Don’t Worry, Be Idle

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

Our’s is an age of anxiety, at least it seems to feel that way to many.  Of course, this is far from an original observation.  Among the several works taking this phrase as a title is W. H. Auden’s post-war poem, The Age of Anxiety, first published as the world emerged from the shadows of war into the disconcerting light of the nuclear age.  Since then anxiety has settled in as a permanent feature of the American cultural and psychic landscape.

In a recent Slate interview, Taylor Clark, author of Nerve: Poise Under Pressure, Serenity Under Stress, and the Brave New Science of Fear and Cool, talked about anxiety in the United States:

Is the United States more prone to higher levels of anxiety than other nations?

Put simply, we are. Perhaps the most puzzling statistics are the ones that reveal that we’re significantly more anxious than countries in the developing world, many of which report only a fraction of the diagnosable cases of anxiety that we do. One of the reasons for this is that the people in many of these third-world nations are more accustomed to dealing with uncertainty and unpredictability. I talk about this a fair amount in the book, but lack of control is really the archenemy of anxiety. It’s its biggest trigger.

That explains the disparity in anxiety levels between the United States and the developing world, but why are we more anxious than, say, your average European nation?

It’s hard to pinpoint an answer, but I think Americans have become extremely vulnerable to the pressures of the 21st century. For the past 50 years, we’ve been getting progressively more anxious in good economic times and bad, so we can’t even blame it on the recession.

Clark goes on to suggest three factors contributing to our “deteriorating” psychic state:

  1. “The first is a simple matter of social disconnection. As we spend more time with our electronic devices than we do with our neighbors, we lose our physical sense of community. Social isolation flies in the face of our evolutionary history.”
  2. “The second major cause is the information overload that we’re experiencing with the Internet and the 24-hour media cycle. We’re all aware of it, but I’m not sure we realize how big an impact it’s having on our brains.”
  3. “The third explanation can be attributed to what one psychologist refers to as a culture of “feel goodism” — the idea that we shouldn’t ever have to be upset and that all our negative emotions can be neutralized with a pill. This to me feels like a distinctly American phenomenon.”

Clark seems to lay a good bit of the blame, if we may call it blame, for our anxiety on technology that paradoxically disconnects us and connects us too much.  This diagnosis will ring true and self-evident to some, but I suspect others will take issue, particularly for the exclusion of other significant social and cultural factors that predate the advent of digital media.  After all, social disconnection has a long history.  We may be talking much less on the phone, but Freud noted long ago that the wonder of being able to hear a loved one’s voice over the telephone was a slight salve for the condition that necessitated it to begin with, that is the loved one’s absence.

But regardless the causes, anxious we are, and quite clearly we are interested in doing something about it which quite often amounts to popping a pill.  While that may sometimes be a necessary and helpful remedy, I’d like to also pass along a prescription written by Sven Birkerts in his recent essay, “The Mother of Possibilities”: Idleness.

While admitting that Idleness, as he is envisioning it, is a difficult concept to pin down, Birkerts suggests that,

Idleness is what supervenes on those too few occasions when we allow our pace to slacken and merge with the rhythms of the natural day, when we manage to thwart the impulse to plan forward to the next thing and instead look—idly, with nascent curiosity—at what is immediately in front of us …

Birkerts leisurely traces the tradition of idleness from the Greeks to the much too harried present via pastoral and lyric poetry, Milton, Montaigne, the Romantics, Baudelaire, Proust, Benjamin, and Camus, to name a few.  It is a pleasant jaunt. Along the way we find Montaigne claiming, “It seemed to me that I could do my mind no greater favor than to allow it, in idleness, to entertain itself.”  And according to Birkerts,

Through the figure of the flâneur—via the writing of critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin—the idle state was given a platform, elevated from a species of indolence to something more like a cognitive stance, an ethos. Benjamin’s idea is basically that the true picture of things—certainly of urban experience—is perhaps best gathered from diverse, often seemingly tangential, perceptions, and that the dutiful, linear-thinking rationalist is less able to fathom the immensely complex reality around him than the untethered flâneur, who may very well take it by ambush.

Yet Idleness has its enemies, not least of which is a bad reputation to which Birkerts addresses himself early on, but also the pace of modernity, and yes, alas, distraction, which is not to be confused for Idleness proper.

The spaces and the physical movements of work and play are often nearly identical now, and our commerce with the world, our work life, is far more sedentary and cognitive than ever before. Purposeful doing is now shadowed at every step with the possibilities of distraction. How do we conceive of idleness in this new context? Are we indulging it every time we switch from a work-related document to a quick perusal of emails, or to surf through a few favorite shopping sites? Does distraction eked out in the immediate space of duty count—or is it just a sop thrown to the tyrant stealing most of our good hours?

