The Metaphors of Memory, Solitude, and the Disembodiment of Ars Memoria

Introduction

What has Dewey to do with Cicero or Babbage to do with Hugh of St. Victor? Why do we feel the need to read so quickly? Or why are we so unsettled with silence and feel the urge to always be productive? In this essay, I would like to consider these questions, and how information storage technologies may have shaped our understanding of memory and how we relate to the world and texts at large.

Memory-as-Filing Cabinet

Memory has often been described as a filing cabinet in which humans store information. The filing cabinet was invented in the United States in the late 19th century and was considered a laborsaving device. Historically, it was viewed as a “machine” and not merely a piece of office furniture. In campaign literature, it was often anthropomorphized and described as a brain with a memory system more reliable than humans. Just as we can outsource memory to the cloud and external databases; office clerks could outsource memory to this storage device.

Early advertisements emphasized that no longer did one have to do the mental work of remembering where papers were located because of its effective filing system through tabs, guide cards, and manila folders for subdivisions. One company claimed, “The compartments of the ‘Desk with Brains’ are — like the cells of the brain — places in which to systematically file data, letters, papers and information, ready for instant reference.”

As Craig Robertson noted in The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information, for file clerks, “To work with information did not require thought; the need to not know separated information labor from knowledge work.” Filing was not considered “brain-work” and was portrayed as a machine that did not require expertise or much physical strength. Men read the files and “thought” their way through the day through intellectual labor whereas women handled the information without full engagement with the subject matter. However, this is not to say that men never handled files, but this role was increasingly being associated with woman in the rise of information labor.

In advertisement, images of disembodied hands and arms of file clerks, detached from the “head” were frequently used in order to signify that this machine replaced mental activity. In the company Art Metal’s promotional material, women’s hands were not only represented as detached from the body, but there was a further abstraction through reducing it to a sketched outline.

Storage of Discrete and Granular Information

Although the distinction between knowledge and information already existed in previous centuries, it became especially popular in the mid-19th century. As documents were separated from the context of bounded-volumes, the term “information” was commonly used to convey the reality of the discrete and particular. As I will later demonstrate, this emphasis upon efficiency and movement towards granularity also appeared in the historical development of the memory arts around the same time the filing cabinet emerged in the modern office.

In memory treatises, the human mind was often compared to a filing cabinet in which memory could store information like files to be accessed and retrieved. Ron White, 2x USA Memory Champion, in a public lecture on mnemonics once described how frustrating it can be to retrieve information when the mind is disordered like a messy pile of papers on the floor of our memory. He argued that we can be more efficient through the proper use of memory technique and “filing” away what needs to be recalled in specific locations in his mind (see 11:30). Before demonstrating that he memorized everyone’s name and face in the audience he stated that he had a “file” for everyone he encountered.

As information storage technologies advanced, we moved from filing cabinets to the “desktop” computer. In fact, we use terms of older textual technologies such as “scroll”, “web page”, “file” and “folder” to help convey certain functions. In an early Apple computer manual, they even used an image of a scroll to explain its use. There is the tendency to describe human memory not only as a filing cabinet, but as a computer in which we can store bits of data.

From Filing Cabinet to Mind-as-Computer

We begin to see a shift in the language used to describe memory. There was a cognitive revolution in American psychology in the 1960’s and the rise of the information processing model of the mind in the 1970’s. This computer analogy has been extended to describe the capacity of human memory as we speak of the brain’s RAM. We speak of the mind and brain as the “software and hardware” of thinking, senses as “inputs,” behavior as “outputs,” neurons as “processing units,” and synapses as “circuitry.”¹

The Oxford dictionary defines memory as “the psychological function of preserving information, involving the processes of encoding, storage, and retrieval.” As

Kei Kreutler

in her essay “Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity” noted, "[it is] a definition nearly applicable both to human brains and computers.” These computer analogies have also moved into the realm of mnemonics. Joe Reddington, former theoretical computer scientist, in his recent work, “Advanced Memory Palaces” stated, “This is the first book that places personal memory techniques in the data-structure framework of Computer Science.”

Storage is Not a Neutral Act

So, at this point, you may be wondering why I am recounting the history of the information storage technologies and how does it relate to mnemonics? Does it even matter? The argument that I would like to develop here is that “storage is never a neutral practice.” The metaphors we use for memory are not mere metaphors, but may indeed shape the way we relate to knowledge itself. In other words, what do we believe we are doing in the act of memory and how do we conceive storage in relation to the human mind? In order to make this connection, I must first share some of the driving forces behind the development of vertical filing.

Efficiency and the Skyscraper

When we encounter the filing cabinet, it is not just encountering a material artifact, but an ideology. As one studies the history of filing, one may discover that this storage device was often advertised as being “Built Like a Skyscraper.” Similar to modern construction practices, the skeletal frames were now of pressed steel and welded together, and its production compared to an assembly line. During this period, the skyscraper was a symbol of progress, efficiency, and corporate capitalism. For one of the chief concerns in the 19th century was saving time. Similarly, the filing cabinet was marketed as an efficient machine and labor-saving device fit for the world of economic growth and progress.

