief History of the Dead does not expand on whether individuals in the City remain as they were to themselves on earth, or now exist, for example, in the form(s) they are remembered. From the ancient Greek thinker Protagoras we have the notion that judgments and knowledge are in some way relative to the person judging or knowing. The same is true of memory. In remembering an event, we bring to mind pieces of a version of what happened, or perhaps we assemble impressions that combine a number of more and less subjective elements. As sense-making animals, we will probably try to build a comprehensible narrative around the events in our lives, at least when required by ourselves or by others: an account that makes sense to us. As opposed to the collective versions of national memory, public accounts and the archive of the Zamani, this remembrance will be specific and subjective, because it will be conditioned by what is significant, meaningful or important to us, which is also true of the way in which we remember people, including the Sasha, who remain in memory, but not necessarily as they were.

Note

1. Quoted in Dorothy L. Pennington, ‘Time in African Culture’, in African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity, ed. Molefi Kete Asante and Kariamu Welsh Asante (New Jersey: Africa World Press), 130. 31 The Body and the Page in Poetry Readings as Remembrance of Composition Holly Pester

Slug sublimity suggests love’s a drag, touch that lingers and leaves a wet trail of memory and ... What did we do before YouTube?1

What is remembered by the poet in the performance of poetry? Are they recalling the rehearsal, pitching their body into the practiced gestures that activate the poem? Through voicing the poem, do they recall sounds and speech patterns from life experience, now delivered back via the live event? Perhaps the performance recalls the moment of composition, most probably involving a transcribing media of some sort; pen and paper, word processor, audio recorder, and therefore the hunched-over body, locked into its interface, an act itself involving automated recollections of speech and language. Can we then say that the performance of a poem, its live reading, is an act of the body remembering that act of remembering through the keyboard? To explore this intrication of questions I turn first to an anecdotal experience of poetry, performance and memory. It is a curious divide in certain scenes of public poetry readings (ignoring the aesthetic lineages, lyrical concerns and cultural cachets) that boils down to the matter of poets reading from either a printed text or by ‘heart’. This, albeit clumsy, separation is pertinent to a conversation on memory and poetry where the act of remembering becomes an essential part of the performance. You could ask how a performance of a memorised text can be about anything other than memory occurring through body and voice? Furthermore, when the memory is replaced with the inkjet page in a poetry reading, is the role of the body demoted? I would like to argue that the cricked-of-neck poet, delivering their poem as if for the first time each time from the page, nodding along to every printed unit, is behaving in a way mechanically analogous to the moment of composition. Not to say that the performer with the internal- ised poem isn’t also behaving mechanically, but the relationship to the poem’s compositional equipment is altered. In other words, the poetry reading that sees the reader hooked to their paper keeps them and the poem in close proximity

271 272 Holly Pester to technology and the interface through which it was written, and to which the performance will be in all likelihood readily uploaded. A notable historic moment in the on-going association between the poet’s voice and media technology is an 1889 recording of Robert Browning reciting ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’. The lines were spoken into the phonograph at the request of Colonel Gouraud, sales agent of Thomas Edison, at a dinner party in honour of the fabulous new device. Listening through the scratchy, muffled audio we can hear Browning fluently racing through the first five lines of the poem before he falters, stumbles and stops, then seemingly overcome with excitement, he apologises having forgotten his own verses. ‘But one thing which I shall remember all my life is’, he says, ‘the astonishing sensation produced upon me by your wonderful invention!’2 This well iterated event of memory loss is a gift to media theorists seeking to inter- relate the phenomena of spoken voice and sound storage media, thus drawing out new versions of the former from the latter. In ‘Aural Anxieties and the Advent of Modernity’, John M. Picker reaches into the content of Browning’s poem (in its completion) for an allegorical account of the technological divide that this captivating breakdown in voice and memory represents. The ‘good news’ transported from Ghent to Aix – as the galloping verse recounts – was transmitted by horse.3 By 1845 this mode of delivery and travel was replaced by the ease of the ‘iron horse’ railway system. The horses described in the poem as a mode of transporting information were defunct. Something technological had intervened on the poem, and also on the poet’s capacity to recall its words, just at the moment his voice was exteriorised, as it was from his memory banks onto the wax coated cylinder.4 Ironically this poem, more than many of Browning’s works, was doing all the things a traditional – as in oral tradition – poem should do to remain within easy recollection. By means of metre, rhythm, rhyme and repetition, it was a container of information for cultural preservation. (Along with the obligatory fantasised combination of sound, word and meaning.)5 The poet’s trip over the mechanisms of recall and failure to deliver the information symbolically marked the arrival of the new medium for information stowage (or in Browning’s case, not so symbolically, as the phonograph was in the very room with him, putting him off). Perhaps we could further explore this incident of recontextualised cultural data into the context of the present day, and realise that this recording of Browning forgetting his verse is no longer a phonographic artefact but a digital file, discernable by the quickest of YouTube searches. Our contemporary folk disseminator and cultural memory bank is teeming with expert, virtuoso, or nervous forgetful poets, whose voices stumble over their rehearsed texts or eloquently roll their rs, accent their es and linger on the mbn of ‘numbness’.6 Gouraud’s chronicling of Browning, now accompanied by the ghostly sepia portrait, is stiffly inanimate while a crackled voice follows the increasingly red bar below. This video clip, fascinating as it is, is mingled in with thousands of captured poetry transmissions, right up to the last night’s poetry reading. As the most recent audio-visual files illustrate our nowadays distributor of verse Poetry Readings and Remembrance 273 is a database of shaky-cams, footage of poets clutching their A4s, traversing their heads from one’s left to right, or those standing empty-handed, delivering their lines as if directly from their very soul! The process that saw Browning’s voice transposing the phonograph and then a YouTube upload brings into the clear a nexus of implications of memory in relation to poetry. At one end is the distribution of data from poems as databases in themselves to the continually distributed mechanisms of media; a cultural memory of poetry stored, not outside our immediate experience, but outside our brains. At the other end is the somewhat volatile practice of committing a poem to memory, and what this means in terms of a text’s live performance or recitation. The mediating form tying this nexus together is arguably the human body, or at least the corporeal object. The Kittlerian approach to this field of questions would be to stress the removal of the human act of remembering, bringing forth poetry from ourselves, and the substitutive act of accessing art/poetry/song/data from storage media: ‘Once art has dissolved into media technologies, a certain kind of poetry nevertheless returns. It comes and stays not with reading or mnemotechniques, but simply through radio and audio equipment’.7 Here the release from the information retention of poetry represents a kind of poetic process in itself; the ‘returning’ of the text via electric media combines the experience of poetry with bodily recall as meaning, without the burden of word- by-word mnemonic meaning. In other words the modern relationship between the poet and their poem is necessarily always conducted through the presence of media technologies (communication or storage based), which insists on a kind of recall at once discursive (relating to a heterotopic set of language acts and cultural gestures) and bodily. That there is no longer any cultural function of the poem to retain semantic meaning, and therefore information via verse conventions – or mnemotechniques – is hardly contentious. But what rarely gets mentioned is that the life of a poem begins and ends in hardware. To compose a poem is to recall speech as an already technologised sound, and also to fantasise about the future recall of hearing that poem as a reply to that sound. How is the poet’s body activated in the composing, performing and even memorising of a poem? The understood relationship between body and memory has often been routed through the text of a poem. Learning a poem by rote is now more closely associated with grammar school pedagogy, where the ability to automatically regurgitate lines of literary discourse were attributed to ‘improvement of physical health, posture and accent’, than with the displaced act of a writing practice. Yet, I want to recover this sense of experiencing a poem’s mark on your memory that is also a conditioning of one’s body.8 Any suggestion to bodily manifestations of poetic scripts alludes to Henri Bergson’s notion of habitual memory. In his distinguishing of a particular form of memory that demands the physical reprocessing of performed acts – as distinct from the form that sees independent, intellectual recollections of the past – habitual memory requires our physical, motor apparatus to ‘store up the actions of the past’. What seems pertinent to me in relation to the act of re-/performing 274 Holly Pester a poem, activating a physical memory of the audio experience of its composition, is a combinatory gesture of memory and doing. In other words, the memory of the action ‘lies in the action itself’. The doing compels the ‘automatic setting into motion mechanisms adapted to the circumstances’.9 Taking the example of memorising verse, Bergson states that to ‘learn by heart is to create a cerebral mechanism, a habit of the body’. Learning a ‘lesson’ by heart requires a process of effort and repetition which, ‘like every habitual bodily exercise, is stored up in a mechanism which is set in motion as a whole by an initial impulse, in a closed system of automatic movements which succeed each other in the same order and, together, take the same length of time’.10 What better way to describe live delivery of a poem than as a ‘habit of the body’, an action that yields the dual process of remembering and doing? Even when the text has not been learned for recital, and instead the printed page acts as a reminder of not just the text but of the archival dimensions to which it is directed, and from which it was sourced, even then the body is called into the combinatory act of remembering gestures of speech, postures of writing, researching and commutating. A truly contemporary poetics takes this middling act of archival memory, transmission and information retrieval as its primary mode and routes itself into the system. This poetics doesn’t try to circumvent the reflexive mode of composition and performance. The result of which is a poem where form and content are wedded to the habits of media engagement, both physical and cognitive. Imagine a poet’s laptop screen that displays an internet browser; open is a poetry database; William Blake’s Memory, Hither Come is up on the screen.11 The other open tabs variously link to: an audio file of a recently deceased theorist’s voice; a video of the poet themself reading in an art centre five years ago; a social media site poised for message. Also open is a blank Word document. Each tool on the one screen extends and defers memory apparatuses. What kind of poetry comes out of that moment and that intricacy of contemporary literature’s auxiliaries? Archive and distribution, research and composition, are circulated via that one hunch-backed engagement, the same back that will lean into the page and mechanically reproduce that moment as performance.

Notes

1. Jennifer Chang, ‘Conversation with Slugs and Sarah by Jennifer Chang: Poetry Magazine’ (Accessed 10 March 2014), http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/ poem/240940. 2. Robert Browning Recites His Poem (1889 Edison Cylinder), (Accessed 11 February 2014), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYot5-WuAjE&feature=youtube_gdata_player. 3. I SPRANG to the stirrup, and Joris, and he; I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three; ‘Good speed!’ cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew; ‘Speed!’ echoed the wall to us galloping through; Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest, And into the midnight we galloped abreast. Poetry Readings and Remembrance 275

4. John M. Picker, ‘Aural Anxieties and the Advent of Modernity’, in The Victorian World, ed. Martin Hewitt (Oxford: Routledge, 2012), 613. 5. I’m not here discussing Browning’s poem in the specifics of its era or genre, but broadly noting that its verse form shares the characteristics of folk poetry, ballads and oral tradition that serve to commit the form and the information contained within, to memory. See, David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 1997). 6. Peter Quartermain, ‘Sound Reading’, in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (Oxford University Press, 1998), 219. 7. Friedrich Kittler, ‘Benn’s Poetry: “A Hit in the Charts”: Song Under Conditions of Media Technologies’, SubStance 19(1) (1990), 5. 8. Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton University Press, 2012), 7. 9. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2004), 87. 10. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 90. 11. William Blake, ‘Song: Memory, hither come, by William Blake: Poetry Magazine’ (Accessed 10 March 2014), http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172941 32 Our Plastic Brain: Remembering and Forgetting Art Heather H. Yeung

In What Should We Do With Our Brain? Catherine Malabou exposes a necessary dialectic at the foundation of neuroplasticity, where ‘the foundation of each identity is a kind of resilience [. . .] a kind of contradictory construction, a synthesis of memory and forgetting, of the constitution and effacement of forms.’1 We meet again the inextricable figures of Memory, Mnemosyne, and Forgetting, Lesmosyne, and an acknowledgement of the importance to human identity formation of both memory and forgetting. It is my intention in this piece to investigate the importance of memory and of forgetting to the manner in which artistic forms have developed, particularly in relation to poetry and music and to what Malabou calls the ‘constitution and effacement of forms’. Our relation to artistic forms, we will discover, often runs in parallel to our memory-biases; many classical art forms foster memorialisation, and are prized, whereas innovative forms (or anti-forms), which encourage or investigate forgetting are more contentiously received, and often meet with critical resistance. Just as conventional art forms lead to easy remembrance, forgetting is put to productive use in many contemporary art forms. And, through their evasion of the conventional formal principles which lead the work of traditional or formal artists to be committed with ease to memory, they open up an aesthetic field for the experience of the artwork as anti-memorial. This sort of innovative forgetting- through-art is not only an important reaction to the last 500 years of formal obsession in Western artistic practice, but through looking at form’s relationship with memory and forgetting, we discover a simple rationale for a lot of the negative critical reactions and popular aversions to some of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ most interesting works of art. Countless mythologies link memory to the arts, and perhaps most of all to the poetic and musical arts: the original three Boeotian muses were Melete (thought), Mneme (memory) and Aoide (song); all but two of Mnemosyne’s nine daughters are associated with poetry and music; the apostrophic invocation of many Western poets and song-writers is addressed to the muses, daughters of memory. Already, if only through the lens of myth, we can link the formal operations of memory with those of poetry and music. The relationship of form to forgetting is the shadowy dialectic to this, and may be approached covertly, through an

276 Our Plastic Brain 277 appreciation of the converse to the ways in which the basic formal elements of poetry and music relate to the operations of memory. Although he perhaps takes too disaffected or technical a view of poetic power, Robert Pinsky writes ‘poetry is, among other things, a technology for remembering. Like the written alphabet and the printing press and the digital computer, it is an invention to help and extend memory.’2 It is indeed true that many of the formal aspects of poetry – rhythm, rhyme, repetition, appropriate metaphor, direction of address – also act as constructions which aid remembrance. And, since memory ‘relies on the “placing” or contextualization of language’, these formal aspects, sometimes alongside a narrative sequence, are keys to easy memorization. A direct link between poetic and musical forms and neural plasticity and memory comes in the way these formal aspects operate, as the sets of words or notes from which they are composed very rarely stray from sequences of two – eight, mimicking the average brain’s working memory capacity which has not really altered in theory since George A. Miller’s research in the 1950s, which set this capacity at n = 7 ± 2. Form is there to help us to not forget. Let us consider first two of the most predominant English accentual-syllabic forms: the ballad and the sonnet. As a traditionally narrative poem, the ballad has a story which must be committed to memory and then performed poetically. The formal structure into which this story is fitted is quite an astringent one: verses of four lines, made up of stressed lines of, alternately, four and three feet, and an abcb or abab rhyme-scheme. We can see this form at work in the oft-anthologised ballad of Sir Patrik Spens:

The king sits in Dunfermlin town, Drinking the bluid-red wine: ‘O whar will I get guid sailor, To sail this ship of mine?’ Up and spak an eldern knicht, Sat at the king’s richt knee: ‘Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor That sails upon the sea’.3

This all fits in very neatly with Miller’s law. So, too, does the sonnet form, where the standard total of 14 lines is split into sections of either eight-six, four-four-four-two, or eight-four-two. The rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean (or ‘English’) sonnet follows this numerical patterning, as sections are rhymed abab cdcd efef gg. These lines are comprised of five iambic feet apiece. We can see this form at work in Michael Drayton’s sonnet ‘Farewell to Love’:

Since there’s no help, come, let us kiss and part; Nay, I have done, you get no more of me, And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart That thus so cleanly I myself can free. 278 Heather H. Yeung

Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows, And when we meet at any time again, Be it not seen in either of our brows That we one jot of former love retain. Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath, When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies, When faith is kneeling by his bed of death, And innocence is closing up his eyes; Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over, From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.4

Further afield, the traditional poetic line of the ancient Greeks, the dactylic hexameter (six stressed feet with possible internal variations of stress and caesura placement), also fits into Miller’s law. As do the most common French poetic lines (feet are counted not by stress but syllable): the octosyllable (eight), decasyllable (ten), and alexandrine (12). The decasyllable is often broken down by a caesura into groups of five-five, four-six, or six-four, and the alexandrine, more famously, into hemstitches (groups of six syllables apiece). In the various forms of Western Classical and Folk music, too, the most common time-signatures range from alla breve (2/2, or two minim beats to a bar) and common time (4/4, or four crotchet beats to a bar), to duple time (6/8, or six qua- ver beats to a bar). It is very rare in conventional forms that the number of beats per bar go above twelve, particularly if there is no split in the stress (for instance, a bar marked 12/8 will often be divided into subsections of three quavers apiece, so each bar is effectively divided into four sub-bars of 3/8). As the piece of music grows out form these basic structures, like the poem, the larger form also takes on logical numerical divisions. Each bar of music will be built to comprise a musical phrase, which we often see to be made up of four or eight bars. The phrasal divisions of any folk tune illustrate these divisions well, or the theme of W. A. Mozart’s ‘Ah je vous dirais Maman’, more commonly known in Anglophone countries as the nursery rhyme ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’. The Classical ‘sonata’ or ‘first movement’ form takes on a tripartite structure of ‘expo- sition’ (the melodic themes, usually two, are established), ‘development’ (the melodies are elaborated and contrasted) and ‘recapitulation’ (the melodic themes are resolved, and played again). On top of this, symphonic forms rarely have more than four movements. Famously, J. S. Bach’s Art of Fugue is no more than a series of developments of a slow four-bar phrase, or ‘subject’, in common time. Similar to this, the ancient Celtic piobaireachd form develops a short, slow, theme (the ‘ground’ or ‘ular’) by adding and subdividing note and harmony elements to create a series of variations. The ground itself will often have either a primary (two two-bar phrases), secondary (two one-bar phrases combined with two two-bar phrases) or tertiary (three two-bar phrases), form. All of this formal construction and play aids memory through familiarity and repetition as well as through numerical breakdown. Form, indeed, breeds a sense Our Plastic Brain 279 of easy familiarity – who can really say, having read Shakespeare’s sonnets, or played Haydn’s piano sonatas, that they can only enjoy and remember fully one of the many works? For many, familiarity with a given structure, coupled with the ease of remembering its main parts (lines, or phrases), leads to a sense of comfort in form and a dislike from any divergence from this sense of familiarity in the artistic form at hand. In this frame of mind, form opposes a negative sense of randomness and disorder and a reluctance to engage with a work which rejects the expectation of and comfort in established formal structures. The frisson of unknowability’s foundations in forgetting (or fear of forgetting) which can be seen in the avant-garde art work, leads to the foregrounding of forgetting rather than remembering, and taps directly into the formal techniques of erasure, dispersal, and effacement of what we have come to recognize as the ‘conventional’ space of the poem on the page. Could it be that it is through their un-rememberability that contemporary avant-garde and digital works in music, poetry and the plastic arts, have sparked so strong and ongoing a critical debate and divide? How do we engage effectively and affectively with avant-garde, conceptual or digital poetic works which use techniques such as erasure, distortion, excessive repetition and blank space in order to work against memory? Could it be that the critical resistance to many avant-garde poetics lies in the fact that they work against memory at a formal and textual level and is it thus that forgetting forms the basis for the ascription of the label ‘difficult’ to more conventional poetic works that also work towards forgetting? In a world where so much value is placed on memory and identity-formation through remembrance, the work of art which actively turns away from being remembered, whose poetic force rises from its embrace of its very forgettability, will necessarily often be rejected out of hand as lacking in value, consigned to dry academic analyses which pride themselves on countering the difficulty of the work with a theoretical prose just as impenetrable, or to coterie circles of practi- tioners who are open to these changing forms and media. There is an unfounded fear that, in forgetting, a lack of ‘self’ occurs. Thence the aversions to and ridicules of a-formal or avant-garde works of art, that are still promoted in many circles. . . But our brain operates both to constitute and also to efface forms. This oscillation is an important element of neuroplasticity. It follows that we should seek also to engage with artistic works which, although they may be less ‘comfortable’, or less ‘rememberable’, try to efface rather than to constitute forms, cultivating our own ars oblivionalis alongside the ars memoriae.

Notes

1. Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain?, 77, trans. Sebastian Rand (Fordham University Press, 2008). 2. Robert Pinsky, ‘Poetry and American Memory’, Atlantic Monthly 284(4) (1999), 60. 3. Anon, from ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, in A Book of Narrative Verse, ed. V. H. Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931), 39. 4. Michael Drayton, Sonnet 61, in The Norton Anthology of Literature vol. 1 8th ed. (New York, W. W. Norton and Co., 2006), 1000. 33 Amnesia and Identity in Contemporary Literature Jason Tougaw

How to narrate the life story of an amnesiac? What aspects of identity remain when memory fails? A cluster of contemporary narratives, fiction and nonfiction, address these questions, offering new hypotheses about the relationship between memory and identity. Alix Kates Shulman’s memoir To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed (2009) tells the story of life with her husband Scott after a brain injury destroys his capacity to form new memories. Suzanne Corkin’s biography Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesiac Patient, H. M. (2013) documents the life of the much-studied neurology patient in its title. Maud Casey’s The Man Who Walked Away (2013) fictionalizes an obscure case history about Frenchman Albert Dadas, whose fugue states propelled extraordinary walks across great swaths of Europe. Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel, The Buried Giant (2015) imagines an Anglo-Saxon world in which collective amnesia produces political peace but leaves its protagonists searching for personal histories. All four works aim to instigate new questions about the relationship between memory and identity – To Love What Is and Permanent Present Tense through careful biographical accounts their subjects’ living and suffering, The Man Who Walked Away and The Buried Giant through experiments with literary form that represent the subjective experience of amnesiacs. These devastating stories are predated by two case histories about amnesiacs published by Oliver Sacks, ‘The Lost Mariner’ (1984) and ‘The Abyss’ (2007),1 both of which seek to describe what’s lost and what remains of identity when severe memory loss transforms the lives of their subjects. If Sacks has a thesis, it’s that the devastation of amnesia makes it difficult to recognize remnants of identity, and that these remnants are keys to mitigating the suffering – or enhancing the lives – of amnesiacs. In ‘The Lost Mariner’, Sacks establishes a narrative pattern that reflects cultural assumptions about the equation of identity and memory. Jimmy, his subject, suffers from retrograde amnesia, a result of Korsakov’s Syndrome. Sacks opens his essay with an epigraph from My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel (1983):

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all.

280 Amnesia and Identity in Contemporary Literature 281

[. . .] Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.2

The epigraph is a narrative foil. The fragility of memory is terrifying to Buñuel. Nonetheless, in his memoir the surrealist is careful to acknowledge that memory blends with imagination – and that identity is a composition of ‘my errors and doubts as well as my certainties’.3 When he adds imagination to the equation, Buñuel hints at the idea that memory is not singular, either phenomenologically or physiologically. The entanglement of memory with a variety of cognitive, somatic and social phenomena is key to the narrative arc of Sacks’s case. Towards the end, Sacks observes Jimmy in chapel:

I saw here an intensity and steadiness of attention and concentration that I had never seen before in him or conceived him capable of. [. . .] He was wholly held, absorbed, by a feeling. There was no forgetting, no Korsakov’s then.4

Sacks undoes Buñuel’s equation between memory and identity. Instead, he suggests that memory and identity are entangled – with each other, with aesthetics, spiritual experience, attention, sociality and other forms of mental experience. Sacks reproduces this narrative arc in ‘The Abyss’, about musician Clive Wearing, whose amnesia results from a brain infection. Wearing’s ability to express himself through music – listening, playing and discussing it – prompts Sacks to differentiate his ‘episodic memory’ from his ‘semantic memory’. The result is that Wearing’s suffering can be mitigated through musical experience, where he can express the semantic identity that outlives his autobiography. In both cases, Sacks undoes the memory-identity equation in order to explore memory and identity as distributed and entangled phenomena – an approach that allows for social interventions that may alleviate the suffering of their subjects. Written nearly three decades after ‘The Lost Mariner’, Corkin’s Permanent Present Tense and Shulman’s To Love What Is begin where Sacks leaves off – with an awareness that an ethical commitment to improving the lives of amnesiacs requires careful differentiation between memory and identity. Corkin writes as a memory researcher with a humane interest in her subject, and Shulman writes as a spouse with an urgent need to understand memory research. Their perspectives are complementary, and their insights about memory are remarkably similar. Both narratives are non-linear quests for discovery that entangle the past with the present in deliberate ways. Corkin tells the life story of Henry Molaison – known in the neurology literature as H. M. – with whom she worked for more than four decades, interrupting that narrative with accounts of milestones in the history of memory research. Shulman tells the story of her husband’s adaptation to his amnesia and her own research about memory, interrupting that narrative with stories about the early days of their relationship. While these are very different books, the intimacy of the writers with their subjects leads to a keen understanding of the ways amnesiac identity may be expressed. Corkin’s goals are personal, ethical, and theoretical. As she writes, ‘it became my mission to make sure that [Molaison] is not remembered just by brief, anonymous 282 Jason Tougaw descriptions in textbooks’.5 Shulman’s perspective is even more personal, of course, because she’s looking for a way to help her husband Scott live a meaningful life after his accident: ‘In our marriage, if we should go our separate ways, his way would be directly to a nursing home. This man [. . .] is too dear to me to be able to contemplate that now’.6 Not surprisingly, the voices of these two writers follow from their relationships with their subjects. Corkin’s is humanely clinical, and Shulman’s is urgently compassionate. Despite the differences, Corkin and Shulman’s insights about memory and identity are often quite similar. They focus on personality traits, affective experiences and intact memories that shape the identities of their amnesiac subjects. Corkin observes that Molaison played a key role in the history of memory research after a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy intended to alleviate symptoms of severe epilepsy: ‘We have learned – initially from Henry – that memory does not reside in one spot in the brain. Instead, memory engages many parts of the brain in parallel’.7 This history of research is where Shulman turns as she struggles to adapt to Scott’s amnesia. In Shulman’s words, again,

since memories of different kinds of things (colors, numbers, music, places, names, among many others) are ‘stored’ in different specific areas of the brain and can be altered over time the generalized concepts of long-term and short- term memory are no more than theoretical constructs [. . .] Cognitive scientists [. . .] divide memory into ever finer categories – including sensory memory, semantic memory, episodic memory and associative memory.8

Both writers emphasize a doctrine of contemporary memory research: the fact that memory is not a single phenomenon; its physiology is distributed and its phenomenology variable. Of course, the same is true of selfhood. If neither memory nor identity is singular, it makes little sense to equate them. Ultimately, the intimacy of these writers with their subjects enables them to identify the expression of personal qualities that don’t require conventional autobiographical memory. While Henry may have ‘lived in a permanent present tense’, ‘despite his amnesia, Henry had a sense of self’.9 Corkin describes this sense of self as ‘skewed, weighted heavily toward his general knowledge of the world, his family, and himself before 1953’.10 Corkin acknowledges that ‘memory is an essential component of everything we do’ and that ‘we need memory to survive’.11 The distinction is subtle, but crucial. Memory is central, but it’s not all there is to identity. The startling personality changes Shulman observes in her husband lead her to a similar conclusion:

The dignified, courtly man I love has emerged from his enforced silence a loquacious stranger – sometimes a clown, full of wild flights of wordplay that keep Heather and Norm and me howling with laughter, sometimes a garrulous, nonsensical, even dirty old man hitting on the nurses.12

Living with Scott prompts Shulman to ask, ‘Can his injury have transformed his very self, stricken deep into his identity? Or revealed a buried self I never knew?’13 Eventually, Shulman answers her own question: ‘But to those of us who Amnesia and Identity in Contemporary Literature 283 know him well, it’s clear that underneath it’s still Scott, shaky but intact, the tall, sweet, blue-eyed guy who loves – has always loved – traveling’.14 In both cases, the devastation of amnesia is characterized by a loss of autonomy and a fleeting awareness of that loss that comes with the cognitive dissonance of living with memories of a distant past while trying to navigate the present. Within the dissonance, Corkin and Shulman recognize enduring aspects of identity – Molaison’s generosity, Scott’s courtliness. That recognition is instructive: an amnesiac’s intimates have the capacity to mitigate the isolation and suffering that come with severe memory loss, shaping social relationships that offer continuous opportunities for social interactions that validate the aspects of identity that endure for the particular amnesiac in question. Casey’s and Ishiguro’s novels are experimental historical fictions with more idio syncratic approaches to undoing the memory-identity equation. While they play with the idea that amnesia may be preferable to remembering, they also acknowledge the suffering that comes with amnesia. Their distinctive and highly original forms of narration follow directly from their ambivalence about retrieving lost memory. Casey’s novel is a fictionalization of a nineteenth-century case history about fugueur Albert Dadas, who trekked vast swathes of Europe in fugue states, finding himself in farflung towns with little or no memory of how he’d got- ten there. Ishiguro’s novel dramatizes the quest of an Anglo-Saxon couple whose village is one of many whose inhabitants’ memories are obscured by a mist that turns out to be the breath of an enchanted dragon. Both novels tell stories about ambivalent quests to restore memory. In Casey’s novel, Dadas’ amnesia is por- trayed as intrinsic to his identity. Who would he be if his memory were restored? In Ishiguro’s, collective memory loss frees citizens from histories of personal trauma and ensures peace by erasing everybody’s recollection of longstanding tribal feuds. They are both third person narratives that mingle omniscience with a free indirect speech, offering sentence level mimesis designed to represent the subjectivity of amnesiac experience. They are bewilderingly beautiful novels that challenge readers to consider novel hypotheses. Casey’s Albert finds himself in an asylum, under the care of The Doctor, whose ‘moral medicine’ involves a holistic approach to healing. In sessions with The Doctor, Albert experiences flashes of memory: ‘“In Saint-Étienne, I remember lying in a hospital with a cold compress on my head, given quinine sulfate to cure a toothache”, Albert offered yesterday as it rose up into the light of his memory – the cold compress, the quinine, the toothache, and Saint-Étienne disappeared’.15 These memories are largely sensory, and they to return him to moments when the urge to roam overcomes him, as when he walks ‘through a town whose name he never learned, filled with the delicate fragrance of the rosewater manufactured there, walking until the earth’s tremor rumbled through his feet and up his shins, until his bones expanded, until his blood circulated astonishment, until, finally, there it was, the urge to walk, and he was lifted into oblivion’.16 The Doctor comes to recognize the value Albert finds in the astonishment and oblivion that characterize his fugue states. They become his identity. Describing their sessions, the narrator observes, ‘Albert is a house, and each day the Doctor discovers another door, but sometimes when the Doctor turns the 284 Jason Tougaw knob, gives it a gentle push, there is a room so full of shame that Albert cannot bear to go inside’.17 Through their sessions, they find Albert’s ‘ragged memory’. He fell out of a tree when he was a child and injured his skull. A more conventional doctor – say Charcot or Freud – might tag this memory as a primal scene and identify it as the cause of Albert’s fugue states. But Casey refuses to endorse straightforward cause-effect relations between Albert’s past and his symptoms. Her narrator maintains a stance that emanates from the subjective experience of the patient, for whom the symptoms – the amnesia, the walking, the atunement to a radical present – are a way of life. Albert finds glimpses of ‘his lost life not lost at all, though there are parts of it he wishes would stay lost’.18 The novel begins and ends in ambivalence. Albert’s fugue states make for a tenuous life, but he values them nonetheless. He will continue to walk, whatever the consequences. Ishiguro’s protagonists, Axl and Beatrice, are a long-married Briton couple who go walking in search of their adult son. Throughout, they are ambivalent about regaining memories of their relationship, their region’s history, and their son’s whereabouts. In one typical passage, Axl ruminates on this ambivalence:

Should Querig really die and the mist begins to clear. Should memories return, and among them of times I disappointed you. Or yet of dark deeds I may once have done to make you look at me and see no longer the man you do now. Promise me this at least. Promise, princess, you’ll not forget what you feel in your heart for me at this moment. For what good’s a memory’s returning from the mist if it’s only to push away another?19

Along the way, Axl and Beatrice acquire traveling companions – Wystan and Edwin (warriors named for Wystan Auden and Edwin Robinson, modernist poets known for their interest in medieval culture) and Sir Gawain (a character well known as a Knight in Arthur’s court and as the protagonist of the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). They join the warriors in a quest to slay the dragon, Querig, whose breath creates the amnesiac mist. They begin to understand the origins of their collective amnesia – and debate its pros and cons. With their memories regained, Axl and Beatrice might find their son and recover their shared history, but they might also learn something they don’t want to know. In fact, their son is dead, and their marriage was not always peaceful. The risks are not limited to the personal. With memory comes history, and with history comes the potential for war. Gawain reveals himself the protector of the dragon – and therefore the keeper of amnesia: ‘Without this she-dragon’s breath, would peace ever have come? Look how we live now, sir! Old foes as cousins, village by village. [. . .] Think, sir, once that breath should cease, what might be awoken across this land even after these years!’20 The novel ends with the dragon slain, but the mist not yet evaporated fully. Axl and Beatrice begin to realize their son is dead, that their quest has been for their own deaths. The implication is that Gawain’s desire to maintain collective amnesia is a fantasy. We must live with memory, but we must also recognize that memory brings personal pain Amnesia and Identity in Contemporary Literature 285 and political strife. Ishiguro writes to engage readers in some reflection about memory’s dark side. Of course, none of these writers are suggesting that amnesia is preferable to a normally functioning memory. Instead, they respond to advances in memory research and experiment with narrative approaches that revise Buñuel’s memory- identity equation: ‘Life without memory is no life at all. [. . .] Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing’. Revising Buñuel’s equation, they ask readers to consider a question that follows from the research: If identity is comprised of overdetermined relations between physiology, culture and history, if life without memory doesn’t make a person ‘nothing’, what does it do? How might we learn more about such questions from examining the subjective experience of amnesiacs through narrative? In their nonfiction, Sacks, Corkin and Shulman emphasize the stakes of such questions for people living with various forms of amnesia. In their fiction, Casey and Ishiguro challenge readers to consider the idea that there may be solace in amnesia and menace in memory. If these texts share a thesis, it’s that contemporary memory research compels investigation about the entanglement of memory and identity – and the countless ways this entanglement shapes individual experience and social structures.

