"Memories are motions, not bodies, and animal spirits, like other exquisitely small particles, can receive and transmit many different motions at the same time. With traces already mixed, it is all too easy for them to interfere one with another: when spirits acquire combined impressions, the implicit traces' causal effects are holistic, everything in a region making a difference in ongoing processing. There is no fixed place for a single 'memory'. As every sensation is, in a sense, many sensations, so every Cartesian memory is many memories: the prejudices of the past are always with us, always to be detected."
Let me start today's blog with this: this reading was a little tough for me to get though. Maybe it was the long day, or just the content, but if my statements in this blog are sorely mistaken...whoops. In either case, Sutton's criticism on the Cartesian view of memory is interesting, to say the least. The part that struck me most was the beginning of the conversation on the formation of memory and imagination. The idea that animal spirits leave imprints while passing through the brain, which ultimately become more and more refined as they pass through the brain is what creates memory has severe consequences. To begin with, this suggests that the first animal spirit that supposedly passes through our brains would have the highest impact on the formation of our memory and imagination. If each memory is, in fact, many memories, the first memory almost has a bullwhip effect on the every other memory, such that each subsequent memory has traces of the first one it. Is each memory, then, only a fragment of that memory, with traces of the First memory all through it? What then of imagination? Is imagination decided almost entirely by that first memory, since imagination stems from the memory: "Imagination here is the work of memory rather than a separate capacity, a disturbing possibility which haunts the moral physiology of the following century."
I think this is an interesting idea, but before I expand on my view on it, let me connect it to something we learned in my ENG280 class last year. We were talking about Suassure's theory of linguistics: the idea of the linguistic sign which is composed of a signifier and a signified. The signifier refers to a word itself, the sequence of letters and the sound it makes, while the signified refers to the "sound-image", the image we have in our minds that is correlated with a signifier. We discussed the importance of this idea, whats the big deal? Well the fact that a linguistic sign consists of these two components is what leads to changes in meanings. One of the fundamental components is the imagination- it is the image our imagination conjures upon hearing a sound. As different images are conjured, different meanings are given to words, then one day, when society as a majority changes the signified, the meaning of a word changes. The imagination, then is the basis of what changes language, and what changes society. What changes the imagination, then? Well, I think the best way to describe it is that it is a mistake of the memory. It is something that is created from a distortion of an instance or time that we attempt to remember, a deviation from an accepted reality that we try to recreate in our heads. So, in the end, imagination is what Sutton describes in his analysis of Descartes, the mingling of different memories except with some deviation thrown in there to create something new, something different.
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