nici /memory Paper

Bubbles of Memory

As beings moving through time, our ability to reference the past and to abstract that knowledge toward the future plays a primary role in our understanding and conceptualizing our own consciousness. As beings who exist within groups and whose continuity often depends upon those groups functioning as we expect them to, our ability to reconcile differences between our own account of events and the accounts of those around us helps us to understand our own subjectivity and respect the subjectivity of others. And as beings who define themselves as members of communities, we construct those communities and their histories through the narration of our perceptions of them. Memory plays a key role in each of these modes of being and the compilation, construction, and consumption of memory is the main focus of this project.

Events of cultural or communal significance can be used as focal points for the formation or reinforcement of community bonds. The goal of this project is to provide a means to gather, connect, and display a collection of personal narratives centered on an event or series of events that is deemed important by a specific community. The methods through which these things are accomplished will be appropriate to the ways memory functions on both an individual and communal level and the effects that this has on the community will be made apparent through their own analysis of participating in the project.  

The proposal is for the creation of a database backed website initially used to display narratives gathered from community members. Prior to interviewing people, images from the time period will be collected and during the interviews the participants will be asked to provide narratives of the memories that these images provoke for them. This collection of narratives from many different community members will be evaluated for similar themes that connect and entered into a database. A public website will be designed that will allow navigation through the different narratives by their relations to each other. Two narratives are designated as related if they are by the same author, they were triggered by the same image, or they share a similar theme as determined by key words or concepts. 

The second stage of the project calls for the development of a web interface, accessible only by members of the community, which allows participants to enter their narratives online and designate their own themes for them. The ability to upload images and to amend the relation will also be design in to the community side of the site. The comparison between the initial implementation and the way in which the narrative space grows as people gain the ability to react to the narrative of others will be illustrative of the way memory functions within a social setting.    

The first implementation of the project will be done for The Hip Santa Cruz History Project (THSCHP) will be used as the test case for the fitness of the project design. Depending on their results future implementations will expand or contract the initial non-reflexive stage and focus more or less on the social dynamics of memory. 

In this specific case the group is connected by their presence in Santa Cruz during the late 60’s and early 70’s and their participation in the Hip subculture.  It was a formative time for our society and the local area, perhaps an era of great significance for our culture. THSCHP has already denoted several formative and influential events in their past and I will gather personal accounts, recollections, triggered memories, and provide a forum for this group to tell the narrative that they wish.

This is a historical project, based on the lived experiences of the participants. I'm asking them for narratives of their experiences, memories of events, and motivations that they feel are important to relate. According to Kelly Oliver the opportunity to share what you have experienced, what you have first-hand knowledge of, is part of what creates subjectivity. (Oliver p. 16)  To be a subject is to be an observer—to experience and collect perceptions about a thing or an event. The act of relating this collection is a declaration that one has that measure of agency; the person speaking is not just a silent third party but capable of participating in the conversation and through that participation shaping the perceptions of others.  This project gives participants a forum for relating their perceptions, as they are encouraged to relate not just what happened but also their subjective lived experiences.

To be capable of subjectivity implies the ability to confer that status on another by listening to what they have to relate and by "bearing witness to something beyond recognition that can't be seen."(Oliver?) This means not only accepting what others have to say about their perceptions but also respecting that those experiences can never be completely communicated. While the benefit of this project to the participants will come partially from their ability to share their stories, it will also be derived from their ability to bear witness to the experiences of other participants and have those narratives trigger new memories.  The website’s appeal to, and successful use by, a more general population will be the proverbial icing on the cake. 

In his book, Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson defines two main types of memory--muscle memory and true memory. Muscle memory is the bodies learned reaction while true memory is much harder to define. “Memory, inseparable in practice from perception, imports the past into the present…”(Bergson p. 80) However, for us to be conscious of the present it must have already occurred in that split second it takes us to be aware of our own perceptions. The present is then not that which is happening but that which has just now happened, and our brains are forever trying to predict what will happen next.

Bergson visualizes the present as a thin layer of just happened that is forever advancing into the future, and defines consciousness as the point of action and agency where the brain undergoes motions and has the ability to affect what it perceives. Consciousness is an illumination of this thin layer, in this human oriented visualization perceiving something is like shedding light upon it; an illumination of that changing moment that can shed its light onto past states—memory—if those states are alike enough to the current lived state. (Bergson p. 194)

            Memory becomes a pattern of motion in the brain, and if the brains current momentum is alike to a past pattern that pattern is drawn to the surface, considered for its usefulness, and worked into our present perception of the moment or not depending on the perceived fit. The most remedial justification for this process is that through the incorporation of the perception our consciousness attempts to predict what will happen next. I see a ball flying through the air and my brain recalls my perceptions of other balls, chooses the information from the one whose circumstances seem the most similar, and uses that information to predict where to position my hands in order to catch it.