Notes

1. Oliver Sacks. ‘A Neurologist’s Notebook: The Abyss (Music and Amnesia).’ The New Yorker, September 24, 2007: 100–112. 2. Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel (New York: Vintage, 1983), 4. 3. Buñuel, My Last Sigh, 6. 4. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 37. 5. Suzanne Corkin, Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesiac Patient, H.M. (New York: Basic Books, 1913), xv. 6. Alix Kates Shulman, To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007), 103. 7. Corkin, Permanent Present Tense, xvii. 8. Shulman, To Love What Is, 140. 9. Corkin, Permanent Present Tense, xii. 10. Corkin, Permanent Present Tense, xvii. 11. Corkin, Permanent Present Tense, xvii. 12. Shulman, To Love What Is, 33. 13. Shulman, To Love What Is, 33. 14. Shulman, To Love What Is, 137–138. 15. Maud Casey, The Man Who Walked Away (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 135. 16. Casey, The Man Who Walked Away, 135. 17. Casey, The Man Who Walked Away, 204. 18. Casey, The Man Who Walked Away, 208. 19. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (New York: Random House, 2015), 251–252. 20. Ishiguro, The Buried Giant, 278. 34 Amnesia in Young Adult Fiction Alison Waller

Adolescence is supposed to be a time to remember. Guidance given in a nineteenth-century moral manual, Advice to Teens, was to live life to the full for ‘the loss of time is irretrievable’,1 and throughout the twentieth century diaries were popular as aides-mémoires for this crucial period of development.2 Add current youth practices of ‘capturing the moment’ for posterity on Facebook or Instagram and it is easy to conclude that the teenage years really are the ‘best years of one’s life’ and not to be forgotten. Psychologists researching autobiographical memory across the life span offer support for the importance of creating memories in youth, identifying a ‘reminiscence bump’ indicating that a high proportion of memories recollected in older age are of events that happen between the ages of 15 and 25 (Rubin et al. 1986). Similarly, studying published autobiographies has demonstrated that the epiphanies or autobiographical ‘turns’ so fundamental to the structure of modern memoirs tend to be formed around events established in the memory in mid to late teenagehood (Sturrock 1993). Fictional narratives presented to young people often help to cement the notion that what they do in this crucial period, as well as how they remember their experiences, will shape their futures and their future selves. Teenage and young adult novels in the Western tradition have commonly followed a bildungsroman pattern in which an event or series of events leads a single protagonist to fuller understanding of their own nature and their transition into adulthood. A violent conflict (S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967)), a significant relationship (Judy Blume’s Forever (1975)), or a life-changing decision (Melvin Burgess’s Junk 1996)), can all act as autobiographical turns for the teenage characters, and reminders for the reader that teenagehood matters. Most importantly, according to several critics of young adult literature, some form of secure identity is seemingly forged through these memorable experiences.3 Philosophers from John Locke to Paul Ricœur have argued that to exist in a meaningful manner is to have continuity over time. Ricœur puts it thus: ‘[i]n many narratives the self seeks its identity on the scale of an entire life’.4 This ontological principle relies on both a stable sense of future development and healthy memories of a past self. In other words, young adult novels work within a model of selfhood in time and portray the unforgettable events that shape their teenage protagonists’ subjectivity. Although vigorous

286 Amnesia in Young Adult Fiction 287 memory is key to commonsense and scientific understandings of adolescence, as well as being implied in many fictional representations of young people, some writers of young adult (YA) fiction towards the end of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century have found that teenage characters who lose memory and forget can also act as potent figures in exploring ideas of identity across time. Recent adult literature and film has made good use of forgetting for dramatic effect: in Jonathan Nolan’s short story ‘Memento Mori’ (2001), which formed the basis for the cinematic exploration of memory loss Memento (Christopher Nolan 2000), Michael Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder (2005) a central theme is how trauma and forgetting can transform the lives of young or middle-aged adults. In the YA novels discussed here, forgetting is especially perilous, since the teenage protagonists are in the process of laying down those memories that will supposedly define them into adulthood and old age. In one of the most important early treatments of these themes, Memory (1987), New Zealand YA author Margaret Mahy explores the precarious relationship between memory and identity for the youthful and for the elderly. In the course of the narrative, her 19-year-old hero Jonny befriends an old woman with dementia called Sophie, and each character faces pleasures and dangers through different types of amnesia. The portrayal of loss of memory in an elderly figure is relatively unexceptional in many respects. As Carol Seefeldt (1977) and Pat Pinsent (2001) have demonstrated, representations of older people were relatively limited in children’s and young adult literature in the later part of the twentieth century, and where they did appear they were often bound to common stereotypes expressed by young people about the elderly: Pinsent identifies the wise old person, the hyperactive old person, the victim, and the evil older person. At first glance, a character like Sophie who has a ‘broken memory’5 fits the category of victim. This cultural stereotype is found in discourses beyond children’s literature, of course. The final age of man is characterised by Shakespeare as ‘mere oblivion’,6 and popular references by younger and older people to ‘senior moments’ build upon anxieties about cognitive decay amongst the ‘greying population’, including fears of a dementia that are partly founded on stereotype threat.7 Sophie’s ‘memory vacuum’8 causes many difficulties for her and for Jonny, who meets her wandering the streets after he has run away from a row with his parents and ends up living with her rather than going home. The depiction of everyday problems created through memory loss (confusion through loss of words, the challenge of remembering where the front door key is, or the hazardous abandonment of a frying pan) offers a young reader a disturbing vision of one aspect of older life, although Sophie’s spellbinding personality does not suggest ‘mere oblivion’ and Mahy’s characterisation is sensitive and funny enough to invite understanding rather than derision. Sophie’s chronic amnesia also has some surprisingly affirming effects. Forgetting how she has aged and how time has passed, Sophie regularly forgets that her husband and other lovers are dead, and mistakes Jonny for her cousin Alva, with whom she may have had a romantic relationship. By flirting with Jonny/Alva she is able to relive past passions with pleasure. 288 Alison Waller

Jonny muses on what it would be like if he could fit Sophie with a new memory from a computer supplier, a literal interpretation of the technological metaphor for data storage that implies that an individual can be ‘fixed’ and their identity across time artificially restored. He concludes that ‘[s]he would have to be personally fitted’, but of course the prosthetic memory would not contain images of her husband or lover: ‘Though memories were often regarded as careful files in a catalogue, Jonny now believed they could just as easily be wild stories, always in the process of being revised, updated, or having different endings written on to them’.9 This image offers a perspective on dementia that dwells less on forgotten content and focuses instead on the liberatory possibilities of re-shuffling memories towards the end of life in order to construct a new narrative of self. Jonny reflects that ‘he might as well put his own name down on the new- memory list himself’.10 The narrative encourages readers to contrast Sophie’s dementia with Jonny’s own forms of teenage amnesia. Jonny’s confusion and trauma over the death of his sister some five years earlier have caused him to create two parallel memories: one in which he is responsible for her fate and one in which it is an accidental death. It is only at the end of the novel that he is able to dismiss the ‘false memory’ and come to terms with his loss. Trauma-induced amnesia is widely used in YA fiction, as the following discussion of two other novels demonstrates, but here it is intertwined with another form of forgetting that is more intrinsically linked to youthful experience and most playfully indicates the potential risks of memory loss for adolescent identity. One important aspect of the classic coming-of-age ritual in adolescence involves reaching a state of oblivion of self through drink, drugs or ecstatic experience, marking entry into a new world of adult pleasures (and dangers). Memory opens with Jonny drunkenly gate-crashing a party, causing a scene, and being driven away by a responsible adult. In the car, he feels his head spin faster and faster ‘like a wild centrifuge’ which ‘flung shred after shred of disintegrating memory into darkness’.11 The next chapter begins:

Jonny woke in the night with no idea of place or time, though it was not so much a matter of waking up, as of rising out of an echoless pit. He knew it was night, but thought at first, as he vaguely located hands, head and feet, that he had been sleeping under the influence of moonlight. He found he was lying flat, spread out like the spokes of a wheel, crucified face downwards. ‘Jonny Dart’, his lips murmured to the earth, against which he was pressed, as he remembered his name. ‘Where am I?’12

This passage marks the start of Jonny’s adventures, and it represents an adolescent drinking spree and its aftermath as both magical (the ‘influence of moonlight’) and sordid (waking from ‘an echoless pit’), but also as essentially frightening. Not only is Jonny ‘crucified’ by the effects of his drinking, but his inability to recall recent events (his anterograde amnesia) means he is momentarily uncertain of his identity and location in time and space. The morning hangover and its disorient- ing quality, along with drunken erasure of remembered facts about time, place, context and identity is in a way metonymic of the longer-term memory loss Amnesia in Young Adult Fiction 289 of dementia. In offering a form of amnesia recognisable to many young people, Mahy provides her protagonist and her readers with a glimpse into serious conditions of memory loss that may await them decades later. More importantly, she explores a more immediate dilemma for teenagers in their quest to understand themselves: how can Jonny assess his past and future selves when his memory ‘like that of an erratic computer, had swallowed whole great pieces of itself’?13 The ontological problems of forgetting thus provide intriguing opportunities for writers of young adult fiction like Mahy: more recent novelists from America have played with the anxieties that surround the unnatural concept of a forgetting teenager in more fantastical ways. Mary E. Pearson’s futuristic The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008) begins with severe physical trauma rather than a hangover. After a terrible accident, Jenna wakes into a state of chronic amnesia with most of her autobiographical memory erased. She also suffers from failures of semantic and procedural memory, having forgotten simple words like ‘Jump. Hot. Apple’14 as well as basic actions like walking, although strangely she does have full memories about facts like the history of the French Revolution. On one level, Jenna’s early existential questioning is similar to Jonny’s when he wakes from his drunken stupor, as she ponders the facts she is given about her previous identity: ‘I don’t remember my mother, my father, or Lily. I don’t remember that I once lived in Boston. I don’t remember the accident. I don’t remember Jenna Fox’.15 Her problems run deeper than Jonny’s, however. The reader learns that Jenna’s physical body has been destroyed in the accident and her consciousness has been ‘downloaded’ into a new biotechnological human shell, a process that recalls Mahy’s use of computer imagery some 20 years earlier. The acute forgetting Jenna suffers is therefore the result of a complete disconnection between body and mind and not just a temporary trauma-induced amnesia. Forgetting for the teenager in this text offers a nightmare vision of loss of self. Without autobiographical memory, Jenna is compelled to construct a sense of identity through various artificial means, none of which are fully satisfactory. She searches for evidence of herself on ‘the Net’ but is ‘overwhelmed by the hits’.16 The best resource for restoring her memories is a series of recorded discs of younger versions of Jenna that her mother asks her to watch, an interesting example of digitising the self that will be recognisable to most young readers. In describing Jenna’s responses to these discs, Pearce conveys the complex negotiations any individual has to make in connecting images of a past self with a sense of their current consciousness, particularly where those images represent forgotten moments in time. Jenna has no actual material correlation with the younger girl, since most of her current form is made of ‘Bio Gel’, and so her disconnection with the lost autobiographical memories is horrifically heightened; she cannot remember being ‘the nimble Jenna Fox on the disc’17 and so cannot know who she is in the present. Even when memories do begin to return, as her synthetic body is updated with data, there is a terrifying disjunction between natural adolescent experience and the aberrant version of remembering it that Jenna has. One of most significant pieces of data returned to her is the memory of the taste of hot chocolate, along with the kind of feel-good recollection of teenage experience that might feed 290 Alison Waller into a ‘reminiscence bump’ in nostalgic older age: ‘I picture a scene, fully formed. Jenna, cross-legged on a blue plaid blanket on the sand. A mug of steaming hot chocolate in my hands. Hot chocolate with three fat marshmallows. I loved hot chocolate. Taste! I am shocked at my first memory of taste’.18 When she goes to recreate the sensation by trying to drink hot chocolate, however, she is shocked to discover that her newly embodied self can no longer safely consume or enjoy food or drink. It transpires that Jenna is safer forgetting such corporeal memories. Pearson taps into contemporary concerns about the separation of body and mind through new technologies. Jenna’s prosthetic memory is described by her surgeon father as ‘only uploaded information’,19 but when Jenna finally remembers the details of her accident and has to make a moral choice about the fate of the other victims whose memories have been ‘stored’ on computer discs indefinitely, the implication is that a purely outsourced self is abhorrent. Although Jenna does manage a sort of synthesis of digital memory and lived experience by the end of the narrative, in some ways this new identity is more monstrous than her amnesiac self. The novel ends 260 years into the future when Jenna and another cyborg are ‘old women in the skin of teenagers’.20 This physical parody of youthfulness is matched by an excess of remembering, as more and more memories can be ‘stored’ in their biochips; a fact that contradicts typical conceptions of disintegration of memory in old age. What is forgotten in youth and what is remembered in old age has repercussions for how identity is shaped over time. In Cat Patrick’s Forgotten (2011), ageing memory takes on a new meaning. In this speculative novel, the teenage heroine London can only remember a waking day’s worth of memories and forgets everything from her past as soon as she goes to sleep. However, she has ‘memories’ of the future that come to her as memories of the past might: sporadically, incompletely and sometimes falsely. The novel’s premise reflects symptoms that some patients with schizophrenia display, where individuals experience paranoid premonitions about the future that are actually memories about the past that have been incorrectly ‘tagged’ by the psyche.21 Patrick’s fiction focuses on the sensational effects of this storyline: the device of falling in love again and again with the same boy allows for a range of romantic episodes that might be expected to appeal to an adolescent reader, while London’s ‘future memory’ of a funeral creates suspense as she tries to work out who will die. The novel is perhaps less concerned with exploring the philosophical implications of its underpinning concept, and certainly offers less interesting commentary on memory, amnesia and adolescent identity than the works by Mahy and Pearson discussed here. However, in theme at least, it reflects some important trends in teenage fiction, which, as a literary form, is willing to explore and challenge common conceptions of ageing and memory (other recent publications include Dan Krokos’s False Memory (2012), Jessica Brody’s Unremembered, Cal Armistead’s Being Henry David and Kate Karyus Quinn’s Another Little Piece (all 2013), to name a few). The best years of your life? But if you can remember them, perhaps you weren’t really there. Amnesia in Young Adult Fiction 291

Notes

1. Isaac Taylor, Advice to Teens, or Practical Help Toward the Formation of One’s Own Character (London: Fenner, 1818), 11. 2. The most famous example is Anne Frank’s diary, published in 1947. 3. See for example: Robyn McCallum, Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999); Roberta Seelinger Trites, Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000); Alison Waller, Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism (London: Routledge, 2009). 4. Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. and ed. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 115. 5. Margaret Mahy, Memory (London: Collins Flamingo, 2002), 78. 6. William Shakespeare, As You Like It (2.7.164). 7. For an account of how memory performance in older adults might be affected by perception of negative stereotypes, see S. J. Barber and M. Mather, ‘Stereotype Threat in Older Adults: When and Why Does It Occur, and Who Is Most Affected?’ in The Oxford Handbook of Emotion, Social Cognition, and Everyday Problem Solving During Adulthood, ed. P. Verhaeghen and C. Hertzog (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 302–320. 8. Mahy, Memory, 64. 9. Mahy, Memory, 206. 10. Mahy, Memory, 206. 11. Mahy, Memory, 25. 12. Mahy, Memory, 26. 13. Mahy, Memory, 62. 14. Mary E. Pearson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox (London: Walker Books, 2010), 14. 15. Pearson, Jenna Fox, 13. 16. Pearson, Jenna Fox, 49. 17. Pearson, Jenna Fox, 85. 18. Pearson, Jenna Fox, 64. 19. Pearson, Jenna Fox, 200. 20. Pearson, Jenna Fox, 256. 21. The phenomenon is discussed by Charles Fernyhough in Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory (London: Profile Books, 2012), 165–166. 35 Remembering Responsibly Thomas F. Coker and Heather H. Yeung

‘There were our own, there were the others [. . .] why should I not sing them?’1 questions the first elegy in the Scottish poet-solider Hamish Henderson’s Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenacia. The imperative to commit acts of remembrance during and after the events of a war is an ancient one, and intrinsically linked to what Paul Connerton calls the ‘ethics of memory’,2 a moral obligation to remember past people and events. Indeed, the majority of the action of Homer’s Iliad could be read as stemming from the moral obligation to remember, which we see work in different ways: from Achilles’s raging vengeance, Andromache’s keening anticipation of the death of her husband, and Priam’s negotiations in mourning for Hector, to Nestor’s meditated advice born out of experience of previous wars, and the funeral games of Patroclus. The action of the Iliad and its relation to memory and remembrance, as in many people’s memories of the wars of the last century and beyond, stem from a concern for one’s own, predicated on the allies versus enemies model of conventional, or ‘symmetric’, warfare. However, in Henderson’s lines we see concern for all people, nations and perspectives who have been affected by conflict (in Henderson’s case, African, British and German), and, as the elegies go on, this extends to a concern for all those who have been affected by any conflict. The global memorial concern of Henderson’s poet-speaker is a prelude to several of the concerns surrounding the idea of responsible remembrance, or the interplay of just memory and just conflict. The field of conflict has changed radically from that of previous ages, boundaries are increasingly blurred between nation states, the interpretations of what constitute ‘good’ and ‘evil’ acts of war are confused, and the tradition of Hellenic militarism of which Achilles, Priam and Hector provide a hybrid archetype is fast dissolving. We are thus led increasingly to ask who and what it is appropriate to remember, and how it is appropriate to remember them. War-remembrance models now no longer fall neatly into the themes of either Dunbar’s timor mortis (war experience as a reminder of the frailty of human life) or Horace’s aere perennis (the elegiac monument built to everlast- ingly celebrate the lives of soldiers). And, as Marc Augé writes, the duty to forget is often as important as the duty to remember; there are unethical or inappropriate notes struck by many national acts of remembrance now which ‘contort the

292 Remembering Responsibly 293 hideous shape of the unspeakable [. . .] into the banalities of ordinary mediocrity [beautifying] death and horror’.3 We meet a paradox wherein the consolation offered by forgetting (or remembering) acts of war operates simultaneously with the unacceptability of forgetting (or remembering) these same acts. In order to even begin to address these inquietudes, it is important to look first at the different ways in which memory and remembrance functions in relation to contemporary conflict on both personal and international levels. Memory, as we have seen across this collection of essays, is intimately connected to the way we constitute our selves. This can be seen in the impulse to collect objects or in an accretion of autobiographical memories. As we have seen even in this book, in the section on the Digital, memory works, too, in the conscious editing of good / bad, true / false memories in our online and offline ‘selves’, as a battle waged against forgetting, in the prosthetisation of the brain’s capacity to remember into the digital archive and in the use of online remembering tools or programmes. Memories of various types also influence physical development, skill-attributes and the way we interact with our environment. In line with the digitally self-constitutive memory acts here, various commentators on contemporary warfare and the ethics of soldiering pay close attention to the disaffection or distancing between the soldier and his humanity produced by the advances in the digital technologies of war. Other commentators have noted the increased appli- cation of affective interaction in the counterinsurgency work which forms a solid foundation for contemporary techniques of war. Although seemingly opposed, the disaffective and the affective schools of thought both work towards the same thing: an up-to-date ethics of warfare which takes into account all of the possible implications for humanity of the ways in which war is waged today. Christopher Coker’s Warrior Geeks (2013) maps the rise and demise of the Homeric warrior-figure in Western military thought alongside the rise of the ‘warrior geek’ – the ‘cyber-’ or ‘cubicle-’ warrior,4 who fights a depersonalised online battle in a cyberspace environment, purposefully disconnected from the human reality of war due to the psychological and physical toll of the violent experiences and difficult ethical choices it involves. The dissociation of the ‘warrior geek’ is a radically different one from that of Achilles in his thymotic rage, where he is disaffected by the pleas of his peers and his elders, and mercilessly disconnected from any person that stands in his way. Peter Sloterdijk writes that in his rage Achilles becomes a ‘complete warrior’. His rage is completely externalised, and in possession of the ultimate clarity of mission he no longer possesses an inner (morally reflective, remembering) life: ‘Fog arises, yet shapes become more determinate. Now clear lines lead to the object. The enraged attack knows where it wants to hit. [He] “enters the world like the bullet enters the battle”’.5 The ‘complete’ warrior geek, however, is physically and psychologically detached from the object of his attack. The opposite of Achilles in his berserker-like fury, his or her dissociation is effective in its affectlessness. The drone and its pilot is the logical, scientised conclusion to nearly a century of distance-wars. For a century, the technologies of warfare have increasingly addressed a problem oft-cited by scholars of the Second World War: that in the 294 Thomas F. Coker and Heather H. Yeung heat of battle only 15–20 percent of allied soldiers actually fired their weapons, the personal ethical decision to not kill overcoming the international message of the war being a just war, a war for humanity against evil. In this case, remembering responsibly in Henderson’s sense is exactly the sort of memory which, in the heat of action, could cost soldiers their sanity, their jobs, and even their lives. This statistic did not go unnoticed for long, and a revolution in Western military training took place aimed at desensitising soldiers to their targets. Practice dummies were for the first time made human-shaped in the hope that in the heat of battle soldiers would forget Mark’s commandment to love your neighbour as yourself (Chapter 12, Verse 31), and the tenth commandment, and learnt to disassociate the image of a human enemy from their own humanity. Equally, military technologies were developed to put as much as possible physical distance between soldier and target. As Susan Neiman writes, ‘resistance to killing someone decreases in direct proportion to distance from them’.6 A manipulation of memory takes place whereby the soldier is taught to be desensitised and to forget the human nature of a target, whilst at the same time he or she is taught to espouse a (completely human) bond of brotherhood with fellow soldiers. The most important memory in this case is the development of and ability to use niche skill-attributes. The effective affective distancing of the complete warrior geek is achieved through a feat of distancing, deferral and derealisation. They exist in an environment where warfare is made to be ‘like a videogame’,7 their battle-view is taken on by a co-pilot, who analyses real-time footage of the object of attack, and their decisions are taken on by an operations team. A senior officer will, on advice, give the final word as to whether a strike will or will not take place. Elements that make up the psyche of the conventional soldier are now split between a team of many, and the drone pilot’s use of memory/experience as an effective moral indicator is eradicated; his or her experience of war in the ‘online’ context will bear almost no resemblance to the war memories of the ‘offline’ soldier, which are often saturated with emotions ranging from boredom to disgust, fear, exhaustion and terror, memories which have been instrumental in the formation of legal and ethical approaches to warfare. Indeed, the strength of the cybersoldier lies in his or her lack of proximity to and lack of memory formation regarding warfare: logic and nondeclarative memory prevail in the online war environment, and decision- making processes are abdicated to a dedicated chain of command structure. It does not take Pavolvian experimentation, Hebbian theory or Freudian psychoanalysis to tell us that it is proximity to and affective engagement with warfare that leads to the most productive and ethical remembrances of war. It is possible, and often therapeutic, to mourn and to celebrate through acts of remembrance lives lost and injuries suffered by known individuals engaged in warfare, just as it is possible to decry the violence done through war to ‘our own’ and ‘the others’. War memorials in poetry and stone are often built around list upon list of names, dates and places. But how is it possible to encompass in these acts of remembrance the disassociated, disaffective warrior geek, so far from human engagement with an enemy as to render the human elements of warfare (name, date, place) almost negligible? The soldier for whom warfare is ‘fucking cool’, Remembering Responsibly 295

‘like a videogame’,8 and who has restricted decision-making power, has nothing important to recall regarding their status as combatant: nothing to remember or to be remembered by. In contrast to the ultra-modern, ultra-online, purposefully disaffected and un-remembering cyber-soldier, is the figure of the counterinsurgent soldier, another product of twenty-first-century warfare. The counterinsurgent differs as radically from the affect-riddled external-facing Homeric warrior as does the warrior-geek. However, where the cyber-soldier works in an infrastructure of disaffection and non-proximity where nondeclarative memory skills are used and soldiers are shielded from using and constructing declarative memories, the counterinsurgent is a finely-tuned grass-roots level warrior of ‘hearts and minds’, trained to take accountability, and to build on knowledge of a given situation through experience and memory. The counterinsurgent warrior wages war within the context of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri label as the ‘armed police work’ of a contemporary style of war which operates as part of a global system of ‘affective industries’.9 War is no longer a question of winning territory, but of sharing space and information, and winning the trust and understanding of communities. By dint of their proximity to potential hostile forces, through working within communities and patrolling and sharing their space, any conflict experienced by the counterinsurgent soldier will be immediate, direct and kinetic, with sometimes horrific casual- ties. These soldiers learn efficacy from proximity (just as the cyber-soldier operates effectively through distance); declarative memory is a major element of the way in which they wage war, as memories of incidents and effective psychogeographic mapping of space are major factors in strategy formation. The war memories thus developed can be as much to do with gaining trust of ‘the others’ as they can be of the work done with one’s own soldiers, or of fighting, bomb-disposal, and the frustration of the ‘courageous restraint’ which made David Petraeus’s doctrines of counterinsurgency so effective. Soldiers’ descriptions of operational tours often involve the bombastic statistic that they are 98 percent boredom and two percent adrenaline. In spite of the boredoms and frustrations, the counterinsurgent is a soldier finely-tuned to the national, international and personal ramifications of his decisions. What better reflection of Henderson’s memorial phrase than this? Soldiers thus return from contemporary conflicts having waged very different sorts of warfare, and formed radically different memories from their experiences of war. Both elicit very different responses from a thinking public regarding the ethics of war and of remembrance. A cenotaph built with Horace’s monument ‘more lasting than bronze’ is no longer wholly appropriate. It is not feasible to perform week-long funeral games for each fallen warrior as in Homeric times, nor can an exhaustive catalogue of injuries inflicted and suffered be made. Equally, the anti-war (or pro-peace) protest commemorates the other side of warfare, bringing to the foreground the problem of the ethics of remembrance as well as of war. How can the memories of current conflicts be transmuted appropriately into some form of remembrance? What, now, are the ethics which underlie the ‘imperative’ to remember? 296 Thomas F. Coker and Heather H. Yeung

When Adorno wrote in his now oft-cited, and frequently decontextualised, essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’,10 he was commenting in part on the ethics of remembrance; the ‘hideous shape of the unspeakable’ that Augé sees so many national monuments assume. There is a difficult dialectic which operates when national and personal monuments to memory come under question, between barbarism and culture, the individual and the state, the morally correct and the hierarchically sanctioned, all within the political, global contexts in which the ethics of remembrance also tread softly. The global cultural memory must still take into account the cultural barbarism of the concentration camps of WW2, the ethically disastrous nationally implemented repression or prescriptive forgetting of the Japanese military atroci- ties perpetrated on the Sino-Russian border in WW2, or, more recently, the sup- pression of knowledge regarding the activities which took place in the Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay detention camps, just as a therapeutic personal forgetting of various acts of war must also take place. Without a complete sense of ‘just’ war, ‘just’ remembrance cannot take place, and a monument ‘more lasting than bronze’ must be unshakeably morally just in its foundations and constructions. But in an age fascinated by ‘survivor accounts’ and driven by the moral importance of acts of testimony, we are apt to forget the responsibility of remembrance, which is often, as Shoshana Feldman notes, a solitary responsibility, and the frequently inaccurate and incomplete nature of testimony, as well as the moral ramifications of the distribution of its often difficult subject-matter.11 In this context, Jeffrey Blustein is right to question the morality of memory and forgetting, since just as not all memory is accurate or just, not all forgetting is prescriptive or repressive:

in our contemporary post-Holocaust world, where memory, however painful its content or contexts, is prized, socially sanctioned, and even sanctified, there is understandable reluctance in many quarters to seriously take up the matter of forgetting and to consider what value it may have.12

Equally, with so many ‘witnesses’ and ‘survivors’, so many perspectives on ‘our own’ and ‘the others’, acts of remembrance on both personal and national scales will always be incomplete. These are what Mieke Bal sees as some of memory’s ‘many tricks’,13 and what Christopher Coker calls the ‘treachery’ of memory.14 It is therapeutic for the soldier returning from war to participate in acts of remembrance, even to write documents of witness of his or her experiences, just as it is therapeutic for the families of the injured or lost to mourn and to rail against the conflict. Yet remembrance is a double-edged sword. It is dangerous, through acts of remembrance, to fetishize the figure of the warrior or the idea of war, or the figure of the survivor and the apparently authentic document of testimony. It is dangerous, too, to not remember enough, and thus disable the remembrance process that is necessary to the formation of moral and ethical judgments and ‘good’ or ‘just’ acts. How, then, is it possible, with the centenary of the Great War looming as we write this, to remember Remembering Responsibly 297 responsibly? And how far and wide must this net of appropriate remembrance be cast? These are the questions which have informed this piece of writing, and which, although they may well not have any hard and fast final answer, are the imperative foundation – and capstones – to every act of remembrance which now takes place.

Notes

1. Hamish Henderson, Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenacia (Edinburgh: Hamish Hamilton, 1948), 2. 2. Paul Connerton, with Jeffrey Kastern and Sina Najafi, ‘Historical Awareness: An Interview with Paul Connerton’, Cabinet Magazine 42 (2009). 3. Marc Augé, Oblivion, trans. Marjoligm de Jager (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 88. 4. Christopher Coker, Warrior Geeks: How 21st Century Technology Is Changing the Way We Fight and Think About War (London: Hurst & Co., 2013), 111. 5. Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, trans. Mario Wenning (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 10. 6. Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (London: Bodley Head, 2009), 371. 7. See Peter Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin, 2009), 230. 8. A drone pilot quoted in Singer, Wired for War, 230. 9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). 10. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Shelley Weber Nicholson and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 34. 11. See Shoshana Feldman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992). 12. Jeffrey Blustein, The Moral Demands of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 5. 13. Mieke Bal, ‘Memory Acts: Performing Subjectivity’, boijmans bulletin 1(2) (2001), 12. 14. Coker, Warrior Geeks, 47. Part VI Twenty-First Century Subjectivities Introduction to Part VI Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery

This part engages with memory by considering the idea that, as Paul Sheehan puts it, narrative is ‘human-shaped’:

It is a uniquely human way of making order and meaning out of the raw material of existence. It is also, more importantly, a way of carving necessity from the uncertainty and potential chaos of personal experience. Put simply, we tell stories about ourselves to give our lives meaning and purpose, and about our kind to maintain the crucial human/inhuman distinction. This is a twofold process: the mere existence of narrative suggests difference, a separation from nature (which does not, needless to say, manifest narrative order); and the kind of narrative that are produced have supported that separation.1

Narrative aligns with memory and forgetting in creating and shaping our understanding of ourselves, and our relation to what is not ourself. As such distinctions grow untenable, or even undesirable, how can we continue to maintain this alignment, as memory itself shades into forgetting, into the inhuman spaces of technology and material processes? The digital age, with its various forms of cognitive offloading and virtual communication, demands of us that we question the nature of our own and others’ control over information and memory. Assigning to forgetting its proper role in the understanding of memory and identity provokes difficult, even painful questions about how we perceive, or want to perceive, ourselves, and the means through which we construct these perceptions. On top of this, the new temporalities of memory explored in Part IV disrupt the possibility of a linear, causal model of the development of identity. In the twenty-first century, we think of memory not so much as the retrieval of fixed facts and past events but as the brain’s ability constantly to reorganize information: memory is the activation of the memory traces as last laid down when remembering an event or fact, which will often have been modified by the present context in which the remembering takes place. This part posits a new form of subjectivity, aware of the ways in which memory is often a highly selective, fictional story that we tell ourselves.