Domestic Storage: The Filing Cabinet in the Home

As Craig Robertson traced the paperization of America, he observed how storage technologies in the nineteenth century tended to shape our relationship to time. He stated, “The arrival of a filing cabinet in the home contributed to the promotion of efficiency as a way to live successfully in ‘modern civilization.’” The practices of scientific management was applied to physical spaces of households. The concept of carefully engineered and planned storage for efficiency developed. The division of larger spaces into discrete and smaller ones for the quick retrieval of objects found its root in filing cabinet logic and information labor. Cabinet companies conducted motion studies and their advertisements claimed that their products make “every motion count.” Consequently, this produced a fixation with saving time and an increased desire for productivity in the modern home.

The Datafication of Memory

Now, how does this history relate to mnemonics? As there was the datafication of knowledge, there was the datification of memory. From documents being detached from contexts to the discrete and particular units of paper in storage, memory was being detached from the rhetorical context, and transitioned to the emphasis upon the discrete and particular units of information stored in human memory. Seth Long, historian of rhetoric, recounts this modernization of mnemonics and detachment from inventio, that is, the connection between artificial memory and the invention of knowledge,

“The influences guiding nineteenth century memory culture were not Cicero or Thomas Bradwardine but British empiricism, faculty psychology, and eighteenth-century treatises like those by Marius D’Assigny and Richard Grey. Thus decoupled from rhetorical theory, discourse production, visual re-mediation, or info management of any sort, the memory arts became ‘mnemonics’ as that term is parsed today — technical tricks for rote memorization, advertised in books and workshops as part of the self-improvement culture that emerged in the industrial world.”

As we see these parallels in the nineteenth century, it should cause us to wonder. What happens when we bring the filing cabinet and its successors, digital files and folders, from the modern office to the “home” of human memory in the form of metaphor? How does this use of language shape us? Is it a metaphor we live by? What we will begin to see is that mental storage too is never a neutral practice. Let us explore these questions in further detail.

Filing in Human Memory and Efficiency Fixation

If I were to pass around sheets of paper in an auditorium and ask the crowd to write what comes to mind when they think about memory, how many do you think would list virtue, composition, or meditation? We rarely associate the art of memory to these practices. But, as we study ancient and medieval practices of memory, we can begin to have a better understanding of our present age. As Mary Carruthers noted,

“Memoria was also an intregal part of the virtue of prudence, that which makes moral judgment possible. Training the memory was much more than a matter of providing oneself with the means to compose and converse intelligently when books were not readily to hand, for it was in trained memory that one built character, judgment, citizenship, and piety.”²

Just as the filing cabinet was introduced into the home and promoted efficiency in domestic life, the image of filing introduced as a metaphor for memory promoted efficiency in the intellectual life. In contemporary teaching, memory techniques are increasingly being marketed as means to remember everything we read, pass univerity exams, or to enamor audiences with memory feats. Just as the skyscraper, filing cabinet, and desktop computer; there is an over-emphasis upon speed, labor saving, and efficiency. This spirit is evident through the use of language for many YouTube video and book titles that we see today:

• “Unlimited Memory: How to Memorize Everything Fast”

• “Superhuman Memory in 31 days”

• “How I memorised 400 pages of notes in 24 hours using AI (ChatGPT)”

• “How I Memorized 57 Pages of Notes in 1 Day”

But, what if memory training was not about saving time? What if memory achieved the exact opposite, what if it caused us to rather slow-down and to think? I can hear Petrarch exhorting us now, “Does not our reading require thought and the toil of human heart?” But perhaps all too often, in the name of efficiency, we have outsourced the labor of memory and solitude to speed-reading and book summary services.

“I refuse to have him simultaneously carry on his business and study; I refuse to allow him to learn without labor what I wrote with labor.” - Petrarch

The Disembodiment of Ars Memoria

Just as the text can be disembodied from the material artifact, the manuscript; the knower can be disembodied from the known text. Like the early filing cabinet ads, we can cut off our hands and arms as it were, and detach ourselves from the rich memory arts tradition that required the skill of solitude, thought, and labor of heart. Perhaps in gaining the body of knowledge, we have somehow lost it. Maybe we have not only detached the hand and reduced it to an abstraction, but we have lost the hand altogether. In the datification of memory, we have come to say, “What is the use of remembering at all?”