We are a task oriented people, equipped with lists and planners, goals and objectives, action points and plans.  Productivity is our mantra.  Distraction pour into our work and our plans, but it has not introduced Idleness; it has rather elided work and play, labor and leisure by their convergence upon the devices that are now instruments of both.

But here again we feel the anxiety rising and with it, perversely, the guilt.  Birkerts remedy:

The mind alert but not shunted along a set track, the impulses not pegged to any productivity. The motionless bobber, the hand trailing in the water, the shifting shapes of the clouds overhead. Idleness is the mother of possibility, which is as much as necessity the mother of inventiveness … “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Thoreau. In idleness, the corollary maxim might run, is the salvaging of the inner life.

Experiment in Twitter

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

This may be short lived, but for the time being I’m experimenting with a Twitter account as a way of finding interesting, relevant, useful content online.  I’ll be linking posts from this site on the account as well as essays, articles, etc. that I think are interesting, but don’t really have the time to write about on here.

So if you’re on Twitter you can find me at http://twitter.com/FrailestThing

We’ll see how it goes …

Social Media, Social Memory: Remembering with Facebook

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 8 Comments

I’m a casual Facebook user.  I have a profile, I’ve got friends, I occasionally check in.  I rarely post anything other than links to this blog (shameless self-promotion), I don’t post status updates, I haven’t uploaded a picture in over a year.  Clearly, I’m not heavily invested and I’ve posted more than a few critical remarks about Facebook’s hegemony and its consequences on this blog.  But recently I’ve been thinking about Facebook in relationship to memory, memory being a recurring theme of late.

For example, in light of the research article I summarized yesterday, “Is Memory in the Brain? Remembering as Social Behavior”, one could view Facebook as a form of social remembering.  Rather than reminiscing in person, we have asynchronous reminiscences with friends, past and present, often centered on posted photographs.  We might even view tagging photos as a kind of social remembering, a collective curating of shared memories.  Often a very old photograph will be posted by one of a circle of friends, the other friends will be tagged, and a round of reminiscing will follow on the comments.

One other analogy that I’ve been toying with is Facebook as memory theater.  I’ve mentioned memory theaters in at least a couple of past posts (here and here), the basic idea is that one constructs an imagined space in the mind (similar to the work of the Architect in the film Inception, only you’re awake) and then populates the space with images that stand in for certain ideas, people, words, or whatever else you want to remember.  The theory is that we remember images and places better than we do abstract ideas or concepts.  During the Renaissance these mental constructs were sometimes externalized in built structures that housed all sorts of artifacts visually representing the store of human knowledge.

Perhaps it is a stretch, but Facebook seems to function in some respects as kind of externalized memory theater.  Instead of storing speeches or knowledge of the world, it is used to store autobiographical memory.  The architecture of the application is the constructed space and profiles are like images kept in the places, each profile carrying with it by association a trove of particular memories.  Most people report as one of the joys of Facebook the reconnection with an old friend from childhood.  While certainly some of these reconnections lead into renewed and sustained contact, most I imagine do not.  We exchange a message or two, we look over their life as it is now, and then we don’t really keep in touch any better than we used to.  But the memories have been activated, and now their profile takes its place in our memory theater, happily recalling those same memories whenever we like.  The profile is not the friend, of course; it simply becomes a placeholder for particular set of memories.

Facebook taps in to more than one aspect of our psychology.  I have often explained its appeal as a function of our desire to be noticed, to receive attention; and surely this is part of the mix. Lately Facebook’s role in the political sphere has been receiving a good deal of attention.  But it may be that its trade in our memories gives Facebook its uncanny persistence.  Increasingly we hear people taking issue with Facebook’s privacy protocols or otherwise complaining about the pressures of always on social media.  Not too long ago, I noted the grumblings over Facebook’s bid to become the ambient background of the Internet and Zuckerber’s disingenuous push for online “integrity.”  Recent studies have also drawn attention to the potentially negative effect of Facebook on psychological well-being, particularly for women.  But for all of this most people struggle to kill their accounts permanently. Like a bad high school romance, we break up with Facebook, only to flirt and make up, and then break up again.

This begins to make sense when we realize that Facebook has become a prosthetic of our memory.  But not just a prosthetic of memory in general, a simple list on a scrap of paper is that much; it is a prosthetic of our autobiographical memory.  It’s a part of our identity, and it is very difficult to kill off a part of one’s self.

