Species Memory

Memory: What set us apart and can bring us together July 2010 Dr Gareth Hoskins Institute of Geography and Earth Science, Aberystwyth University tgh@aber.ac.uk Dr Chris Bear Cardiff School of Planning and Geography, Cardiff University Bearck@cardiff.ac.uk 1) Opening In this paper we use the concept of memory to bring together two separate dialectical tensions: animal-human, and individual-social. We’re interested in examples relating to the remote propagation of behaviour – instances where individuals seemingly draw on and contribute to a kind of metaphysical pooled memory. Examples include sheep in western Australia learning to negotiate a cattle grid by rolling on their backs and the almost simultaneous repetition of this practice by sheep on other side of the continent; The detection of emotional spikes during dramatic events by instruments placed around the world as part of the “global consciousness project”; stories about animals or humans anticipating natural disasters; telepathic cats predicting the death of OAPs in sheltered housing. Those events and phenomena that suggest, or are at least interpreted as evidencing, shared intuitive or transcendent knowledge. Such examples implicate notions of world spirit, world consciousness or global brain (Bloom 2000) which might seem fanciful and tempting to dismiss as eccentric, fringe or “new-age” but they form part of a widespread and long running motivation in western philosophy and science to identify and explain the collective, how the whole amounts to something greater than the sum of its individual parts. We’re specifically interested in how memory gets implicated in this “greater than” aspect, and how memory as transcendent, recasts the spaces of interaction between individuals and groups. We’re at the very early speculative phase of this research and it brings in vast literatures about nature and culture, about consciousness, about temporality, about representation and practice, about materiality and mentality, and about the idea of existence itself. In the broadest terms we’re looking to suggest memory as a way of bringing structuralism and phenomenology together. So there’s a lot going on in this paper! but the single thread we want to fix on, and follow through with, is the way memory (loosely defined as experienced, learned, or biologically inherited) has been used to account for that aspect of the group that exceeds the straightforward aggregation of individuals. There are illustrations of this effect in all sorts of realms from work on crowds (Canetti 1960), herd behavior (Shiller 2000), group think (Gladwell), and work on packs, swarms, flocking birds, and fish shoals. But one of the best examples is the ant colony (Slide). Entomologist William Wheeler in the 1920s remarked that ants acted like the cells of a single beast with a collective mind. The colony forms a super-organism which coordinates various kinds of agriculture – aphids are captured and kept for purposes of milking, fungi is intentionally grown for food. This is from Canetti writing in 1960 on Crowds and Power. The crowd [man] needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count, not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. Suddenly it is a though everything were happening in one and the same body. (1960,15-16) As soon as it exists at all it wants to consist of more people: the urge to grow is the first and supreme attribute of the crowd. It wants to seize everyone within reach; anything shaped like a human being can join it. (1960, 17) Such collectives resist being broken down to individual components; they imply something extra, something more, and are often used to suggest the presence of something universal, or metaphysical. The search for that which brings us all together, that unites all humans, or all living beings, or even all things whether living or not, goes back to pre history. It’s written through pre-socratic and then Greek philosophy, in elements of continental and anglo-American process philosophy (ontologies of becoming), and more recently in environmental ideas linked to deep ecology and in some aspects of social policy research on group behaviour and consumer consciousness. And this urge for “bringing together runs in contrast to perhaps equally long running efforts to pull humans apart from animals and nature more generally. 2) Setting Apart From the first few lines of genesis, man has occupied an elevated position, separate, and distinguished from the world: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." (Genesis 1:27, 28) This partition has become part of what Latour refers to as The Great Divide and we have become ever more ingenious in its maintenance - most commonly by constructing points of rupture along various kinds of continuum. The time when we came down from the trees, for example, or the single mutation that marks a break between humans and other mammals. Humans have been marked out as exceptional most famously by Descartes on the basis of having mind, but other distinguishing criteria have included reason, self awareness, language, and tool use, and all of these implicate, in some form or another, the faculty of memory. French Archaeologist and philosopher Andre Leroi-Gourhan is especially interesting in the way he highlights memory as a distinguishing feature both in a technological sense and in a social sense. Leroi-Gourhan, argued that humans were distinct from animals due to their use of technology, a facility enabled by the adoption of an upright stance which freed the hands for manipulation and the face for complex communication. He saw technology as a “third memory” in addition to genetic memory, and the memory of the nervous system. “From the moment homo sapiens existed, organizing a structure for social memory was predominant amongst the problems of human evolution” …” “tradition is as vital biologically to the human species as genetic conditioning is to insect societies” (Gesture and Speech[from memory and rhythmns] 1993, 228-9). For some contemporary evolutionary psychologists it’s not the objects or social ties produced by memory that marks humans out as exceptional but memory itself. Rossano argues that the evolutionary leap from Neanderthal man to Homo sapiens was brought about by the practice of thinking symbolically during campfire mediations that enhanced parts of the brain related to working memory. In the book Elements of Episodic Memory Endel Tulving makes a similar distinction “animals can adjust, adapt, and learn but they cannot travel back into the past in their own minds”(1983, 1). And so it seems precisely this capacity for removal, or mental displacement, that sets us apart. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics Heidegger argues that the crucial difference is that man can act upon the world but animal can’t because he is captivated by it. The animal is absorbed, subsumed, engulfed by the world whereas man can generate distance enough to recognize the world and act on it…. man is in relation with the world whereas animal IS the world. Deleuze affirms this in his discussion of “becoming animal” arguing that the mark of being human is that we can transcend being human, that we can make ourselves open to untold non-human possibilities (from Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000, 418 after Ansell Pearson, 1999). Agamben’s book The Open tracks this division more comprehensively and argues that human is what results from a relentless philosophical and political separation of humanity from animality. But he notes that this separation is becoming less stable due to things like the genome project making “The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man” (Agamben 2004, 77). 3) Bringing Together This subversion of human and non-human categories is an objective in contemporary geographic debates. Recent work on ‘more-than-human geographies’ has interrogated ‘“the human” as no less a subject of ongoing co-fabrication than any other socio-material assemblage’ (Whatmore, 2006: 603); and reimagined ‘society’ as a heterogeneity of actants, in a relational ontology where ‘humans, animals and machines no longer can be seen to have an existence independent from the relations that constitute them’ (Braun, 2005: 836). Work in geography on this “bringing together” is limited in a number of ways. First, by a tendency to reinforce binaries of ‘human/non-human’ or ‘human-animal’ even when highlighting their mixing. Second, by accepting that subjectivity might be extended beyond humans, but often essentializing and homogenizing it – in terms of animal rights for instance (Holloway 2007). And third, by studying animals only in their relations or becomings with humans. There is a surprising lack of work, for instance, on how animals make their own geographies and on how they form their own groupings (although see Hinchliffe et al 2005). Strum and Latour (1987) point towards a performative understanding of baboon ‘society’ where baboons order their social world by their very activity’ (p. 4 of the printout from the web version…). In Reassembling the Social (2005) Latour qualifies this by saying that a performative baboon society is not merely performed through face-to-face interactions but involves ‘their home range, the life history of each interaction, the trajectory of friendships and coalitions, the built-in variations of sizes, sex, anatomical features, etc.’ (p. 199). We might note beyond this that, in the same way as ‘society’ is not composed merely of humans, ‘baboon society’ is not composed merely of baboons but involves interaction between multiple species and individuals. One way this has been theorized is through the rhizome. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari highlight neo-evolutionism as a rhizomatic way of moving beyond species categories because it defines not on the basis of characteristics but by populations that vary, and not by heredity but by transversal communications between heterogeneous populations. They note “Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree (1988,263). “Schools, bands, herds, populations are not inferior social forms, they are affects and powers, involutions that grip every animal in a becoming just as powerful as that of the human being with the animal (ibid, 266). Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes. These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations (ibid, 267). This rhizomatic “bringing together” cuts across human-non-human distinctions to understand combinations proliferating. We take this forward by examining combinations that proliferate through a memory that is shared and transcendent. (i.e. a memory that doesn’t entirely reside in the individual, or the object, or in the practice of their interaction). 4) Stretching memory The concept of memory has been stretched in recent years. Despite various attempts to claim ownership over it or delimit its analytical scope, memory has been evicted it from its conventional location in the brain. On the one hand we have a stretching of memory into the general realm of the organic – either inwards, into the folds of the cortex, or outwards, outside the brain with notions of embodied memory where the past becomes inscribed as scars, habits and everyday movements, or in genes where the past is carried forward to subsequent generations as inherited character traits. On the other hand memory has been externalized from the body, into the environment, or the material world of objects or into the group or collective context, Papoulias has termed this move “the de-psychologisation of memory and its redefinition as social process” where “the marketplace may have replaced the head as the privileged spatiality though which memory is imagined” (2003, 115). But memory as a something that can be collective goes back to the birth of modern sociology with Emile Durkheim, and his notion of collective consciousness. His 1893 work The division of Labor in Society notes: The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society forms a determinate system which has its own life; one may call it the collective or common conscience. No doubt, it has not a specific organ as a