Saint Thomas Aquinas, tempera on wood, ca. 1477, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

I want to make a contrast between early filing cabinet advertisement and a portrait of Thomas Aquinas to highlight this disconnect in the history of mnemonics. In the figure above, we do not see an open book and the image of a floating and disembodied hand flipping through pages. We see rather a closed book, the body of the theologian, and a gestured hand in the act of disputatio, that is, a man who internalized what he read through the labor of solitude, meditation and the memory arts. Lina Bolzoni commenting on this portrait in A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Europe reminds us,

“Such is the strength of the speakers’ memories, it is to be inferred, that the content of the book is firmly imprinted in their minds, from whence they bring forth, one by one, the subjects to be analyzed and discussed.”

The Crumbling of the Directory Structure Model

You may be wondering, why I have been discussing filing cabinets when it seems that we no longer live in an age of nested hierarchies but the primacy of search and artificial intelligence?

L. M. Sacasas

wrote an insightful essay, A World Ordered Only By Search. He explored the filing cabinet and how this directory structure model seems to have become altogether foreign for many students as a mental category. He asked an important question,

“…metaphors make sense of things by explaining the unknown (tenor) by comparison to the known (vehicle), but, when the known element itself becomes unknown, then the meaning-making function is lost. Which is to say, that files and folders are metaphors that help users navigate computers by reference to older physical artifacts that would’ve been already familiar to users. But, then, what happens when those older artifacts themselves become unfamiliar?” (emphasis added)

I began to reflect upon his question: what happens when we have burned down the skyscraper and set ablaze the filing cabinet with the flame of search? What then happens to our metaphors of memory and how does this shape the way we relate to texts? What we discover is that it is not common practice for people to memorize today. “What for?” we say, “we have what we need in on our devices.” In the easy and instantaneous access to knowledge, perhaps we have lost our sense of gravitas. So, what can remedy this neglect?

Memory as Garden-City

As C.S Lewis once advised, for every new book, read an old one; perhaps we can also say that for every new metaphor of memory, ponder an old one. By no means, am I arguing against the principle of order that filing affords. But, what I’d like to emphasize here is that memory cannot be simply reduced to the filing metaphor, we need an array of imagery to fully capture its nuanced complexity and beauty.

I am intrigued by the abundance of agricultural and architectual metaphors in the Bible and how St. Augustine combined the two when speaking of memory.³ Perhaps, his use of language is instructive for how we are to understand the nature of the memory arts. He went on to say,

“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.”

St. Augustine’s use of “fields” communicates this act of meditation in the spaces of soliditude and “palaces” communicates the use of order and structure characteristic of a designed memory that makes this degree of thinking possible. What we may observe is that for him, mnemonics was not simply a technique for the efficient storage of information, but was anchored in very body and soul, shaping the moral life. He did not come to a cabinet or desktop of “files” but a storehouse of inumerable treasures of knowledge and wisdom in which he sought to order himself in accordance to truth.

Conclusion

Shall we have many books on our shelves, but none in our hearts? Is it that we do not permit ourselves silence?⁴ “Oh, I’ve read that once” we say, “but can’t tell you anything about it.” Perhaps we need to be reminded that knowledge is not only useful but sweet. Instead of coming to the fields and vast palaces of memory, we are prone to come to the fields of diversion and thereby neglect the practice of solitude. Do we read much yet so little? As Soren Kierkegaard noted, “The result of busyness is that an individual is very seldom permitted to form a heart.”⁵

Books are not mere files, discrete items to be stored, encoded, and retrieved. Dear reader, your heart is a treasure chest, not a database. As in the datafication of knowledge, there is the datification of reading. We break texts into manageable parts that can be searched and extracted at will like files from guide tabs and manila folders. We thereby tend to come to texts as tourists and not as pilgrims. Consequently, we are less likely to receive texts as gifts, prefering to assert our dominance; seeking to order, manipulate, and master rather than being ordered and mastered by the very text encountered. Perhaps, this means we are to read less to read more. May we hone the craft of memory, and cultivate the sweet skill of solitude.

“Therefore I beg you, reader, not to rejoice too greatly if you have read much, but if you have understood much. Nor that you have understood much, but that you have been able to retain it. Otherwise it is of little profit either to read or to understand.” - Hugh of St. Victor

1. See Mind as Computer: Birth of a Metaphor” pp. 134-135.

2. See The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture by Mary Carruthers.

3. For more wisdom and lessons from agriculture, I recommend

Over the Field

by Hadden Turner. I often think about his essays, The Burdens of Speed and The Form of a Tree

4. See “Repetition Is the Mother of Memory: The Permanent Learning of Petition by

Christopher Perrin

“At its core, repetition is a search for what one previously found and loved. The Latin word literally means “a seeking again.” It is a petition that is repeated. Why do we read the Psalms over and over or a great poem like Hopkin’s “God’s Grandeur?” For that matter, why do we return to the same vacation spot, revisit certain restaurants, or re-watch favorite movies? We are seeking the same thing because there is something good achieved by returning–and that good is the deeper appreciation or possession of something beloved. Ideally, that is the kind of memory we seek.”

5. See

Samantha Rose Hill

for insightful reflections on loneliness and solitude.