300 Introduction to Part VI 301

We live in a digital age that seems to have revitalized ‘a certain Benjaminian spirit of the collector as cultural analyst, but the practices of what one does with those collections differs’.2 We constantly collect ourselves via social media, yet this archive is mutable and dynamic. N. Katherine Hayles has written of the transformations of the digital age as creating ‘a highly heterogenous and fis- sured space in which discursive formations based on pattern and randomness jostle and compete with formations based on presence and absence’.3 Gilles Deleuze claims that, subject to the ‘the digital language of control’, ‘individuals become “dividuals”’.4 Rather than persisting in outdated conceptions of the individual, our best response to these changes may be to assert that such new formations of the subject can be understood and negotiated through a recognition of their presence in the past. The term ‘dividual’ originates in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1938) as an expression of the breakdown of the individual inherent to modernity:

The first till last alchemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual personal life unlivable transaccidented through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal).5

‘Cyclewheeling history’ asserts itself here through the imagery and concepts we have seen recurring throughout this book: the body as text, the continuous present tense. It can also be understood as an appropriate metaphor for the emerging conception of human memory as an ongoing process of revision and renewal. Understanding the ‘dividual’ in the Deleuzian and Joycean senses provides a continuity between digital and embodied memory, and between early twenty- first and early twentieth century challenges to the traditional idea of the self as a coherent, organic whole. This convention was also put into question by Sigmund Freud, whose work was developed by post-Freudian thinkers from Jacques Lacan to R. D. Laing. Selfhood as an enclosed entity or subject of scrutiny was further challenged, post-war, by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, whose work explored the postmodern notion that human identity is a social, historical construct, at the heart of which lies a disturbing contingency. Deleuze developed his own ideas by responding to Freud’s ‘Wolf-Man’ case study, which criticized Freud’s betrayal of his own project in shaping the functions of the multi- plicities of the unconscious within linear narrative. Deleuze and Guattari link this movement in Freud to both the formation of recognizable subjectivity through narrative, and to the operation of literary narratives in terms of reconstructive memory: ‘It is not very difficult to determine the essence of the “novella” as a literary genre: Everything is organized around the question, “What happened? Whatever could have happened?”’ Contemporary novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose obsessively detailed, six-volume, autobiographical My Struggle has been put forward as a twenty-first 302 Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery century A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, emphatically rejects the possibility of writing what happened: ‘for me’, he tells us,

there has been no difference in remembering something and creating something. When I wrote my fictional novels they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones and the line between them is completely blurred. When I write something, I can’t remember in the end if this is a memory or if it’s not – I’m talking about fiction. So for me it’s the same thing. It was like I was writing a straight novel when I was writing this but the rule was it had to be true. Not true in an objective sense but the way I remember it. There’s a lot of false memory in the book but it’s there because it’s the way it is, it’s real.6

Memory’s tendency towards fictionalization is often not identified by us; even less so does the self mark its constitutive memories as false. Memories are true lies, yet not often perceived as such; it is only when we encounter contradictory evidence or hear counter-narratives from people with whom we shared an experience that we may be led to notice the highly subjective nature of memory. Cinematographers, literary authors and artists have explored a whole range of psychopathologies in order to dramatize this fascinating yet unsettling feature of memory, and to show the fragility of human life and identity. A Beautiful Mind (2001) shows how confabulation (the self’s production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself, others and/or the world, without the deliberate intention to deceive) has deep repercussions for our self-conception and our relationship to others and the world, in this case with dramatic global political repercussions. Literary examples include the exploration of De Clérambault’s Syndrome, also known as erotomania (whereby a patient falsely believes a social superior is in love with them), in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (1997), and of Capgras Syndrome (in which people think their loved ones are merely imperson- ating Doppelgängers, and may even go so far as to kill their partner, parents or siblings) in Richard Power’s The Echo Maker (2006). These novels share a willingness to engage with such conditions in terms of their lived and biological reality, drawing on research, and refusing to treat their characters’ conditions as metaphors. At the same time, there is a refusal to draw fixed boundaries between illness and health; in acknowledging the biological aspects of all human behaviour, the line between pathology and normal life blurs, and science can no longer be relied on to re-establish it. This is the role of narrative and memory. McEwan’s protagonist Joe Rose struggles throughout the novel with the question of what happened, revising his memories to distinguish himself from the deluded Jed. Joe returns throughout to the question of his role in the tragedy that brings the two together at the start of the novel, and of how his own behaviour may have contributed to Jed’s increasing obsessiveness and the breakdown of his relationship with Clarissa. Jed’s condition is real, not some delusion of Joe’s, but the two share an obsessiveness with reading meaning into small details from the past that bleeds through diagnostic categories into everyday life. Introduction to Part VI 303

In his essay ‘Touching Brains’, Jason Tougaw has written on the recurring fantasy in contemporary fiction that through direct contact with this supposed seat of identity, we might relate to the self it supports more deeply than previously possible. In David B’s Epileptic (1996–2004), another nuanced contemporary meditation on mental illness, the narrator fantasizes at one point that ‘he might exchange brains – and therefore identities – with his epileptic brother Jean-Christophe, who lives with severe generalized epilepsy’.7 Tougaw notes that the fantasy is ‘ironic in a devastating way, because it stands in for the connections they can’t maintain in life. David’s fantasy is a surrogate for empathy he can’t muster for his brother in life’.8 Raymond Tallis notes that another response to epilepsy, by Aristotle in On the Sacred Diseases, provides one of the earliest known statements of the idea that the brain is, in a sense, the self; Aristotle’s ‘deeply humane’ claim that men ‘ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arises our pleasures, joys, laughters and jests, as well as our sor- rows, pains, griefs and tears’ countered a moralistic reading of disease in terms of divine intervention, advocating a rational, naturalistic approach, but in so doing formed the root of the contemporary notion ‘that the brain is not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition of conscious experiences: that it is the whole story’.9 Writers such as David B., in their attention to the lived experience of psychopathology, and their disruption of established cultural narratives around mental illness, have taken on the humane purpose of this naturalistic approach; in this same spirit, they recognize the false promise of neuroscientific interpretations, of deciphering within the brain’s functioning what happened, emphasizing the role of conscious and unconscious selection in the creation of their narratives. As Tougaw and Tallis remind us, to resist fixed interpretation, and to understand what happened as the incomplete and semi-fictional product of memory, is at the heart of ethical subjectivity. The writers in this part build on the knowledge that the narratives we create out of our experience can never be true to reality, and that our efforts to distinguish ourselves from what is not us can never be entirely successful; they propose ways in which to use this knowledge to create new and better narratives. As we saw in Part III, narrating the very real prospect of self-extinction forces us to unpick and redefine the stable conceptual register through which we have previously constructed linear narratives of human development and progress, or of technological encroachment onto unspoiled nature – fixed trajectories leading to utopia or apocalypse. Here, Claire Colebrook argues that the pre-determined concepts through which such narratives operate – ‘nature’ and the ‘human’ – are themselves constructs that blur together the biological, technological, historical and cultural. To recognize ourselves as dividuals entails exploring and incorporat- ing the inhuman: ‘Rather than think of the future from the inscribed archive, one might imagine other archives that would, in turn, re-inscribe the present from within. We might call this counter-memory: what other presents might have been, and are present virtually, harboured in all the inscriptions outside human recognition?’ We might begin to do so with the claim that such re-inscription of the present from within is emerging as characteristically human. 304 Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery

The form of the question of ‘what happened’ presumes that the answer will be singular. Patricia Waugh draws our attention to an alternative in her focus on literature which takes as its subject the experience of hearing voices, an experience literalizing the perception of oneself as the synthesis of multiple selves. Waugh’s work as co-investigator on the interdisciplinary Hearing the Voice network similarly draws our attention to how literary form acts as a participant (or set of participants) in a cultural dialogue often disremembered in the selective attention through which academic disciplines define themselves. To understand the individual novel as an engagement with multiple voices has consequences for how we understand the individual’s experience of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH); shifts in our shared constructions of subjectivity, in what we choose to remember, reverberate across multiple pathways. Alison Waller’s piece on her work on adults rereading books from their childhood carries on Waugh’s line of thought by exploring ‘the implications for multiple selfhoods emerging from recollections of the reading self and the capacity for self-deception to play a part in this process’. In developing her own metaphor of the ‘time-capsule’, she recovers a moment from Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu often disremembered as part of a focus on the significance of the madeleine: the moment when Marcel, ‘tempted to reread his childhood favourite when he comes across a copy of George Sand’s François le Champi while browsing his host’s library shelves’, resists due to ‘fears that his own sense of his younger self would also be damaged through this kind of readerly digging, getting “buried in oblivion”’. The promise of a meaningful connection with the past allowing for a renewed sense of agency in the present held out by the madeleine is mirrored here by the threat of such a connection revealing the distance between two selves, and the frailty of their connection. Robert Pepperell’s chapter begins by emphasizing the acts of remembrance and forgetting that contribute to our neurocentric culture. Pepperell’s own formulation of the posthuman can be seen as an act of remembrance, of the ‘widely distributed array of forces and substances (gravity, light, air, moisture, energy and so on)’ beyond the brain that make up human life; to ‘believe that the essence of a human being is contained in the brain, or part of the brain, or even within the skin of the body, is simply to ignore an enormous range of highly complex and integrated processes going on around the body that contribute in fundamentally important ways to the existence of that being’. Moving his focus to contemporary discussions on the changing understanding of memory in the digital age, Pepperell argues that technology is simply another one of these processes, as much a foundation of our sense of self as a threat to it. Pepperell’s post-digital, analogue model of the relation between mind and world posits an alternative to the vogueish notion that ‘you are your brain’ that allows for a genuine continuity between self as we understand it now, the ever-expanding scope of scientific knowledge, and our shifting relationship to technology. Joanna Bryson discusses confabulation: ‘a narrative that sounds like a memory, but that we know to be false’. To distinguish between confabulation and what we might suppose to be the normal functioning of memory in creating a narrative of Introduction to Part VI 305 the self becomes more complex the more attention we pay to such cases. Despite what we have learnt about the workings of the brain, the way in which we distinguish truth from falsehood lies within the same social consensus that distinguishes between disease and health. When we assume a naturalistic perspective, turning away from this consensus, the conclusion is, as Bryson puts it, ‘simple’: ‘all narrative memory is essentially confabulation’. We skew our memories to conform to the norms of our society to the extent that we can be said to have achieved a coherent, frictionless sense of self through an act of confabulation not recognized as such; we are, then, dividuals. Neander Abreu and Martijn Meeter close this collection by considering the most significant challenge to what has been its own implicit assumption, that of the positive role of memory in our lives. For those who have experienced trauma, memory ties them to a moment that they must move beyond, and undermines their sense of self through the ongoing effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Abreu gives voice to the question these people put to us: ‘Why should I remember that?’ He also gives voice to a challenge facing those treating these people: how to distinguish between those whose symptoms are real, and have a genuine connection to traumatic events, and ‘malingerers’, those who seek invent or exaggerate symptoms of PTSD for whatever purpose. For those suffering from PTSD, memory resists any purpose we may have assigned to it in fulfilling a function with no redemptive aspects at all, which interrupts the patient’s ongoing narrative of self. For the psychologist, the way in which memory works makes it very difficult, if not impossible in some cases, to demarcate between PTSD and malingering; the way in which the narrative of their experience the individual tells themselves and others shift and produces their memories anew. Abreu responds to this contradiction through narratives of his own – case studies from his practice that carry their own truth without resolution. Martijn Meeter takes up what was implicit in Abreu’s piece, answering the question of ‘why should I remember that?’ by proposing that ‘maybe you shouldn’t’. Drawing on further research into the workings of trauma, as well as a wide-ranging consideration of how we understand knowing and telling the truth through culture, he proposes an alternative to the use of narrative in helping those who have experience trauma: these narratives do not have to be truthful. When we allow a patient to develop a narrative that relives their suffering but is, in a way, false, ‘truth yields to life, and that is how it should be’. This is a significant challenge to a widespread notion rooted in various conceptions of the self. Meeter identifies the notion, already present in Freud’s earliest writings, that ‘explaining a patient’s past to him or her will give the rumbles of the unconsciousness their place, leading to a better life for the patient’; what we now know of memory gives the lie to this idea that a sense of self must be developed through an uncovering of the truth, an engagement with the past as it was then. In Part IV, Squire and Wixted provide a foundation for understanding even the act of narrative remembrance as a form of forgetting, referring to the ‘long-standing idea, which has received renewed attention in recent years [. . .] that retrieval of memory provides an opportunity for updating or modulating what was originally learned and even 306 Sebastian Groes and Nick Lavery the possibility of severely disrupting it’. In order to move on with our lives and progress, for instance after experiencing trauma, it is often beneficial to let go of past episodes in our lives which either lock us into a stifling nostalgia, a backward- looking mode that can sometimes be conservative if not downright regressive. Memory and forgetting form complementary parts of this process of moving on. This challenge to the role of truth in our understanding of ourselves takes us back to Knausgaard’s use of ‘false memory’ in his autobiography. In the same interview, Knausgaard claims that ‘To do something good you have to step out of society, almost out of humanity, if that’s possible’. New and emerging perspectives on memory emerging confront us as a challenge to how we have previously understood our humanity, as a society and as individuals. This should not be a source of crisis, of anxiety. The writers in this part remind us to take this as an opportunity. Just as memory, in its selectiveness and creative aspects, can alter and renew the individual’s sense of self, even in response to trauma, how we understand memory can allow us to find new ways to express what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. 36 Losing the Self? Subjectivity in the Digital Age Claire Colebrook

There are three senses of extinction that have recently come to the fore in cultural production, popular science, philosophy and government policy: (1) the anticipated sixth great extinction event (which we are beginning to witness (Kolbert 2014)); (2) already actualized extinction caused by humans of other species (posing the question of our destructive power, as evidenced by the red list and the widening uptake of the notion of the Anthropocene (Gillings and Hagan-Lawson 2014), and (3) self-extinction – the capacity for us to destroy what makes us human. This third sense might appear to be secondary, parasitic and perhaps ‘only’ metaphorically linked to actual extinction. I will argue the contrary: what may at first appear to be an accident caused by human history and the development of technologies – self-extinction – exposes a broader potentiality of what has come to be known as life. Rather than see humanity as a species that visits accidental destruction upon an otherwise benevolent planet, human self-loss might be an appropriate figure for life as such and might prompt us to question the colonizing moralism that has typified extinction rhetoric. In this respect I would like to reverse the way climate change is conceptualized. One might say that there is a stable earth that is self-organizing and that this benevolently enclosed pseudo-organic whole is the proper home to organisms (including humans). Humans, however, cease to be organic and become technological by extending and supplementing themselves; the organic self-maintenance is broken, and technology deadens human life, and then reaches a fever pitch to the point of destroying all organic life. Against this narrative I would argue the contrary: life ‘is’ technical, ‘originally technical’, and it is possibly the disruption of organic stability that generates something like a climate, a system that exceeds organisms and is far from closed. What we know as anthropogenic climate change might therefore be seen as an effect of a certain anti-technical commitment to the organism. Think of the stable human being: not exposed to the ravages of the outside world, not subjected to the Sisyphean temporality of producing just enough to survive, safely housed in a (heated/cooled) walled building, curled up in a chair, curled around a book, able to develop their rights, freedoms and reflective capacities, and capable of saying ‘I’. Then think of the way the figure of this safe organic enclosure captivates attention: to say ‘I’ is to imagine that the flux of time and consciousness is akin to a bounded body. To

307 308 Claire Colebrook think of one’s self in such a manner may, as Lacan noted, require misrecognition – substituting distributed, dispersed and volatile forces for some figure of the psyche. Not only does thinking of earth and nature in this way – as a stable, intentional and organic whole – emerge alongside the production of a self who is protected from the ravages of existence; one might say that a three-fold organicism is politically, colonially and climactically intertwined. ‘I’ can be a self, viewing nature both as if its temporality were in accord with my intentionality and as if its intensive power were an intimation of subjective freedom, only if nature is viewed at a distance, if it is capable of being read. This is Kant’s argument in the Third Critique: one must – for the sake of scientific and moral progress – assume an orderly stable nature in accord with one’s sense of the reason of the world; if nature appears to exceed such order then that allows us to feel the difference between nature and mind, feeling our own power to determine nature rationally. Kant is able to view nature this way not only because what came to be known as ‘nature’ was technologically tamed by way of the industrialized agriculture that would intensify climate change and that in turn relied upon the enslavement of other humans not granted the freedom of subjectivity (Chakrabarty 2009), but also – we might say – because practices and technologies of reading generated a self of deep attention. ‘Man’ – the man who would inflict damage upon himself and the planet by way of technology – was the effect, not the cause, of the production of ‘nature’ as a stable organic and beneficent whole. Rather than say that there is this thing called ‘humanity’ that came and destroyed the planet, and – also by way of technology – destroyed itself, it would be more accurate to say that the figure of ‘humanity’ is coterminous with the planet-destructive creation of ‘nature’, and the energy- intensive intellectual technologies (from mass printing to iPads) of the enabled self who is formed in concert with a certain type of archive. There is a widespread lament regarding something like a self-extinction occurring in the human brain. According to Susan Greenfield, ‘we’ are losing identity: where we once worked with a synthesizing power of grammar, syntax and critique, we are now seduced by a culture of stimulus. We are not just losing one of our critical powers – our power to synthesize what is not ourself – we are losing ourselves. For ‘we’ are – as human, as identities – just this synthesizing power. According to Greenfield, a certain degree of self-loss is required for stimulus and pleasure, but a counter-tendency of neural extension is required for meaning and self. The self is neither absolutely stable and self-same, nor fully exposed to its outside, but must be self-organizing; indeed, the self is this delicate balancing act of memory and forgetting, openness and closure. For Greenfield, technology and a culture of stimulus is tipping the self into an accelerated loss of its capacity for meaning. Here, her work resonates with a broader culture of mourning including popular texts such as The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain (Carr 2011), Distracted (Jackson 2008) and Proust and the Squid (Wolf 2008). Such popular morality tales rely largely on the concept of reading technologies as purely external: as good extensions that ought to remain subservient to the brain and organism that they properly enhance. However, other narratives, such as N. Katherine Hayles’s distinction between deep attention and hyper attention (Hayles 2007; Losing the Self? 309

Hayles 2010) and Bernard Stiegler’s lament for the contemporary ‘short circuits of transindividuation’, argue that the self is generated from the inscriptive technologies that allow both for the reading practices of care and deep attention, and for the proliferating production of stimulus that threatens selfhood in its profound sense.10 What I would add to Hayles’s and Stiegler’s dialectic – where the self is created and destroyed by its relation to the archive – is a planetary dimension. Intensive reading practices would not have been possible without the harnessing and capture of energy, both from other humans and from the planet. This delicate and fragile reading self – and the notion of a humanity and man with the power to view nature as if it were in accord with moral and universal reasoning – is not accidentally partial; it does not just happen to be the motif of the ‘man’ who colonizes and enslaves the globe. Rather, universal ‘man’ – the man of reason and empathy – is enabled by technologies that have always been destructive of other humans and non-humans, but are now today seen also to be destructive of what took itself to be ‘humanity’. In this respect one might say that the post-Enlightenment argument that man is pure existence without essence is enabled by technologies that initially free some of the world’s living beings from the brute existence of the planet, but then generate an accelerated extinction. The freedom that is achieved by increasingly complex archival technologies draws more and more from the globe, but also entwines the supposedly free and meaning-oriented self increasingly with technologies that maximize and threaten ‘our’ pure existence. We can lose ourselves – extinguish ourselves – because we are nothing other than potentiality. Nothing guarantees the being of ‘man’, because man is not a being, and suffers most when he mistakenly takes himself to be nothing more than a thing among things, or mistakenly thinks that there is an essence of the human (one that might be enhanced or maximized by way of technology). This is why Agamben has isolated a last chance for redemption precisely at this point in our history when it becomes apparent that what we are is not something essential that will necessarily come into being. For Agamben, following a tradition that goes back at least as far as Heidegger, both totalitarianism and democratic hedonism (both being a captivation by mere actuality without a sense of the coming into being of the world) are forms of deadening managerialism.11 For Agamben, life does harbour the potentiality for a new politics, but this would only be if the potentiality of life were not set outside political order as ‘bare life’, but could be liberated from passive spectatorship or totalitarian subsumption. It is at this point of exhaustion, when we have become frozen spectators in a world in which images appear as ready-mades, that we can see both that there is no guarantee that we will be human, and that what is valuable in the human is not its fulfilment of proper ends, but its realization that in the absence of any determined end what has called itself humanity may once again rethink its infancy. Agamben, despite his criticism of a history of metaphysics that has not thought about the threshold from which relations between life and its mere potentiality have emerged, nevertheless maintains and intensifies a long-standing question about the human capacity to incapacitate itself precisely by way of maximizing what it takes to be its highest 310 Claire Colebrook end. Let us say that we take one of the effects of life – our capacity to fashion or set an end for ourselves – and then become subjected to that end by way of forgetting impotentiality. What is truly worth thinking about is not what we must be and what we properly are, nor that which lies outside all memory and forgetting, but that it is always possible that everything we do is haunted by a certain not doing – including the language that we speak, and the archive through which we maintain ourselves. All that we say, store, remember, sustain and take to be our very own emerges from a threshold that harbours a potential not to do. Put briefly, it is not just that humans – having no stable essence – might become other than what they imagine they ought to be, nor that they are pure becoming; it is not just that humans are exposed to the open. Rather, a history of thinking and theorizing has stabilized and politicized life – giving it form and propriety – at the expense of that which does not bring itself into full articulation and view. Potentiality is not only an openness to becoming, but also a possibility of non-realization, or of being stalled by the very technologies that enabled material freedom. Indeed there is something essentially self-destructive about the human theoretical eye: our very openness to the world – the very relation that is our life – is precisely what seduces us into forgetting that before there is an eye that acts as a camera or window there must have been something like an orientation or distance, a relation without relation. The criticism of the reification of humanity or the forgetting of potentiality has both highly reactive dimensions (ranging from anti-corporate liberal humanisms to continued laments regarding technology’s destruction of the human archive), and highly complex and future-oriented modes. Both Gilles Deleuze and Jean- François Lyotard drew upon Leibniz’s monadology to argue that the world unfolds from perception, rather than perception being a stable capacity that must somehow grasp and represent an objective outside; they were both critical of the notion of the subject as some type of substance, and even more critical of a history of thought that has enslaved thought to one of its images (Deleuze 1993; Lyotard 1991). Rather than see the eye as an organ that allows the organism to view the world, one might see the self or subject as an effect of all the perceptions and encounters that exceed the relatively stable organism’s bounds. There are two directions this criticism of the embodied eye can take: one is to expand the sense of the body, to imagine a receptive or perceptive power that is not a simple snapshot of the world but a full and expansive openness. Rather than mind as a ghost in the machine we might think of extended mind or distributed cognition. Here we might locate a pseudo-Heideggerian criticism of Descartes that was taken up by cognitive science: man is not a camera, not a computer, and the eye is not a window (Thompson 2007). But there’s another path, or another way to think about the ways in which what has taken itself to be human has truncated its own future by attaching itself unthinkingly to its already completed path of becoming. Rather than broadening the self or human to include emotions, dynamism and the non-cognitive, or rather than trying to reunite mind and world, one might create a greater difference and dehiscence: tear the eye from the body, dis-organize the body. Rather than lament that we took the eye-mind for a Losing the Self? 311

camera, computer or window (rather than an integral aspect of the lived body), one might think of the eye as a machine. Doing so would create something like a synthesizer or transformer, allowing what has been (memory) to be recomposed into new futures. Before exploring that in detail, we can go back over the relation between the eye and human self-extinction, between the eye that views the world in order to enable survival, and the eye that then becomes frozen or seduced by its own imaging power – to the point where the eye takes in a frozen image of the self. This argument for the self as not being a substance but the condition of something like the organized perception of substance has a long philosophical and moral history. But if Aristotle argued that what distinguished us as humans was not merely perception of the world, nor consumption of the world, but the capacity for perception and consumption to go beyond what is to consider what ought to be, and if Plato also argued that we should not merely perceive but think about that which gives itself to be perceived, this moral distinction becomes formal in modernity. That is, what takes itself to be a difference in kind – such as Aristotle’s distinction between nutritive and rational souls, or Plato’s insistence on another world of Ideas – becomes a difference in task, memory and futures: it is because we can make promises and imagine another world that we ought to act as if we could become universal legislators. Kant does not argue that we have to be more than simple substances, he insists that as subjects we are not things at all. There are not two types of substance – thinking and extended – because substance is that which is given from the power of thinking. Kant is perhaps the first in a long line of anti-Cartesianists who will argue that it is an illusion to perceive thought as a thing. There are only things because there is something like an organizing or synthesizing power. It makes no sense to strive to perceive or know the self. In the beginning is a potentiality for viewing from which we constitute a viewed world. Whereas Kant argued that something like the subject existed as this condition for all intuition, with intuition synthesized into ordered unities, Henri Bergson argued that there was no subject who intuited images, just images or perceptions from which we posit some thing – the brain – that provides the illusory image that would cause all images (Bergson 2004). Mind is possible because of memory; it is because the past has been retained that perceptions have range or amplitude, and thereby approach the future by way of potential paths not given in the material immediacy of the present. Pre-modern philosophy argues that we are not only appetites but also possess an organizing relation to the world, while modern philosophy argues that we are only organizing relations, with appetites and interests being possible only because there is imaging. This raises the question: if the mind is not a thing but a potentiality, how does it become mired in images from which it has emerged? How is a synthesizing power capable of memory and futurity – by way of images – seduced by certain images, falling back into an untimely inertia? What if the brain (supposedly) properly oriented towards synthesis were at risk of falling back, of devolution? What if Agamben and others are right to diagnose thought’s falling away from its practical calling? All the anticipatory mourning 312 Claire Colebrook rituals regarding the society of the spectacle, society of simulacra, world of passive consumption, epoch of mere exhibition without aura, hyper attention rather than deep attention, have to recognize the mind’s potentiality to forget itself, and to remain within the Cartesian theatre of its own making. It might do well, then, to reconsider all the ways in which ‘we’ are now react- ing with horror to our own capacity not to be ourselves. When today – with horror – we look at young minds, we ask how they have become nothing more than cameras and computational devices. The young brains of today are supposedly not affected or world-oriented; they manipulate Facebook, Twitter, messaging and media with ruthless algorithmic force; they ingest images without digestion or rumination. We watch, with horror, as the human brain reverts to being not so much a reader of Proust as akin to a squid, or mere life. This tendency to be nothing more than a screen for images is observed as at once the brain’s horrific tendency towards self-extinction and yet utterly contrary to who ‘we’ properly are. In response – and perhaps the strongest is that of Bernard Stiegler – there is a call to retrace the mind’s becoming, returning once more to a potentiality for synthesis and care, rather than acquiescence. And yet, along with lamentations regarding human self-loss, or a falling away from our proper reason, this release of the intuition of images from the organizing self is just as frequently hailed as redemption from the rigidity of Cartesian man as some affectless and world-divorced subject. Ranging from affirmations of a new empathetic, mindful and ecological self to various posthumanisms that declare the end of reflective reason and universal logics, ‘man’ declares himself to be at an end, now at one with a vital and vibrant life. In the beginning is a dynamic and world-oriented receptivity from which organized cognition, and the sense of the self as subject or man, emerges. It is from a primary openness to the world, a primarily dynamic and sensible world, that there emerges the sense of one who sees. This reiterated concern regarding a counter-vital tendency in the brain’s very capacity for imaging is not unique to philosophy, theory or recent theses of the brain. An originary techno-phobia – articulated as a warning that we might forget who we are if we extend ourselves by way of writing and other memory techniques – has more often than not accompanied equally frequent techno- philic valorizations of the human as the being capable of sustaining himself by way of his own self-surpassing. ‘Man’ is that being who, by way of his extra- natural essence, is capable of vanquishing and surpassing his own nature. Today, though, the arts and technologies of memory and erasure have reached a quantitative extension that perhaps opens up new intensities. On the one hand it is as though our obvious glutting on images – from the seduction by marketing labels and visual stimulus to the voyeurism of disaster porn – evidences the brain’s fragility to be nothing more than itself, to be a screen. The thousands of years of evolved complexity can fall away through overconsumption. Just as the very desire for fats and sugars that propelled the body to hunt and develop technologies for metabolic stability and survival will also drive the modern body into obesity, hypertension and an early grave, so the darting eye that stimulated the brain Losing the Self? 313 into becoming a reading and interpreting animal may also be at the forefront of the human species’ cognitive atrophy. Rather than moral, these are economic problems; or, more accurately: what look like moral problems require an economy that is more complex than current binary modes. The human animal delayed consumption of immediate resources, developed hunting and farming techniques in order to store energy, and so then freed energy and resources for further technical development. The viewing eye also delayed immediate response, developing concepts and perceptive technologies that enabled greater viewing sophistication – the same replicating technologies that would supposedly sacrifice the reading brain to the merely stimulated eye. Apart from the general interest of observing a widespread anxiety regarding the brain’s own capacity to destroy itself through the very perceptive power that generated its supposedly proper potentiality in the first place, it is possible – rather than debating the goods and evils of self-loss – to orient this discussion towards the perception of futurity. Is not the problem of both sides – that we are losing our capacity to synthesize ourselves and that we are really, properly, nothing more than dynamic powers to perceive – that what is required today is an inhuman perception? Our very narration of the brain and its emergence as the properly synthesizing milieu from which all other imaging milieus need to be considered, shelters us from the thought of the inhuman images that confront us at the limits of the embodied eye. We might consider, here, Deleuze’s criticism of Bergson, which is technical and counter-vital. For Bergson the intellect cuts up the world for managerial efficiency and then subjects itself to that same technical calculus. Redemption lies in retracing the path, regaining a vitality that is no longer that of the organism, but a genuinely spiritual power to think beyond the extended units that we have used to organize the world. For Deleuze, the problem is that the eye remains too close to the lived; it is the cutting power of the eye that needs to be thought, but not in terms of its creation of discrete unites but as an analogue rather than digital synthesizer. Jacques Rancière has commented on a certain double nature of the image that defines art: commenting on Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Rancière notes that Barthes had begun his career by stripping images of their myth or lure by reading what appeared to be enigmatically frozen as actually the outcome of human history and labour.12 Barthes’ commitment to a reading that would return the frozen image to the dynamism of history was reversed in Camera Lucida, where Barthes referred to a dazzling power of the image as what is generated when photography becomes an art. For Rancière this is not noteworthy because of some interest in Barthes’ biography, but because it discloses art’s double relation to the image, a doubleness inherent not only in photography but also (for Rancière) in the novel. The novel as art at once describes and represents by way of images, and also draws attention to and destroys any simple notion that the image is secondary and effaces itself before that which it indexes. There is in Rancière’s notion of art as a release of the image from anything other than its own dazzling materiality a certain anthropocentrism of the aesthetic image; it 314 Claire Colebrook is as though release from systems of human reference would somehow yield the shining of light in itself. Man would be divided between his mundane anchored mode and his futural power of pure perception, with politics arriving fully in its grasp of its dynamic relation to sensation as such. This pure formalism is not tied to Rancière’s thought alone; it defines all anti-foundational liberalisms, and relies crucially on the subject’s capacity to erase its own memory and arrive at a moment of pure becoming, a pure openness to the radically inhuman counter- memory of sensation. To this extent all art leading up to the avant-garde would be art and image only to the degree to which it was anti-mimetic, or other than any form of reference, as though art somehow were god-like, freed from any necessity to be anything at all, liberated from all constituting relations. Correlatively, ‘the human’ is deemed to arrive at its own proper being when it is capable of scanning its own archive, recognizing itself as the improper animal par excellence, deeming itself to be an animal of both memory and memory’s erasure. In Rancière’s work there is the image as recording, and then the image as that which stands alone – allowing for imaging as such to appear. The aesthetic becomes ‘man’s’ way of recognizing his own power of inscription, recognition and then release from recognition. What renders such a privileging of sensation as such problematic is not only the moral binary it perpetuates between enslavement to capturing images and liberation via reflexivity, but a distinction between a universal self-reflexive humanity and a merely representational and captured subject. Against this privileging of aesthetic freedom, and against the lamentation of human self-extinction by way of image capture, I would propose that we consider a third side of the image that would be prompted by the thought experiment of extinction. By referring to extinction as a thought experiment, I want to move in two directions. If we think of the experimental passage to extinction as thought – if we imagine thinking as a variation that takes place from function but essentially risks all function – then thinking of life as mindful requires thinking of mind as intrinsically destructive. This would not be a repetition of the Western motif of man as the being who can transcend any given essence, but – quite the opposite – would admit a sedimentation of the unthought residues that operate in thinking. Rather than lament that human thought and memory are being destroyed by the very techniques that enabled their extension, and that man comes into being when he masters the medium of imaging, we might think of an extinction that comes from without and opens memory to new horizons. Thought occurs when relations between terms are destructive, when there is a not knowing or mispri- sion. Life occurs not with ongoing self-sameness, but with an experimental variation that could be construed as risk (except that risk implies betting, strategy or even the venturing of some being). It is only after variation that one might refer ex post facto to a mutation that is interpreted as good for some being or some environmental fit. There is just variation that is not variation of any being. If extinction is a thought experiment, it is because the process of extinction is a variation without a given end determined in advance; thinking possesses an annihilating power, and this is so both because the self is constituted by what it remembers, Losing the Self? 315 and by what it forgets for itself but is nevertheless remembered elsewhere – in all the archives that remain unread and unreadable. Today a certain thought of delimited extinction, the extinction of humans, opens up a variability or intrusion of a different side of the image. This is a geological, post-Anthropocene or disembodied image, where there is some experimental grasping at a world that would not be the world for a body, nor the world as body. It differs from an avant-garde immanence of aesthetic matters or sensations, for such notions tend towards a god-like self-sufficiency. What happens if one thinks of the vision of no one? The positing of an Anthropocene era deploys the idea of human imaging – the way we have read an inhuman past in the earth’s layers – but might extend beyond this speculation from the human by altering geological reading not just to refer to the past as it is for us, nor the future as it will be without us, but the present as it would be without an assumed reading humanity. Rather than think of the future from the inscribed archive, one might imagine other archives that would, in turn, re-inscribe the present from within. We might call this counter-memory: what other presents might have been, and are present virtually, harboured in all the inscriptions outside human recognition?