substratum; it is, by definition, diffuse in every reach of society. Nevertheless, it has specific characteristics which make it a distinct reality. It is, in effect, independent of the particular conditions in which individuals are placed; they pass on and it remains. Moreover, it does not change with each generation, but, on the contrary, it connects successive generations with one another. It is thus an entirely different thing from particular consciences, although it can be realized only through them. (The division of Labor in Society 1893, 79-80) For Durkheim, this common conscience is organized through a shared sense of social time and maintained through enduring memories. His student Maurice Halbwachs focused in particular on those collective memories: “collective memory … encompasses individual memories while remaining distinct from them. It evolves according to its own laws, and any individual remembrances that may penetrate are transformed within a totality having no personal consciousness.” (On Collective Memory 1996, 51). What we have here and in a number of more recently conceived variants (cultural memory, ethnic memory, public memory, and social memory) is the notion of memory as something that exceeds the brain as a superorganic. Its existence might not necessarily be directly detectable but it is assumed on the basis of its expression: in the landscape, in the stories we tell, in our habits and gestures. But this idea of memory as superorganic has come under critique in geography (Withers 1996 ‘Place, memory, monument, Ecumene; Johnson 2005 locating memory’) and elsewhere. Boyarin, sums up the position well: “It is worth restating the commonsense notion that the ‘place’ of memory on the most material level remains the individual brain—not to reify the body once again but to warn against any idea of memory as superorganic, and to recall as well that in our world, the notion of the individual cannot be transcended merely with a word.” (1994, 27). The idea that memory could indeed be “social” was maintained with a turn to practice (see Connerton, Middleton and Edwards, Bal, Roach, Fortier). Urry for example notes in Sociology beyond Societies: “memory does not seem to be physically locatable in the same part of the brain and merely waiting for appropriate activation. It appears to be organized through social practices as people remembering together and work at producing their memories within particular social contexts.” (1999,136) Social memory, in terms of feelings of belonging, imagined communities, or sense of place, for example, could be talked about without the metaphysical or transcendent aspects through a performative lens; social memory as citationality, reinscription, re-signification (Butler 1990). With this approach, expression becomes all there is. And society becomes no more than the sum of its individual parts (albeit in complex and multiple relations). With this performative approach it’s not so much that the collective needs constant reiteration, but that the collective is the reiteration itself. This seems reductive and a little disappointing since it avoids the “greater than” emergent aspect leaving us with nothing but transaction. If the idea of social memory could be upheld by a retreat into practice, it was, in fact upheld in the 19th Century by a retreat into anatomical foundations. Adolf Bastion, one of the founders anthropology, for instance, proposed that every brain inherits species-specific elementary ideas, primordial thoughts which give rise to a social soul; Theodule Ribot a physiologist writing at the end of the 19th Century held that psychological and genetic memory were based upon a common mechanism, and Freud maintained that the individual contained history – not only a record of personal experiences, but the history of his or her species and race. And if the analyst looked carefully enough, he could reconstruct not only incidents from the patient’s childhood but incidents from the childhood of humankind (Otis 1994, 183). Under this biological foundation collective consciousness could be the outcome of shared physiological structures of the brain leading to a universal structure of mind. Freud’s interest in the “collective mind” was inspired particularly by French social psychologist Gustav Le Bon writing in the early 20th century on crowd emotions and herd behavior. In a 1921 essay entitled Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Freud quotes Le Bon at length: “'The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological group is the following. Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a group puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation” (Le Bon 1895 The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, page 21 quoted by Freud 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, page 9) In the essay Freud notes that while Le Bon does describe how the individual is altered by the group he avoids identifying what it is that unites people. Freud accounts for this unity by arguing that libidinal bonds fashioned between a group leader and its members means that love overcomes narcissism. But we’re still talking about individuals directly interacting here. Jung’s theory of collective unconsciousness goes a step further. In Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious he writes: “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” (Jung, C 1959 Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 43) Jung’s formulation of “racial memory” the idea of an ancestral memory carried forward in thoughts, feelings and behaviours from previous generations and linked to the collective unconscious, indicates again how non-empirical metaphysical knowledges and sensibilities could remain possible because of shared biological foundations. Interestingly, research on memory in animals rarely deviates from this biologistic path – animal memory is seen almost exclusively as instinctive, hard wired, and innate. Could, by the same token, there be a metaphysical or social memory amongst animals, or even between animal groups? There is some work on what might be called the cultural memory of animals in behavioral science, a field spanning not only biology but psychology and computer science, with models to study the interactions within and between groups of animals. In this last section, we look at three approaches to the study of non-human group memory with a focus on how each attempts to make sense of the collectives individuals develop amongst themselves. 