Recollection and action
Past matters grip, clamp, invade, and interfere in “present” action, thus creating a historical contraction, bringing to the surface a historical object. Getting near the historical contraction is the task of the work’s historian. Th e historian is then
getting- in and - out, moving between the diff erent layers of the work’s history, the work’s habits. Bergson hints at how one can tempt past matters to move toward the surface of the present through the process of recollection:
Th at a recollection should reappear … it is necessary that it should descend from the heights of pure memory down to the precise point where action is taking place. In other words, it is from the present that the appeal to which memory responds comes, and it is from the sensori- motor elements of present action that a memory borrows the warmth which gives it life. 60
In other words, all that one can do in order to recollect the reality of the past is act. It is only through action that the past can be recollected. As complimentary to spontaneous, involuntary memory, pushing itself from depth to the surface, the humanist works from the outer surface inwards, or rather “downwards,” in order to uncover and recollect that which is “inside” the historical excavation site. Indeed, the direct parallel for that is the archaeologist, working in his exca-vation site, on the surfaces available to him, shoving away dirt and sand, in order to reach a deeper surface where his “things” lie. An infi nitesimal weave of grades and layers separates between the level of action, which is the place of present- time and where the body acts through its received and preconceived ideas and schemes, and the level of pure memory, which is where some content is retained without being demanded on the behalf of no need whatsoever. “Between the place of action — … — and the place of pure memory … we can discover thou-sands of diff erent places of consciousness, a thousand integral and yet diverse repetitions of the experience through which we have lived.” 61
Habituation and fi delity
Th e infi nite work of recollection Bergson just described is by- and- by an infi n-ite work of habituation, habituation to the reality of the past. We arrive here to meet the historian Gaston Roupnel, who was one of the main infl uences on the Annales School , one of the few theoreticians of history to notice literally the his-toriographical potential of habit:
Actual being is nothing but an aggregation of historical habits of living sub-stance; it is nothing but the support of the infi nite multitude of gestures whose mechanism was regulated and its precision acquired by millions of ancestral experiences, by millions of exercises of repetition, each composing a birth and a life to those who are today dead. Hence we are in matter— which is memory;
we are in nature— which is recollection. Replete with signifi cation which is not
of an imagined expression, but rather … rich in realities and precisions, we can, we have the right to say that life is the memory of matter. 62
Th e labor of the humanist is laden with an ethical task, which is to adhere to the work he is following. Its adherence is grave, because it realizes a loyalty to pure memory, the memory of the past as past. Historical fi delity is a “joining,”
a self- annexing to a certain historical matter, frequently a document, but all the other three humanist matters demand this kind of fi delity as well. By an adher-ence to the work, in a process of what Badiou may be agreeing to call an ethic, 63 one is engaged with a movement of habituation: a habituation to that which was already written or to the monument which was erected. Historical work is the eternal habituation to the unbearable reality of the past. Th e adherence to a work becomes an archaeology when its rewriting comes to dissecting enunciations, events and things, and then to place them together, ordered and systematized, to form what Foucault calls the Archive . Th e archive is “the fi rst law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements are unique events. … It is that which defi nes the mode of occurrence of the statement- thing; it is the system of its functioning .” 64
Th e archive is therefore a kind of a meta- rule, a “ruler,” ordering the statements- things of the matter of history. And therefore, to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter, the question regarding what is the “earth”
in which the humanist is digging, a possible suggested answer would be: the humanist digs in the earth of habits, and his recollection is one of habits. In other words, habit is the hyle of the humanist.
Working with habit
Habit is a methodical engine leading the way from a work met as a document to establishing the work as a monument of its own production. As mentioned earlier, in order to recollect one has to act, adding more and more covers on one’s investigated work. Th e that which is needed is making the cast of the work. Th at is in fact what habits do. Th e habitual layer is physicomoral ; fab-rics, covers, gestures, attributes, ornaments, ideas, and commentaries or any other accessory added to the work are examples of habits, and it is this dress-ing that we were suggestdress-ing above as the possible material approach to works.
Th e body itself, in this framework, is conceived as a condensed cohesive con-glomeration of habits, which is enacted and maintained by the rehearsal of movements and gestures. F é lix Ravaisson- Mollien showed in 1838 that habit
can lead a habituating subject as close as it gets to its own corporeal reality.
By working with habits, by the adherence to a habit , repeating it, rewriting it, making variations of it and experimenting with it in diff erent situations, one weaves the instrument/ s enabling one’s own extended existence. Th e working with habits is a dressing which is simultaneously an undressing, peeling or exfoliation into the habituating body. Habitude functions not only horizon-tally, that is to say, as repetition of deeds and gestures over a period of time, but also vertically, as a binder between a gesture, a work and its historical depth, returning to its beginning. A habit contracts into itself a condensed genealogy of naturalized gestures (documents, exposed historical positivities;
instruments, mechanism of memory, and transmission; monuments, honored things; elements, historical a priories). It is a vertical spiral, to use the terms of Ravaisson himself, functioning simultaneously as rehearsal but also as a retroactive piercing into the history of the organism; moving up and down the habitual konus- spiral depends on how far one is willing to work with a habit in order to decompose it and to recompose it again. Remember Levezow’s search for the idea entailed in the work of art? Here is what Ravaisson has to say regarding a similar matter:
[The] state of nature to which habit leads thought back … is the condition and the primary source of any distinct thought. … How can we deliberate about grasping in the present or retrieving from the past an absent idea? … Before the distinct idea that reflection searches out, before reflection itself, there must be some kind of unreflective and indistinct idea, which occasions reflection and constitutes its matter, from where one parts, where one can lean. 65
Reaching, within the infi nitesimal web of habits, a surface of this quasi- idea, an indistinct idea, upon which one can lean, from which one can part, makes the craft of the humanist. Instruments, elements, documents, and monuments are her attributes and armor. Even Don Quixote moved on real earth.
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