http://mss.sagepub.com Memory Studies DOI: 10.1177/1750698008340182 2009; 2; 299 Memory Studies John Sutton Looking beyond memory studies: Comparisons and integrations http://mss.sagepub.com The online version of this article can be found at: Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com can be found at:Memory Studies Additional services and information for http://mss.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts: http://mss.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navPermissions: http://mss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/2/3/299 Citations at Macquarie University Library on September 1, 2009 http://mss.sagepub.comDownloaded from EDITORIAL Looking beyond memory studies: Comparisons and integrations JOHN SUTTON, Macquarie University, Australia Projects in memory studies are best driven by topic not tradition, because the phenomena under investigation are usually interactive, not neatly compartmentalized. This imposes open-endedness not only in tracing diverse activities of remembering across the spread of relevant disciplines, but also in looking beyond memory altogether in order better to understand its diverse manifestations. In different contexts (theory-development, descriptive case study, interventionist manipulation, and so on) the balance shifts between pinpointing particularity and seeking pattern. It is notoriously diffi cult, as Steven Brown noted in Memory Studies 1(3), to identify 'the limits and extent of this aspect of human conduct that we are calling "memory"' (2008: 262). Building on Brown's robust acceptance of this uncertainty, this editorial encourages the comparison of memory studies to other projects, or other domains of enquiry. Brown worked through an analogy between memory and sexuality to point to 'a set of fundamental obstacles' to the study of 'memory'. The comparison with sexuality, among its other effects, warns of the dangers of fi xing concepts, strategies and institutions too fi rmly and too fast. But are there any other domains for comparative analysis that, used for different purposes, might reveal clues and options as well as pitfalls? What is the state of memory studies in relation to the interdisciplinary study of dreaming, say, or of gesture, or emotion, or colour vision? Or, for other purposes, we might spy on the interdisciplinary study of jazz, say, or of gardens, or sport, or diagrams, or cloth, or martial arts, to ask whether and how the multiplicity within each of these domains is acknowledged and mapped in case study or in theory. The activities and phenomena in most of these domains, as in remembering, are complex and highly structured, involving at once many distinctive dimensions that specifi c analyses may try to map and tap: neural, affective, kinesthetic, sensory, material, interpersonal, historical, political, cultural, technological, and so on, where each dimension named in this truncated list is itself wildly heterogeneous. Brown argues that because instances or activities of remembering usually occur across many such dimensions at once, 'an implicit barrier is set against establishing the analytic priority of any particular aspect of the practice': he goes on to diagnose various forms of anxiety at the unbounded nature of the resulting projects (Brown, 2008: 269). © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav MEMORY STUDIES, 1750-6980, Vol 2(3): 299–302 [DOI: 10.1177/1750698008340182] http://mss.sagepub.com at Macquarie University Library on September 1, 2009 http://mss.sagepub.comDownloaded from MEMORY STUDIES 2(3)300 But there are good reasons for comparative analysis across disciplines and subdisciplines, for looking beyond the boundaries of memory studies, beyond the wish to avoid sealing off and reifying a homogenized subject-matter. Memory is often in use when it is not explicitly in question. We often have to sneak up on it: as Barbie Zelizer noted in this journal's fi rst issue, 'one of the key lessons of contemporary memory studies is that vast and intricate memory work is being accomplished all the time in settings having little to do with memory per se' (Zelizer, 2008: 80). So each of the domains and topics listed above overlaps with memory studies, bearing a stronger relation to remembering than mere analogy. Some specifi c theoretical, historical and empirical questions about jazz or gesture or cloth, for example, are at the same time questions about remembering (Berliner, 1994 and Monson, 1996 on jazz; Clark, 2008: 123–33 and Katsman, 2007 on gesture; Jones and Stallybrass, 2000 and Stallybrass, 1993 on cloth). So memory studies is not insulated and isolated from these and other domains of enquiry. Within the neural and cognitive sciences of memory, likewise, institutional pressures towards specialization hang in the balance against general acknowledgement of the dynamic interactivity of the processes under investigation. Those brain systems and processes that are actively engaged in our activities of remembering are not sealed off and isolated, but are rather certain integrated and coordinated activities of contextsensitive sensory, kinesthetic, linguistic, emotional and motor systems (Rubin, 2006). Critics worry that a notion of memory that encompasses activities spanning brains, bodies, small groups and material objects is simply too generic, and the systems in question too motley, to form the basis of productive research (Adams and Aizawa, 2008; Rupert, 2004). Steven Brown's recommended response to such concern is to crank up the shock and anxiety, asking for more 'transversal links', concepts or models to articulate relations across disciplines that they then unsettle (Brown, 2008: 266–8). As I interpret this call, the study of specifi c and constrained forms or contexts of remembering requires the moulding and fusing of concepts and methods from distinctive subdisciplines, in projects driven by topic rather than tradition. This is because, as many papers published in Memory Studies so far demonstrate, remembering itself often involves the interaction or coordination of different processes operating at different timescales across different