5) Conceptualising collectives Each of these represents a different disciplinary perspective – indeed, some have been shunned by the scientific mainstream – but our interest here is in the different ways they attempt to make sense of the collectives that develop. While Nagel (1974) famously concluded that it is not possible for humans to know what it is like to be a bat, the work in cultural geography of Hinchliffe et al (2005) suggests that it is possible to become attuned to nonhuman scripts, and ethologists have long spoken of the ‘language’ used by various nonhuman animals to communicate (e.g. von Frisch and Lindauer, 1956). Being attentive to different ways of thinking through interactions seems, then, vital to any attempt at understanding animals on their own terms. The perspectives that we present here are secondly of interest because of their differing characterisations of agency’s role in group behaviour. In particular, the perspectives differ through their varying emphases on instinct, learned and transcendent memory, and the relation of all these to different geographical scales. Example One: Collective Intelligence Our concern about how the concept of a non-biological collective memory might be extended beyond humans is an issue that is increasingly attracting the attention of biologists and behavioural scientists. There are studies on how groups of animals function, on modes of communication within the groups, on the relationships between individuals and groups, and the ways in which groups respond to particular situations and environments. This work has tended to differentiate between groups that maintain some form of unity but where the individuals within them hold considerable agency (‘aggregations’ in the case of solitary bees), and those where the group might be viewed as more than the sum of its parts. Krause et al (2010: 29), giving an example of a flock of birds or a crowd of humans, claim that: ‘the fact that animals group and show collective behaviours, including consensus decision-making, only tells us that decisions are made in a social context and that animals have evolved forms of decision making that can result in agreement but are not a conclusive indication of swarm intelligence’ (ibid). Marshall and Franks (2009: R395) label this ‘collective intelligence’, where ‘collective behavior …responds adaptively to the environment of the colony’. They have also identified collective cognition, which goes further and ‘rests on parallels between how social insect colonies function as cognitive systems, and how brains function as cognitive systems’ (ibid.) The parallel with brains is key here. In brains, a combination of neurons produces the mind, which is considerably more than just the sum of its parts. Both these collectives, despite their differing levels of coordination respond to contemporary events in the local environment. The communication that takes place is largely within the groups and, as such, is largely confined to individual species. Example 2: Hysteresis   While example one deals with engagements with contemporary environments, other approaches have explored how the group is influenced by its previous histories. Recently, computer scientists, working in the field of theoretical biology, have employed the term ‘hysteresis’ to describe the spatial dynamics of animal groupings revealed through computer models. Hysteresis is a term more commonly used with reference to the properties of magnetic materials, defined as ‘any dependence of the value of a property on the past history of the system to which it pertains’ (OED, 1989).    Couzin et al (2002) investigated the relationship between individual behavioural change and changes in the structure of the group of which the individuals were members. In studying computer models of animal groupings such as fish shoals and bird flocks, they found that, in spite of changing conditions and changing individual behavior, ‘only a few types of stable collective-behavior typically emerge’ (Couzin, 2008: 37): swarms, torus and parallel groups (see image). Similarly, they found that collective-behavior patterns can change even when individual behavior remains the same. This demonstrates, they suggest,  ‘a novel form of collective memory, where the previous history of group structure influences collective behaviors as individual interactions change, even though the individuals have no knowledge of what that history is’ (Couzin et al, 2002: 2).   The scientists modeled how a group can change in response to food or to threat.  So usually you would expect that the tendency to stay close and the tendency to avoid collision stay the same.  If one starling moves, the others move in relation to it.  The starling doesn’t have a sense of the whole group but the whole group moves.  Crucially, according to this research the response from others is not necessarily the same for the same stimuli: ‘our model reveals that two very different collective states can occur for identical individual behaviour, demonstrating the importance of the previous history of the group structure’ (Couzin et al 2002: 9). The authors suggest that ‘collective memory may be an as yet undiscovered property of group behaviour transitions in animal groups such as fish schools’ (Couzin et al 2002: 10) and encourage further research in the area.   