Notes

1. Paul Sheehan, Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 9–10. 2. Jussi Parikka, ‘Archival Media Theory’, in Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 13. 3. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 27. 4. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, in CTRL Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel (London: MIT Press, 2002), 319. 5. James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake (London: Wordsworth, 2012), 185.34–186.08. 6. Quoted in Andrew Anthony, ‘Karl Ove Knausgaard: “Writing is a way of getting rid of shame”’, The Observer, Sunday, 1 March 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/ books/2015/mar/01/karl-ove-knausgaard-interview-shame-dancing-in-the-dark. 7. Jason Tougaw, ‘Touching Brains’, Californica, 5 March 2013, http://californica. net/2013/03/05/touching-brains/. 8. Ibid. 9. Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinities and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham: Acumen, 2011), 29–30. 10. Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 79. 11. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller Roazen (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1998), 13. 12. Jacques Ranciè re, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 15. 37 Memory and Voices: Challenging Psychiatric Diagnosis through the Novel Patricia Waugh

A novelist might be thought of as a person who regularly speaks with the dead and the departed: as Hilary Mantel has observed, ‘only the medium and the writer are licensed to sit in a room by themselves with a whole crowd of imaginary people, listening and responding to them. Social convention allows the medium and the writer to talk to the dead’.1 Mantel brought the observation to life in Beyond Black (2005), taking the comic novel to new and unvisited places. A black comedy-cum-ghost story-state of the nation-satirical-fantastical work proposing ways in which we might expand our notions of selfhood and the real, it is her most audacious novel, her most wildly fantastic, and yet it is also the closest of all her novels to the autobiographical memories excavated in her memoir, Giving up the Ghost, published two years before. A familiar story of a youngish woman battling with the demons of an abusive childhood, Alison comforts herself with food and grows huge but, as she realises how her bulk confers an enviable ‘stage presence’, she sees too that her attunement to pain and suffering and her experience of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (AVHs), ‘hearing voices’, in non-medical jargon, allows her to somehow externalise an inner pain felt only as bodily and physiological suffering. That endows her with the gift of ‘sensitivity’, a hyper-vigilant awareness of others that means she can ‘listen in’ to the recesses of their inner lives, to memories and desires not even available to themselves. It is only at the end of the novel that the pieces of the plot come together to reveal that the strange voices and presences encountered by Alison are not visitations from a spirit world, but are emanations from her mind, dissociated memories of childhood abuse, protracted negligence, violence and violation of her mental and bodily integrity that have remained inaccessible until she allows into her house at the end of the novel the strange young man whose death opens her own capacity for feeling. (The plot, as we shall see, bears a more than passing resemblance to that of Mrs Dalloway, despite Mantel’s swipes at Woolf’s more ladylike suffering in her 2010 life-writing piece, Ink in the Blood). For most of the novel, and with the panache of her own creator, Alison unknowingly draws on memories, half-glimpsed in images of violence and violation, in phrases and strangely iterated words, that she cannot access in her own consciousness, voices from the past. They are appropriated though in the

316 Memory and Voices 317 reinvention of herself as a colourful neo-Victorian medium – one who, like those mediums that are novelists, ventriloquises from out of what Woolf called ‘the undermind’, the hidden reservoir behind explicit episodic memory. Accessed via the voice of others that seem to speak through those acknowledged as one’s own, their contents seem always to come from someone else’s experience, someone else’s past, someone else’s place. Through her own ‘voices’, Mantel opens up the possibilities of the comic novel in its capacity to empathise and engage with varieties and contexts of mental and physical suffering. In the space of a paragraph, she can transition from expres- sionist techniques that project emotional states, generated by implicit memories that evade conscious grasp, onto devastated landscapes; to a comic-satiric ventriloquism that indicts a conformist and commodified culture of greed for its failures in empathy. In one breath she can move from Alison’s uncanny and unknowing identification with the violated earth and the dug-over and trodden creatures of a building site, to vocal mimicry of the equally automatised but corporate unknow- ingness of Suzi, the estate agent’s agent, anxious to flog another utopian vision of life in a ‘Galleon home’. Mantel dares, riskily, to blend the techniques of the conventional trauma novel – the aftershocks of amnesia, broken narrative, haunting, flashbacks, suicide, visions and voice abuse and abandonment – with those of classic black comedy: surrealist juxtaposition, somatisation, gallows humour, satire, the grotesque and the reduction of the human to a machine. But what makes the novel so fascinating in part is how, detail for emotional detail, it picks up the motifs, themes and experiences that constitute Mantel’s own life, the life that she treats directly in the memoir. Here, she suggests how ‘writing about your past is like blundering through your house with the lights fused, a hand flailing for points of reference. [. . .] Lives start long before birth, long before conception [. . .] if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts within our lives [. . .] The country of the unborn is criss-crossed by the paths we turned our back on. In a sly state of half-becoming, they lurk in the shadowland of chances missed’.2 Where Alison, gang-raped, neglected and graphically abused, learns the power of imaginative and physical dissociation, Hilary, the dreamy and sensitive Catholic girl already afflicted with migraines, voices and visions, finds her childhood security split apart as mother moves lover Frank into the family household that is still inhabited by father, Henry. As lies and tensions build inside the home, ridicule, social ostracism and bullying becomes the staple of her experience outside. ‘Sometimes you come to a thing that you can’t write’ Mantel tells the reader in the memoir, and you become aware that your readers are ‘bracing themselves’ for some ‘revelation of sexual abuse’. What remains emotionally dif- fused in the melancholic prose of the memoir, intensifying as Mantel narrates the medical botching of her body, the subsequent loss of her sense of self as drugs bloat her body and dull her mind, the hysterectomy that removes the possibility of child-bearing, is rendered vividly and sensorily through the stylistic ‘ferrous gavotte’ of the novel: yes, she delivers the anticipated trauma of sexual abuse, but hardly in the manner of the conventional ‘trauma novel’ or the ‘misery memoir’. 318 Patricia Waugh

She requires the shock of the new, the bomb of comedy dropped in places endangered by bourgeois sentimentalisation. Horror and abuse are everywhere in this novel but concretised into the black comedy of the ‘fiends’, a ghostly but solid enough motley crew of Shakespearian rogues and a two foot high trickster figure who constantly plays menacingly with his flies. But evil as he seems, Morris is also Alison’s spirit guide; it is only when she can listen to as well as hear him that she discovers the terrible truth of her past and can finally shake off all of her demons. Mantel invokes the familiar metaphor of the house of fiction: ‘I am a shabby old building in an area of heavy shelling, which the inhabitants have vacated years ago’. But she writes to survive: ‘I am writing in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are. Spirit needs a house and lodges where it can [. . .] There are other people who, like me, have had the roots of their personality torn up. You need to find yourself, in the maze of social expectation, the thickets of memory: just which bits of you are left intact?’3 Writing imaginative fiction for Mantel is evidently the self-therapeutic process described by D. H. Lawrence; for others, however, Berryman, Lowell, Plath, for example (interestingly all poets), the experimental act of summoning the voices of memory, dredging up buried experience, is seen by Al Alvarez (1971) as putting the integrity of the self dangerously at risk. Brought up Catholic, Mantel was also brought up on transubstantiation, the reality of the spirit world, and the possibility of communication with the dead, but she also argues insistently that ‘If you skew the endocrine system, you lose the pathways to the self. When endocrine patterns change it alters the way you think and feel’.4 The history of trauma has swung periodically from the spiritual to the material, the psycho- genic to the physiological. Fiction can’t tell us much about the endocrine system, but it can offer unique insight into the way in which inner voices, the haunting and mostly half-glimpsed memories that bring into being the work of fiction, may also function to threaten and destroy the very integrity of the self: the self viewed not simply as an endocrine system or a flow of neurotransmitters or neuroplastic anatomy, but an interplay of experiences, past and present, that are straddled across body, mind, environment, language and time. For the novelist David Mitchell, writing a novel is a kind of ‘controlled personality disorder [. . .] to make it work you have to concentrate on the voices in your head and get them talking to each other’.5 We are all novelists, suggested the philosopher, Daniel Dennett (1992), a swipe perhaps at Freud’s idea of the unconscious as inherently ‘poetic’, but mainly alluding to the idea of the brain as a parallel processor, running off multiple ‘drafts’ that shape us into the narrative selves we become. But most of us aren’t literally novelists. Summoning voices with such intensity, living in the head for years at a time, calling up memories and making them real again would, for most of us, disorder our personalities, to say the least. Think about how voice controls memory in fiction: in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), for example, as the novel begins we are invited to follow the uncomprehending Benjy Compson’s gaze ‘all along the fence’. But what has brought Benjy to the perimeter fence of the golf course is not sight, but sound; Memory and Voices 319 it is the sound of a voice reverberating as memory, taking him back in time, the cry of ‘caddy’ that echoes in his head, making emotionally present again his long departed and disowned sister who, until her disgrace, has loved him with a kind of maternal fervour so lacking in the cold and self-absorbed Mrs Compson. Similarly, in the opening of Mrs Dalloway (1925), Clarissa’s transportation into the past of girlhood is effected through a train of thought, conveyed through free indirect discourse, where the word ‘hinge’ – Rumpelmayer’s men are coming to take the doors off their hinges – brings an imaginary sound into Clarissa’s mind, a ‘squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now’, as the doors are opened into her young womanhood and the romantic complications at Bourton, as she ‘plunges’ into a past made present through a doubling of space and temporality.6 Novelists, though, mostly use writing to liberate but control the force of memory, controlling thereby their own absorption into the past or creative dissociation from the actual present. They intuit the implicit agency of the inner voice, its ready attunement to a world of interlocutors, in order to create imaginary characters whose intentionalities entangle with those of real readers. The novelist problematises ontological boundaries without ever becoming fixed in the delusional, without inner voices becoming uncontrolled hallucination, without the present becoming entirely submerged by the newly liberated past. So might greater reflection on the voices of the novelistic process contribute to understanding of the emergence of AVHs and/or appropriate therapeutic responses? Avatar or dialogue therapies already work on principles akin to the creation of fictional worlds and characters. The assumption that hearing voices is inevitably psychotic, predominantly a first rank symptom of schizophrenia, is now under review; AVHs are acknowledged aspects of grief, spiritual insight, voluntarily dissociated states such as meditation; they might follow traumatic events, abusive experiences, prolonged stress or sensory deprivation. Persecutory voices might arise out of conditions of anxiety or hypervigilance or out of ruminative or obsessional thinking, where thought is no longer in the gift of the thinker, its agency annihilated by self-generating and uncontrolled iteration. Most of all, the experience of hearing voices is associated with disturbances in, disrupted patterns of, memory and the processes of laying down and retrieving memories, so that the inner dialogue that normally orients and grounds the self is flooded and set adrift in space but especially in time; voices or a kind of confabulated – ‘gist’ – version of voices of the past return in inner speech as voices of others, the not me, voices that might be commenting on me, punitive, derogatory, admonishing, whispering suicidal commands, as well as offering comforting and conciliatory noises. Recent research by Bentall, Van der Hart, Herman, Moskowitz, and many other psychologists has revealed how the phenomenon of auditory verbal hallucinations might more appropriately be understood as a dissociative memory disorder rather than a psychotic phenomenon as such, and might therefore be viewed on a continuum with other kinds of experiences of memory and voice that are non- clinical: creating verbal worlds and characters as in writing fiction, or hearing the voice of the departed, as in grief.7 Strong empirical associations have been demonstrated, in particular, between traumatic experiences of childhood neglect 320 Patricia Waugh and abuse and later distressing experiences of voice hearing normally regarded as psychotic where the voices seem to carry disowned components – the disremembered parts – of the past self and its experience. Dissociated fragmentation is here understood as a protective mechanism allowing the individual to block or numb or detach psychologically from events that are too overwhelming to process. Interestingly, although this perception of hearing voices, which, for most of the last hundred years, has been regarded as the first rank symptom of schizophrenia, is only now being acknowledged in medical research. Yet the discourse of dissociation, with its roots in nineteenth century psychology, has during that time been kept continuously alive in literary writing and, particularly, by novelists in their fictional works. The French psychiatrist Moreau de Tours first observed how psychotic symptoms, especially voices, seemed to be bound to experiences of trauma and distressing events that often remained hidden to memory or attempts at recall. Indeed, later in the century Pierre Janet developed techniques of hypnosis that allowed him to reinvoke painful scenes, long lost to conscious memory, and, while under hypnosis, to enter the patient’s vocalisation of the memory and change the voices (Janet 1907). Janet’s interventions would most certainly now be con- demned as unethical, and yet the dialogue and avatar therapies that are proving most successful work essentially in this way but with patient co-operation, to rewrite the narrative, find new interpretative frames – most obviously, too, akin to those employed by novelists to retrieve and discover voices and shape them into full-blown characters in writing their novels. Numerous novels, perhaps most famously Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), chart that process as the telling of the emergence of the fiction itself as indeed do other fictionalised accounts of voice hearing experiences such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Muriel Spark’s The Comforters (1957) or Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). Yet the process of demonstrating with clinical accuracy the relation between voices and forgotten traumatic experience is a difficult one, fraught with problems: memory itself is notoriously unreliable, confabulatory; therapeutic procedures always risk planting suggestive clues that may trigger further confabulation. But as researchers accept that Auditory Verbal Hallucinations arise in many modes and dimensions, many of them associated with traumatic experiences or forgotten periods of protracted stress, the more descriptions and formal representations available, the more understanding may be enhanced and expanded. Novels – fictional worlds built out of voices – have much to offer for even as they are imaginary worlds they are built out of the inner voices of real individuals. So Mitchell’s focus, as a novelist, unlike Dennett’s, a philosopher, is on voices rather than narratives as key to the constitution of a self and a storyworld. Virginia Woolf too suggested we are ‘mosaic’ rather than monad: well before the self is narrativised, self-awareness emerges in our ability to model other minds in our own and to turn that capacity recursively inwards, so our inner life is grasped as divided between thinker and thought before becoming narrator and narrated. Furthermore, as Unamuno noted in 1913, all this is achieved though voice: ‘to Memory and Voices 321 think is to talk with oneself, and each of us talks to himself because we have had to talk with one another [. . .] Thought is interior language and internal language originates in external language’.8 If I turn my attention inwards, my thoughts may appear as a pale echo of my own voice but ‘I’ may seem unlocatable, oddly outside. Whose is the voice I hear? Is it ‘me’ or ‘mine’, something not me, but that I own? If I listen too hard and for too long, I risk losing ownership of, let alone identity with, my voices; I may feel more like a ventriloquist’s dummy than a self. Or I may retain ownership but lose agency, hearing ‘my’ voice but disconnected from me, expressing alien content that seems not my own. My sense of self is evidently at times a precarious achievement. Losing it – the self – is the risk taken in the performance of internal negative capability that is writing a novel. Not simply losing control of one’s voice, but a sense of the relationship between myself and my voices. Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre is a self-conscious performance of such perplexity: whether he authors characters out of voices that are his, or whether they, the voices, author him: ‘Who says this, saying it’s me? [. . .] It’s the same old stranger as ever, for whom alone accusative I exist, in the pit of my inexistence, of his, of ours’.9 For Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, too, we continuously ‘walk through ourselves’, encountering the voices of characters we’ve met, never quite knowing whose thoughts we’re ‘chewing’.10 Even getting lost in a novel as readers, is to find ourselves decentred, hallucinating the voices of others, hearing our own played back through the new and strange. Dickens, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Beckett, Woolf, Waugh, Spark, Coetzee, Mantel and many other novelists who ‘hear voices’ that conform to the diagnostic category of AVHs, have reflected on how composition summons but facilitates control of voices that may express unacknowledged aspects of the self, expand, yet threaten to dissolve, its boundaries. Most documented of all is Virginia Woolf: letters, diaries, talks, memoirs, essays, fiction, offer a wealth of representations and reflections. The writings on madness, neurasthenia and degeneration of her doctors, George Savage, Maurice Craig, T. B. Hyslop, and the more enlightened Henry Head, offer considerable insights into the medical understanding of her illness. In Mrs Dalloway (1925), Woolf explicitly fictionalised the psychotic voice-hearing that she herself associated with barely remembered early experiences of violation and loss: childhood sexual abuse, patriarchal bullying, deaths of mother and siblings. But she displaces her experience onto the war veteran, Septimus Smith, and sets the novel in 1922, the year of the publication of the first official Report on Shell Shock. Septimus’s inability to communicate his memories and felt horror is compounded – like Woolf’s own – by the ‘violators of the soul’, his term for his doctors, with their physiologically reductionist preoccupation with eating and rest for exhausted ‘nerves’, their refusal to listen to his ‘message’. The doctors don’t listen to what the voices are trying to communicate; so Septimus kills himself. Woolf’s own suicide in 1941 occurred when, convinced she could no longer write and therefore ‘communicate’ her own message, she left a suicide note to her sister intimating that the voices had returned but, because no longer communicable, no longer within her control. 322 Patricia Waugh

Woolf likened the precariousness of writing to madness, walking out exposed, without protection, onto an illuminated ledge, over a dark and unknown sea.11 Both involve the release of voices, memories hitherto unheard, the voluntary rendering over of the self to a disunity that would test even the most heroic or steely capacity for control. Salman Rushdie’s figure for this is his narrator Saleem, whose body is splitting and peeling, exploding with the pressure of voices ‘jostling inside’, his head a kind of digital radio tuning into the inner speech of a world of ‘midnight’s children’.12 Like many writers – as ancient theories of ‘inspiration’ suggest – Woolf felt there was something ‘mystical’ about this ‘hearing’ and understood her voices as bringing the possibility of a new interpretive frame, ‘a message’, that might allow the recovery of meaning lost to explicit memory and an expanded feeling of integrity. Hearing voices in so many novels – in Woolf, Morrison, Spark, Waugh – is presented as part of the mind’s capacity for ‘abduc- tive’ logic, its confabulatory genius when under duress. When the self shatters and reason fathoms no simple or linear cause because the past refuses to render up its secrets, the process of turning voices, its traces, into the characters of a world – the ghost of the dead daughter in Beloved or the double of Clarissa, that is Septimus, in Mrs Dalloway – allows for externalisation and therefore control of intense but often unfelt emotions, horror, terror, grief, whose acknowledgement and expression opens a path for their reintegration. Since the nineteenth century, fascination with dissociation and the notion of an ‘intelligent unconscious’ manifesting as a voice or a figure who is bearer of truths that the self is unable to face or acknowledge, has provided a major impetus for themes and formal motifs of fiction: from the materialisation of Jane Eyre’s anger in the ravings of the mad Bertha Mason, to the birth of the double, the inner voice that is externalised in Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Dostoevsky’s The Double was the inspiration for the invention of Septimus as the alter ego of the suicidal society hostess Clarissa Dalloway, saved finally by the ‘message’ of his death as she at last is able to feel: the ‘thud’ of his defenestrating body resounding through her own and through the boom of Big Ben.13 Novels are more than thematisations of hearing voice experiences: their formal use of voice reminds us how our inner lives are also a performance of auto- ventriloquism. The ‘voices’ we hear as our own in the flow of thought, of inner speech, are often internalisations of the dialogues now disremembered but through which we have become selves: the prohibitions, taboos, reproofs, encour- agements, that set up a kind of diasporic babble within a ‘Sunday park of contend- ing and contentious orators’, in T. S. Eliot’s words.14 In being definitively attuned to interiority, therefore, the novel is also most attuned to social context. Inner and outer are in constant reciprocal relation. Novels shift the normative metaphor for knowing from ‘seeing’ to ‘hearing’; they suggest the self is more a membrane, where inner and outer flow and mingle, than it is a distinct spectator who gazes on a world constituted and awaiting measurement. The first fictional character in English was Robinson Crusoe, a survivor, living alone for 27 years after the trauma of shipwreck. Like his author, Crusoe is saved by his ability to listen and respond to his inner voices, and to allow them speak to each other. ‘Better than sociable’, Memory and Voices 323 he describes his time on the island. Voices of despair are countered by those of a personified Reason, God speaking to him, to make the best of it, for invoking his drowned companions, ‘Where are the rest of you? [. . .] Is it better to be here or there, and then I pointed to the sea?’15 Does Crusoe actually or mentally point to the sea? We don’t know. Fictional voice blurs the boundary between inner and outer, imaginary and ‘real’. Voices allow externalisation of emotion; imaginary friends, they provide ‘a great deal of comfort within’. Only once does a voice bring terror: his parrot startling him out of sleep, mimicking his master’s despairing cry, ‘Poor Robinson Crusoe’. Why terror? It is his voice but now owned by another, an alien tormentor with its own agency liberated into the world. It was after reading Dostoevsky that the narrative theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, developed his concept of ‘double voicing’; in novels, the author ‘uses another voice by inserting a new semantic intentionality into a discourse which retains an intention of its own’.16 In fiction, a ghostly trace of another is heard through every voice: through tone, mimicry, stylistic nuance. As Woolf depicts Mrs Ramsay’s flow of inner speech in To the Lighthouse, she is pondering whether her children will remember any of their childhood experience as a stay in the future against the inevitable erosion of time that is death. When thinking ‘children don’t forget’, she is ‘instantly annoyed’ by an alien voice calling out ‘we are in the hands of the Lord’. ‘Who had said it?’ the text asks.17 Does the alien voice of Victorian religiosity simply pop up in her thoughts, or does she speak it aloud? It is impossible to know: fiction reminds us how the self is interwoven with the world, how the mind’s recursivity not only allows other minds to be modelled in and heard through one’s own, but also how the mind seems evolved for time- travel, for bringing the past back into the present as though one inhabited it once more. Inner and outer, past and present, flow across the membrane of the self. Like Bakhtin (and possibly Vygotsky, the first psychologist of inner speech), Woolf’s fascination with the possibility that novels might illuminate the dialogic nature of inner voices began with her reading of Dostoevsky (see Vygotsky 1987). In life, as in fiction, for Dostoevsky and Woolf, voices ‘act upon, influence, and in one way or another determine the author’s discourse’.18 Voices might be ten- ants or strangers to whom one extends hospitality, setting them talking to each other; but they might also be guests who refuse to leave, take over and threaten the host. Novels transport the self beyond its safely policed boundaries, exposing the precarious harmony that is the polyphony of consciousness. They remind us, as Clarissa Dalloway thinks to herself, that to live, even for a moment, is dangerous.19

Notes

1. Hilary Mantel, Giving up the Ghost: A Memoir (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), 54. 2. Mantel, Giving up the Ghost, 222–223. 3. Mantel, Giving up the Ghost, 216. 4. Mantel, Giving up the Ghost, 239. 5. David Mitchell, in interview with John Freeman, How to Read a Novelist (London: Constable and Robinson, 2013), 200. 324 Patricia Waugh

6. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3. 7. There is now a huge literature on this topic. For a useful overview of recent research on dissociation and voice hearing, see Eleanor Longdon, Anna Madill and Mitch G. Waterman, ‘Dissociation, Trauma, and the Role of Lived Experience: Toward a New Conceptualisation of Voice Hearing’, Psychological Bulletin (New York: American Psychological Association, 2011), 1–49. 8. Quoted in Stephen Toulmin, ‘The Inwardness of Mental Life’, Critical Inquiry Autumn (1979), 7. 9. Samuel Beckett, ‘Texts for Nothing’, The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989 (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 91. 10. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 2000), 162. 11. Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf (6 vols), vol. 4, ed. Nigel Nicholson (London: Hogarth Press, 1975–1980), 231. 12. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Picador, 1991), 4. 13. Woolf discusses the decision to write Septimus as Clarissa’s double in the first New York edition of the novel, also published in 1925. 14. T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 25. 15. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: Norton, 1975), 78. 16. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics: Theory and History of Literature, 8, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 1984), 189. 17. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), 102–103. 18. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 195. 19. The research for this essay was supported by a Wellcome Trust strategic award (WT098455MA). 38 Rereading the Self Alison Waller

Returning after many years to a meaningful childhood book can be seductive and painful in equal measures: certainly it offers any bookish adult an intriguing method for exploring memory and subjectivity, as several recent memoirists have discovered.1 A range of metaphors have been employed to describe the process of remembering and rereading in relation to readerly identity. In a 1906 essay on reading, Marcel Proust describes childhood books as ‘the sole calendars we have left of those bygone days’,2 suggesting that they have a valuable referential purpose: they are what critic Matai Calinescu glosses as ‘pretexts for remembering, occasions for attempting to re-explore certain spaces of memory and to relive certain events and impressions of our personal past which coincided in time with their reading’.3 Childhood books can also be understood in terms of a spatial, rather than temporal index. Feminist critics Betsy Hearne and Roberta Seelinger Trites explore the way that texts encountered in youth can function as ‘narrative compasses’ to guide readers in their lives and to act as points on a map giving shape to identity.4 But in many cases of remembering early reading experiences these indexical metaphors of calendar or compass seem rather too orderly and precise, suggesting a direct and single correlation between reader and text that can be pinpointed with accuracy in time or space. Is there a metaphor for revisiting books from the past that expresses a messier relationship between remembered book and remembered self, and a more organic process of rediscovery? A psy- choanalytical model offers up an option for one commentator, who describes a story by Mark Twain going ‘underwater to drift in the currents of my unconscious mind’, presumably ready to be washed up at a later date on the shores of adult consciousness.5 I prefer an earthier image, however, and propose that rereading a long-forgotten childhood book is sometimes like digging up a time capsule. The action not only reveals a half-forgotten literary treasure, often muddied by words or illustrations not properly retained in memory over time; it also brings to mind a youthful self and his or her experience of reading that can challenge any current sense of coherent identity. The archaeological activity of unearthing something from the past has the thrill of adventure and of the unknown, but simultaneously the cultural artefact being recovered is familiar and tied to autobiographical experience.

325 326 Alison Waller

Digging up the past in such a way can be a risky and laborious activity. Proust recognised this fact in another of his musings on childhood reading, where the exact references between book and self suggested by calendars of days vanished gives way to an unrulier set of connections. The Proustian hero of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is tempted to reread his childhood favourite when he comes across a copy of George Sand’s François le Champi while browsing his host’s library shelves. He resists, however, recognising that he could too easily cover up precious memories he maintains about the book and his mother reading it to him. Moreover, he fears that his own sense of his younger self would also be damaged through this kind of readerly digging, getting ‘buried in oblivion’.6 This example from Proust’s fiction hints at the treacherous potential of treasure-hunting amongst books of the past by pointing to the complex and entangled relationship between young reader and text, implying that on returning to a childhood book in adulthood one might unearth fragments about both a remembered narrative and remembered self that necessitate puzzling over and interpreting. Memory is always an active exercise in imagination, of course: ‘[t]o remember is not like watching a video’.7 Cultural critic John Frow argues for memory to be understood as a form of textuality, a model which Anne Whitehead describes as ‘predicated on the non-existence of the past, with the consequence that memory, rather than being the repletion of physical traces of the past, is a construction of it under conditions and constraints determined by the present’.8 Here I will briefly explore the implications for multiple selfhoods emerging from recollections of the reading self and the capacity for self-deception to play a part in this process, drawing on responses from participants who took part in my recent project about rereading childhood books. I asked a group of adult readers to identify a significant book from their youth and recall as much detail as they could about its content and appearance, and of the circumstances and influence of reading it as a child. One of the participants in my study, 78-year-old Clive,9 described himself as an enthusiastic reader, both as a child and into adulthood. The Water-Babies (1863) was an important part of his early reading history and in interview we discussed his memories of the story of young chimney sweep Tom who runs away from his master. Readers who include Charles Kingsley’s novel as part of their memories of childhood reading tend to be divided in their remembered emotional responses. 67-year-old Rachel specifically recollected the episode in which Tom falls into a stream when trying to escape and is transformed into a water-baby, and she recalls her younger self enjoying the moment’s thrilling sense of freedom. In contrast, Clive’s memory of the text centres on his realisation at reaching this point in the story that Tom appears to have tragically drowned. Tom tumbles into a ‘clear cool stream’, falls asleep ‘into the quietest, sunniest, cosiest sleep that ever he had had in his life’, and later a ‘black thing’ is found in the water. Clive describes how his child self was affected by this traumatic incident in the narrative, and how he fled from the book without finishing it:

Well my mother read it to me and I, I, it upset me greatly and I, I made her stop reading it. I said I can’t stand this, you know. And I think, I mean the incident of the drowning I think is what I found. Well firstly, of course, I mean, Tom Rereading the Self 327

is very badly treated, you know. Um, and that was all very painful. Um . . . and then of course when he, when he jumps in the river and, and drowns, no I found that very distressing.

As a time capsule, The Water-Babies provides scraps of information about Clive’s early reading – or listening – identity and offers some clues about how that subjectivity has altered over time. The reconstructed memory of his youthful response to Kingsley’s novel suggests a reader who is both dependent (he is being read to by a parent) but also assured (he chooses when to end the reading experience); it also indicates a highly empathetic reader who remembers the ‘distressing’ episode at the river for its tragic overtones rather than for its shift into redemptive fantasy (it seems quite likely that as a child he never reached the moment where Kingsley’s narrator notes that Tom is in fact ‘quite alive’ and has become a water-baby). On rereading Kingsley’s novel as an adult at my request, Clive reports on his new response to Tom’s watery fate: ‘Well I just skated past it . . . obviously at this age it didn’t distress me at all’. According to Clive’s account of rereading, as an adult he can distance himself from the traumatic moment of apparent drowning without feeling pity for the young protagonist so intensely. The transition from identification with the protagonist to ‘skimming’ for plot in this case reflects Joseph Appleyard’s model of reading development, in which early childhood is most clearly marked by the ‘reader as hero’ and adulthood by the ‘pragmatic reader’.10 Clive’s claim that his lack of distress as an adult reader of The Water-Babies is inevitable – ‘obviously at this age it didn’t distress me at all’ – is worth interrogating because he has a similar response to his revisiting of two other childhood favourites: A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner (1926 and 1928). These storybooks were read to him around the age of three or four by his father, and he remembers that they offered him great ‘comfort and familiarity’. The affection he felt for these books when he was a boy may help him remember Milne’s characters, episodes and playful language with more vividness and accuracy than other books from that period in his life. However, Clive notes that ‘it’s not a book I’d spend much time on these days’. His comment asserts a need to separate himself as adult reader from his childhood self and from his youthful emotional connection to books or significant textual moments. Winnie-the-Pooh acts as a referential marker for an alien subjectivity: a calendar of days that are indeed lost. Again, the developmental and experiential differences between children and adults might account for Clive’s partition of his early literary taste, although throughout the history of children’s literature many serious attempts have been made to challenge commonsense assumptions about what children and adults like to read. For example, in his treatise ‘On Fairy Stories’ first published in 1947, J. R. R. Tolkien countered the claim made by fairy-tale collector Andrew Lang that children have a natural love of marvels and the marvellous, basing his rebuttal on the authority of recollection: ‘Lang’s description does not fit my own memories [. . .] speaking for myself as a child, I can only say that a liking for fairy-stories was not a dominant characteristic of early taste’.11 Tolkien values fairy tales more as a 328 Alison Waller

‘grown-up’ than he did as a child, according to his remembered account; whereas the worth of Winnie-the-Pooh moves in the opposite direction for Clive. What is clear is that there are at least three versions of the self in the image of the time capsule. The adult who remembers a buried book is separate both from the adult rereader who digs it up to reread, and from the image of the child reader who is released from the capsule alongside it. This remembering adult provides a connection between the other two selves which allows us to imagine a textual subjectivity that exists over time, a sense of self that Paul Ricœur considers via the complex ‘connectedness of life’12 and which Peter Hollindale frames specifically as ‘childness’, a ‘meaningful continuity between child and adult’.13 In Clive’s case, his remembering identity indicates a continued anxiety around the fate of Kingsley’s chimney sweep that extends from childhood, even though in the actual event of rereading as an adult that unease seems to have been dispelled. Digging for the past can only ever unearth fragments that can be put together in many different ways once they reach the surface once more. Sociologist Maurice Halbwach has made the case for recognising the creative and dynamic aspects of memory in precisely these terms. He observes that memories of childhood are continually reproduced or repeated at different stages of life and therefore cannot be considered as ‘intact vertebra of fossil animals’.14 For this reason, he asserts, coming across a well-loved book from childhood provokes unrealistic anticipation in nostalgic adult readers because we erroneously believe that we can ‘recall the mental state in which we found ourselves at that time’.15 It is clear that a ‘true’ account of our reading childhood self is not simply ‘out there’ to be dug up like a fossil, which is why the anthropological and purposeful metaphor of time capsule seems to be more useful. A long-lost childhood book and attendant memories of it might act as the capsule full of intriguing fragments; however active memory must still become a tool for interpretation.

