A session on ‘What is Memory Studies?’ held on 13th September, 2023 by Dr. Merin Simi Raj and Dr. Avishek Parui, faculties in the Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, was attended by students and professors alike.
The lecture focused on clarifying concepts and theories in memory studies as well as the working of the Memory Studies Centre. Dr. Parui began the talk by explaining a couple of paradoxes of memory. He elucidated the first paradox of memory being defined as an interplay and entanglement of remembrance and forgetting. These two important concepts should not be perceived as ontological opposites but as weaved in a web of interconnectedness. These interwoven cognitive functions are paradoxed such that every act of remembering involves some forgetting, as the brain is hardwired to forget. This characterises a large chunking out of information as an act of memory, defining memory as a dynamic activity, a verb having performative quality. This paradox entails an asymmetrical association of remembrance and forgetting.
The second paradox is of memory being a retrospective as well as prospective activity. We assume memory as a characteristic of the past, but it plays an essential role in the anticipation of the future as well. Parui talked further about two morals of memory. The molecular mechanism of memory studies the functioning of the brain through electro-chemical reactions and the firing of neurons and strives to answer the question, ‘How does the brain remember?’ while the cultural mechanism of memory pertains to the affect on culture through memory. There is a certain intermix between the molecular and cultural mechanisms which shapes the memory process. Parui cited cognitive philosopher Andy Clark to explain the processing of information by the brain. Clark talks of memory in terms of a hydraulic metaphor, signalling the constant leak of information into and out of the brain, leading to simulation of knowledge. Our consumption of knowledge is also dependent upon the ecology and environment around us. Also, what we remember is a function of how we remember things, people and instances. The connection between the modality of memory and the material of memory represents how you remember and how you forget. Parui also mentioned Prof. Andrew Hoskins’ work regarding connectivity as an useful model of memory which probes if the human and social/cultural study of remembering and forgetting can or should be fruitfully connected, as bodies are different interfaces through which memory travels and connects – may they be artificial/natural or organic/inorganic.
Dr. Avishek went on to elucidate the act of memory in three diachronic phases, namely, Encoding, Consolidation and Retrieval of information. Each phase has a slippery quality. The brain carries out encoding in a biased way, as emotions and the emotive connect influence the process of encoding. The nature of duration of memory, long term or short term, depends upon the phase of consolidation. The process of retrieval happens when the context matches the memory. Modern neuroscientists prefer the term reconstruction rather than remembering, as reconstruction provides a structured, phased manner of memory retrieval. Dr. Parui then turned the focus on the interaction between literature and memory. Focalisation in literature assumes importance as it has a situated narrator who represents the focal point through which the story has been told, thereby giving a perspective to our memory. Thus, the fundamental functionality of memory has literary tendencies. ‘Affect’, in layman terms, is something that has movement and simultaneously moves you. Affect in literature produces movement of memory, since the medium of language is designed to project affect. Parui described affect in literature through the example of Wordsworth’s famous poem ‘Daffodils’ – Wordsworth notices and depicts the daffodils, and not the grass or the sun, giving us a biased representation and signifying the constant foregrounding and backgrounding in literature. The literary forms of information are more affective than journalistic forms of information, as they are hyperbolic and figurative. Neuroscientists concentrate a lot on fictional literature because of the augmented reality it manufactures, which continually defamiliarizes time, space and the environment around us. Fiction follows a gradual process of defamiliarization, combining together material reality and imaginative reality, the fantastic and the factual, making literature the best bet to study streams of consciousness. The open endedness in fiction showcases the organic relation between fiction and memory studies. So, memory pans out as an interconnected complexity of remembering and forgetting, and retrospection and anticipation of the future.
The textualization and politicisation of memory and history follows the cultural, ideological and political momentum of time. Politically motivated history is carefully manipulated and prominent figures are pushed in the background and marginalised to consciously manufacture amnesia. The politics of writing history is a constant interplay of inclusion and exclusion. History is not just the presentation of the past but is also actively used as a tool and resurrected to manufacture the anticipation and projection of the future. History has also been used to legitimise capitalist and political policies to shape and influence the public memory. Similarly, nostalgia is not just an aspect of memory. The politics of nostalgia harnesses nostalgia as a tool to project or imagine the future. Nostalgia studies reveal that the politics of nostalgia is geared toward the future through the reconstruction of the past which was never really there.
Turning to the interdisciplinary nature of memory studies, Parui elucidated the different modalities of memory being academic, cultural, political and artistic. He also emphasised on deconstruction as the production of possibility, and that which accommodates and celebrates ambivalence. Ambivalence in real life might have negative connotations, but in memory studies, ambivalence has its ontological core in an anti-binary and anti-dualistic nature, with the intermixing of forgetting-remembering and past-future orientation.
Dr. Parui ended his talk by stressing on the need of memory studies to focus on the question of how the neural net processes structure into the brain as we know, before handing over the mic to Dr. Merin.
Dr. Merin began the discussion by highlighting the functions of the Memory Studies Centre, which focus on research oriented and project oriented aspects of memory. She defined memory as not a stagnant concept but a dynamic process. The history of civilization has always strived to transfer and preserve sets of information across time and space. This offloading of memory to different external devices has evolved through time in the form of cave paintings, tablet inscriptions and digital avenues in the modern times. Memory functions through 3 essential phases of remembering, recalling and recovering. Dr. Merin also talked about the difference in preservation of memory in the pre and post digital era. We participate in any event that happens, we remember how that event took place, and we relive it vicariously when we consume it through digital media.
The processes used in the Memory Studies Centre focus on the intersection of memory and technology. When researching a community through its preserved memory, its history is mostly available in scattered resources and scholarship and rests largely with the individuals in the form of private stories, conserved artefacts, lived experiences and cultural history. From a theoretical and clinical perspective, this material falls under different categories of cultural, social and intergenerational memory, and comes with an innate sense of hierarchy. While converting these into digital archives, memory paired with technology has the potential to reproduce data without the inherent stacked hierarchy with an equal mode of transfer. The participatory model, processes and the constant state of flux is preserved through digitisation. The Memory Studies Centre addresses the question of how to approach memory as a lens for hyperconnectivity. The hyperconnected neural network and dialogues can be unravelled using interdisciplinary memory methods and the combined lens of memory studies and digital technologies.
The lecture ended with a brief Q&A session.
Report by Sonia Kute
Photo by Akhil Faizal & Appukrishnan M V
Article 19 