This example takes a step further than example one. The concept of hysteresis introduces a notion of collective memory, whereby groups of animals operate not only on the basis of the interactions of their members, but also on the basis of their past structures. This might be viewed as a highly evolutionary understanding of animal groupings, whereby particular formations have evolved to best deal with particular threats and opportunities, the torus formation, for instance, ‘may provide energetic savings as a result of individuals using the slipstreams of others’, while the parallel formations minimize ‘collision between individuals’ and ‘facilitate group movement’ while also promoting communication within the group [Couzin et al, 2002: 9]). For our purposes though, the interest in this approach lies in their notion of collective memory, that sets it apart from other perspectives which label such behavioural patterns as merely instinctive. Example 3: formative causation and morphic resonance   Our final example goes further in presenting a spatially extended perspective on the relationships between individuals and, as such, stands apart from the other two examples. Rupert Sheldrake first proposed his controversial hypothesis of formative causation in his 1981 book A New Science of Life. The central argument of this theory is that: ‘…organisms are subject to an influence from previous similar organisms by a process called morphic resonance. Through morphic resonance, each member of a species draws upon, and in turn contributes to, a pooled or collective memory. Thus, for example, if animals learn a new skill in one place, similar animals raised under similar conditions should subsequently tend to learn the same thing more readily all over the world’ (Sheldrake, 1992: 431)   Morphic resonance occurs through morphogenic fields, which Sheldrake compares to gravitational and electromagnetic fields, in that they ‘are invisible, intangible, inaccessible, tasteless and odourless…[and] are endowed with the property of traversing empty space, or even actually constituting it’ (2009: 94)   Sheldrake cites a variety of examples to support his theory. Writing in New Scientist, he discussed the propensity of cattle to avoid not only cattle grids but also lines painted across roads (1988: 65), a tendency not limited to cattle with previous direct experience of metal grids.   A second striking example is of the spreading tendency of blue tits to open foil-capped milk bottles. He cites a study of the dispersal of this phenomenon from its first recording in Southampton in 1921 through to 1947, by which time it appeared quite common across not only the UK (see map) but also in parts of mainland Europe. Sheldrake argues that this could be the result of formative causation on the basis that: 1) ‘Tits do not usually venture more than a few miles from their breeding place, and a movement of as much as fifteen miles is exceptional’ (1988: 177); and 2) ‘Milk bottles practically disappeared during the war, and became reasonably common again only in 1947 or 1948. Few if any tits that had learned the habit before the war could have survived to this date, but nevertheless attacks on bottles began again rapidly’ (1988: 178). For Sheldrake, the spread is more than mere coincidence and offers evidence of a form of collective memory, whereby spatially and temporally distant birds are brought together by morphic resonance’s ‘action at a distance’ (Sheldrake, 1988: 109). Offering a different spatial and temporal framework to understand animal (including human) collectives, Sheldrake’s hypothesis remains species-focused. The most significant resonances, he argues, are from an animal’s ‘own past. The next most specific resonance will come from genetically similar animals that lived in the same environment, and the least specific, from animals of other races living in different environments’ (2009: 205). There is, therefore, potential for cross-species influence, but his account of a more-than-human world is limited. Sheldrake's ideas have received praise, criticism and not a little amount of scorn from other scientists.  He has been marginalised by the academic community and, apart from that article in New Scientist has been left to publish in outlets like the Journal of Scientific Exploration and Noetic Sciences Review. But the idea of morphic resonance is part of a long running inclination to identify some kind of presence that accounts for the collective as greater than the sum of its parts. The point is that our world contains things beyond the empirical, the verifiable, and immediately intelligible.  In their paper "Dead Geographies and how to make them live" Thrift and Dewsbury explain becoming as something that  necessarily entails deformation, reformation, performation, and transformation which involve gaps and gasps, stutters and cuts, misfires and stoppages, unintended outcomes, unprecedented transferences, and jagged changes (2000, 418). It’s these unprecedented transferences that we’re interested in because of what they offer to a more open understanding of the group. 6) Conclusion Overall the examples we have given here emphasise the different ways individuals come together – across space but also through time. We suggest that memory is an important element in understanding how collectives become in ways that exceed their tangible relations. The examples we’ve used suggest three ways (there are plenty more possibilities beyond these) in which groups develop and are maintained. The first two examples put boundaries around species, or around small groups within species. The third example is rather more open to inter-species collectives. While we do not make any claims here for the relative validity or credibility of any of these studies, they do lead us to suggest that cultural geographers could be more open to different ways of engaging with more than human subjectivities and collectives. Further, in thinking about how individuals operate in the world, focusing solely on the tangible – smell, sight, sound, touch – even if we acknowledge that these senses might operate differently from our own, is limiting. As such, the concept of a collective consciousness or group mind, offers a way to move beyond conventional groupings – defined spatially (such as flocks, schools or herds) or taxonomically (such as kingdoms, phyla, or species). Rather, collectives might be viewed as potentially spatially and temporally more fluid. 1