parts of complex systems, each with its own distinctive histories, formats and dynamics. Big history or cultural norms sedimented in body, brain or group show up again, for example, in particular small stories or momentary conversational turns about the personal past, or layered in embodied routines and 'ghost gestures' (Behnke, 1997; Murakami, 2003; Samudra, 2008); plastic, biosocial brains carry the idiosyncratic traces and dynamic tendencies of culture-ridden personal experience (Calvo-Merino et al, 2005; Draganski et al, 2004; Malabou, 2008; Mithen, 2008); fragments of erased or suppressed histories end up seeping or 'bleeding through' at unexpected angles (Klein, 2002, 2008). The phenomena themselves are motley. The requisite pluralism is demanded by the world, not imposed by theorists' whim. Institutional, practical and institutional tasks are set by the resulting need to care for both particularity and pattern: memory studies requires both experiment and at Macquarie University Library on September 1, 2009 http://mss.sagepub.comDownloaded from SUTTON LOOKING BEYOND MEMORY STUDIES 301 ethnography, so as both to hone in on processes at single dimensions, and explode out to attend to interaction and spread. Memory studies can play a central role, for example, in the development of cross-disciplinary fi elds such as neuroanthropology and cognitive archaeology (Downey, 2008; Malafouris, 2008), in which phenomenology and cognitive science might be natural allies rather than glaring antagonists. What forms of longer-term immersive collaboration are workable across disciplines? What sizes and types of small teams, with how much diversity, are appropriate for distinctive projects? How do we develop the right kinds of interactive listening and mutual concept-sharing for boundary spanning over time? Knowledge management and distribution are dizzyingly creative and complex challenges for memory studies, because very few corners of the arts and the humanities, or of the cognitive, social or natural sciences are entirely or in principle irrelevant. There are specialist skills, methods and literatures in extraordinarily precise multiand subdisciplinary corners, which may turn out to be just what need to be accessed. So projects that contrast or integrate memory studies with related projects elsewhere across the disciplinary spectrum help, because comparative analyses are often also integrative: in sometimes looking beyond memory studies, the raw materials – the concepts, methods, and transversal links – for better doing memory studies may become accessible. References Adams, F. and K. Aizawa (2008) The Bounds of Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Behnke, E. (1997) 'Ghost Gestures: Phenomenological Investigations of Bodily Micromovements and their Intercorporeal Implications', Human Studies 20: 181–201. Berliner, P. (1994) Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, S.D. (2008) 'The Quotation Marks have a Certain Importance: Prospects for "Memory Studies"', Memory Studies 1(3): 261–71. Calvo-Merino, B., D.E. Glaser, J. Grèzes, R.E. Passingham and P. Haggard (2005) 'Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An fMRI Study with Expert Dancers', Cerebral Cortex 15: 1243–9. Clark, A. (2008) Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Downey, G. (2008) 'Why Brain Science Needs Anthropology'. Available at: http:// neuroanthropology.net/2008/02/04/welcome-to-new-readers-why-brain-science-needsanthropology/ , Draganski, B., C. Gaser, V. Busch, G. Schuierer, U. Bogdahn and A. May (2004) 'Neuroplasticity: Changes in Grey Matter Induced by Training', Nature 427: 311–12. Jones, A.R. and P. Stallybrass (2000) Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katsman, R. (2007) 'Gestures Accompanying Torah Learning/ Recital among Yemenite Jews', Gesture 7(1): 1–19. Klein, N.M. (2002) Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920–1986 (DVD-ROM with book). Los Angeles, CA: Annenberg Center for Communication/ZKM. Klein, N.M. (2008) The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (2nd edition). London: Verso. at Macquarie University Library on September 1, 2009 http://mss.sagepub.comDownloaded from MEMORY STUDIES 2(3)302 Malabou, C. (2008) What Should We Do With Our Brain?, trans. S. Rand. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press. Malafouris, L. (2008) 'Between Brains, Bodies and Things: Tectonoetic Awareness and the Extended Self', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363: 1993–2002. Mithen, S. (2008) 'The Brain as a Cultural Artefact', Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18: 415–22. Monson, I. (1996) Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation as Interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Murakami, K. (2003) 'Orientation to the Setting: Discursively Accomplished Intersubjectivity', Culture & Psychology 9: 233–48. Rubin, D.C. (2006) 'The Basic-Systems Model of Episodic Memory', Perspectives on Psychological Science 1: 277–311. Rupert, R. (2004) 'Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition', Journal of Philosophy 101: 389–428. Samudra, J.K. (2008) 'Memory in our Body: Thick Participation and the Translation of Kinesthetic Experience', American Ethnologist 35: 665–81. Stallybrass, P. (1993) 'Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things', Yale Review 81(2): 35–50. Zelizer, B. (2008) 'Why Memory's Work on Journalism Does Not Reflect Journalism's Work on Memory', Memory Studies 1(1): 79–87. JOHN SUTTON is Professor of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, where he was previously Head of the Department of Philosophy. He is co-editor of Memory Studies, and author of Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge University Press, 1998). His current projects address collaborative remembering; kinesthetic memory and skilled movement; and distributed cognition in early modern England. Address: Macquire Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquire University, NSW 2109, Australia. [email: jsutton@maccs.mq.edu.au] at Macquarie University Library on September 1, 2009 http://mss.sagepub.comDownloaded from