            This conceptualization of memory makes it seem so static, as if our past perceptions existed outside of our mind. This is not at all Bergson’s point, rather he acknowledges that we are always within our own perceptions and no perception is purely free of memory. (Bergson 170) As perceptions surface they are affected by the present state of the mind, just as they influence our predictions in the now.

            This conceptualization of memory and perception has dealt with them as if they were discrete unit that exist on their own. My personal experience of memory has lead me to believe that instead of one perception rising to the surface of the now you receive a bundle of interconnected perceptions triggered by and associated with the now state of perception. For example, when I perceive an envelope lying on my desk, earlier perceptions of what the envelope might contain rise. It’s an envelope for photographs, I know because I have perceived photographs coming out of objects that I have similar perceptions of. I perceive the writing on its side that tell me where it was processed and who it was done for. This triggers an image of the person whose name appears, not complete enough to be a memory but perhaps a collection of perceptions.

            This collection of past perceptions that arises due to their symbolic similarities to my current perception are all bundled together in my mind. This tendency for memory to exist in connected chunks is something I visualize by extending Bergson’s model. If you divide our perceptions of the past and the future by this plane of the present perceptions and consciousness is the area of the just now happened, this area is always moving forward. I see this motion as propelled by our own self awareness, leaving a turbulent zone behind it in which perceptions from the past are always in motion. These pockets of memory are moved further from and closer to the surface in a chaotic motion, those that approach the surface may be illuminated by the consciousness if their patterns fit with the minds current state. 

            These pockets within the chaotic motion are memories. Consisting of perceptions that hold together through strong association they often represent specific points in time. Endel Tulving, a Canadian neuroscientist, explained this tendency of memory to congeal around moments rather than clumping in like types by examining the way we perceive time.

"The basic units of perceived time are events. An event is something that occurs in a particular place at a particular time. The closely related term 'episode' refers to an event that is part of an ongoing series of events" (Tulving p. 229).

 The basic design of my project encourages the structuring of memory as episodes instead of continuous narration. I’m asking people to relate their experiences in narrative episodes that are independent from each other and have no more than an implied order to them.

 By centering the narratives on images I am encouraging an even more compartmentalized set of perceptions about the past than if the narratives were solely on topical choices. The image is a static thing, while each person’s perceptions of it will be different and pull different perceptions from their memories; I see an image as generally more stable than a concept. The way our brains process an image may change, the meaning that we assign different symbols or signs within the image may change, but the image itself is not so malleable. 

This project does not attempt to construct a hierarchal ordering to the display of the narratives, the pathways through the information are determined by the user. The available choices are influenced by the themes identified when the narrative is first entered but the user does have the choice to use a search function. Each narrative segment is connected to other segments, either those related by the same author, those related by use of the same supporting image, or those related by common theme.

            The linkage between image and memory has often been utilized as a memory aid. Ancient Greek orators used mnemonics to facilitate the recollection of large amounts of information. (Schacter 46) Although this process involved the creation a familiar mental image and the insertion of that which was to be remembered within it rather than using a set image to trigger a memory, it still demonstrates a connection between the ways the brain processes an image and handles more abstract knowledge.

This reliance on image as central element is somewhat justified by currently held opinions on episodic memory. “Typically, a remembered event or episode consists of some focal elements (e.g., objects or actions) framed within a spatiotemporal context.” (Roediger, Craik, and Tulving 43) These focal elements serve as the center point around which perceptions and memories are organized, and the knowledge of when and where they occurred effects the way evaluated. Tulving also developed a theory that we encoded into our memories retrieval cues that allow us to pull those memories to the surface.

 The act of encoding serves to integrate the representations of the event with its context so that later presentation of part of the context (recall) or part of the focal event (recognition) can lead to reintegration of the entire encoded episode. (Roediger, Craik, and Tulving 43)

 

 Whether this is done consciously or not, the theory describes how a minor representation of an event can trigger the memory and perceptions of the entire event. The link between event and episodic memory situates the memory as an occurrence of something in the world. The focus is on things that happen outside of the self and though the self is the source of the perceptions, the events themselves act upon subjects other than the self. 