Notes

1. Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built is one of the most successful bibliographic memoirs from the last two decades (London: Faber and Faber, 2002): it builds a textual account of the author’s childhood through reflections on key books from that part of his life. Patricia Meyer Spacks attempted a similar project in 2011 with On Rereading (Cambridge, Mass. and London: the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), producing ‘an autobiography of thoughts and feelings elicited by novels’ (18). Other examples include Wendy Lesser’s Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002) and essays from The American Scholar collected by Anne Fadiman in Rereadings (New York: Farrar, Struas and Giroux, 2005). 2. Marcel Proust, On Reading, with Sesame and Lilies I: Of King’s Treasuries by John Ruskin (1906), trans. and ed. Damion Searls (London: Hesperus Press, 2011), 4. 3. Matai Calinescu, Rereading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 96. 4. See Betsy Hearne and Roberta Seelinger Trites (eds), A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 5. Madison Smartt Bell, ‘A Child’s-Eye Reading of Mark Twain’, in Twice-Told Children’s Tales: the Influence of Childhood Reading on Writers for Adults, ed. Betty Greenway (New York and London: Routledge, 2005). Rereading the Self 329

6. Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again (1927), trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2002), 196. 7. Steph Lawler, ‘Stories and the Social World’, in Research Methods for Cultural Studies, ed. Michael Pickering (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 39. 8. Anne Whitehead, Memory (London: Routledge, 2008), 49. 9. Names of participants have been changed. 10. Joseph Appleyard, Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 11. J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’, in Tree and Leaf (London: Unwin, 1964), 39–40. 12. Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another (1990/1992), trans. and ed.Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 115. 13. Peter Hollindale, Signs of Childness (Stroud: Thimble Press, 1997), 49. 14. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis Coser (1941/1952) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 47. 15. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 46. 39 Neuroscience and Posthuman M emory Robert Pepperell

In the early 1980s a remarkable piece of evidence was uncovered about the importance of the brain in our everyday conscious life, but it has not been widely discussed since. At that time a young man was given one of the earliest brain scans. He had hydrocephalus, commonly known as ‘water on the brain’, which is a rare medical condition in which the fluid filled ventricles of the brain are exces- sively enlarged. In severe cases this can dramatically inhibit the development of brain tissue, and in the case of this man resulted in him having only a small fraction of the normal amount of cortex. The doctor who studied him described him as having ‘virtually no brain’.1 Yet despite this he had led a full life, having obtained a first class degree in mathematics. Many other similar cases are documented in the medical literature (Berker et al. 1992). Our culture is becoming ever more ‘neurocentric’, with the prefix ‘neuro’ being tagged to disciplines as diverse as marketing, law, aesthetics and economics. The brain is often invoked as the essence of human nature itself, so that experts can confidently assert: ‘We are our brain’.2 But it is worth considering whether the importance of the brain as the seat of conscious life has been oversold. What do brains do? On their own, it seems very little. A brain in a vat, as the perennial philosophical problem illustrates, is inert with respect to the world around it. Perplexingly, the very organ that supposedly provides us with all the feelings and sensations that make life worth living can itself feel nothing at all. Surgeons can freely operate on the brains of patients who are fully conscious. There is no doubt that brains, as constituent parts of functioning bodies, play an important role. If we alter the structure of the brain, through surgery or trauma, then there will often be consequences for the patient, which are usually predictable. Sometimes minute interventions, in the form of chemicals or electronic stimulation, can produce large psychological or physiological effects. But it is also true that significant disruption of brain structure, through surgery, illness or accident, can result in only minimal effects on the life of the subject, or no perceptible effects at all. A man recently shot a 3.5 inch nail into his head without noticing until he became nauseous a day or so later.3 All this adds to the mystery of this organ, which is perhaps now the most studied but least understood in the body.

330 Neuroscience and Posthuman Memory 331

If the state of the brain determines the condition of the human, as scientists such as Dick Swaab believe, then our current level of ignorance about what brains do betrays a corresponding level of ignorance about what it is to be human. No-one now working on the problem has any idea how neurological activity in the head can give rise to subjective experience (if indeed it does at all). The question of what it is to be a human remains open, and despite all its remarkable advances in recent years neuroscience can offer few answers. If anything, much research has demonstrated that features of experience we often regard as quintessentially human, such as the freedom and volition of our own ideas and decisions, are more likely attributable to unconscious processes over which we have little or no control (Soon et al. 2008). The danger with much neuroscientific research, or at least the way some of that research is reported, is that it equates what it is to be a human being with being a brain. But if we can live full and rewarding lives effectively without brains then it suggests human nature must be attributable to something else. So what else might this be? One response is that we misunderstand what it is to be a human if we confine humanity to any specific object or process. To believe that the essence of a human being is contained in the brain, or part of the brain, or even within the skin of the body, is simply to ignore an enormous range of highly complex and integrated processes going on around the body that contribute in fundamentally important ways to the existence of that being. A human life is constituted by a widely distributed array of forces and substances (gravity, light, air, moisture, energy and so on), all of which collectively contribute to that life. Elsewhere I have termed this expanded, integrated, view of human being the ‘posthuman’ view to distinguish it from those humanistic views which regard the human as distinct, unique and often as superior to everything else in nature (Pepperell 1995). Posthumanism is often painted as an apocalyptic prognosis for our continued existence. Transhumanists and other associated groups are actively promoting versions of a ‘human free’ world, most commonly citing rapid technological advances as eventually eliminating our current mode of existence. Whether we are ultimately converted from biological into digital beings, or rapidly superseded by an approaching ‘singularity’, in which artificial intelligence systems evolve beyond a critical threshold and gain dominance over us, it seems the way we live now will not go on forever. It is argued that the fact that we see no evidence of other intelligent life in the near Universe is a consequence of a certain cosmic truth: that all life forms that develop high levels of technological sophistication ultimately erase themselves. But many of these digital destruction scenarios are founded on a mistaken notion of what technology is. It is not an autonomous, ultimately independent force of nature that we have seeded and nurtured only to be eradicated by. Technology is, and always was, part of what it is to be a human. Technological extension is a natural feature of the human condition, and we improperly delimit human existence by drawing an arbitrary boundary between machines and our selves. There never was a biological-mechanical divide since the boundary of the human never ended at the skin. But perhaps we are only now, at this point in our history, in a position to fully recognize this. Just as nothing a human does can be 332 Robert Pepperell called inhuman, so nothing consequent on our actions or behaviour, or deeply embedded in that action of behaviour, can be excluded from the human domain. Under the posthuman paradigm, the human is recognised as the boundless and widely distributed energy structure it always was. All this has repercussions for our conception of mental attributes, like memory. Douwe Draaisma has shown how we tend to conceive of memory in terms of the most advanced technology available at any time, from clockwork mechanisms, through the weaving loom, to steam engines, electrical relays and most recently the digital computer (Draaisma 2000). But the computer metaphor, which encourages talk of ‘coding’, ‘information’ and ‘programming’ in relation to psychic processes, is looking ever less appropriate in light of recent discoveries about the way our brains actually work. Rather than uncovering neatly organised ‘circuits’ that perform discrete functions, we find a far more messy, counterintuitive arrangement in which the same neural cluster can be involved in several different tasks at once, where inconceivably intricate feedback and feed-forward loops resonate in unpredictable ways, and where activity is widely distributed across the brain as whole.4 The notion that ideas or memories – such as the memory I have of my grandmother – might be straightforwardly ‘encoded’ in a specific neuron (the so-called ‘grandmother cell’ hypothesis) is now entirely discredited (Gross 2002). What would it mean anyway for something to be ‘encoded’ in a cell? In a post-digital view of nature, which denies the possibility of representing the full complexity of natural processes with discrete informational units, we are pushed back to analogical thinking (Pepperell and Punt 2000). In analogue systems, the parts affect each other because they are physically integrated (the lever moves the cog which moves the dial in such a way that the dial can be considered an extension of the lever). In an analogue description of memory we can find no break in the continuum between worldly event, bodily event and mental event. Digital models of the mind, meanwhile, are composed of discrete units of information processed by a computational system. Digitally encoded data are not contingent on the hardware that stores them – the same sequence could be instantiated in any suitable substrate. This could not be the case with brains, where the very biochemical structure, physically shaped by experience over a lifetime, is a constituent of the mental process itself, as is the body and the world it inhabits. If we want to better understand memory we cannot rely on a neurocentric, digital or computational approach. The mind and the memories associated with it are not solely attributable to the brain, let alone any ‘circuit’ within the brain. Mental events are distributed through the brain, body and the world, across space and time. My thoughts about home when I’m away are, at least in part, attributes of the home itself and my involvement with it; my thoughts about childhood are composed of (not simply representations of) the countless interactions and events in which I partook. To deny this is to conspire in the widely promoted programme that seeks to eliminate our humanity by reducing it to an informational stream. This, to my mind, is a more pervasive and insidious strategy for human extinction that the one in which we are simply crushed by our own incompetence, or sacrificed to our own ingenuity. Neuroscience and Posthuman Memory 333

Notes

1. Roger Lewin, ‘Is Your Brain Really Necessary?’ Science 12,210(4475) (1980), 1232. 2. Dick Swaab, ‘We Are Our Brain’, Academy Magazine, Winter 2005/2006 (2005), 16. 3. ‘Man Shoots Nail Into Head Without Noticing’, BBC News, accessed 14 January 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16663332. 4. See also Yadin Dudai’s (2010) account of the elusiveness of localized physical traces of memories in neural tissue. 40 The Confabulation of Self Joanna J. Bryson

Confabulation is a technical term for a process typically ascribed to patients who have problems with their memory or their self awareness. We ask a patient why they have done something, and they tell us a narrative that sounds like a memory, but that we know to be false. So we say that the patient has confabulated. Their unconscious (but still diseased) mind has drawn together disparate stories in a desperate attempt to make their recent actions—and lives—make sense. Such a case is described by Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998). A patient denies that they have lost control of an arm after a stroke. To test whether the patient really believes they still have the use of two arms, they are handed a tray. The patient, who does indeed still believe both arms work, grasps only one side of the tray, allowing the contents to spill. When asked why the contents have spilled, the patient confabulates ‘I didn’t want them’. Oddly though, despite the lack of conscious access, the patient is remembering the fact of their paralysis. When their inner ear (part of the vestibular system) is stimulated with a shock of cold water, they report not only awareness of their paralysis but also of how long they have been afflicted. When their vestibular system recovers, they can recall the event of a cold ear, but not what they said concerning their paralysis. Confabulation is both convincing and fluid, and it happens not only to the ill or injured. Experimental subjects falsely accused of breaking a computer by pressing a wrong key can come to believe the accusation, and even sign a confession (Kassin and Kiechel 1996). This internalisation of the projected guilt only occurs if the accused had been working rapidly (lowering their own certainty of events) and another witness is present that swears to have observed the event. In such a case, a subject can comes to believe and even recall what seems to be the most likely explanation. Similarly, subjects fail to notice if a person they are giving directions to changes gender or race while some ‘movers’ (further stooges of the experiment) briefly come between the subject and the person to whom they are talking (Simons and Levin 1998; Levin et al. 2000). How likely is it for someone to change race or gender? The memory corrects itself without troubling the subject’s conscious recall. These are also forms of confabulation: false recall of events known not to have occurred.

334 The Confabulation of Self 335

One explanation for such lucid and transparent constructions is simple—all narrative memory is essentially confabulation. Recalling narratives is not something at which we are all inherently skilled. This is why we value story tellers and those with good recollection, and why we use external devices like books to record our narratives for us. This is strikingly different from how well and easily we recall whether we have seen a picture before, or how fluently we speak. It is more like our capacity to catch and throw—something we practice for years, something for which you can find adults who still perform weakly, but ordinarily they do better than 12-year-olds, who are in turn better than the average six-year-old. What most cognitive species are good at is, first, remembering contexts, and second, learning to associate them with ideal actions (Heyes 2012). This allows us to learn what to do when, to respond to opportunities, to behave quickly and intelligently. But for humans, this is not enough. We wish to make complicated, multi-step plans, learning not only actions but consequences. These consequences will create a new context, allowing us to produce a chain of actions and contexts to string complex and clever sequences into a grand design. We can use this same ability to deduce what must have been in the past. We seem easily to recall particularly unusual events as unique contexts, but what led to them? And what ensued? Did anyone ultimately benefit, and if so how did they act? And why should we care? That question at least is easy. The past matters to the extent that it informs the present and predicts the future. If something bad happened, we want to know why so we can prevent it happening again. If something good happened, we want to be able to repeat it. If something extraordinary happened, we want to be ready if it happens again, if for no other reason than because humans offer prestige to those who seem knowledgeable. One problem of memory seldom acknowledged is that it takes time (Huk and Shadlen 2005; Sipser 2012). It takes time to think, it takes time to recall. It certainly takes time to consider different options and construct (or favour) a chain of events out of web of possibilities (Chapman 1987). And so, we forget. We only remember what is likely to useful. But what’s interesting is this—what’s likely to be useful varies by context. And what we remember varies as well. People are often shocked or frustrated by their own poor memories. One of the reasons for this is that our memories have not only a directly functional role, but also a more complicated meta-narrative role. Our memories are part of our identity. And while we might recognise that others behave inconsistently or seem to have contradictory goals or motives, we seldom see this in ourselves. One explanation for this is because we in fact have several selves (a theory called constructivism; for a recent discussion see Lebow 2012). In particular contexts we have particular goals and beliefs. For example, when walking we may be annoyed by drivers, and while driving be annoyed by pedestrians. Thinkers from Hume (1739) to Minsky (1988) have speculated that a coherent self is an illusion, constructed for some form of convenience: ‘we may observe, that what we call a mind, is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and suppos’d, tho’ falsely, to be endow’d with a perfect simplicity and identity’.1 336 Joanna J. Bryson

Perhaps that convenience is planning the future—it’s easier if at any one point you assume your goals are consistent.

I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts. And as the same individual republic may not only change its members, but also its laws and constitutions; in like manner the same person may vary his character and disposition, as well as his impressions and ideas, without losing his identity. Whatever changes he endures, his several parts are still connected by the relation of causation. And in this view our identity with regard to the passions serves to corroborate that with regard to the imagination, by the making our distant perceptions influence each other, and by giving us a present concern for our past or future pains or pleasures.2

Or perhaps the narrative of self is something that has evolved culturally because it promotes society—it is easier to maintain social order if people are responsible for their past actions, which after all they are likely to repeat in similar circumstances (Graziano 2014). The self cannot be considered entirely an illusion. An individual has (ordinarily) one set of human DNA, one set of biological parents, one educational and one criminal history. An individual is more or less fixed in their adult height and a number of their acuities. Nevertheless, much of the self—the stories we tell, the people we love, our homes and other possessions, our friends, our goals, our needs, even our names—much of this changes over time. There is great convenience not just for others but for the self in being able to confabulate a version of the self to benefit the reasoning of that self (and others) about itself. Now as we come to understand our selves better, we might hope to become better at reasoning about our other selves as well—the pasts we can’t remember, the people we appear to be to others, the people we might become in the wrong or right circumstances. We might hope that this insight will improve our empathy and our judgement. But what if our ignorance is not the result of unfortunate chance biological limits, but rather reflects a set of optima, carefully honed by evolution, suited to the dynamics of our social situations and our mental well being? Our new reality of big data providing records of our every move, and of ever-improving scientific (or artificial intelligence) models for predicting and understanding our behaviour, make many fearful because of the loss of privacy from others (Bryson 2015). We fear exploitation by advertisers who might take advantage of our weaknesses, governments that might find ways to disenfranchise us, bullies and assailants that might manipulate or abuse us. But what about our privacy from reality, and from our selves? Are there limits to the extent to which a life should be self examined? Science tells us that optimism rather than realism is key to our mental well being (Taylor and Brown 1988), but also that our individual levels of optimism and pessimism are highly influenced by both our The Confabulation of Self 337 genes and our upbringing (Plomin et al. 1992). We will almost certainly experience the answer to this question in the near future, but whether we will accurately recall our lives in the past and know what we have gained or lost—that is less certain. More likely, our newly-confabulated selves will conform to the new norms of society and recall a skewed perspective on our current present, our future past.

Notes

1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London: John Noon, 1739), 207. 2. Hume, Human Nature, 261. 41 Malingering and Memory Neander Abreu

During my first year of clinical psychology training a 29-year-old woman came to my office and asked me to help her to deal with a horrible experience. Three years before, she had been in her relative’s place for a family party. After a few hours, the house was invaded by robbers. They were violent, hit people and took their money. One of her cousins suffered sexual violence, and no one could help her; the assaulters intimidated those present and threatened them with guns. This sad and scary experience left a mark on her. She became depressed. She was afraid to go out at night. She was unable to look others in the eye, thinking that they were judging her, and that she should have protected her cousin. She told me during some of our therapy sessions that she really would like to forget everything about that hideous day. But she could not. Her memories were stronger than her desire. She told me that a psychiatrist had told her that she had a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and that she agreed; the scenes were so vivid to her that they seemed to have happened just a few moments ago. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has a criteria set of basic elements, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). It involves exposure to a traumatic stressor that serves as the gatekeeper criterion, re-experiencing of that trauma, numbing and avoidance, and increased arousal and reactivity. In this edition of the DSM, PTSD is included in the chapter on Trauma- or Stressor-Related Disorders (TSRD), with Acute Stress Disorder (ASD) and Adjustment Disorders (Ads) completing the adult TSRD list. Some non-traumatic events may play a role in PTSD development, depending on whether or not a subject exacerbates the emotional value of the event (Levin, Kleinman and Adler 2014). At the time that I began as a psychologist my fears of making a wrong diagnosis, or of failing in applying useful therapies, led me to wonder whether my patient had a real trauma, or if she was in some way exacerbating her reaction to the events. I was advised to focus on her symptoms, and to lay emphasis on the procedures that I could follow to help her in dealing with the situation described above. Friedman et al. (2011) provide a good discussion of the differences between disorders that are dependent on a traumatic stressor, and those that are the result of the exacerbation of an event by the patient. Despite this very useful distinction, which can be applied to diagnosis and intervention procedures, there

338 Malingering and Memory 339 is something that should be kept in mind, and that allowed me to parse out her story carefully. Her feelings were very similar to those of other patients with PTSD, with all the expected signs and symptoms, but the way she told me her story drew my attention to its effects on her mood, disposition, lack of strength, inhibition and how sloppy, lazy and slow she appeared, indicating that PTSD has affected her mood and motivation. Two aspects of the individual’s exposure to the qualifying stressor – criterion A, or the gatekeeper criterion for PTSD, according to the DSM-5 – should be investigated. First, was the stressor life-threatening, or did it result in serious injury? Secondly, was the event exposure direct, as in experiencing or witnessing a fire, or was it indirect, as in learning something about fires, such as how fearful it is to be in a house that is burning? It seems that despite the distinction to be made between real dangers and experiences that are not life-threatening, such as a divorce, the latter may still lead to symptoms of PTSD (Anders et al. 2011). The fact is, however, that some individuals with a suspected PTSD disorder may be malingerers. Malingering is the intentional production (or reporting) or exaggeration of symptoms for a specific purpose. Malingering is usually associated with some secondary gain, such as obtaining monetary compensation, or avoiding criminal prosecution (Larrabee 2003). It is easy to understand why memory problems are the main complaints of PTSD patients and malingerers. Memory systems are very complex, but more than this, they are linked with our self, world knowledge, abilities and emotions. Memory compresses a lot of different characteristics. Memory has different classification in terms of duration (long and short term memory), functions (declarative and nondeclarative) and even time, for example, past (retrograde) and future (prospective) memories. They differ in terms of neural sites, but there is evidence that the neural networks involved are partially interdependent (Takashima et al. 2006). Memory, therefore, is highly vulnerable to traumatic events once the system is fragile; at the same time, this delicacy explains why malingerers complain about memory. It is not easy to discriminate between genuine PTSD and malingering. Kunst, Winkel and Bogaerts (2011) have investigated the effect of malingering and fantasy susceptibility in victims of interpersonal violence and its relation to PTSD. 125 victims of interpersonal violence who applied for state compensation were assessed for PTSD and peritraumatic reactions, that is, dissociation, distress and tonic immobility. Dissociation and distress predicted PTSD, but tonic immobility did not. The researchers investigated whether proneness to fantasy and malingering were associated with PTSD. Malingering was associated with increased PTSD symptoms, but not proneness to fantasy. This research shows the tiny boundaries between PTSD and malingering, which makes them very hard to distinguish. To make it clearer, let me talk about Henry. Henry (not his real name) was a 32-year-old man at the time I assessed him, who had been involved in a car accident as the driver. Henry was driving from a club on a Saturday, drunk, with three other men. On a curve, he lost control of the car, which flipped. One of his friends died in the accident, while Henry suffered a traumatic brain injury. After 20 days in the hospital he was discharged, 340 Neander Abreu able to walk and talk but suffering with some memory complaints. His mother, a very careful woman, helped him to submit all the documents he needed to receive state compensation for individuals in rehabilitation. The money that he was receiving from the government was important in supporting him and his mother, but the benefit was going to be cancelled. She was very worried about this, and began to make him afraid of the prospect of getting a job and failing in it, due to his poor memory. Moreover, his mother insisted that he should think about the images of the accident, so as to stop him from driving. He developed symptoms of PTSD related to the accident, and it became difficult to establish how true these experiences were. Malingering is prevalent in PTSD, and it seems to be more common in delayed-onset PTSD (Ahmadi et al. 2013). What is interesting about Henry is that the way he began to tell his story affected his cognition; mainly his memory, but also his behaviour. It is important to investigate the modulation, mainly in memory, which occurs in individuals that present malingering, to establish a pattern to distinguish PTSD and malingering. It is easy to judge malingerers, but it is harder to understand the effects of their malingering on their cognition and behaviour. One option that has been suggested is to investigate pre-trauma functioning as a parameter to get a more complete assessment of individuals, and help to establish whether they really have experienced trauma. The new DSM-5 criteria may result in over- reporting of PTSD symptoms and malingering (Freeman, Powell and Krimbell 2008). According to new DSM-5 criteria, some traumatic experiences that are not so harmful to an individual may have emotional effects similar to those caused by real traumatic events, such as serving in a military base in a conflict area (Zoellner et al. 2013). First, let’s keep in mind the experiences that produce PTSDs. They are not the result of good experiences. They may be filled with pain, fear, sadness, insecurity and other mixed feelings that may result in a vivid and stressful experience, and consequently repeat daily, for a long time, with a marked effect on the quality of life (Olatunji, Cisler and Tolin 2007). Studies on PTSD and neuropsychological performance and emotion processing show that individuals with PTSD may display greater activation of the amygdala and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (PFC) compared with controls, and less ventral medial PFC activation. Taken together, the results of functional neuro-image studies show a failure in salience detection, emotion regulation (ventral medial PFC), cognitive control (lateral PFC) and autobiographical recall (posterior cingulate cortex) (see Cisler et al. 2014). The nature and frequency of neuropsychological impairments in PTSD seems to be heterogeneous, but the studies do show that long term memory problems in PTSD seem to be dependent on attention resources (Isaac, Cushway and Jones 2006). In others recent study conducted in Canada, veterans with PTSD showed deficits in executive function, with reduced speed and more errors in Stroop tests, more errors in digit-symbol tests and verbal fluency, and an effect on verbal memory in patients with traumatic brain injury/PTSD (Pineau, Marchand and Guay 2014). Neuro-imaging and neuropsychological studies suggest that bad experiences may result in changes in the way the brain works to process cognitive Malingering and Memory 341 functioning. Even when taking into account some controversy regarding these studies, they show, at least, that some changes are detectable. Our language activates our brain. We speak, and we may see images in relation to words such as the names of objects. We read, and have thoughts while doing so. The way a story is told can cause changes in the way we process images, words and feelings about the story. Why not the feelings about a traumatic event? Mood is something that may change cognitive functioning. For example, depression and anxiety contribute to greater distractability and deficits in divided attention, categorical (semantic) and lexical (verbal) fluency and even long-term memory in patients with PTSD (Pineau et al. 2014). Elderly patients with mild cognitive impairments may have problems with cognition if they have depression as a comorbid. Depression, anxiety or other mood states may influence the brain and cognitive functions. Let me tell you Mario’s story. He was a 23-year-old married man and an industrial electrician with a full-time job in a big company near his home. His wife was at home when she received a phone call from a Marios’ friend, who explained to her that he had been sent to hospital after fainting while working. She went to the hospital; after a few hours, Mario was awake and talking, but only using few words. The next day he was much better and able to talk, but suffering from a devastating retrograde amnesia. He was not able to recover images, facts or stories about his life, including the fact that he was married. His wife was a stranger to him. He couldn’t even remember his parents; his amnesia had a huge temporal gradient. Brain imaging showed that there were problems with his temporal lobes and amygdala. Mario was having difficulty in recovering information about himself, including professional abilities, and he was also not able to connect emotion and experiences. He was not a malingerer, nor was he showing symptoms of PTSD. He had to learn about his life experiences using photographs, letters, objects and stories, but all were without emotion to him. Every time someone believes in his or her stories, the effects on the way they are told are more relevant, at least to him or her. It is possible that the activation of the brain, more specifically of memory areas such as temporal poles, may result in recall of a story with a new “colour”, depending on the emotional value, actual context and other feelings from the past. PTSD sufferers and malingerers tell stories about themselves, not only about events. Mario’s story was empty of sig- nification to him. He experienced no feelings about the times he tried to recover from memory, or the pictures people brought him of his marriage or childhood. Considering the emotion and feelings we have when we tell a story about ourselves, and how they influence our mood, motivation or cognition, we are faced with a challenge in understanding how long and how far a story may go deep in PTSD sufferers’ and malingerers’ brains, changing the way in which they process cognition, and the emotion they feel about the event when they tell stories they lived in the past. A good perspective to assume in facing up to this challenge comes from studies on the episodic buffer, a component of the working memory model, assumed to be a temporary multidimensional store that forms an interface between the subsystems of working memory, long-term memory and the central 342 Neander Abreu executive (Baddeley, Allen and Hitch 2011). The episodic buffer is supposed to be responsible for taking information from our crystalized memory and bringing it to our working memory, where we process it and combine it with actual information. The episodic buffer may provide a rationale to realize what malingerers and PTSD individuals feel when they tell their stories, how it affects their lived experience, and how vivid it is. Telling a story is an amazing experience. It changes our mood, and maybe our memories. Telling a story, and believing in it, may change the sense of perception of those with PTSD. It seems that anytime we tell a story, we form a new story. There is hope in this. Cognition and mood may be two brothers that work together to organize a room. The challenge lies in understanding how deep the experience of telling a story runs. Hearing the stories of individuals with trauma is a challenge that creates the opportunity to understand how individuals with PTSD and malingerers may change their stories, in the present and in the future. At this moment, we might imagine the response of an individual with PTSD: Why should I remember that? Is there another way of looking at that day, or what I imagine about that day? Perhaps their words, in their stories, can say to us: Cognition and emotion will help you to comprehend me. Memories are not isolated from our emotions. Every time you recall an event, a piece of music, a story, an image or even words that are linked with your experiences, there is neural activation that is capable not only of making you ‘see’ or ‘hear’ your past experience, but of constructing a new emotional interpretation of the event. In particular, I, and others, think that we may well understand this better in the future through new research linking memories and the emotional charge of the memories. This is a good way to understand PTSD and malingerers as individuals, and, if we are lucky, to find new ways to help them. 42 Trauma and the Truth Martijn Meeter

Witnessing horrible things may leave a person scarred for life – an effect usually referred to as psychological trauma. We do not know exactly what it does or how it worms its way into our psyche, but psychological trauma has been linked to a wide range of fear- and depression-related symptoms (Bonanno and Mancine 2012), and has been linked with even more extreme forms of psychopathology. In one famous example, one of the first patients diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder claimed her personality split in two to deal with the traumatizing sight of her dead grandmother (Thigpen and Cleckley 1954). Some images are horrible enough on their own to cause trauma, but often it is not so much the actual events that are traumatic, but their interpretation. For example, a near-accident in which a car brakes just in time not to crush you can cause nightmares. A similar near-accident, in which you jumped away just in time from the braking car, may be almost instantaneously forgotten. If that is the case, the difference would have been the feeling of control in the second situation: you jumped; you escaped the situation; you were in control. It may be illusory (if the car had not braked, it would have hit you no matter what you did), but the fact that you feel you had control over the situation makes it far less traumatic (Geer and Maisel 1972). Child abuse by a loved one may be more damaging than abuse by a stranger. This effect depends on the child realizing that the adult behaved in a way that was inappropriate. Sometimes, events therefore become traumatic only when the child is old enough to realize that the events constituted betrayal by someone they depended on (Briere 2002). So in many cases, it’s acknowledging and interpreting life’s miseries that hurts, and not necessary the event itself. It’s the truth behind the event that damages. Would it not be better, then, to replace the truth with some more easily bearable story? We all know the answer when it concerns others: yes, often the more bearable story is better than the truth. In a survey of Reader’s Digest readers, 96 percent admitted to lies of convenience, usually to spare someone close an unpleasant truth (Kalish and Dermody 2004).

343 344 Martijn Meeter

We also know the answer when it concerns ourselves: emphatically not! We prefer knowing the truth no matter how painful it is. Consider extramarital affairs. Perhaps not traumatic, but still incredibly painful when discovered. In one unscientific survey, nearly 90 percent would rather know that their partner was having an affair, rather than being blissfully ignorant for the rest of their lives.1 We have all sorts of biases and unintentional blindnesses, but most of us would never purposefully shield ourselves from the truth. Good art gets made around the tension between being happy and knowing the truth. Characters in Dostoyevsky’s novels destroy everything around them in their vain quest for the truth. In the play The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen, friends of Hjalmar discuss whether they should shield him from the knowledge that his happy family life is built on illusion. Gregers decides to speak up, in the belief that knowing the truth will make Hjalmar a better man. The utter devastation that this causes seems intended to prove Gregers wrong – no, we should not share the truth at all costs. But Hjalmar also had a choice: no one forced him to destroy his family once he knew the truth. However, it seems self-evident that if one’s life is incompatible with the truth, it’s life and not truth that should yield. Patients suffering from trauma rarely have the choice to live a life in which the trauma is simply denied or forgotten. It’s an open question whether they would even choose to forget if they could. Consider electroconvulsive therapy: it is a very potent way to end debilitating depression, but at the cost of some memory loss (Meeter et al. 2011). For many patients, the possibility of losing their memories weighs more strongly than that of ending their current misery. Patients with trauma may, similarly, also prefer to suffer rather than to not know the truth about their past (indeed, this is the central message of Michel Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004). What patients usually crave instead of forgetting is meaning, that is, being able to give the trauma a meaningful place in their life narrative. The fact that traumatic events seem senseless, cruel acts of blind fate, is part of what makes them traumatic. Traumatic memories are often intrusive; they intrude in the mind of patients often and unpredictably (Birrer et al. 2007). Many patients and therapists believe that this is because they represent unfinished business. The trauma has not been given a proper place. Many therapies are therefore built on the idea of letting patients discover what exactly happened and why, so that the trauma is given a place. This thought is already present in Freud’s first writings: explaining a patient’s past to him or her will give the rumbles of the unconsciousness their place, leading to a better life for the patient. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) similarly strives to make patients interpret their life in a healthier way, while Eye Movement Desensitization Therapy (EMDR) for trauma explicitly strives for closure (Shapiro and Laliotis 2011). Indeed, giving an interpretation is often named as one of the success factors in psychotherapy, the common factors that explain why wildly different forms of psychotherapy, based on mutually exclusive theories, yield approximately equal success rates (Grencavage and Norcross 1990). Trauma and the Truth 345

Does interpretation have to be truthful to help? Research into the so-called ‘need for closure’ suggests it does not. Closure is defined as ‘a desire for definite knowledge on some issue and the eschewal of confusion and ambiguity’ (Webster and Kruglanski 1997). Ambiguity is unpleasant, closure theorists think, a state to be replaced as quickly as possible by a state of certainty. People would vary in how strongly they dislike uncertainty, but all of us would rather believe something – anything – than not knowing what to think of some issue. An extreme example of this, in the context of trauma, is a form of therapy called ‘past life regression’. This is psychotherapy in which patients find the cause of their current afflictions in trauma experienced in a past life (Gomperts 1996). For example, a patient may suffer from lower back pain because of a previous life as a slave hauling rocks across the pyramids in ancient Egypt. There has been no study of how successful this form of therapy is, which to most of us would either be self-delusion or outright quackery. However, one author interviewed multiple patients. All were relieved to know what previous life caused their current misery, and the author could not but conclude that they were genuinely better off after therapy (Gomperts 1996). So we know that patients, whether suffering from trauma or from something else, crave interpretation. We know that this interpretation does not have to be truthful to help. We also know that some interpretations are more painful than others. Take these three together, and it would be tempting to let therapists goad patients towards a healthy interpretation of the past, disregarding the truth. Should a therapist just get patients to find a suitable past life (perhaps in a favourite historical period, as extra service) to blame all their ills on? We could see this as an innocent, but very potent, placebo. Placebos work in psychiatry, just as they do in general medicine. But it is considered unethical to prescribe them to patients who think they are receiving a real treatment (though perhaps not in all cases (Lichtenberg et al. 2004)). Similarly, it would seem unethical purposefully to get patients to believe wrong things about their past, even if that lightens their suffering. However, what may pass muster is to let patients construct their own illusions. Therapists could instruct patients to try and create their own interpretation of events. The therapist would then not guard against illusion, but only against harmful interpretation. Why would that be fine? We should be under no illusion about our ability to reconstruct the past if we’re not already remembering it. Examples abound of how memory can be fooled, and how we can be led to believe we remember something that never happened (Loftus et al. 2008). If the truth in memory is uncertain anyway, is it not okay to be neutral about whether a patient’s healing interpretation of the past is true or not? In fact, the step towards such ‘truth neutrality’ was taken long ago. Online trauma therapies constructed for dealing with trauma include as a last step the instruction to reflect on how the patient has been changed through the experience, and what it will mean in the future. The idea is that patients will come up with some happy ending: have they not become wiser, have they not met people through the car accident, or loss of a dear one, that they would otherwise never have met? Notably, the therapist does 346 Martijn Meeter not comment on how sensible this ending is; closure is the goal, not finding out what really happened (Lange et al. 2003; Wagner et al. 2006). At that moment, truth yields to life, and that is how it should be.