One last thought, only a suggestive one at that: it is one thing to artificially condition one’s memory to store up vast amounts of information about the world or large chunks of poetry, it is quite another to artificially store up one’s autobiographical memory.  Our technology has made the storage of memory cheap and easy, but there is something to be said for forgetting.  The artificial extension of autobiographical memory involves us in some of the more complex regions of human psychology and personality.  We enter into the realm of mourning, catharsis, obsession, fantasy, and more.   We might consider as well that healing and forgetting very often go hand in hand.  In any case, we have a good deal to contemplate.

“They tell, and here is the enigma, that those consulting the oracle of Trophonios in Boetia found there two springs and were supposed to drink from each, from the spring of memory and from the spring of forgetting.”  Jacques Derrida (Memoires for Paul de Man)

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If this post was of interest, you may also want to consider Social Media and the Arts of Memory.

“Is Memory in the Brain?”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Most of us think of memory as something that goes on exclusively in our brains, but alongside of efforts to view cognition in general as an embodied and extended activity, some researchers have been arguing that memory also has a socially extended dimension.  David Manier is among those pushing our understanding of memory so as to encompass acts of social communication as remembering.

Manier’s 2004 article, “Is Memory in the Brain?  Remembering as Social Behavior,” published in Mind, Culture, and Activity seeks to establish social remembering as a legitimate and significant area of study for cognitive psychologists.  In order to this, Manier begins by challenging the dominant understanding of memory which construes memory as something located in the brain or as a faculty housed exclusively in the brain.

“Historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, often influenced by Halbwachs (1950/1980), have taken up the topic of collective memory, looking at ways that organizations preserve important aspects of the past, and ways that events of weighty historical importance (such as the Holocaust) become integrated into the collective identity of a group of people …. But among some psychologists, especially those whose emphasis is on neuroscientific approaches to memory, it is possible to detect a certain ambivalence toward this topic.” (251)

Manier intends to argue instead, “for the usefulness of conceptualizing remembering as social behavior, and for expanding the science of memory to include communicative acts.” (252)  Manier and his colleagues have conducted a number of studies into what he terms conversational remembering.  These studies take place in “naturalistic contexts,” that is everyday environments as opposed to the contrived laboratory environment in which most cognitive scientific research takes place.  Thus far, Manier’s studies suggest that the dynamics of social remembering shape the subsequent remembering of individual group members.

Manier briefly traces the history of the belief, most recently articulated by Tulving, that memory “has a home, even if still a hidden one, in the brain” back past recent neuroscientific discoveries to ancient Greece.  Plato operated with what Cropsey has termed an “obstetrical metaphor” according to which “the purpose of philosophy is to serve as a ‘midwife’ to the birth of ideas having germinal existence within the soul; in this sense, Plato saw knowing as involving an act of remembering.”  Thus memory was not conceived as mere storage of information, nor simply as a brain function, but “rather more like a journey, a quest in which conversations with a philosopher … can play a crucial role.”  (253)

According to Manier, this more conversational, dialogical, social conception of memory was displaced by Aristotle’s “emphasis on taxonomy” and his division of the soul into four faculties: the nutritive, the sensory, the locomotive, and the rational.  Memory, associated with imagination, was understood as a function of the sensory faculty through which one perceived images of things past.  While Aristotle did not maintain that what he had distinguished in theory was in fact distinguishable in reality, others who came after him where not so precise.  In Manier’s brief sketch, the notion of memory as a faculty located in the brain evolves through the Medieval heirs of Aristotle, to Locke, Thomas Reid, and then on to Gall and Spurzheim (founders of phrenology), Fechner, and Ebbinghaus.  (253-254)

Certain metaphors have also reinforced this “modular or topographical” view of memory:

“Often, the metaphors have been influenced by discussions of anatomy and physiology (… ‘the mental organ’ of language production – discussed by Chomsky …).  Moreover, the industrial revolution, with its production of heavy machinery, lent weight to an emphasis on metaphors about psychological ‘mechanisms.’  The development of computers spawned a host of new metaphors for cognitive psychology, including information processing, hardware and software, systems and subsystems, control processes, input and output, the computational architecture of mind, parallel distributed processing, …. (254)

Against the “mental topography” approach, Neisser has called for “ecological validity” which “asserts the imperative of understanding ‘everyday thinking’ rather than the study (preferred by many experimental psychologists) of how isolated individuals perform on contrived experiments conducted in carefully controlled laboratory settings.” (255)  Following Bruner, Manier goes on to characterize remembering as an “act of meaning” adding, “memory is something that we as humans do, that is, it is a meaningful action we perform in the sociocultural contexts that we take part in creating, and within which we live.”  Furthermore, “If it is correct to say that memory is something we do rather than something we have, it may be more appropriate to think of remembering as a kind of cognitive behavior ….” (256)

