From the issue dated September 22, 2000
|
|
Books, Computers, and Other Metaphors of MemoryBy ERIC JAGERToday, people often describe themselves and their minds in computer terms, referring to "hard-wired" personality traits and mental "software." Or they treat their mental life as a movie, "replaying" their memories and offering their "take" on things. Such metaphors are clues to our collective psychology; they suggest the extent to which we imagine ourselves in terms of the media technology that surrounds us. To be sure, many of us continue to use a different and much older metaphor of selfhood based on the written word. Hardly a day goes by that we don't refer to someone's "character" or to "reading" another person's mind or making a "mental note." When promising to improve ourselves, we still vow to "turn over a new leaf." Such expressions picture human beings in specifically textual terms, a model of the self that goes back to ancient times. But textual metaphors were already in decline by the mid-20th century, and now, at the turn of the millennium, the old textual self is clearly dying. Why are we trading it in for a modern high-tech psyche, and how does the mental upgrade rewrite our collective self-image? Some history can help us answer those questions. Classical authors like Aristotle pictured memory as a scroll or wax writing tablet (the source of our terms "tabula rasa" and "impression"), and the Bible refers to a "tablet of the heart." Indeed, by about A.D. 400, when Christendom had embraced the codex -- the basic form of the book still used today -- the self was imagined as a "book of the heart." The Bible's authority kept the heart at the center of our book metaphors of the self for centuries. Medieval monks described an internal "scribe" writing a book of memories in the heart, while secular poets portrayed lovers "reading" their own hearts. Medieval artists drew people holding heart-shaped books, some of which even survive today. Focusing on the heart was a crucial step toward the modern idea that a person is a unique individual. By roughly 1400, the single comprehensive book of the heart had been replaced in medieval religious writings and art by multiple books, each considered unique to the individual. For poets, the book of the heart was often a private record of intimate feelings or fantasies -- the diary of a singular human being. Thus Petrarch said that he "wrote" in his heart the "story" of his love for his Laura. In early modern times, however, the book of the heart underwent radical changes. After Gutenberg, it was often pictured as a printed volume, suggesting a more-mechanical self. John Locke, for example, described the mind in quasi-typographical terms, as a "white paper" imprinted with sensory experience. In the early 17th century, as scientists like William Harvey reduced the heart to a pump and philosophers like René Descartes removed the soul or self permanently to the head, the book of the heart came increasingly to be replaced by what Shakespeare's Hamlet referred to as "the book and volume of my brain." In the 19th century, Thomas De Quincey and other writers were invoking "the palimpsest of the human brain," a complex mind with multiple layers of memory and experience. By 1900, Freud had adapted that metaphor to his theory of dreams and the unconscious, and as late as 1950 Jacques Lacan likened the unconscious to a "censored chapter" that was the key to one's personal history. This book of the brain was more secular, and still more individualistic, than the book of the heart. Not even a modern secular book of the self, however, could compete with powerful new metaphors derived from the latest media and machines. Starting in the mid-1700's, the clock, the steam engine, the electric dynamo, and the internal-combustion engine all, in turn, helped popularize an even more mechanical picture of the mind, as suggested by many common expressions still used today, like "blowing off steam," "a loose screw," "what makes him tick," and "all revved up." Even Freud preferred electrical and chemical models of the psyche, as shown by his fondness for terms such as "mechanism," "apparatus," "energy," and -- his most influential legacy -- "repression." Photography further changed how we talked about the mind ("mental picture," "focus," "photographic memory"), and the movies gave us a new script of popular expressions for mental experience ("flashback," "montage," "slow motion"). The increasingly mechanical metaphors appealed to a modern industrial and capitalist outlook. The book of the heart had been rooted in the contemplative world of the medieval monastery; the new metaphors that idealized an active, productive self were spawned by the Industrial Revolution. Today's metaphor of choice, both inside and outside the university, is clearly the computer. The notion of the brain as a computer originated several decades ago in cognitive psychology, and today cognitive scientists discuss perception and memory in terms of "synaptic circuitry" and "computational cost." With personal computers now standard equipment in millions of homes and offices, people commonly speak of "accessing" their memories, and a Time magazine cover several years ago pictured the human head as a computer circuit board -- an image worlds apart from portraits of people holding heart-shaped books. One of the most telling signs of the critical change from book metaphors to screen metaphors is how both scientific and literary authors continue to pay passing homage to textual metaphors for the mind while more frequently relying on video or computer ones, as if the latter now come more naturally. Gore Vidal, in his memoir, Palimpsest, begins by depicting himself "erasing some but not all of the original while writing something new over the first layer of text," and, from time to time, he reverts to that metaphor. Still, he also resorts to other tropes that betray a more video-based imagination. For example, "As I replay the ancient tapes of memory, I begin to see the story from quite a new angle," he writes. "If it were possible, I would like to reedit all the tapes, but they are now so fragile with age that they would probably turn to dust." The overlapping metaphors of memory (from an author who claims to be virtually the last literate person in the Western world) are symptomatic of our time. The tendency of obsolete technologies to remain alive (or at least dormant) as symbols, images, or metaphors has been dubbed "iconographic inertia" by the author Nicholson Baker. Long after the steam engine has disappeared from the scene, we still use it to describe our feelings or behavior. The same inertia attends the codex. In practical terms, the overlap in our metaphors highlights the fact that computers are often used for textual functions once confined to the written (or printed) page; in conceptual terms, it suggests that we recognize that computers not only crunch numbers but, like texts, manipulate symbols as well. But even more, it hints at the way that, in our centuries-long attempt to describe (let alone explain) the human mind or consciousness, we have been playing a kind of shell game, using one metaphor after another to contain an elusive entity. Our mixed metaphors also speak to our sense of loss. It is no small irony that writing, which Plato denounced in the early days of Western literacy as an alien technological threat to our essential humanity (reason, memory, the soul), is often held up today in the form of the codex as a symbol of the human qualities supposedly threatened by newer technologies, especially the computer. Richard A. Lanham, a professor of English who has written widely on technology, offers an ironic and hyperbolic paraphrase of such attitudes in his recent book, The Electronic Word (available in both print and hypertext): "The book itself is sacred. ... The codex book creates the vital central self. The codex book defines human reason. ... Its very feel and heft and look and smell are talismanic. We must have an agency of the federal government to protect it." For Lanham, the question is not whether the codex ultimately can be saved (it cannot), but whether the sort of experience and the kind of self traditionally associated with it will continue to be possible in the new electronic age. Well into the new century, we will undoubtedly continue to invoke "character," "impressions," and other traces of our old textual selves that go back to antiquity. But that conception of the self has a limited future when the technology on which it is based, the printed book, may soon become as much a symbol of the past as the manuscript codex is today. Postmodern culture still pays homage to the old ideal, as in the slogan of a recent literacy campaign, "Find Yourself in a Book." But when those words flash onto the TV screen for a few seconds during a station break, they ironically signal not only the book's demise as an actual medium for understanding ourselves and the world but also its fading relevance as a symbol in our collective imagination. Eric Jager is a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author of The Book of the Heart (University of Chicago Press, 2000). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B14
|
Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education