Note

1. http://www.asexuality.org/en/topic/90582-cheating-to-tell-or-not-to-tell/; there is a host of internet sites dedicated to finding out about one’s spouse, to help those 90 percent truth-seekers. Conclusion: ‘The Futures of Memory’ Sebastian Groes

On or about December 2010 human character changed

In her 1923 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, Virginia Woolf claims that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’.1 Via a self-conscious piece of short fiction that chronicles the differences between the representation of human character in the work of Edwardian (pre-modernist) and Georgian (early modernist) writers, Woolf suggests that the various contexts, social relationships and the nature of human beings had transformed: ‘All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature’.2 The dating of major transformations of the Zeitgeist is tricky and complex; any grand claims about periodization are undercut by a sense of randomness and uncertainty. Yet, Woolf had a remarkable sense of the acceleration of the evolution of consciousness she and her generation were experiencing. There were new technological innovations such as the telegraph, electrification, the motor car and the aeroplane, which all enacted a contraction of felt time and space, and accelerated lived experience. New narratives by Darwin and Nietzsche fundamentally changed people’s outlook on history and time, and the unimaginable violence of the Great War destroyed ‘Enlightened’ ideals of Progress. Woolf and her generation saw the maturing of the secular capitalist democracy, which replaced the hierarchical social structures of the religious aristocratic society. Woolf’s claim referred to Roger Fry’s 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in London, which affirmed aesthetic and artistic revolution as central to our new perception of the modern world. Impressionism was followed by Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism, reframing experience as a phenomenological construct; there is a gap between our experience and the world so that representation comes before ‘the real’. In a letter to Matisse, painter André Derain stated boldly: ‘Perhaps we are a happy generation in the sense that we might be the only one to have realized that stone, colour, etc., no matter the material in which the human spirit finds its pleasure, has its own life, independent of what we make it represent’.3 Ezra Pound argued optimistically

347 348 Sebastian Groes that we should ‘make it new’, and this newness was aesthetically superior to realism. In the ‘Futurist Manifesto’ (1909), Marinetti claims: ‘We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’.4 Yet, this beautiful newness was often perceived to be a violent intervention in modern life: in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) the motor car severs the already thin links between man and nature. In Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) a car backfires in a London street, startling the citizens, whilst an aeroplane writes advertisements in the London sky, which no one seems able to read. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the human mind disintegrates, had been published in 1904, and The Great War, too, undermined the belief in the stability of human identity through new psychological disorders such as shell-shock. The new image of human beings changed: less innocent, disillusioned and a little bit sadder, but also more self-conscious about their condition. The field of memory studies had seen many breakthroughs and theories at the end of the nineteenth century, creating a deepening awareness of memory. Thinkers working in psychology and philosophy such as Hermann Ebbinghaus, Pierre Janet, Alfred Binet, William James and Henri Bergson had made enormous headway in theorizing memory in the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, as Suzanne Nalbantian shows.5 They made distinctions between habitual and pure memory, a notion which has survived today in the difference between explicit, conscious and implicit, nonconscious memory. They saw incredibly powerful new theories of the human mind, in which Freud’s theory of the unconscious dominated, but also shared a profound interest in the role of the brain and the senses. Rapid social changes further fuelled concerns about the ability of the mind to keep up with the modern world, and questioned the nature and value of human beings. The Futurists were obsessed with the machines of modernity, and Marinetti speculated about an emergent non-human, mechanical species. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) presented a new hybrid of man and machine: ‘the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing’ and secretaries write with ‘automatic hand’. These writers were part of a literary revolution which was obsessed with time, memory and consciousness, and included Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Eliot and Virginia Woolf herself. They were digging into memory via the stream of consciousness technique – an invention by William James – to show that human consciousness always remembers the past through the act of living in the present. The experimental psychologist Frederic Bartlett showed in Remembering (1932) that socio-cultural contexts were profoundly important forces in shaping remembering processes. Memory was an unconscious, associative force that yoked together past, present and the future into a seamless continuum, as T. S. Eliot speculated in ‘Burnt Norton’ (1935).6 This modernist moment was exciting, yet also shaped by a sense of loss and uncertainty, and also a fear of an apocalyptic future. The subjectivity that emerged had changed as well: fragmented, fragile, lonely and solipsistic. Conclusion 349

Our age has seen a similar confluence of major advancements in our understanding of memory, whilst a breathtaking acceleration of societal developments has raised anxieties for the well-being of the human mind and memory. Many revolutions are radically reshaping our thinking about what it means to be a human being. Globalization, the digital revolution, overpopulation, climate change, an ageing demography and ongoing scientific breakthroughs are just a few examples of developments that are having a major impact upon the understanding of ourselves, the world, other people and nature. We too have been living through a sudden acceleration and proliferation of contextual changes, which have in turn radically changed the nature of life. Climate change poses pressing questions about the impact of mankind on the earth, but has also generated new temporal complexities to us, as well as new mortalisms. Diseases of the ageing brain, such as dementia and Alzheimer’s, ask painful question about the nature of identity and selfhood, and challenge our relationships with loved ones. As Jason Tougaw’s and Alison Waller’s mediations on amnesia show, there is a great fear of forgetting, and of being forgotten, in contemporary society, which re-emphasizes the importance of memory for individual identity. Indeed, Claire Colebrook speaks of the fear of losing the self, whilst Pepperell argues we are being reduced to informational streams. The human mind likes narrative and story-based memories to narrate a coherent and continuous self, but with the dominance of new social media and platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iTunes and Instagram, experience and memory have been subjected a counter-narrative drive, which fragments and disperses the self. Are we becoming inhuman ‘dividuals’? Together with Patricia Waugh, these critics are finding new forms of synthesis, in which, as Jeannette Baxter argues, non-conscious memory processes play a key part. Karen Brandt shows, paradoxically, that the human mind is well-equipped for forgetting, which also has a beneficial effect on the psyche and behaviour of man, as well as making us flexible for the consideration of alternative futures, which is something Jessica Bland argues for. Whilst new storage technologies may weaken our ability to make rational value decisions about what is and what isn’t important, we see a shift towards the study of forms of memory rather than content, which Daniel Hutto traces in his Enactivism thesis. How we remember is more important than what we remember, but as many critics here have shown, it is the ability to turn ourselves into a human-shaped narrative that allows us to continue to consider ourselves as human. Although we may pass our biological sell-by date, our private lives live on as increasingly public memories on the web, over which we have increasingly less control, as Wendy Moncur and Stacey Pitsillides discuss. Ownership of, and control over, memory is increasingly indeterminate: a group ‘selfie’ of several teenagers snapped on the smartphone of one of the subjects is shared across different social media sites. It has a single creator, but multiple owners who can appropriate a copy of it to share, edit and tag as they wish, and return to it at any moment in the future to modify that memory. As with the modernist era, there is a renewed sense of the connectedness of the past, present and future. Evolutionary biologists have shown that memory has evolved so we can plan the future, stressing the ‘forwardlookingness’ of memory. 350 Sebastian Groes

Joanna Bryson challenges the traditional view of memory formation as a direct flow from short-term to long-term storage, and shows we now know that many different components of memory emerge at different times after the event to be memorized has taken place. Memory and imagination are used to simulate and predict the future, and are therefore vital for maintaining social and moral order and establishing justice: memory provides the imaginative framework for a stable civilization. We thus see a complexification in our thinking about time and memory, and are confronted with new attitudes and sensibilities, veering from a new immersive bliss in the digital world, to new forms of terror. In light of the grand, empty mathematical vision required for understanding Big Data and algorithmic patterning, Patricia Pisters shows that we see an emerging database logic that allows for endless series of new combinations, orderings and remixes of its basic and previously singular source materials. This forces us to reconceive memory from the point of view of many possible futures, which yields a revolutionary prospect: rather than accepting one possible reality, we now see a universal ungrounding of perception and temporality that emphasizes a plurality of future possibilities. The implication is that memory itself no longer functions as a stable ground or source that allows us to extrapolate or extend a logical future. This opening up to a plurality of futures and pasts is unsettling, and may fill us with terror because it entails a sense of a loss of agency. Paradoxically, it is also a positive, empowering idea which allows us to escape the dominant apocalyptic discourse, and replace this cripplingly singular logic about the future in contemporary culture with dynamic, plural and protean futures for the generations to come, as Jessica Bland theorizes. We thus regain a sense of authorship over our lives, and narrative media have a key role to play as they simulate the processes we are currently going through. Writer and philosopher George Steiner notes that human nature has changed because the internet gives us the capacity to look up anything, so that we don’t need to remember anything anymore.7 Steiner’s elegiac tone makes him part of a group of critics who caution against the many changes we are living through because they feel we are losing ideas and values that have been the centre of human life for over 2,000 years. These cautionary attitudes are often shaped by technophobia, and a concern about digital technology in particular. Social media and other digital tools such as Google and GPS are thought to be the cause of memory rot. One concern Nick Carr explores is the distraction the online experience has produced, causing superficial, associative ways of thinking. Information overload, too, is a major concern, because it inhibits the ability of long-term memory to absorb information, as neuroscientist Torkel Klingberg has observed. In Delete (2011), Victor Mayer-Schönberger thinks through the implications of a culture in which no information is discarded. If we believe the rhetoric of some of these critics and writers, we are losing our soul, or at least, the very qualities that make us uniquely human. They pose a pressing question: if memory is what makes humans special, and the storage of memories is outsourced to machines, are we not tampering with the very nature of our existence? If individual cognition and memory developed for planning and, more specifically, navigation in Conclusion 351 space, do machines that take over these processes intervene in, or possibly speed up, the evolution of mankind? There is also a group of reluctant optimists and enthusiasts, and most of the contributors to this book can be aligned with them. These critics are not plunging themselves blindly into these new developments, but unlike the doom mongers, they are curious about the new possibilities the twenty-first century offers. They are wary of the claims that the new digital technologies overthrow ‘culture and knowledge as we know it and that its members’ practices are radically different from older generations’ new media engagements’.8 They subscribe to the rejection of nostalgia, as Sebastian Groes does, as the urgency of contemporary issues requires a focused attention on the present. Thinkers such as Joanna Bryson, Mike Hulme, Jason Tougaw, Wendy Moncur, Barry C. Smith, Adam Roberts, Ineke van der Ham, Heather Yeung, Daniel Hutto and Flora Lysen, to name but a few, are tentatively optimistic about the new contexts that are reshaping human beings. Adam Roberts and Sebastian Groes theorize what is happening to the nature of human beings if machines are taking over cognition and memory, and they note that the prospect of a transhuman entity in which the boundary between man and machines is blurred is as exciting as it is scary. They align themselves with critics such as Clive Thompson, who notes that ‘Not only has transactive memory not hurt us, it’s allowed us to perform at higher levels, accomplishing acts of reasoning that are impossible for us alone’.9 They argue that the defining characteristic of the human is the thing which ultimately reinforces our humanity – and transcends it – and digital technology is merely the most recent toolset that makes this possible more easily. It is useful to note that a biological imperative is at work here, which operates on a ‘Minimal Memory Model’: ‘the resource-recruitment process aims to mimimize the use of biomemory and to maximize the use of environmental support’.10 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew MacAffee conclude that ‘the transformations brought about by digital technology will be profoundly beneficial ones’, but also that the workforce will change dramatically in the next decades, and will leave some people with ‘ordinary’ skills and abilities behind.11 Indeed, the advances and pressures of our age can assist us in refining our understanding of what memory will become, and what new functions it must develop for it to function in the twenty-first century. We could date this change of human character to around 2010, when the spread of the internet matured, a new attitude to the earth manifested itself and a new critical framework for understanding these developments was in place. 1997 saw a strong expansion of the internet and the use of email; in the decade after the year 2000 the number of internet users grew from 394 million to 1.858 billion, about 22 percent of the world’s population. The introduction of the internet in the west means that new generations of so-called ‘digital natives’ were born during this period who would never experience a pure offline identity, but are totally immersed in the online world, their minds tapped into digital devices. What has been emerging, then, is an acceleration of the mismatch between our Stone Age brains, and the rapidity of technological changes which has changed social behaviour: ‘While the pace of technological change may seem dizzying, the underlying 352 Sebastian Groes practices of sociability, learning, play, and self-expression are undergoing a slower evolution, growing out of resilient social structural conditions and cultural categories that youth inhabit in diverse ways in their everyday lives’.12 For the Anglophone humanities, the late nineties are also important as the point at which the influence of postmodernist high theoretical paradigms started to wane, which meant a reconsideration of the idea that the postmodern experience was purely an ahistorical experience. Postmodern critics such as Fredric Jameson thought of memory mostly in metaphorical terms as signifying an ahistorical, amnesiac experience; similarly, in the work of Gilles Deleuze, the schizophrenic’s hearing of multiple voices was regarded as a metaphor for postmodern culture. In the early noughties the Zeitgeist had shifted to a new seriousness and a preference of materiality over a preoccupation with discourse and language, and amnesia was considered a very real problem. Significant is Suzanne Corkin’s record of neuroscientific research Permanent Permanent Tense (2013), in which the life of the amnesiac H. M. was chronicled. Similarly the hearing of multiple voices is no longer a metaphor but is investigated by Hearing the Voice as a very real mental condition.13 1995 saw the publication of Robert Pepperell’s creative-critical exploration The Post-Human Condition, which argued that due to the impact of high-technology we are shifting from an anthropocentric universe to a world in which humans, and the Humanities, are increasingly marginalized. The groundwork of this ideological dismantling of the Humanities had been undertaken by Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who pointed out the constructed nature of humanist thought, challenging its authority. N. Katherine Hayles consolidated these ideas about the changing nature of humans in How We Became Posthuman (1999). This reconceptualization of the human in the light of new technologies also found ground-breaking expression in Andy Clark’s and David Chalmers’s 1998 essay ‘The Extended Mind’, which argued that the human mind was no longer central to cognitive processes, but merely a part in a dynamic self-organizing whole.14 Another important year for our reconfiguration of human character was 2000, when Paul Crutzen introduced the concept of the Anthropocene, which suggests there will be a time when mankind has ceased to exist, and that there will be a distinct geological strata of detritus that mankind has left behind. The popularity of apocalyptic climate change novels and films such as The Day after Tomorrow (Dir. Roland Emmerich, 2002) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) demonstrated and consolidated the idea of the Anthropocene in popular culture. These cultural products enact a kind of ‘preliminary’ or ‘proleptic’ mourning, according to Claire Colebrook, whereby we lament our fate and grieve for ourselves as if we were extinct already. Greg Garrard calls the tense belonging to the Anthropocene the future perfect subjunctive: we’re being asked to look forward in order to look back upon ourselves today with a sense of shame and embarrassment that we didn’t act sooner and more dramatically. Mark Currie calls this paradox ‘anticipation of retrospection’,15 which is part of a wider reconsideration of the nature and function of memory. Climate change is thus part of a wider set of developments that open out into new mortalisms and posthumanisms: it draws on a geological memory Conclusion 353 that dwarfs the human, and the human imagination, something mirrored by the cosmological memory of astronomy, as the film Nostalgia for the Light (Dir. Patricio Guzmán 2010) explores. Simultaneously, around this period we see the dominance of the hard sciences, within which the New Science of Mind matures. We could date this this turn around the start of this new century, with a definite break around 2005–2007, when neuroscientist Eric Kandel’s In Search of Memory (2007) maps the emerging of the new science of consciousness and defines its characteristics.16 This process began with new research into memory in the 1950s, in which patient H. M. played a key role. The neuroscientist who worked with him, Suzanne Corkin, notes that new technologies consolidated the new science of mind: ‘Amazing technological progress since 2005 has made it feasible to map the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie memory formation at the level of individual brain cells. The discipline of neuroscience is experiencing a series of transforma- tive events driven by advanced technology’.17 This turn was spearheaded by an edited collection by Roedinger, Dudai and Fitzpatrick, Science of Memory: Concepts (2007), which offered key concepts such as plasticity, working memory, consolidation and forgetting, focusing on the brain as the central organ for memory. A new interdisciplinary spirit emerged. From the mid-1990s Douwe Draaisma started writing interdisciplinary books on memory, such as Metaphors of Memory (1995; 2000) and Why Life Speeds Up When you Get Older (2001). In 1998, neuroscientists Gordon Shepherd and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr wrote an interdisciplinary essay on the ‘Proust Phenomenon’.18 Suzanne Nalbantian’s Memory in Literature (2003) devoted a chapter to neuroscientific perspectives, and she followed this up with The Memory Process (2010), which collects humanistic and neuroscientific perspectives on memory. Attilio Favorini’s Memory in Play (2008) also sets out to further the dialogue between science and the arts. Another response came with a volume of Memory Studies, edited by Wolfgang Kansteiner (2010), which also linked collective, cultural memory studies with an interest in individual biological memory.

Metaphors of memory in the twenty-first century

One way of imaginatively capturing the changes to human character in the twenty-first century is through metaphors of memory, which have a long tradition, starting with the Greeks. In modernity, metaphors of memory have moved, as Corin Depper has noted, from the classic tale of Simonides, who invented the spatial forms of the art of memory, and Plato’s wax tablet, to Renaissance memory palaces through Freud’s Wunderblock. This development reflects an evolution in the conceptualization of memory. In pre-modern times, remembering was understood as the retrieval of fixed representations of events whereby the integral purity of the original experience is retained. We now know that memory is our capacity constantly to reorganize information whose understanding is itself determined by contextual association and reconsolidation in the present moment. 354 Sebastian Groes

In the light of these rapidly changing contexts, we have seen a frantic scramble for new metaphors of memory. Metaphors are often the result of professional deformation: writers often speak of the ‘texture’ of memory, and, in the digital age, memory as often been described, fallaciously, as working like a computer. This ignoring of representational problems is not only an intellectual, but also a political and cultural problem, as Catherine Malabou argues in What Should We Do With Our Brain? (2008):

We don’t understand this organization, which gives rise to so many unsettling metaphors in the register of command and government: a controller that sends orders from on high, a central telephone exchange, a computer . . . all of this cybernetic frigidity, which only serves to alienate us from consciousness, itself the only sign of life and liberty in a domain of organic necessity, where movement and grace seemed to be reduced to mere reflex.19

Could it be that neuroscientists are promoting the brain as a detached, controlling machine because it (unconsciously) argues for the intellectual supremacy of neuroscience in the study of consciousness? Neuroscientist Stanlislas Dehaene shows that his discipline has moved on:

I do not intend to revive the cliché of the brain as a classical computer. With its massively parallel, self-modifiable organization, capable of computing, the human brain departs radically from contemporary computers. Neuroscience, indeed, has long rejected the computer metaphor. But the brain’s behaviour, when it engages in long calculations, is roughly captured by a serial produc- tions system or a Turing machine.20

We are moving away from seeing memory as storage and towards the idea that memory is a dynamic process, suggesting that scientists are increasingly open to exploring problems of representation. In sections by Nick Carr, Michael Burke and Stephan Besser we see the rejection of the idea that the brain and memory can be represented through mechanic, hydraulic or computer metaphors. Nick Carr argues the internet is not a neural network and Google not an ‘artificial brain’.21 Yet, there still are many representational problems that are often ignored. One problem lies in the seductiveness of fMRI techniques, which present maps of the brain which are often mistaken for the mind itself.22 Writer and literary scholars are experts at teasing out of problems of representation. Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006) features a London black cab driver, Dave Rudman, whose mind unravels, and the rants he writes down become a new Bible for a community that survives a flood 500 years later. Dave’s psychiatrist notes:

The psychiatrist mistakenly believes that there is a copy of the A–Z literally buried within the cabbies’ hippocampus. Self points out that there is a tendency to overlook metaphorical thinking. If computation does not suffice as a metaphor, we could return, as Malabou’s emphasis on ‘organic necessity’ suggests, to the existing Humanist archive of images. Douwe Draaisma argues for Freud’s Wunderblock, or magic slate, as the best metaphor.24 Michael Burke also returns to Freud, who in Civilization and its Discontents (1930) argues that the human mind is in search of an immersive, oceanic feeling – an unconscious oneness that draws on procedural memory, and plunges us actively into non-conscious, non-linear modes that produce an immersive cognitive circuitry. Joanna Bryson brings us back to a narrative patchwork quilt of memory which we pull over our heads, whilst Stacey Pitsillides, speaking of the multiplicity of digital identities we now tend to amass, uses the apt metaphor of the mesh in the net of consciousness. In search of a twenty-first century metaphor of memory, Flora Lysen argues for the Brain Observatory as metaphor complex of visibility, memory storage, fixity and vividness, cartography and cinematography.25 The Brain Observatory offers a new metaphorical imaginary of being able to ‘observe’ and ‘collect’ data on memory from a virtual location, and foregrounds some of the key issues when thinking about memory today: concerns about materiality, presence, the role of digital technology and the role of the brain and body in the production of consciousness. It is the process of multiple users engaging with the Brain Observatory that offers a metaphor for memory in the twenty-first century: accessible for all, and therefore democratic, distributed across the globe uniting users into a global brain.

Ten characteristics of memory in the twenty-first century

In light of the rapidly changing context discussed above, it is helpful to set out a list of numbered developments that chronicles the changing state of memory in the early twenty-first century.

1 The role of the human mind in memory is increasingly marginalized. With the ferocious power of the digital, technologies and machines are increasingly taking over cognitive and memory functions and storage, making memory an increasingly non-biological process. New forms of cognitive technology make the brain a porous, permeable container that mediates and navigates between the mind and the world. The early twenty-first century is characterized by a nomadism of mind and memory. Cognition and memory are not dependent solely on neural activity but are dynamic processes in which the mind interacts with external forces beyond the subjective self. Although in the anthropocentric model of embedded cognition the human being still features at the centre of thinking and memory processes, in models of extended cognition the human biological unit is a subservient part of a dynamic self-organizing whole. The power of humans has become more complex and ambivalent because ‘the underlying issues involve the very 356 Sebastian Groes

complex dynamics and human agency in both its conscious and unconscious manifestations’.26 Through instant, repeated and shared retrieval processes, memories are increasingly dynamic and protean, but also migratory and distributed across platforms, media and technologies, and other people’s minds. 2 Memory is increasingly a collectively shared networking activity between humans and machines resulting in transactive assemblages with a democratic potential. In a digital context, memory that is based on cognitive interdependence has intensified exponentially.27 Both memory storage and memory processes tend to involve more than one creator and/or user, who assemble what has been called ‘networked memory’.28 While the state and conglomerates such as media and ITC giants attempt to wield power through digital technology, traditionally powerless individuals and bodies of people are able to create independent zone for themselves where reinterpreting and rewriting of knowledge and memory.29 This development has a democratic potential and allows us to challenge hierarchically structured authority and other privileged social constellations, and explore the potential of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ or the ‘group mind’. 3 Memory is an intersubjective process. The location of memory is changing, taking place not strictly in the brain, but acting though dynamic cognitive process within the intersection of the mediating spaces where the mind and external tools and machines connect in cognitive loops and circuits. Memory processes also take place between individual subjects, who, with the help of the ubiquitous presence of technologies, engage in ‘transactive memory’.30 Memory requires an intersubjective, transhuman point of view. 4 ‘Global Memory’ has matured. New technologies have caused memory storage and processes to become a world-spanning practice; the global reach of the corporations and the internet have created a super-organism made up of all human minds bound together by something like a biological version of the internet. This process started around 1900, and matured in the twentieth century with the strong effects of the advancement of new technologies on cultural production. 31 With more awareness of climate change at the start of the twenty-first century, there is also a renewed awareness of the earth as a global notebook that contains memory traces of mankind’s presence written into the geological strata. 5 Memory is an increasingly mediated process of fictionalization which undermines the possibility of authentic, original remembering. Postmodernism taught us that thinking and perception are constructed and narrated, and argued that in the post-war world we tend to (prefer to) live life at the level of representation. Our heavily mediated perception fictionalizes memory, and external forces beyond the subjective self shape, edit and manipulate memory. Despite the waning of postmodern theory and a renewed desire for authenticity, memory is more than ever a process of representation. 6 Memory is increasingly conditional, mutable and open-ended. In the digital age, much of memory is taken over by technology and programs Conclusion 357

outside the human body, so that outside forces are shaping our memories. This open-endedness of memory is increased by the knowledge that, because technology makes memories easily retrievable, we are enabled to revisit and reinterpret past autobiographical memory. Other people share in the construction of our memories, both now and at a later date, makes memories less fixed and absolute, and more relative and mutable. Memory work in the twenty-first century is never finished, and always provisional. 7 Memory is forwardlooking. There is a renewed emphasis on the fact that memory evolved for planning purposes, and that it has a great role in shaping our imagination and prediction of the future. Memory has a profound role in making decisions, navigating space and plotting the world ahead. The possibility the extinction of mankind due to climate change asks us to imagine our present lives as future memories. 8 Memory has acquired new, complex temporalities. We are seeing new, posthuman machine times that displace traditional organic notions of history and time. With the ability to instantly retrieve memories and information through digital technologies, the gap between the present retrieval moment and past memories is a closed circuit. Conceptions of death have become increasingly complex: even though we may experience biological death, we may continue to dwell in cyber space as digital memories. The Anthropocene asks us to imagine our present as memories in a future where everything is already dead. These are new, posthuman mortalisms that shape twenty-first century subjectivities. 9 The unconscious has a major role to play in memory. We are seeing a return to an investigation of the role of non-conscious processes in memory. Research has shown that half of our ‘conscious’ lives we are engaged in some kind of mind-wandering. In fact, a recent study even suggested that daydreaming is the default state of our brain, and that those parts of the brain are overridden by other part when we need to focus on a particular task.32 Hayles notes that recent research has suggested that the unconscious ‘plays a much larger role that had previously been thought in determining goals, setting priorities, and other activities normally associated with consciousness. The “new unconsciousness”, as it is called, responds in flexible and sophisticated ways to the environment while remaining inaccessible to consciousness, a conclusion supported by a wealth of experimental and empirical evidence’.33 The web and social media such as Twitter, which are algorithmically generated and mined, have become a new collective unconscious of our culture. 10 Memory has accrued a plurality of new, often anti-anthropocentric perspectives. New studies into memory require new posthuman forms of vision and imagination. Climatic memory demands a geological perspective. Neuroscience has introduced a molecular, neural vision which in art has generated a cellular, synaptic imagination.34 In ‘Big Data’ and algorithmic patterning requires an ‘empty’, mathematical perspective. These perspectives continue to displace humans at the centre of critical thinking. 358 Sebastian Groes

A twenty-first century ethics of mind and memory

In light of this list of changing characteristics of memory there are new, urgent questions that arise: What should we do with our memory? What is memory for, in twenty-first century contexts? How can we make memory more useful, perhaps in different ways? Must we take better care of our mind and memory, or ensure that we reduce the impact of these contexts on our human minds? How, and to what extent, can we let our cognitive abilities evolve in beneficial ways? Should we be afraid of the evolution of the human mind that’s to come? Such questions evoke new debates about the bioethics and the biopolitics surrounding these rapid changes in memory. They include the right to privacy in the digital age, and, more contentiously, the right to be forgotten through some kind of digital switch-off after we die biologically. There is also a fascinating debate about the ethics of human enhancement, which Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu explore in Human Enhancement (2009). In The Second Machine Age (2014), Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew MacAfee explore how machines will take over various human professions in the next century, greatly altering the shape of society, but also the values and forms of recognition. To discuss the ethical issues regarding memory fully would require another book. Yet, let us make a start by calling for new ethical questions that sets the agenda for the new critical thinking about, and protection of, the human mind. Our humanity exists in a shared duty of care towards our cognition, in which memory features centrally. In society there exists a strong awareness of the lived effects that new and rapidly changing contexts have on cognition and memory, which can be used to establish a new competency of mind and memory. We need a reconsideration of pedagogic strategies within a new form of education and society that should teach all of us about the precarious nature of the human mind, and the contexts and influences that shape it and govern our everyday lives as citizens in liberal democracies. This new competency generates a new ethical and political awareness about human power and freedom, which can be laid down in a flexible, open-ended body of rules that safeguards our psychobiological life. These ethics should form a body of codes that enriches our lives, and reaffirms our basic civil liberties. We should have more ownership and control over our brain, mind, memory and behaviour. Just as physicians take the Hippocratic Oath, these ethics should be enshrined in universal law and be integrated into business models and in capitalist production. Fantasies of stopping scientific, technological progress and the digital revolution are useless, and enslave us to a nostalgic, potentially regressive rhetoric. We should establish an ethical debate about how technology can be used in a beneficial manner. We can re-direct the harmful impact of technology on the human mind by finding new ways to protect and nurture the workings of the mind and memory, through software such as internet blocker Freedom, but also, more importantly, through ethical debates in the public realm. In liberal democracies, the government must aim to close the current gap between rapid developments Conclusion 359 and their often slow responses through the creation of independent bodies whose advisory reports are swiftly implemented. New technologies can be employed to, wherever possible, create contexts in which we are able to use and explore our human cognitive abilities and functions to the fullest. Those same technologies can also be used to commit our society to improve the lives of people whose cognition is somehow impaired. As an example, Ineke van der Ham showed how we can use GPS technology to help, for instance, stroke patients. Discussions by Heather Yeung, Peter Childs and Martijn Meeter have foregrounded the importance of the ethics of memory, and remembering, whilst Nick Carr, Adriaan van der Weel and Sebastian Groes showed the ethical implications of reading. Such ethical considerations show the continued value of the Humanities, which is the pre-eminent field in developing the intellectual frameworks that offer a proper duty of care to the human mind. The Humanities will thus continue to be able to offer its traditional social functions, which includes enabling frameworks for empathy and morality, facilitating an ethical responsibility, and for critical thinking and reading. This ability to unite disparate forms of thought as well as its ability to think critically offers new opportunities for a seriously marginalized Humanities. But after the dismantling of the authority of the Humanities at an institutional level, we can no longer return to a naïve, archaic form of Humanism. The idea that, in Robert Hampson’s words, ‘humanities research has an important custodial role in relation to cultural assets’ no longer seems to be enough.35 The Humanities can be the middle ground where our increasingly uncertain, chaotic world, and the fragmentation of our pluralizing knowledge, norms and value systems might be restored to some sort of unity. However, this middle ground is constantly shifting and we need a more mutable, flexible model; the Humanities’ practices are to be reconsidered in order to adapt to new, contemporary demands on society and the human mind. The challenge of its authority should be viewed as an opportunity for reinvigorating responses; the Humanities are not sacred, but could benefit from a critical, anti-monumental spirit, which will take them into the twenty-first century with new confidence, and new objectives. This book embodies and enacts a new idea of a dialogue between the Humanities and the Sciences, in the spirit of E. M. Forster: Only Adapt. This book is symbol of a new, ferocious intellectual energy, and has shown the power of cross-disciplinary dialogue through the creation of a space where thinkers and critics can interact with one another as active citizens. Its dynamism invites a new embodied cognition, a thinking-with-the-body that can incorporate numerous disciplines, including neuroscience. Memory in the Twenty-First Century celebrates play, curiosity, creative-critical exploration, serendipity and imagination. We can make it new, again. Critical reading and thinking have a privileged position in understanding contemporary forms of thinking about memory because reading comes closest to understanding and analysing, in Paul Ricœur’s words, ‘the virtual experience of being-in-the-world proposed by the text’.36 We must reconsider reading as a form of simulation that allows us to critically navigate, anticipate and understand 360 Sebastian Groes modern virtual experiences. This skill is political and ethical, and indispensable, and if we reconsider literacy in the digital age, we may take the human into the next century in new, creative-critical ways. We must reintroduce Homo Ludens, ‘Playing (Wo)man’. Play is an immersive, creative power that draws on and generates spaces that often fall outside the power of the state and capitalist enterprise. As Jussi Parikka states: ‘Play is important when understood as part of didactics – the hands-on approach that allows us to try, to have tactile contact with, to touch and open media and hence, paradoxically, to work in quite the opposite manner to the cool distance-taking mechanic methodology’.37 We must play in order to adapt to the digital, and the digital offers plenty of opportunities for play, if approached with an awareness of the mode of production from which it emerges and a conscious knowledge of the rules of representation that it is founded on. Paul Bloom states that ‘[i]magination changes everything. It evolved for planning the future and reasoning about other minds, but now that we have it, it is a main source of pleasure. We partake in experiences that are better than real ones. We can delight in the minds that create imaginary worlds’.38 However, we could use imagination for not just pleasure, but also for a serious purpose: it is the novel, hopefully in new, exciting forms, that is able to provide the deep imaginary space that enables a complex thought. As Adriaan van der Weel, Michael Burke, Sebastian Groes and Mark Currie have argued, the novel has a vital role to play in the ethics of memory because the world of the text problematizes our relationship to the world beyond the subjective self, acting as a space of simulation where we rehearse multiple interpretations, part of an ongoing, unfinished process that questions memory and identity in our contemporary culture. If memory operates and acts in the same way as predictive simulation, we should use the dynamism and mutability of memory so that we can reorder and reinterpret the past with a view to forcing a major reconsideration of the world to come. We should, then, not fear the future, but accept the current indeterminacy and uncertainties with a spirit of openness and plasticity that posits the increasingly conditional and relational nature of life in the twenty-first century as a form of control, rather than viewing it as a disempowering development. The plurality of futures embedded with our reconsideration of memory allows us to reject the cynical idea that our old world cannot be changed through ideas. Let us renounce the rigid anticipated expectations of future anterior tense that dominates our twenty- first century lives, and embrace the possibilities of the unbidden. The world is changing, and if it is losing particular values and ways of life, this might not be such a bad thing after all. Our changing memory shows us how to adapt to the new contexts that are reshaping out lives: we must embrace mutability, plasticity and be prepared to live in and open-ended manner if we want to survive. How fast the ecology of life is changing can be demonstrated by looking at Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), which is partly founded on neuroscientific knowledge on the memories of black cab drivers. In his satirical novel it is our carbon-based way of life that is criticized, through the imagined flooding of England. Glow (2014), an equally psychotropic, neuro-literary work by young novelist Ned Beauman Conclusion 361 suggests how the world is changing when the protagonist Raf points to the new mindful consciousness of a new generation:

Raf has always envied couriers for the MRI scan they take of their city, front tyres like toroid dog noses, a dead leaf’s difference in the height of a familiar kerb felt somewhere in the sinews when Raf himself probably wouldn’t even notice an extra few inches; and because, like pirate radio, they were supposed to get squashed under the internet, but didn’t; and because he once saw a game of bike polo and it looked like a lot of fun.39

The world is changing, and humans are changing with it, rapidly and maybe irrevocably. If we want to continue allowing future generations to remain human, we should accept and embrace this continuity in change. Memory allows us not only to find mental anchors in the past, and thus create an (imagined) sense of stability and coherence, but also to forge connections between the past, present and future. Memory is what makes us human to begin with; therefore, our new understanding of memory considered in this book gives us fresh insights into how we will be able to remain human – albeit of a different sort – in twenty-first century. Memory is vital for imagining new ways of being human whilst navigating the radical changes and possible futures of the world that lie ahead.

