Memory Practices in the Sciences

Citation

Guha, M. (2007), "Memory Practices in the Sciences", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 1, pp. 83-84. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710722087

Having originally accepted this complex text for review, purely on the title, I had anticipated taking it for advice to psychologists specialising in memory and memory disorders, of which I have a vast supply on tap. After careful perusal over several commuter train journeys I changed tack and drew it into a discussion with members of the Maudsley Philosophy Group [an organisation with which I maintain a slightly tangential relationship] and with Charlie Sharp, the Institute of Psychiatry's computer manager – a man of formidable erudition.

The general conclusion, and I think this can stand as the summary review, was that this book raises a range of very important philosophical issues underpinning current developments in information work. Reading this book will not make any reader of the Library Review any better at the job. Ploughing through it – and it is not easy reading in spite of the forced elegance of the writing style – I sometimes wished that the author had not got so carried away with the potential Johnsonian intricacies of scholarly English and would simply say what he meant – will not make anyone into a better practical librarian, but it will give the persevering reader a collection of new ideas and new ways of thinking about stored information.

Memory used to be an extremely expensive resource. Socrates may have just sat under a tree in his spare time, but the technique that Plato used to record what he said there and pass it on to us was arduous and chancy. The origins of scientific communication lie in newsletters written out by hand, probably in Latin, and transported at vast expense, by individuals on horses. Now I can draft a review, select “Maudsley Phil.Gp” from an address book, send it out to a dozen individuals at a touch of a button, get their comments in, cut and paste in any phrases I like, delete the rest, store the results, and send them off to the review editor without leaving my desk, and the only reason why I have even to be at my desk is because I obstinately prefer to keep my train journeys for the perusal of print.

This book really reminds us of the importance of what and how we choose to forget, focussing on three “memory epochs” – the 19th [using geology as the core subject], 20th [cybernetics], and 21st [“databasing the world”] centuries. The traditional view of the history of science appears to be the opposite of “normal” history. “Normal history” is the emergence of a contingent set of facts about the social world. The history of science at least claims to be the chronicling of the emergence of a preexisting set of facts. A truly “scientific” discipline should, in theory, display total recall of every cumulative discovery.

The author's central argument is that the integration of the past history of the world, the past disciplinary history of cybernetics, and the understanding of memory as a cybernetic problem, was a means of moving across disciplinary boundaries, without which there can be no universal synchronizing discipline [a “universal discipline” being a set of practices and beliefs that lays claim to encapsulating all of human knowledge]. The final focus, on biodiversity, shows how the eras focussed on in the book essentially cover the period of the growth of global planetary management, and the need for the data‐base that will allow us to read life as information and, simultaneously, to meditate on the economy of our globalizing empire. Not, then, an easy book or a practical tool, but one to sit under a tree with and think about.