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Article Excerpt
HISTORY ANIMATES DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS
HISTORY ANIMATES DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS AT MANY DIFFERENT timescales. * Brains, people (with their embodied minds and their more or less mindful bodies), small groups, and institutions are all open to the past, both to specific past events and to general past trends and practices, without in general being overwhelmed by it. Coordinating change at many different rates and at many different levels of organization, these interacting and history-dependent open systems exhibit and contribute to a range of phenomena related to remembering. But how do they incorporate and act on the basis of their pasts? By what mechanisms, and through what media do traces shape the behavior of these systems?
Such general questions abstract away, for sure, from the specific neural or affective or interpersonal or organizational features that compose and flavor memory processes in particular individuals and collectives. One critic complains that "the positing of a weakly defined type, generic memory ... subsuming both internal and external states and processes" will not be of significant explanatory use (Rupert, 2004). Others think that my search for an integrated framework within which quite different memory-related phenomena might be understood is "a non-revolutionary approach to embodied cognition," "a project that can be undertaken while leaving much of the cognitive psychology of memory as the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems" (Adams and Aizawa, 2008: 179). In contrast, my hunch is that an initial levelling of the grounds of inquiry can fruitfully and substantially rejig the terrain of memory studies by flattening out what otherwise often remain the damagingly disconnected domains of distinct disciplines. We want to examine relations between different memory-related phenomena empirically, as the focus for explicit study (Wertsch, 2002: 37-38), rather than starting with any assumed divisions of proprietary labors between psychological and social sciences.
So there is strategic room in memory studies for deterritorializing, refusing to privilege any particular location--whether in neurobiology or in narrative, in cognition or culture--as the single home of our subject-matter. This might help in developing models of the relations between individual and collective memory based not on analogy or parallel or metaphor, but on understanding interactions between distinct yet highly interdependent phenomena. These interactions between forms of memory and between disparate components in and across (transient or enduring) systems take many shapes, revealing cooperation and complementarity as well as competition and conflict. The pluralist framework sketched in this paper for studying such forms of interaction and coordination has many historical predecessors and contemporary resonances across the disciplines that will not be highlighted here (see also Sutton, 2009). Instead, the paper selectively updates recent literature in the philosophy and psychology of memory and distributed cognition, complementing a distinct treatment of related material from a more empirical perspective (Barnier, Sutton, Harris, and Wilson, 2008).
Before embarking on the task of framework construction, here are two examples from recent empirical studies that do justice to the entangling of embodied, cognitive, affective, and cultural dimensions of remembering. Neither is yet a case of "collective memory"; before seeking conceptual space for one way of characterizing such a notion, it will help first to delineate a broader range of memory phenomena.
In 1999, Kyoko Murakami interviewed British former prisoners of war about a return visit they undertook to Japan almost 50 years after their incarceration there. Seeking to elicit these men's "views on reconciliation with the troubling past," the Japanese interviewer set up an unusual cross-cultural social setting (Murakami, 2001) in which the following exchange occurred (Murakami's transcript conventions follow those developed by Gail Jefferson for conversation analysis):
Ted: I haven't worked all morning getting it right for you just to look at it
Audrey: Well--well I usually eat first and then [I (...)
Ted: [(right) right. (Now) what would you like to hear about (.) would you like to hear how
Interviewer: yes, uhm (.) are you finished with all--
Ted: aye we're all right (.) [we're all right
Mary: [yes yes
Ted: [I am all right (.) you are in charge now
Interviewer: oh (.) no (.) hohoho
Ted: you give the orders Kyo:tsuke:h
Interviewer: hh no no no no I'm not here for that (.) hehh (.) um ((drink))
Ted: (now hurry up when) (.) Charlie's out and then you might get some (.) order (.) heh he[h
Mary: [heh heh heh
Like many of the war veterans, Ted uses a Japanese phrase--Kyotsukee, "stand to attention"--and couples it with embodied actions: Murakami also describes the use of ichi-ni-san-shi and sagyoo sagyoo ("one two three four," and "work, work!"), likewise shifting these conversations between their physical and temporal location in English homes and a quite different zone of personal and power relations. At the transition into the interview proper, the hesitant researcher resists the power Ted is ascribing to her: he follows up by announcing "you give the orders" and using the Japanese for "stand to attention," Kyotsukee. As Middleton and Brown note in commenting on this extraordinary moment, the utterance creates "trouble" in the interaction, bringing the moral order of the wartime labor camp somehow in to the present with a "visceral shock" (Middleton and Brown, 2005: 134-5). Its effect is not due to its meaning alone, but also to the incorporated and affective force of the word as a material symbol: Ted's highly charged autobiographical memories do not (in this exchange) appear in deliberate reference to particular past experiences, but filtered through the partial enactment of once habitual movement and permeating the present social setting. Whatever remembering is occurring in that utterance, there is no "we" here and now: the interviewer is not among those with whom Ted's relevant experiences were shared. Big history, personal memory, and bodily practices are concentrated together in this uneasy intrusive communication.
A second example also shows embodied and intercultural interaction in coordinating communication about the past, this time in a technologically saturated context. Cognitive anthropologists Nomura and Hutchins (2007) studied the microprocesses of interaction between Japanese training pilots and American flight instructors. Among many multimodal productions of situated communication involving bodily and speaking practices to facilitate joint reasoning, they identify an intriguing example of fluid switching across two people to reinterpret the shared recent past. As trainee and instructor talk about several hard landings in the flight simulator, the trainee looks through a small oval made with his index fingers and thumbs to indicate a particular perspective on the approach to the runway. While the trainee struggles to articulate what's happened verbally, his articulate gesture "has created an opening for the instructor to complete the discourse." Picking up and reusing this same gesture, the instructor transforms it smoothly to show a new visual perspective on the runway. He then turns his right hand to model the first part of the runway itself, then the motion of the plane down the glide path. The instructor next hits his right hand onto his left three times to indicate what he simultaneously calls "the firmer touchdowns" the pair have recently experienced in the simulator. In a last rapid movement sequence, he makes the same hand model first the plane's starting flare and then an appropriate movement of the trainee pilot's hand in manipulating the controls.
The shared gesture, woven together with linguistic utterances, is here taken up into a rich common structure of meaning as the communicators switch together between distinct referents and points of view: the multimodal communication encompasses remembering, and shared imagining as well as suggesting or instructing. In using gesture and speech together to take the trainee pilot again in memory through the events they have recently shared, the instructor ensures that there...
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