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (London: Hogarth, 1923), 4. 2. Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 5. 3. Quoted in André Derain: The London Paintings, ed. Erns Vegelin van Claerbergen and Barbara Wright (London: Paul Holberton, 2005), 34. 4. F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Futurist Manifesto’(1909), trans. Eugene Weber, date accessed 4 May, 2015, http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/marinetti.html. 5. Suzanne Nalbantian, Memory in Literature (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 6–23. 6. T. S. Eliot writes: ‘Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past.’ See: http://www.openculture.com/2013/06/ listen_to_ts_eliot_recite_his_late_masterpiece_the_ifour_quartetsi.html [Accessed 9 September 2014]. 7. George Steiner quoted by A. S. Byatt in the introduction to Memory: An Anthology, Harriet Harvey Wood and A. S. Byatt, eds. (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008), xv. 8. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, Mizuko Ito et. al. eds. (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2010), 1. 9. Thompson, Loc. 1790. 10. Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Loc. 322–32. 11. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew MacAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (London and New York: Norton, 2014), 4. 12. Ito, Hanging Out, 1. 13. See http://hearingthevoice.org/. 14. David Chalmers and Andy Clark, ‘The Extended Mind’ (1998). http://consc.net/papers/ extended.html. 362 Sebastian Groes

15. Mark Currie, About Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University press, 2010), 29. 16. Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (New York: Norton, 2007), xii–xiv. 17. Suzanne Corkin, Permanent Present Tense: The Man with No Memory, and What He Taught the World (London: Penguin, 2013), 314. 18. Kirsten Shepherd-Barr and Gordon Shepherd, ‘Madeleines and Neuromodernism: Reassessing Mechanisms of Autobiographical Memory in Proust’, A/B: Autobiography Studies, special issue on Autobiography and Neuroscience 13(1) (1998), 39–60. 19. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain? trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham, 2008), 4–5. 20. Stanlislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain (London: Penguin, 2014), 106. 21. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember (London: Atlantic Books, 2010), 174. 22. Boris Katchka notes: ‘fMRI can take pictures of the brain at work, tracking oxygen flow to selected chunks while the patient performs assigned tasks. The most active sections are thus “lit up”, sometimes in dazzling colors, seeming to show clumps of neurons in mid-thought. [. . .] Lehrer warned of the machine’s deceptive allure. “The important thing,” he concluded, “is to not confuse the map of a place for the place itself”’. Boris Katchka, ‘Proust Wasn’t a Neuroscientist. Neither Was Jonah Lehrer’. NY Magazine, 28 October 2012, date accessed 13 September 2014, http://nymag.com/news/features/ jonah-lehrer-2012-11/index5.html. 23. Will Self, The Book of Dave (London: Viking, 2006), 438. 24. ‘Like the magic slate, psychology seems to have two memories. The celluloid sheet on the surface seems to have two memories. The celluloid sheet on the surface receives stimuli and can easily be wiped clean. It is always available for new notes. Everything that is written on that celluloid sheet finds its way into a deeper layer of wax, but this layer is very difficult to access. Permanent traces can only be consulted by removing the outer layer. [. . .] The text is preserved within, but it is a text which is no longer read, which is also a form of oblivion. Unless we consult those deeper registers more frequently, texts will continue to appear on the ever receptive celluloid surface, repeating what has long been present’. Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, trans. Paul Vincent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 223. 25. See http://thebrainobservatory.ucsd.edu/ 26. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 94. 27. See Daniel M. Wegner, Toni Giuliano and Paula T. Hertel, ‘Cognitive Interdependence in Close Relationships’, in Compatible and Incompatible Relationships, ed. W. J. Ickes (New York: Springer, 1985), 253–276. 28. Andrew Hoskins, ‘Digital Network Memory’, in Mediation, Remediation and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, ed. Astrid Errl and Ann Rigney (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 91–108. 29 Ananda Mitra notes: ‘Those who have the power to create voices in the discursive space of the Internet could also be the ones who produce memory narratives of the digital age. This is a particularly curious position since the technology is problematizing power in the virtual. While the conglomerates such as media giants are attempting to wield power on the Internet, the traditionally powerless individuals are able to carve out a discursive zone for themselves too’. ‘Digital Memory’, Journal of Information, Communication & Ethics in Society, 3(1) (2005), 5. 30. Wegner, Giuliano and Hertel, ‘Cognitive Interdependence’. 31. Wolfgang Ernst notes: Wolfgang Ernst: ‘In contrast to two thousand years of basically written history, the advent of the audiovisual recording media had led to a genuinely multimedia “global memory” projects [. . .] which turned the archive into a discrete matrix of life itself’. Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 125. Conclusion 363

32. See Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works (London: Vintage, 2008), 197–201, who points to Malia F. Mason, ‘Wandering Minds: The Default Network and Stimulus-Independent Thought’, Science 15(393) (2007), DOI: 10.1126/science.1131295 / 33. Hayles, How We Think, 94. 34. Eric Kandel notes: ‘Thus we gain from the new science of mind not only new insights into ourselves – how we perceive, learn, remember, feel, and act – but also a new perspective of ourselves in the context of biological evolution. It makes us appreciate that the human mind evolved from molecules used by our lowly ancestors and that the extraordinary conservation of the molecular mechanisms that regulate life’s various processes also applies to our mental life’. Kandel, In Search of Memory, xiii. 35. Robert Hampson, ‘Custodian and Active Citizens’, in The Public Value of the Humanities, ed. Jonathan Bate (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 69. 36. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 2, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 100. 37. Jussi Parikka, ‘Archival Media Theory’, in Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1–36; 14. 38. Bloom, How Pleasure Works, Loc. 3219. 39. Ned Beauman, Glow (London: Sceptre, 2014), Loc. 404. References

Foreword

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Introduction

Berns, Gregory S., Kristina Blaine, Michael J. Prietula and Brandon E. Pye. ‘Short- and Long Term Effects of a Novel Connectivity in the Brain.’ Brain Connectivity 3(6)(2013): 590–601. http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/brain.2013.0166 Bloom, Paul. How Pleasure Works. London: Vintage Digital, 2011. Bostrom, Nick and Andres Sandberg. Human Enhancement. Edited by Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Corkin, Suzanne. Permanent Present Tense: The Man with No Memory, and What He Taught the World. London: Allen Lane, 2013. Crownshaw, Richard, Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland. Introduction to The Future of Memory. New York and Oxford: Bergbahn, 2010. Dehaene, Stanislas. Consciousness and the Brain. London: Penguin, 2014. Hacking, Ian. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2002. Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber, 2010. First published in 2005. Jarrett, Christian. ‘Reading a Novel Alters Your Brain – So What?’ Wired 01 June 2014. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/01/reading-a-novel-alters-brain-connectivity- so-what/. Accessed 2 April 2015. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin, 2012. LeDoux, Joseph. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. London: Penguin 2002. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. London: Fourth Estate, 2010. Livingston, Paisley. ‘Literature and Knowledge.’ In A Companion to Epistemology. Edited by Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do With Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham, 2008. Nalbantian, Suzanne. Memory in Literature. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. —— The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanstic Perspectives. Boston: MIT, 2010.

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Part I Metaphors of Memory

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Part II Memory in the Digital Age

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Part III Ecologies of Memory

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Part IV Memory and the Future

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Part V Forgetting

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Part VI Twenty-First Century Subjectivities

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Abreu, Neander, 305 Anthropocene, notion of, 307, 352 Ackerman, Rakefet, 127 Anthropocene imaginary, 150–1, Adams, Douglas, 210 153, 156 Adonais (Percy Bysshe Shelley), 151 anthropogenic climate change, 307 The Adoration of Jenna Fox anticipation, 141, 144, 149, 166, 203, 292, (Mary E. Pearson), 289–90 328, 352 Adorno, Theodor, 153, 154 automatic habitual, 213 Advice to Teens, 286 imaginative, 208–12 aesthetics, 73, 281, 330 antimonumental memory, 146 affective cognition, 119, 123 anxiety, 145, 160, 166, 242, 306, 313, 319, Agamben, Giorgio, 32, 309 328, 341 The Age of Stupid (Fanny Armstrong), aphasia, 11 1, 144, 166, 176 apocalypse, 82, 303 ageing brain, diseases of, 1 apocalyptic fictions, 1, 141 agency, 25, 70, 73–4, 111, 113, 117, 153, apocalyptic predictions, 193 195, 200, 209, 304, 319, 321, 323, Appleyard, Joseph, 327 350, 356 Arcades Project (Walter Benjamin), 32 Age of the Prosthetic Mind, 132, 136 Arcadia (Jim Crace), 176 Aggleton, John Patrick, 42 archeopsychic memory, 146, 182–6 Ågren, J. Arvid, 206 archives, 116–17, 315 Ahmadi, K., 340 Aristotle, 17, 21, 28, 199–200, 202, AI (artificial intelligence), 1, 111, 303, 311 331, 336 On Memory and Reminiscence, 28 aide-mémoires, 34 On the Sacred Diseases, 303 tea and madeleines as, 47–8 understanding of memory, 28 Albert Angelo (B. S. Johnson), 135 Armistead, Cal, 290 algorithms, 5, 72, 111, 178, 227 Arshamian, Artin, 43 Allen, Richard J., 342 artificial memory, 30 Alvarez, Al, 318 The Art of Fielding (Chad Harbach), 181 Alzheimer’s disease, 246, 260–1 Art of Fugue (J. S. Bach), 278 ambiguity, 345 art of memory, 142, 170, 173 Amnesia (Peter Carey), 1, 239 Gormley’s ‘Exposure’ sculpture, 177–8 amnesia, 1, 241–4, 248, 260, 280–5 see also memory palaces differentiation between memory and The Art of Memory (Frances Yates), identity, 281–3 27, 29–30 sufferings associated with, 283–4 Asimov, Isaac, 71 as theme in young adult (YA) fiction, Aslan, Alp, 266 286–90 Asperger’s syndrome, 1 Amour (Michael Haneke), 1, 242 associative conditioning, 20 amygdala, 39, 43, 123, 252, 255–7, attention span, 5, 7, 9–11, 136, 165, 241, 340–1 251, 257, 281, 308–9, 312, 340–1 Anders, Samantha L., 339 Atwood, Margaret, 176, 181 Annese, Jacopo, 59, 60 Oryx and Crake, 176 Another Little Piece (Kate Karyus The Year of the Flood, 177 Quinn), 290 Auden, W.H., 143, 151, 152 anoxia, 83 auditory cues and memory, 20, 42 anterograde amnesia, 260 auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs), 304, The Anthrobscene (Jussi Parikka), 132 316, 319–20

388 Index 389

Augé, Marc, 292 black cab drivers, see under London autobiographical memories, 20, 47, 235, Black Mirror TV series (Charlie Brooker), 79 257, 289, 293, 316 The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb), automatic writing, 53 192–3 automatism, 53–5 Blake, William, 154, 170 psychic, 54 Blakeslee, S., 334 Auvray, Malika, 40 Blom, Phillip, 30–1 Avatar (James Cameron), 24, 70–4 Bloom, Paul, 2, 145, 360 aversion learning (CTA or COA), 46, 49n12 Blume, Judy, 286 awareness, 10, 16, 39–40, 90, 144, 175, 179, Blustein, Jeffrey, 296 256, 264, 281, 283, 320, 334, 348 body/bodies, 71, 79–80, 85, 119, 126, see also consciousness 289, 304 Away from Her, 242 Bogaerts, Stefan, 339 Boia, Lucien, 160 Back to the Future Part II Bonanno, George A., 343 (Robert Zemeckis), 193 The Bone Clocks (David Mitchell), 181 Baddeley, Alan D., 342 The Book of Memory (Mary Carruthers), Bakhtin, Mickhail, 323 18, 28 Bal, Mieke, 296 Borck, Cornelius, 58 Ball, Philip, 60 Borges, Jorge Luis, 64, 196, 220, 223 Ballard, J.G., 20, 21, 51, 145, 146, Bostrom, Nick, 9 149, 150, 182, 183, 184, 185 Bourne Identity (Doug Liman), 239 Banks, Richard, 114 brain, 330–1 Barnes, Julian, 65 capacity for imaging, 312–13 Barry, Caswell, 101 cortex, 48, 72 Bartlett, F.C., 264 curators, 22 Bauml, Karl-Heinz T., 266 global brain, 24, 64, 71–3 Baxter, Jeannette, 63 memoir, 12 Bazin, André, 28 neocortex, 23, 251, 256–60 Beacons: Stories for Our Not So Distant Future neuroplasticity, 82, 247–8, 276, 279 (Gregory Norminton), 181 scans, 91, 98, 101, 134, 330, 354 Beasts of the Southern Wild science, 8–12 (Benh Zeitlin), 176 working memory capacity, 277 Beaulieu, Anne, 58, 60 see also hippocampus; neuroscience Beauman, Ned, 360 Brain Observatory, 58, 61, 355 A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard), 302 neuro-scientific memory research, 59 Beckett, Samuel, 321 visualizations of brain activity, 58 Beecher, Donald, 28 Brandt, Karen R., 246, 265, 349 Being Henry David (Cal Armistead), 290 Brandt, Kaz, 55 Bekinschtein, Tristan A., 81 Breton, André, 20, 51 Benjamin, Walter, 32–3, 65 Nadja, 53 ‘Unpacking My Library’, 130 Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh), 17 Benjamin, Walter, 65, 130, 136 The Brief History of the Dead (Kevin Bergson, Henri, 273, 274, 311 Brockmeier), 246, 269–79 Bergson, Henry, 202, 203 Briere, John, 343 Berker, Ennis, 330 Bright Air, Brilliant Fire Bernays, Edward L., 113 (Gerald Edelman), 245 Bernlef, J., 242 Bringing the Biosphere Home (Mitchell Besser, Stephan, 24–5 Thomashow), 165 Between Memory and History (Pierre Nora), 5 Brockmeier, Kevin, 246, 269, 270 Big Data, 83, 87, 350 Brody, Jessica, 290 biological memory, 67–8, 80, 211 Brooks, Peter, 131 Birrer, Eva, 344 Brown, Jonathon D., 336 Bjork, Robert A., 264 Brown, Roger, 23 390 Index

Browning, Robert, 272 climate change, 1, 142–4, 147–57, 190, Brubaker, Jed R., 117 352–3 Bryant, Richard A., 47 anthropogenic, 165, 168, 307 Bryson, Joanna J., 206, 304–5, 336 as imaginary of human memory, 150–3 Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries, 51–2 material benefits of climate, 160 Burgess, Melvin, 286 memories of past weather, 159–62 The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro), 1, 280 as preliminary mourning, 148 Burke, Michael, 85–6, 120, 122, 123 temporality of, 165–6 Civilization and its Discontents, 355 writing about, 171–3 Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: closure, 345–6 An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind, Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell), 181, 216 85–6, 119, 124n2–124n3 Clugnet, M.C., 43 Burns, James G., 218 cognition, 1, 3, 5, 9, 18, 359 Burnside, John, 181, 182 embedded, 5, 22, 25, 117, 125, 184, 332, 355, 360 Calinescu, Matai, 325 embodied, 34, 54, 72, 119, 123, 126–7, Camera Lucida (Roland Barthes), 313 141, 185, 196, 214, 224, 234–5, 249, Camillo, Giulio, 30 290, 301, 359 Capgras Syndrome, 302 enacted, 79 carbon footprint, 133 extended, 355 Cardozo, Julian, 81 role in planning, 206–7 Carmichael, S.T., 43 Cognition in the Wild (Edwin Hutchins), 18 Carr, Nicholas, 24–5, 73, 85, 127, 132, 211, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), 344 308, 350, 354 cognitive offloading, 78–83, 86, 300 The Shallows, 78 cognitive overstimulation, see information Carruthers, Mary, 18, 28 overload Carson, A., 135 A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (Bernard Cartesian dualism, 9, 16 Baars), 24 causality, 23, 192, 215 Cohen, Tom, 175 central nervous system, 9 Coker, Christopher, 293, 296 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 153, 308 Warrior Geeks, 293 Chalmers, David, 80, 220, 352 Coker, Thomas, 249 Changeux, Jean-Pierre, 9–10, 16 Colebrook, Claire, 24, 142–3, 303 Changing Our Textual Minds (Adriaan van collective memory, 70–1, 181, 283 der Weel), 85–6 The Collective Memory Reader (Jeffrey K. Changizi, Mark, 85, 126, 127, 132 Olick), 5 Channel 4, 112 The Comforters (Muriel Spark), 320 Chapman, David, 335 communal memory, 113 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 18 Composition No. 1 (Marc Sarpota), 135 Chesterton, G.K., 222 computer as metaphor of memory, Childs, Peter, 24, 246–7 24–5, 245 A Child’s Christmas in Wales (Dylan computer memory, 67–8 Thomas), 144, 163–4, 166–8 conditioned taste, 46 Chu, Simon, 20, 39, 42 confabulation, 1, 10, 304–5 chunking, 81 forms of, 334 Ciiarlottestdllc, Virginia, 207 of self, 334–7 cinema, 19, 34, 60, 72, 115, 195, 227 Confessions (St. Augustine), 229 in terms of time, 213–16 Connor, Steven, 53 The Circle (Dave Eggers), 12 Conrad, Joseph, 320 Cisler, Josh M., 340 consciousness, 10, 21, 24–5, 218, 347–8 Clark, Andy, 9, 18, 80, 126, 352 defined, 16 Clark, Nigel, 157 consolidation process, 5, 22, 252, 254, Clarke, Arthur C., 210 257–9, 353 Cleckley, Hervey M., 343 Consuming Power (David Nye), 166 Index 391 contemporaneous being, 53 active (conscious) synthesis of contemporary cuture, 85, 193, 350, 360 understanding and recollection, 213 continuing bonds, 108, 118n3 Difference and Repetition, 213 Copjec, Joan, 150 passive (unconscious) synthesis Corkin, Suzanne, 9, 22, 24, 352, 353 of time, 213 Permanent Present Tense, 22 De Man, Paul, 153 costs of memory, 218–19 dementia, 246, 260, 288 induced, 219 democratic hedonism, 309 in terms of energy expenditure, 219 Dennett, Daniel C., 16, 318 counter-intuitive concept, 194 Depper, Corin, 18 Craig, A.D., 48 depression, 341 Crisis of Memory and the Second World War Derain, André, 347 (Susan Rubin Suleiman), 6 Derakshan, Nanzanin, 265 Critchley, Simon, 33 Dermody, Cynthia, 343 cross-mapping of memory, 72–3 D’Errico, Francesco, 113 cue retrieval, 20, 38–41 Derrida, Jacques, 301 cultural memory, 6, 70–2, 241 de Tours, Moreau, 320 cinema as a form of, 216 Dewhurst, Stephen A., 264 global, 296 Dick, Philip K., 12, 191, 220, 225 cultural narratives, 303 Dickens, Charles, 47 culture Dickinson, Anthony, 206 digital, 79 digital human, 125, 160 ownership of digital content, 83, 109–10, postmodern, 5, 239, 352 125, 127–8, 130, 207, 321, 349, 358 critical-creative, 8, 142 digital age, 83, 84, 86, 114, 115, 132–3, Currie, Mark, 140, 141, 241, 352 194, 215, 238, 244, 300, 301, 304, 354, Cushway, D., 340 358, 360 cybernetics, 5, 70, 71, 79, 145 digital brain, 57–60 cyclewheeling history, 301 digital culture, 79 digital death, 109–11 Dalí, Salvador, 54 digital lives, 108–9 on automatism, 54 degrees of intensity, 111 The Persistence of Memory, 20, 51 vs digital death, 109–11 Damasio, Antonio, 21 multiple digital identities, 109 Damnatio memoriae, practice of, 268–9 online accounts and digital assets, post data, x–xiii, 10, 214–16 death, 109–10 The Day after Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich), post-self, 111–12 176, 352 digital media, 112 The Death of Cinema (Paolo Cherchi digital memory, 219, 350–1 Usai), 85 archives, 116–17 The Death of Grass complexities of reading in the digital age, (John Christopher), 176 85–6 de Chardin, Teilhard, 71 digital textual docuverse, 85 decision-making processes, 78 documents about the dead, 114–16 declarative knowledge, 255 mapping of knowledge, 85 declarative memory, 256, 295 new ways of storytelling, 87 Dee, T., 182 Digital Passing, 83 deep attention, 308 digital reading, 127–8, 131–2 Dehaene, Stanislas, 10, 16, 24, 125, counter-arguments to critics of, 133 126, 354 difference between material text and De heimweefabriek (Douwe Draaisma), 3 digital text, 133–4 Delete (Viktor Mayer-Schönberger), 238 problems with, 136 Deleuze, Gilles, 72, 213, 240, 247, 301, 310, psycho-physiological experience of, 135 313, 352 digital technology and global networks, 79 392 Index digital text, 125, 127, 127, 133 emotional memory, 265 digital tools, 80, 83, 250 enacted cognition, 79 directed forgetting, 264–5 enactivism, 196, 349 dissociative identity disorder, 343 encoding and decoding messages, 5, 170, Distracted (Maggie Jackson), 308 178, 230–3, 252, 254, 258, 260 dividuals, 301, 303, 305, 349 Enduring Love (Ian McEwan), 23, 302 DNA, 181, 184, 205–6, 336 The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje), 239 Doctor Heidenhoff’s Process (Edward engrams, 23 Bellamy), 58 environment, 97, 100, 104–7, 116, 135, Dolan, Raymond J., 39 144, 177, 219, 232, 294 The Double (Dostoevsky), 322–3 epilepsy, 1, 83, 251, 282, 303 double voicing, 323 Epileptic (David B), 303 Downes, John J., 20, 39, 42 episodic buffer, 342 Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery (Richard Slee and episodic memory, 193, 210–11, 257, 317 Cornelia Pratt), 58–9 e-poetry, 135 Draaisma, Douwe, 17, 27, 57, 64, 72, 244, Epstein, Russell, 20 245, 332, 353 e-reading, 78 Drayton, Michael, 277–8 Ernst, John, 108 dreaming, 63–4, 226, 228n16 Ernst, Wolfgang, 134 dreams, 149 erotomania, 302 Dror, Itiel, 80, 81 Etchamedy, Nicole, 106 The Drowned World (J. G. Ballard), 145, 149, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 176, 182–6 (Michael Gondry), 1, 287 Dualism, 6, 9, 16 Eterni.me, 84, 111 Dudai, Yadin, 21–2, 60 ethics of memory, 148, 239, 249, 292, Dumit, Joseph, 58 359–60 Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert), 223 Eustache, Francis, 47 Dupoux, Emmanuel, 205 evolution, 32, 87, 125, 170, 178, 196, 206, 336, 347, 353 eBay, 110 evolutionary biologist, 190, 349 Ebbinghaus, Hermann, 263 evolutionary psychology, 178 The Echo Maker (Richard Power), 12, e-waste, 132–7 181, 302 Ex Machina (Alex Garland), 1, 25, 79 ecocritical realism, 176, 179–82 explicit memory, 119, 121–3 ecology, 140, 142–4, 146, 147, 175, 179, Exposure, 2010 (Antony Gormley), 176–8 180–1 Extended Mind Thesis (EMT), 80, 220–2, Edelman, Gerald, 245 247, 352 Education, 5, 28, 126, 358 external memory, 68 Egan, Jennifer, 181 extinction, 307, 314–15 Ehrlich, Paul R., 206 eye movement desensitization therapy Eileen Maisel, 343 (EMDR), 344 elderly and forgetfulness, 265–6 Eysenck, Michael W., 265 electronic reading, see digital reading Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenacia (Hamish factual memory, 80 Henderson), 292 False Memory (Dan Krokos), 290 Eliot, T.S., 322 false memory, 306 e-literature, 135 familiarity, 252–4, 278 Elysium (Neill Blomkamp), 176 based decisions, 254 embedded cognition, 5, 22, 25, 117, 125, fantacies, 176–8 184, 332, 355, 360 feedback-guided learning, 255 embodied cognition, 34, 54, 72, 119, 123, Feldman, Shoshana, 296 126–7, 141, 185, 196, 214, 224, 234–5, fiction, 209–10 249, 290, 301, 359 as self-therapeutic process, 318 The Emotional Brain (Joseph LeDoux), 123 see also novels Index 393 fictional imagination and memory, 63–6 functional magnetic resonance imaging Another Woman (Woody Allen), 63 (fMRI), 21–4 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows of brain activity of London taxi drivers, (J.K. Rowling), 64 98–100 Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Elizabeth The Future of Memory (Susan Rubin Kolbert), 179 Suleiman), 6 Fifty Degrees Below (Kim Stanley ‘Futurist Manifesto’ (Marinetti), 348 Robinson), 177 futurity of memory, 193–7 Finnegan’s Wake (James Joyce), 31, 301 conceptualisation of time, 202 Fitch, W. Tecumseh, 205 connection between ‘real’ future and Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 86, 130, 136 narrative future, 201 The Great Gatsby, 130–1, 136 database logic of, 214–16 flash bulb memory, see under memory forecasting, foresight and fiction, Flash Bulb Memories (Martin Conway), 23 209–10 The Flood (Maggie Gee), 1 future anterior, 202–3 Fludd, Robert, 18 future as a memory trace, 199–204 fluvial mind processes, 124 imaginative visions of future, Fodor, Jerry A., 220–2, 230 210–12 Foer, Joshua, 79 memory as basis for planning of future, Fogarty, Lionel, 157 194, 205–7 forecasting, 209–10 notion of symbolisation, 203 foresight, 209–10 paradoxes of predicating Foresight Institute, 109 ‘memoir’, 222 Forever (Judy Blume), 286 forgetting/forgetfulness, 238–9, 244–9, 251, Gaia thesis, 145, 182 279, 304 Garber, Jake, 108 ageing and, 265–6 Gardony, Aaron L., 103 coping mechanism, 265 Garrard, Greg, 141, 142, 144, 145, directed, 264–5 166, 180 H. M.’s experimental surgery, 251 Gautam, Shree Hari, 46 intentional, 263–6 Gazzaniga, Michael S., 135 ontological problems of, 288–9 Gee, Maggie, 144, 147, 176, 177, of potentiality, 310 178, 181 schematisation, effect of, 264 climate change, writing about, as theme in young adult (YA) novels, 171–3 287–9 climatological time, 144–5 unintentional, 263–5 The Flood, 144–5, 172, 176, 181 Forgotten (Cat Patrick), 290 The Ice People, 144, 147, 172–3, 178 Forty Signs of Rain (Kim Stanley Light Years, 171–2 Robinson), 177 usefulness of the essentialism of ‘forwardlookingness’ of memory, nature, 145 4, 245, 349 Where Are the Snows, 172 Foster, David J., 101 Geer, James H., 343 Foucaud, Julien, 218 Gérard, Francis, 52 Foucault, Michel, 113–14, 117, 301 Ghostwritten (David Mitchell), 181 Foundation’s Edge (Isaac Asimov), 71 Gibson, E. Leigh, 20, 47, 48 Four Fields (Tim Dee), 182 Gibson, William, 12, 71 Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), 148 Gilhooly, Mary, 108 François le Champi (George Sand), 304 Gillings, Michael R., 307 Freedom (Jonathan Franzen), 181 Gilroy, Paul, 5 Freeman, Thomas, 340 Glisky, Elizabeth, 191 Freud, Sigmund, 53, 132, 301 global brain, 24–5, 71–3 Wunderblock, 25, 353, 355 globalization, 72, 240 Friedman, Matthew J., 338 global memory, 72, 356 394 Index