“An episodic memory represents a specific past experience as an event that has happened in the world; it is referenced to the external environment. An autobiographical memory represents a specific past experience as an event that happened to the individual; it is referenced to the internal self.” (Fivush 36)

 

Autobiographical memories are more internal, they are based on events but their importance is in the effect they have on the self. They can be formative experiences, or moments of epiphany. Both of these types of memories will be represented in this project, the difficulty lies in finding images that can be used to trigger autobiographical memories in more than one person. Until initial interviews are done, I do not have the knowledge of what types of images might serve as such a trigger and for that reason the initial stages of the project may deal primarily with episodic memories.

In childhood the development of the awareness that your memories of an event are not the same as other peoples memories of that event is a key step toward understanding the self as differentiated from others. (Fivush 7) In the early stages of this project the representations of the participants through their narratives will likely mirror this stage of development. The different perceptions of events and locations that they narrate will be more linked to the external images than to the internal self.  The awareness of subjectivity that this will breed with contribute to the feeling of being unique and having a unique perspective. As the project progresses it will become possible to find ways to trigger and link more autobiographical memories and promote an examination of not just the experiences that people had, but the subjectivities and subject positions that those experiences made available.

The overriding goal in collecting these narratives is to develop a sense of the the time and place that the participants are narrating. It is in essence a history project whose evidence is the lived experiences of the participants. The relation between memory and history has always been problematic, though postmodern sensibilities make it less so. History is commonly perceived as recorded information about the past that is heavy on fact and figure and lighter on subjective experience.. The term history can be traced back to its Latin root historia--narrative of past events, account, tale, story--and that even further back to a Greek verb for inquiry, and yet further back still to roots that involve witnessing and the act of seeing. History has always been an answer to the question "What happened?" but only in relatively recent terms has it been expanded to asking “and how did that make you feel?”

            Postmodernism calls into question many assumptions about objective truths or standards. In his article, The Anti-Aesthetic, Fredric Jameson explains one of postmodernisms core concepts, pastiche, as that of a parody without an original to make fun of. (Jameson p.114) This lack of normalizing standard can be translated into our current terms by saying it is the subjective experience of an event to which there is no objective experience.  Or, to put it another way:

If "experience," moreover, is always embedded in and occurs through narrative frames, then there is no primal, unmediated experience that can be recovered. The distinction between history and memory in such accounts is a matter of disciplinary power rather than of epistemological privilege. (Olick, and Robbins)

 

Memory becomes an acceptable source of historical evidence. This change to what can be considered historical data gave rise to a new form history.

“History from the Bottom” arose as a term for the way in which historians sought to examine "the lives of inarticulate people and embarked on an unprecedented effort to rewrite history from the bottom up. A salient characteristic of their agenda was a search for structure in the multiplicity of individual experiences."(Zunz 58) Inarticulate subjects are not people who can’t speak but rather individuals who do not have access to the power structures through which history was normally recorded. While they may be perfectly capable of telling their own stories, and may already be doing so in different contexts, their stories were not being included in the larger scale construction of history. 

The search for structure within a collection of experiences is one of the main motivations for this project. There are currently many collections of memory online, but the majority of them lack any meaningful way to compare similar experiences or to identify and follow the common threads the occur throughout the narrations.

Narratives are extremely important to our society; they have important functions both personal and cultural levels. Though definitions vary in technicality according to the context for the purpose of this paper a narrative is a story told about the world from the perspective of a person or group of persons, it is a way of making sense of events and relating reactions to those events. (Wikipedia Narratives) According to N. Katherine Hayles “narrative in its historical and evolutionary role was a powerful tool for shaping as well as expressing human subjectivity and sociality–and it remains so today.” (Hayles p.3) Through narrative we explore relations of cause and effect, the results of actions and inactions, and possible subject positions.

If personal narrative involves "recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed" (Brooks p.3) than a more broadly based set of narratives should provide some means to generalize from them. When faced with an accumulation of information it becomes necessary to find ways to filter it in order to chart a coherent path through the data. As postmodernism discredits the unifying social narratives that have previously held together nations and people, we are faced with an increasing diversity of stories to hear and an increasing number of people to tell listen to.  

            Bakhtin adds to our perceptions of this diversity with his concept of polyphony. As a multitude of voices that are dissimilar, and yet without hierarchy, he connects this concept to the rise of the individual and the separation of the private and the public. (Aronowitz p. 149) The voices of those who have experienced a loss of a collective identity that once was bound through communal work, but now finds itself fragmented by modernity, become the substitution for the sense of history. Bakhtin developed this idea to analyze Dostoyevski's literature and through that analysis studies the cultures represented in it. The aspect of Dostoyevski’s work that appealed the most was the loss of an overriding narrative. The author not only used monolog to bring his own voice across, but incorporated the dialog of characters who directly oppose his political and world viewpoints. (Aronowitz p.152, 156)

            In literature there is an almost necessary hierarchy of order, words appear one after another, paragraphs follow each other. In reality the multitude of voices each tell their own stories, simultaneously, and our ears chose which ones to hear at any given time. This sense of limitation can be carried over to the way bodies move through space.  "Time constructs narratives by its intersections with social and symbolic space." (Aronowitz 149) People experience time in hierarchal order, one second follows the next and we chart our way across the social and symbolic space. Our narratives are pathways of experiential data through this these dimensions, we can relate only what we encounter on our pathway. To get idea of what an area looks like you must read the data from any paths that cross through it, and the most precise imaging of a space with no fixed points will come from knowing when those pathways intersect.

