Confrontation or Convergence: Staging the Encounter of History and Memory

Abstract

The emphasis in Mnemonic on the cultural and historical context of remembering adds a cautionary note to the brain-centric account of memory that dominated the previous chapter. I do not want memory to slip away into the abstraction of pattern recognition or recategorization on the one hand, and neural or chemical or electrical pulsing on the other. If memory is “nothing but” recategorization, how is memory connected to the already actualized? How can connectionism account for the feeling we have that a memory is “mine,” a reflection of something “I” have been through (as William James insisted was a marker of memory) ? If there is no evidence for psychophysical isomorphism (the purported conformity of physiological process and phenomenological experience) in neural networks (Edelman 2004, 63), if the implication in “trace” of “mirroring” or “copying” is rejected, then what is the causal connection between event and trace? If it is as true to say that the developmental, social, and historical contexts and environments are mnemogenic as it is to say that the brain is mnemogenic, how do playwrights represent such a proposition? Only the last question is answerable within the scope of this book.