Global Positioning System (GPS), 80, 82, hearing voices, 1 85, 94, 103, 132, 244, 350 Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad), 320, benefits to using, 105–7 322, 348 cognitive consequences of, 105 Hegel, G.W.F., 203 features of, 106 Henderson, Hamish, 292 as a tool for treatment of navigation Her (Michel Gondry), 25 impairment, 104–5 Herz, Rachel S., 39 Globe theatre, 18 Heyes, Cecilia, 335 Glow (Ned Beauman), 360–1 Heylighen, Francis, 72 glucose and memory, 47 Hindmarch, I., 47 The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing), 7, 320 Hinton, S. E., 286 Goldman, Alvin I., 233 hippocampal-cortical activity, 258 Goldsmith, Morris, 127 hippocampus, 47, 252, 254, 256–7, 260 Gomperts, W.J., 345 of London taxi drivers, 98 Google Maps, 57, 103 of London’s black cab drivers, 81–2 Gormley, Antony, 176, 177 in mental mapping, 82 Gotman, Kélina, 72, 73 navigation and spatial memory, role in, Gottfried, Jay A., 39 93–4, 97 Gove, Michael, 19 neurons of, 97 Graziano, Michael S.A., 336 pattern of action potentials, 97 Green, Barry G., 45 role in spatial memory, 252 Greenfield, Susan, 308 size, retired taxi drivers vs full-time Grencavage, Lisa M., 344 working taxi drivers, 98 Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog), 176 The Hippocampus as Cognitive Map (John Groes, Sebastian, 20, 65, 86 O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel), 82 Ballard’s work, 146, 182–6 Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais), electronic reading, 86–7 214–15 Groom, Nick, 160 Hirsch, Marianne, 5 Gross, Charles G., 332 H is for Hawk (Helen MacDonald), Guattari, Felix, 240, 247 17, 176, 182 Guay, S., 340 Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard), 34 Guide to The Galaxy (Douglas Adams), 210 Hitch, Graham J., 342 Hobbes, Thomas, 207 habitual memory, 273–4 Hobsbawn, Eric, 239 Hacking, Ian, 2 Hollindale, Peter, 328 Hafting, Torkel, 97 Holocene, 151, 153 Hagan-Lawson, Elizabeth L., 307 Homer, 79 Hagglund, Martin, 203 Horkheimer, Max, 153, 154 Hamann, Stephan, 265 The Hothouse (Brian Aldiss), 176 Hampson, Robert, 359 The House at Pooh Corner (A. A. Milne), Haraway, Donna Jeanne, 60 327–8 Hardt, Michael, 295 Howard, Lorelei, 94–5 Harley, Trevor, 159 Howards End (E. M. Forster), 348 Harnad, Stevan, 80 Huang, Jiungyao Y., 106 Harris, Charles B., 12, 181 Hughes, J.H., 112 Harvey, David, 240 Huk, Alexander C., 335 Hassabis, Demis, 97, 191 Hulme, Mike, 143, 161, 167 Hayes, Gillian R., 117 ‘The Day Ahead’, 161–2 Hayles, N. Katherine, 4, 79, 81, 133, 134, Human Enhancement (Nick Bostrom and 301, 308, 352 Julian Savulescu), 358 distinction between deep attention and humanities, 2, 4–8, 79, 131, 359 hyper attention, 308 The Humanities and Public Life (Peter Brooks How We Became Posthuman, 352 and Hilary Jewett), 131 Writing Machines, 133 humanists, 2, 6, 30 Index 395 human mind, 1–2 John C. Norcross, 344 Hume, David, 335 Johnny Mnemonic (William Gibson), 239 Husserl, Edmund, 201 Johnson, B. S., 135 Hyde, Robert J., 45 Johnson, Christopher D., 32 hydrocephalus, 330 Jones, G.V., 340 hyper attention, 308 Joyce, James, 19, 31, 301, 321 HyperCard program, 34 Kahneman, Daniel, 4, 185 I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence), 176 Kalish, Nancy, 343 Ibsen, Henrik, 344 Kandel, Eric, 353 Ignorance (Milan Kundera), 223 Kant, Immanuel, 308 Iliad (Homer), 292 Kapow! (Adam Thirlwell), 135 ‘I Love Alaska’ project, 87 Kasket, Elaine, 112, 117 imagination, 64–5 Kassin, Saul M., 334 immediate memory, 43 Kastan, David Scott, 133 Immemory (Chris Marker), 19, 34–5 Keene, Nicolas, 19 immigrants, memory of, 3 Kelly, Kevin, 128 implicit memory, 85, 119, 121–3 Kennedy, John F, 23 Inception (Christopher Nolan), 215 Kentucky Zero Route game, 87 An Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore), 176, 182 Kerridge, Richard, 166 information-as-covariance, notion of, 232 Kiechel, Katherine L., 334 information-processing story of memory, Kimbrell, Tim, 340 231–4 Kingsley, Charles, 326, 327 information overload, 5, 78, 350 Kinzler, Katherine D., 205 information retention of poetry, 273 Kirk, David, 112 In How We Became Posthuman (N. Katherine Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 132 Hayles), 116–17 Kiss Me First (Lottie Moggach), 12, 84 In Memory of W. B. Yeats Klass, Dennis, 108 (W. H. Auden), 151 Klingberg, Torkel, 78 Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Koenig, Olivier, 124 Brain (Semir Zeki), 11 Kolbert, Elizabeth, 179, 307 intelligent unconscious, 322 Korsakov’s Syndrome, 280 intentional forgetting, 263–6 Kosslyn, Stephen M., 124 interdisciplinary, 3, 20, 81, 304, 353 Köster, E.P., 43, 45, 48 internal memory, 68 knowledge, 5, 8, 18, 30–1, 33–5, internet, 1, 24, 35, 64, 67, 68, 70–3, 78, 82, 85, 98, 131, 219, 255 109, 210, 350, 351 Krokos, Dan, 290 internet service providers (ISPs), 109–10 Kruglanski, Arie W., 345 Interstellar (Christopher Nolan), 142, Kulik, James, 23 147–8, 176 Kundera, Milan, 223 An Introduction to Metaphysics (Henri Kunst, Maarten, 339 Bergson), 52 Kunzru, Hari, 19, 33, 125 involuntary memories, 20, 214 Kurtz, Tanja, 265 Isaac, C.L., 340 Kurzweil, Ray, 193 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 1, 2, 180, 280, 283–5 Lacan, Jacques, 203 Jabr, Ferris, 85, 127 Laland, Kevin N., 206 Jackson, M., 308 Laliotis, Deany, 344 James, William, 23, 123 Lange, Alfred, 346 Jamie, K., 182 Larrabee, Glenn J., 339 Janet, Pierre, 320 Larsson, Maria, 43, 44 Jarrett, Christian, 11 Last Child in the Woods Jaws (Steven Spielberg), 24 (Richard Louv), 165 JFK (John F. Kennedy), 23 Latour, Bruno, 71, 72, 147 396 Index law of Prägnanz, 167 Maguire, Eleanor A., 82, 98, 99 Leadbeter, Charles, 108 Mahmud, Abdullah Al, 106 Lebow, Richard Ned, 207, 335 Malabou, Catherine, 7, 9, 246, 354 Le Doeuff, Michele, 61 malingering, 339–41 LeDoux, Joseph, 9, 123 The Man Who Walked Away (Maud Casey), LegacyOrganizer app, 83, 111 1, 280 Legend of a Suicide (David Vann), 176, 182 Mancini, Anthony D.., 343 Le Guin, Ursula K., 12 Manes, Facundo F, 81 Lessing, Doris, 7 Manet and the Post-Impressionists (Roger Leung, Pauline, 47 Fry), 347 Levin, Andrew P., 338 Manovich, Lev, 215 Levin, Daniel T., 334 Mantel, Hilary, 316–18 Levy, Daniel, 72 Beyond Black, 316 Levy, William B, 207 Giving up the Ghost, 316 Liben, Lynn S., 106 mapping, 21, 85, 127 Lichtenberg, Pesach, 345 Marchand, A., 340 L’Idea del Theatro (Camillo), 30 Marinetti, F.T., 348 lifelogging, 84, 116, 118n4 Markeley, Robert, 143 LifeNaut.com, 111–12 Marker, Chris, 19 literature, 16 La Jetée, 34 brain and, 9–12 Statues Also Die, 33–4 Liu, Ziming, 127 Markley, Robert, 175 Living Nowhere (John Burnside), 176, 181–2 Marvin, Carolyn, 58 Livingston, Paisley, 10 Masson, André, 54–5 Livingstone, R. B., 23 ‘The Cemetery’, 54 Loftus, Elizabeth F., 345 Mémoire du Monde, 54 Lomas, David, 54 Matrix, 226 London Fields (Martin Amis), 176 Matter and Memory (Henri Bergson), 52 London Mayer-Kress, Gottfried, 72 The Knowledge, 82, 92 Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, 78, 115, 238 Soho, 92–5, 100 Maynard Smith, John, 206 London taxi drivers, 219–20 Mbiti, John, 269 black cab drivers, 81–2, 90 McCarthy, Cormac, 141, 148, 177, 178 fMRI analysis of brain activity, 98–100 McCarthy, Tom, 242, 287 hippocampus of, 98 McEwan, Ian, 23, 176, 179 neuro-psychogeographical study of, McNeill, Isabelle, 35 98–100 media, 1, 11, 22, 58–61, 68, 72, 78, 83, 87, long-term memory, 121, 240, 256, 258, 288 136, 272–4 Louv, Richard, 165 medial temporal lobe memory system, Lovelock, James, 75, 145 252–4, 257 Luddite movement (1811–17) of textile memory impairment associated artisans, 79 with, 255 Luria, A. R. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (José neurological thinking, 91 van Dijck), 83 The Man with a Shattered World, 90 mediation, 58, 115, 246, 349 The Mind of a Mnemonist, 90 Meeter, Martijn, 305, 344 Lyotard, Jean-François, 310 Melancholia (Lars von Trier), 176, 177, 215 Lysen, Flora, 22, 24 Memento (Christopher Nolan), 1, 142, 239, 241, 287 Macdonald, Helen, 17, 176, 182 memorisation, 29, 104, 126, 271, 273–4 The Machine (James Smythe), 12 Memory (Margaret Mahy), 287–9 madeleine, 19–20, 25, 38–41, 42–8, Memory, Hither Come (William Blake), 274 214, 304 The Memory Cell (Walter Besant), 58 Magnetic Fields (Phillipe Soupault), 53 Memory in Culture (Astrid Erll), 5 Index 397

Memory in Literature (Suzanne palace(s), 19, 28, 30, 33, 34, 81, 125, 126, Nalbantian), 353 196, 225 Memory in Play (Attilio Favorini), 353 philosophical theories of, 229–30 Memory in the Twenty-First Century, processes, 6, 349, 355, 356 6, 12, 359 ‘real’ and ‘artificial’, 225 memory/memories, 348 recall, 27, 47, 227 aide-mémoires, 34 reconsolidation of, 22–3 autobiographical, 20, 47, 235, 257, 289, relationship between imagination and 293, 316 future, 190–2 biological, 67–8, 80, 211 role of brain in, 5 in CD-ROM, 34–5 scientific understandings of, 242–3 characteristics, in the twenty-first semantic, 121, 210, 281–2 century, 355–7 shared, 80 classification of, 339 short-term, 22, 78, 121, 240, 260 collective, 5, 7, 8, 70, 71, 73, 181, 214, socio-cultural contexts and, 5 268, 283 spatial, 97, 252, 257 communal, 113 spike, 3 definition, 19 spontaneous, 52, 53, 224 in dimensions of time, 213–16 storage, 60, 261, 356 DNA part of, 205–6 storehouse model of, 230 embodied, 141, 301 strategy for memorizing lengthy episodic, 193, 210–11, 257, 317 speeches, 29 ethics of, 148, 358–60 studies, 4–5 evolution in formation of, 349–50 theatre, see memory palace(s) explicit, 119, 121–3 time span of, 21 fallibility of, 180 total, 83–4, 223–4 familiar picture of, 229–31 traumatic, 17, 23, 211, 344 ‘flash bulb memory’ (FBM), 23 types of, 240 forwardlookingness, 4, 245, 345 unconscious, 53, 55 fragility of, 281 universal and culturally specificity global, 72, 356 of, 269 habitual, 273–4 voices and, 316–23 holes, 268 war, 293–6 humanities and, 5, 150 working, 78, 81, 121, 124n2, 136, 251, identity and, 281–3 265, 277, 341–2, 353 immediate, 43–4 Memory Palace (Hari Kunzru), 33 implicit, 85, 119, 121–3 memory palaces, 18–19, 28–30, influence on physical development and 33–4, 225 skill-attributes, 293 The Memory Process (Suzanne Nalbantian), information-processing story of, 231–4 6, 353 information theoretical models of, 5 Memory Studies (Wolfgang Kansteiner), 353 inorganic, 149 Memory Theatre (Simon Critchley), 33 internal, 68 memory theatres, 17–19, 28, involuntary, 20, 214 30–1, 35 location, 254, 258, 356 The Mentalist, 19 long-term, 22, 121, 240, 256, 258, 288 mental mapping, 21, 127 meta-narrative role of, 335 Merwin, W. S., 144 mnemonics, 18 Mery, Frederic, 218 narrative, 207, 300–6, 335 Metaphor, Memory, and Aby Warburg’s neural plasticity and, 277 Atlas of Images (Christopher D. non-biological forms of, 25 Johnson), 32 non-declarative, 256, 294–5 metaphor fallacies, 21 nonconscious, 348 Metaphors of Memory (Douwe Draaisma), 17, odour, 38–40, 42 27, 353 398 Index metaphors of memory, 16–19, 72, 244 Mojet, J., 45 architectural metaphors, 30 Molaison, Henry, 57–9 films, 33–4 Moncur, Wendy, 83, 111, 112 flash bulb metaphor, 23 Moon (Duncan Jones), 1 historicization of, 18, 22 Moonwalking with Einstein (Joshua Foer), Internet, 67–8 19, 79 magic slate, 25 Moore’s law, 219, 225 memory as a flock of pigeons, 17 Moraru, Christian, 224 memory as a process, 22 Morozov, Evgeny, 243 mind as a computer, 24–5, 245 The Mortgage on the Brain mind as a sieve, 65 (Vincent Harper), 58 of the modernist period, 19–21 Morton, Timothy, 147, 150 nature, 152–7 motor-skill learning, 255 palaces and theatres, 17–19, 28–31, mourning, 148, 150–2, 157 33–5, 225 Mulkay, Michael, 108 palimpsest, 25 Muller, U., 46 paths of, 27 multidisciplinary, 85 Plato’s wax tablet metaphor, 17–18, 27–8 Murdoch, Iris, 199 proto-modern images, 18 music, link between poetry and, 277–9 Renaissance art, 31–2 Myers, Lynn B., 265 storage room/storehouse, 18, 21, 24, 28, My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis 229–30 Buñuel (Oliver Sacks), 280 Surrealism, 20 My Struggle (Karl Ove Knausgaard), 301 tears as, 24 theatre, 18–19, 28 Nadel, Lynn, 82, 97, 101, 102 in the twenty-first century, 353–5 Nairne, James S., 178 metaphors of neuroscience, 21–4 Nakamura, Kimihiro, 126 Metropolis (Fritz Lang), 79 Nalbantian, Suzanne, 6, 48, 52, Michaud, Philippe-Alain, 34 348, 353 Miller, George A., 277 narrative-based medicine (NBM), 7 Milne, A.A., 327 ‘Narrative Clip’, 84, 116 Milner, Brenda, 97 narration, 201, 210, 213, 215, 248, 283 Milton, John, 152 narrative memory, 207, 305, 335 Lycidas, 151–2 nature writing, 181–2 Paradise Lost, 155–6 navigation aids mind impact on cognitive ability, 103 extended mind thesis (EMT), see under users of, 103–5 cognition Negri, Antonio, 295 embedded, see under cognition Neiman, Susan, 294 embodied, see under cognition neocortex, 23, 251, 256–60 enacted, see under cognition neocortical lesions, 259–60 new science of the, 4–8 networked memory, 356 mind-body split, see Cartesian dualism neural metaphor, 72–3 ‘Mindwheel’ (Robert Pinsky), 87 neural replay, 258 Minority Report (Philip K. Dick), 191, 215 neuroaesthetics, 11 Minsky, Marvin, 335 neurocentric culture, 304, 330 Mitchell, David, 318 neurological realism, 12 Mitra, Ananda, 86 neurology, 90 mnemonic(s), 18, 28, 30–1, 53, 221, 273 Neuromancer (William Gibson), 71 Mnemosyne Atlas, 17, 32 neuromania, 8–12 mnemotechniques, 273 neuronal ideology, 247 modernism, 19–21, 55 Neuronal Man (Jean-Pierre Changeux), modernity, 33, 197, 272, 301, 311, 348, 353 9, 16 Moggach, Lottie, 84 neuroplasticity, 82, 247–8, 276, 279 Index 399 neuro-psychogeography memory, role of, 123 analysis of Self’s brain activity, 100–2 pre-reading mood, 121 experiences in streets of London’s Soho theory of, 119 district, 100 Odds Against Tomorrow of London taxi drivers, 98–100 (Nathaniel Rich), 181 neuropsychological impairments in odour cues, 39, 42–3 PTSD, 340 associations between tasting and, 44–6 neuroscience, 5, 90, 128, 353 Pavlovian or classical conditioning of amnesiac brain, 243–4 experiment, 46–7 cognitive testing, 82 odour-evoked autobiographical of forgetting, 244–5 memories, 43 functional magnetic resonance imaging odour memories, 38–40, 42 (fMRI), 21–4 Odyssey (Homer), 79 H. M.’s experimental surgery, 251–2, 255, offloading technology, 82 281–2 O’Keefe, John, 82, 97, 101, 102 information processing, 232–3 Olatunji, Bunmi O., 340 insula, 48 olfaction and memory, 20, 38–41 introspections, 10 olfactory LOVER, 43–4 limits of, 9 online profiles, 83–4 Parkinsonian patients, 91 The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (Evelyn visual, odour and auditory cues and Waugh), 320 memory, 20 Orwell, George, 239, 246, 268 Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro), 2 Other People (Martin Amis), 239 New Atlantis, 211–12 Our Final Century (Martin Rees), 208 New Model Army (Adam Roberts), 86 Out of Mind (J. Bernlef), 1, 242 The New Science (Giambattista Vico), 31 The Outsiders (S. E. Hinton), 286 The New Spirit of Capitalism (Luc Boltanski overpopulation, 1, 349 and Eve Chiapello), 247 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 185, 263 parahippocampal cortex, 254 9/11 attacks, 6, 23 Parikka, Jussi, 58, 132, 360 Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell), 52, Paris Peasant (Louis Aragon), 53 79, 176, 246, 268 Park, Heekyeong, 266 Nixon, Rob, 160 Parush, Avi, 105 Noah (Darren Aranofsky), 176 past life regression therapy, 345 Noë, Alva, 126 Patchwork Girl (Shelley Jackson), 87 noosphere, 71 Pathosformel (‘Pathos formula’), 32–4 nostalgia, 163–5, 168 Patrick, Cat, 290 Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán), Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich 176, 353 classical conditioning novels, 222–3 experiment, 46–7 role in ethics of memory, 360 Pepperell, Robert, 9, 52, 331, 332 thematisations of hearing voice perirhinal cortex, 254 experiences, 316–23 Perkins Wilder, Linda, 18 Nowicka, Anna Maria, 265 Permanent Permanent Tense (Suzanne Nox (Anne Carson), 135 Corkin), 352 Nye, David E., 166 Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesiac Patient, H. M. Oblivion (Douwe Draaisma), 245 (Suzanne Corkin), 248, 280–2 Oblivion (Joseph Kosinski), 148 ‘perpetual present’ thesis, 241 oceanic literary reading mind, 119–24 The Persistence of Memory affective (sign-fed and mind-fed) inputs, (Salvador Dalí), 20 120–3 Personality, 59, 108, 242, 282, 287 emotional responses, 122–3 Pfeiffer, Brad E., 101 literary reading loop, 121–2 Phelps, Elizabeth, 23 400 Index

Phillips, T., 135 Proust, Marcel, 10, 19, 214, 218, photography, 19, 28, 113, 313 224, 325, 348 physical life, 108 In Search of Lost Time, 20, 42, 304 Picker, John M., 272 madeleine episode and memories of past pineal gland, 9 life, 38–48 Pineau, H., 340, 341 Proust, Marcel, 19, 20, 42, 43, 325 Pinker, Steven, 131 Proust and the Squid (Maryanne Wolf), Pinsent, Pat, 287 85, 308 Pinsky, Robert, 247, 277 Proust Phenomenon, 20, 38–41, 246, 353 Pitsillides, Stacey, 83–4 psychological trauma, 54, 239 planning, 206–7 Punt, Michael, 9, 332 children and, 207 cognition and, 206 qualia, 10, 16, 22–3 plasticity, see neuroplasticity Quinn, Kate Karyus, 290 Plato, 17, 311 play, 360 Ramachandran, V.S., 334 Plomin, Robert, 337 Rancière, Jacques, 313–14 poetry rationality, 5, 20, 52 formal aspects of, 277 The Raw Shark Texts (Steven Hall), 242 music and, 276–7 reading remembering/remembrance in, 271–4, digital, 127–8, 131–2 278–9 ethics of, 131 technology and poetry reading, link with real world, 126 271–2 materiality and, 133 war memorials in, 294–5 non-reading, 121 Pöppel, Ernst, 206 post-reading, 121 positivism, 9 pre-reading, 121 post-apocalyptic fiction, 148 screen-based, 127, 134, 194, 258, 274 The Postdigital Membrane (Robert Pepperell recollection, 252–4 and Michael Punt), 9 based decisions, 254 The Post-Human Condition (Robert reconsolidation of memory, 22–3, Pepperell), 352 258, 353 posthumanism, 331–2 Recorded Futures, 209 postmemory, 6 Rees, Martin, 208 post-self, 111–12 Remainder (Tom McCarthy), 242, 287 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 305, remembered self, 325–6 338–42 remembering, 19, 20, 34, 38, 55, 97, 148, executive function and, 340 152, 210, 227, 231, 234–5, 242, malingering associated with, 247–8, 257, 259–60, 270–1, 277, 339–40 279, 283, 287, 289, 290, 293–4, neuropsychological performance and 300, 325, 328 emotion processing, 340 Remembering (Frederic Bartlett), 5 response of an individual with, 342 remembering/remembrance, 227, 231, potentiality, 310 234–5, 251–61, 268–70, 304, Pound, Ezra, 347 345, 359 Powell, Melissa, 340 ethics of, 292–7 Pratt, Cornelia Atwood, 58 moral obligation to, 292–7 prediction, 193 on-screen, 227 Price, J.L., 43 in performance of poetry, 271–4 priming, 121, 255 remorse, 66 Prinz, J.F., 45 Renais, Alain, 19 procedural knowledge, 255 representational-cum-computational procedural learning, 121 information processing, 230 procedural memory, 121 repressive coping style (repressors), 265 Index 401

Resnais, Alain, 72 search machines, 1 All the World’s Memories, 33 Google-based, 57, 80, 103, 132–3, Last Year at Marienbad, 34 350, 354 Marienbad, 34 see also Global Positioning System (GPS) Night and Fog, 33 Searle, John R., 16 Statues Also Die, 33 The Second Machine Age (Erik Brynjolfsson retained information, 230 and Andrew MacAfee), 358 retention, 127 Seefeldt, Carol, 287 retrospection, 141, 352 Self, Will, 4, 8, 53, 80–1, 82, 98, 100–2, revelatory text, 98 354–5 reverse course of memory, 66 psychogeographical mapping of place, 21 Rewriting the Soul (Ian Hacking), 2 The Book of Dave, 12, 82, 90, 98, 177, Ricoeur, Paul, 185, 199, 202, 286, 328, 359 354, 360 The Road (Cormac McCarthy), 148, 150, Self Comes to Mind (Antonio Damasio), 21 177–8, 352 self-consciousness, 93, 218, 241, 249 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 34 self-defining memories, 191–2 Robinson, K. S., 177 self-extinction, 307–8, 311, 314 Robinson, Kate, 31 selfhoods, 2–3, 301, 304, 307–16, 349 rote learning, 19, 28, 80, 126 confabulation of, 334–7 Rothberg, Michael, 72 from recollections of reading self and Rowling, J.K., 24, 64 capacity for self-deception, 325–8 Rubin, David C., 286 semantic dementia, 261 Ruis, C., 105 semantic knowledge, 260 Rushdie, Salman, 4, 322 semantic memory, 121, 210–11, 281–2 Russell, James, 207 Semon, Richard, 22 Russell, Peter, 71 Seneca, 67–8 Rycroft, Jane A., 47, 48 The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes), 65–6 Shadlen, Michael N., 335 Sacks, Oliver, 259 Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre (Linda Perkins An Anthropologist on Mars, 91 Wilder), 18 The Man Who Mistook His Wife for The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to a Hat, 91 Our Brain (Carr), 127, 308 Said, Edward, 5 Shapiro, Francine, 344 Sandberg, Anders, 9 shared knowledge, 4 Sandel, Michael J., 244 Sheehan, Paul, 300 Sarpota, M., 135 Shepherd, Gordon, 20 Saturday (Ian McEwan), 2, 12 Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten, 20, 353 The Savages, 242 short-term memory, 78, 121, 240, 260 Scarry, Elaine, 131 Sightlines (Kathleen Jamie), 182 Scar Tissue (Michael Ignatieff), 242 The Sight of Death (Nicolas Poussin), 11 Schacter, Daniel L., 191 Simon, Herbert A., 207 schizophrenia, 290, 352 Simonides, 28–9, 35 Schooler, Jonathan W., 39 Simons, Daniel J., 334 Schultz, B., 135 Sipser, Michael, 335 science-fiction dystopias, 148, 176 Sixty Days and Counting (Kim Stanley Science of Memory: Concepts (Roedinger, Robinson), 177 Dudai and Fitzpatrick), 353 Slee, Richard, 58 Scoville, William Beecher, 97 sleep, 21, 53, 64, 85, 163, 258–9, 290, 323 screen-based reading, 127 sleeplessness, 78 The Sea, The Sea (Iris Murdoch), Sloterdijk, Peter, 293 199–201, 203 Small, Dana M., 45 The Search for the Source of the Whirlpool of Smarter Than You Think Artifice: The Cosmology of Giulio Camillo (Clive Thompson), 80 (Kate Robinson), 31 Smith, Barry C., 20, 40 402 Index

Smith, Michael A., 47 Sznaider, Natan, 72 Smith, Zadie, 156, 176 Szpunar, Karl K., 191 Snapper (Brian Kimberling), 181 Snow, C.P., 2, 7 Takashima, A., 339 social life, 108 ‘taking care of the self’, 114, 117 socio-cultural contexts, influence in Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 17 remembering processes, 5 Tallis, Raymond, 303 Soho experiment, 4, 92–4 Tamplin, Jeanette, 11 Solar (Ian McEwan), 176, 179–80 Tangled Memories (Marita Sturken), 240 Solstad, Trygve, 97 tasting, 39 somatic cushion, 124n2 associations between odours and, 44–6 Soon, Chun Siong, 331 Taube, Jeffrey S., 97 soul, 2–3 Taylor, D.J., 207 Source Code (Duncan Jones), 215 Taylor, Shelley E., 336 Soylent Green (Richard Fleisher), 176 technical memory, 6 Sparrow, Betsy, 67 technological singularity, 193 spatial memory, 97, 252, 257 technology Spelke, Elizabeth S.., 205 archival, 309 Spence, Charles, 40 evolution in formation of memory/ Spencer, Jeremy P., 48 memories and, 349–51, 358–9 Spens, Sir Patrik, 277 memory in terms of, 332 Spiers, Hugo, 4, 97, 99, 101 poetry reading and, 271–2 MRI scans of people’s brains engaged in warfare, 293–4 route-planning, study of, 91–4 techno text, 134 spike, memory, 3, 156 temporality, 141, 155, 157, 165–6, 178, spontaneous memory, 53, 224 190, 195, 307–8, 319, 350 Squire, Larry, 23, 242, 245, 248 tense, 141, 202, 224, 352, 360 St. Augustine, 229 Tetsuro, Watsuji, 159 Steiner, George, 78, 133, 350 The Texture of Memory (James E. Young), 6 Steptoe, Andrew, E., 48 Theatres of Memory (Raphael Samuel), 5, 241 Stiegler, Bernard, 153, 309, 312 Thigpen, Corbett H., 343 Still Alice (Lisa Genova), 242 Thinking, Fast and Slow Stoicism, 184–5 (Daniel Kahneman), 185 storage house metaphor of memory, Thirlwell, Adam, 135 18, 21 Thomas, Dylan, 144, 163, 164, 166 stroke patients, 11, 91, 104–5, 126, Thomashow, Mitchell, 165 334, 359 Thompson, Clive, 67, 80 Sturken, Marita, 240 Thompson, Evan, 235, 310 Sturrock, John, 286 Tieman, Denise, 45 subjectivity, 8, 20–1, 147, 283, 286, 300–1, time, philosophy of, 213–16 303–4, 307–15, 325, 327–8, 348 in Western thought, 269 Sunshine (Danny Boyle), 147 Tolin, David F., 340 Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action Tolkien, J.R.R., 327 and Cognitive Extension To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed (Andy Clark), 220 (Alix Kates Shulman), 280–2 Surrealism, 20, 55 To Save Everything, Click Here (Evgeny model of spontaneous memory, 52–3 Morozov), 243 Surrealist neuroscience, 51–3 totalitarianism, 309 survival processing, 178–9 total memory, 83–4, 223–4 Sutton, John, 230 Total Recall, 220, 226–7, 239 Swaab, D., 8, 9, 331 ‘Touching Brains’ (Jason Tougaw), 22 Sweeting, Helen, 108 Tougaw, Jason, 12, 22, 248–9, 303 Synaptic Self (Joseph LeDoux), 9 transactive knowledge, 4 Szathmáry, Eörs, 206 transactive memory, 68, 351, 356 Index 403 transcendence, 225, 245–6 A Visit from the Goon Squad transcription technologies, 134 (Jennifer Egan), 181 transindividuation, 309 visual brain, 11, 59–60 trauma, 5–6, 17, 34, 65, 214, 283, 287, visual cues and memory, 20, 42–3 305–6, 318, 343–6 Vonnegut, Kurt, 171 automatism, 53–5 Vygotsky, L.S., 323 relation between voices and forgotten traumatic experience, 318–20 Wagner, Birgit, 346 therapies for, 344–5 Walter, Tony, 108, 114 trauma-induced amnesia, 288–9 Warburg, Aby, 31–3 traumatic memories, 17, 23–4, 211, 344 Warburg, Aby, 32, 34 traumatic stressors, 338–9 war memories, 293–6 Treatise on Astrolabe (Geoffrey Chaucer), 81 warrior geek, 293–4 Tree of Codes (Jonathan Safran Foer), 135 Waskett, Louise, 42 Tribble, Evelyn B., 18 The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot), 348 Cognition in the Globe, 18 The Water-Babies, 326–7 Trouern-Trend, J., 182 Waugh, Evelyn, 17 Tulving, Endel, 210 Waugh, Patricia, 304 Turkle, Sherry, 115 We Are Our Brain (Dick Swaab), 8 Turn of Mind (Alice LaPlante), 242 Wearing, Clive, 281 twenty-first century, 208 weather, see climate change twin towers, 7, 214 weather, memories of past, 159–62 Two Cultures debate, 7 Christmas and snow, 163–8 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick), The Weather Project (Olafur Eliasson), 176 1, 25 Weather Weirding, 143 2500 Random Things about Me (Matias web, see internet Viegener), 87 Webster, Donna M., 345 Wells, H. G., 71 Ulysses (James Joyce), 19 The Wet Mind (Stephen M. Kosslyn and unconscious memories, 53, 55 Olivier Koenig), 124 The Unfortunates (B. S. Johnson), 135 What Should We Do With Our Brain? unintentional forgetting, 263–5 (Catherine Malabou), 7, United Micro Kingdoms, 211–12 276, 354 Unremembered (Jessica Brody), 290 What’s Wrong With the World (G. K. Chesterton), 222 van der Ham, Ineke J.M., 104 Whitehead, Anne, 326 van der Weel, Adriaan, 85, 86, 132 Whitehouse, Harvey, 206 van Dijck, José, 83 White Teeth (Zadie Smith), 176 Vanhaeren, Marian, 113 Why Life Speeds Up When you Get Older Vann, David, 176, 182 (Douwe Draaisma), 353 Van Oudenhove, Lukas, 48 Wikipedia, 230 Verhagen, Justus V., 46 Wild (Jay Griffith), 182 Vernadsky, Vladimir, 71 The Wild Duck (Henrik Ibsen), 344 Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock), 24 Willem Winkel, Frans, 339 Vidal, Fernando, 58 Williams, Raymond, 164 virtual communication, 300 Willis, Katharine S., 103 virtual media, 86 Wilson, E. O., 145 virtual memory, 57, 113 Winner, Langdon, 128 archives, 116–17 Winnie-the-Pooh (A. A. Milne), 327–8 documents about the dead, 114 Witherly, Steven A.45 virtual reality, 100, 105, 107, 132–3, 194, Wixted, John T., 23, 242, 245, 248 199–200, 202, 214, 226, 258, 355, Woillard, Geneviève, 173 359–60 Wolf, Maryanne, 85, 132 virtual simulation, 99 women, 150, 219 404 Index

Woolf, Virginia, 320–3, 347 The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood), ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 347–53 176–7 Mrs Dalloway, 185, 319, 348 Yellow Dog (Martin Amis), 239 Woollett, Katherine, 98, 98 Yeung, Heather, 249 working memory, 78, 81, 121, 124n2, 136, 251, 265, 277, 341–2, 353 Zeki, Semir, 11 world brain, 71–2 Zellner, Martina, 266 writing, 125, 128 Zielinski, Siegfried, 58 about self, 113–14, 116–17 Zimprich, Daniel, 265 in digital era, 126 Žižek, Slavoj, 142, 179, 203 Zoellner, Lori A., 340 Yang, Wenjing, 265 ‘Zombies, Run!’ (Naomi Yates, Frances, 27, 29, 30, 31 Alderman), 87