Now Manier articulates his chief claim, “remembering can be viewed as an act of communication.”  (257)  He aligns his claim with Gilbert Ryles’ earlier argument against the “tendency to view silent thoughts as somehow real thoughts, as opposed to the thoughts that we speak aloud.  By analogy, Manier suggests that not all remembering is silent remembering, and he offers the following definition:  “Remembering is a present communication of something past.”  He goes on to give various examples, all of which constitute acts of remembering:  solitary, private remembering; remembering in conversation with someone; and remembering through writing.  Each example was a remembrance of the same event, but each situation shifted what was remembered.  (258)

While some may argue that behind acts of remembrance there lays one’s “real memory” physically located in the brain, Manier suggests that the “neurophysiological configuration” is “only the material basis for real acts of remembering.”  Furthermore,

“This view of acts of remembering accords with the concept of distributed cognition, according to which we humans use the cultural tools that are available to us.  As Dennet, announced … we no more think with our brains than we hammer with our bare hands. And one of the important cultural tools we use in our thinking – and especially in our remembering – is group conversation.” (260)

Manier then provides a transcription of a family group conversation to illustrate how memories shift through the give and take of conversation, memories that presumably would not have been altered otherwise.  He concludes,

“Remembering is not only shaped by internal, cognitive processes.  When we reconstruct past events in the context of conversation, the conversational roles that are adopted by group members will affect what is remembered.  Moreover, conversational remembering can be shaped by other influences.  These influences on remembering – as well as a host of other sociocultural facts – tend to be missed by an approach that limits itself to what goes on in the brain.”

Manier, David.  “Is Memory in the Brain? Remembering as Social Behavior” in Mind, Culture, and Activity, 11(4), 251-266.  2004.

Vast Palaces of Memory and the Wonder of Being Human

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

I come to fields and vast palaces of memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images of all kinds of objects brought in by sense-perception.  Hidden there is whatever we think about …. When I am in this storehouse, I ask that it produce what I want to recall, and immediately certain things come out; some things require a longer search, and have to be drawn out as it were from more recondite receptacles.  Some memories pour out to crowd the  mind and, when one is searching and asking for something quite different, leap forward into the center as if saying ‘Surely we are what you want?’ With the hand of my heart I chase them away from the face of my memory until what I want is freed of mist and emerges from its hiding places.  Other memories come before me on demand with ease and without any confusion in their order.

This passage is from Augustine’s chapter on Memory in his Confessions, and to some degree it resonates with our own experience of memory.  I suspect, however, that at the same time it may seem as if Augustine’s memory is more expansive than our own and that he has achieved a greater organization and mastery over his memory than what we would claim over ours.  And this is probably about right.

In The Art of Memory,Francis Yates wonders,

It is as a Christian that Augustine seeks God in the memory, and as a Christian Platonist, believing that knowledge of the divine is innate in memory.  But is not this vast and echoing memory in which the search is conducted that of a trained orator?

The “vast palace of memory” that Augustine describes suggests to Yates a memory that has been trained in the artificial memory tradition associated with classical rhetoric.  It is a fascinating tradition that Yates elegantly chronicles in her classic work and which Joshua Foer has revisited in his recently published, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. You can get an article length taste of Foer’s book in his piece for NY Times Magazine, “Secrets of  a Mind Gamer.”

This may become a well-worn topic around here in coming days, weeks, months, so I’ll apologize in advance for that.  At this point, though, I’ll only throw out the observation that in his rather dense, Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur considers various abuses of memory including artificial memory.

Coming back to Augustine, he goes on to write of memory,

It is a vast and infinite profundity.  Who has plumbed its bottom?  This power is that of my mind and is a natural endowment, but I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am.  Is the mind, then, too restricted to compass itself, so that we have to ask what is that element of itself which it fails to grasp?  Surely that cannot be external to itself; it must be within the mind.  How then can it fail to grasp it?  This question moves me to great astonishment.  Amazement grips me.

This is a remarkable observation of the inability of memory, and the mind more generally, to encompass itself.  His wonder at the complexity and opaqueness of the “inward man” is one of Augustine’s most significant and enduring contributions to the Western tradition. The recognition that there is an element of itself that the mind fails to grasp, that “the mind knows things it does not know it knows,” predates the Freudian unconscious by a good 1500 years.

Finally, this astonishment and amazement also lead Augustine to question why we are not all equally amazed by the mystery and wonder that is a human being:

People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfall on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars.  But in themselves they are uninterested.

A good reminder that the most amazing thing about the universe that contains such wonders may be the creature who is able to contemplate them, be moved by them, and hold them in memory.