            The combined effect of this collection of pathways is a multiple author narration of something that is beyond the experience of any one person.  Each narrator serves as a source of authority—these narratives are culturally significant because their author was present and can relate their experience. However, that authority springs from a very subjective standpoint. If all the narratives are considered as a whole, as one text, the author function of the project is the idealized collective identity of the group. The more inclusively this group is defined, the greater authority we give them.

“The author serves to neutralize contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts... "(Foucault p.111) By giving a text a singular origin it is assumed that any contradictions that arise can be explained through understanding the author, that there is some underlying focus that he or she is circling.  In a text created by a collective of authors contradictions will arise in the narrative accounts entered. The perspectives on certain events will differ, perhaps facts will be contested, and certainly opinions will vary. These contradictions will serve as proof that the collective nature of the text is not distorting individual memories; memory is never separate from the vessel that contains it and in any collection of memories it would be expected to have a range of values.

 "Noticing the ways in which images of the past are the products of contestation has led varieties of both constructionists and deconstructionists to emphasize that the past is produced in the present and is thus malleable."(Olick, and Robbins)  

 

Should all parties agree on everything we would have to wonder if they were not suppressing their own perceptions to fit the normalized perception of the group.

The study of how memory functions in social setting has been the focus of many recent theoreticians. Memory functions in a social setting and is thus subject to the normalizing forces on group dynamics. As Halbwach said it, “it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories...”(Olick, and Robbins) While this social setting may have negative effects, such as a person distorting their memories to fit the commonly accepted perception on an event, it also has positive benefits. To return to the terminology of Bergson, reading another persons perceptions can align your own mind in such a state as to allow for previously unrecalled memories to surface.

Memory does not function separate from the self that is invested in the now, that self does not function separate from the community and society that it is a part of. This project is an attempt to build structures that promote the positive aspects of social memory and facilitate the compilation of a body of narrations that sheds light on a community. It will be interesting to see how memory functions within this social structure—how memories triggered by the same image vary from person to person, how narratives episodic memories and auto-biographical memories can be stimulated by types of images, how the connections that are designated by a particular participant get taken up by others, how the narrative space fills itself out as reflexive narration starts to play a larger part—and how a history can be built from subjective standpoints. 

            Should this first implementation of this project be a success, the next logical step would be to provide an easy to implement set of instructions or packaged deal that any group could use to create their own narrative space. As historians invite personal experience in as evidence, the societal perception of historians may grow to include all manner of people outside the traditional institution of history. By providing communities with the tools to gather their own narrations of their histories we can help eliminate silent third parties from our society.

 

Sources Cited:

Aronowitz, Stanley DEAD artist LIVE theories and Other Cultural Problems New York, NY: Routledge Date?

 

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. London: George Allen & Unwin, ltd. 1911.

 

Brooks, Peter Reading for the Plot Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

 

Fivush, Robyn. "3 Owning Experience: Developing Subjective Perspective in Autobiographical Narratives." The Self in Time: Developmental Perspectives. Ed. Chris Moore and Karen Lemmon. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001. 35-5.

 

Hayles, N. Katherine “Narrating Bits: Encounters between Humans and Intelligent Machines” Los Angeles, CA: University of California, Los Angeles.

 

Jameson, Fredric. ”Postmoderism and Consumer Society” The Anti-Aesthetic, Ed. Hal Foster, New Press , 2002. 111-125

 

Morris, R. J. “A discourse upon method, historical knowledge and information technology” Institute of Historical Research http://www.history.ac.uk/digit/morris.html

 

Olick, Jeffrey K., and Joyce Robbins. "Social Memory Studies: From "Collective Memory" to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices." Annual Review of Sociology 24.1 (1998): 105+

 

Roediger, Henry L., Fergus I. M. Craik, and Endel Tulving. Essays in Honour of Endel Tulving. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989.

 

Schacter, Daniel L. Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, 1st ed. New York: Basic Books, 1996.

 

Wikipedia Narrative http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative

 

Zunz, Olivier, ed. Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.