Monuments and humanist anamnesis
Th e last of the four humanist matters is the monument, which is the most memorial of the four. It is aimed at reminding eternity of its own produc-tion. Yet all humanist matters are mnemonic instruments: Th e humanities have essentially to do with a work of memory or recollection. Th e practice of history, that is the inscribing of the past with the various instruments of inscription (imaging, writing, science, monuments, etc.), is an activity of rec-ollection, it is a mnemonic activity that literally collects, again, and again, and again, past matters. One can argue against this hypothesis that it eff ectuates a cultural reifi cation of memory, the latter being an operation internal to an individual mind. Yet, as Francis Yates has shown, 40 memory was from early- on conceived as an activity that must be externally assisted by various structures and images. Recollection was never defi ned as belonging exclusively to the human mind. Th e humanities are one of the most developed and comprehen-sive human- made memory machines; belonging to the humanist profession means to be occupied with a work of anamnesis, of recollection and recovering past matters.
Humanist anamnesis is still, whether one likes it or not, dependent on some demand for understanding of the work in question, and therefore it cannot escape a certain hermeneutic element. An example of a hermeneutical creed can be found in the statement made by archaeologist Konrad Levezow (1834): “An artwork consists in an idea, as its spiritual essence, and from the form, the image, in which the idea, as in a body, is sensually dressed.” 41 Th is expresses what her-meneutical readings oft en want to achieve by the interpretation of a work of art: recovering that idea which was dressed by the work. Yet how is one to reach this idea which is dressed by the specifi c work in question, and how does one reach the place where this idea can be recollected? Th e history we are conceiving here would concentrate exactly on the “dressing” (in Levezow’s quote above the idea
is “ eingekleidet ”) of the idea. Taking the work itself as the truth to be uncovered and exposed, recollecting the work would literally mean making a cast of the work, which is to say, putting a cover on the work rather than peeling it off from some “idea” which it is supposed to cover.
Memory, recollection, and humanism
Yates 42 examined the manner in which memory, art, and method have been interwoven throughout the history of Western thought and the humanist trad-ition. 43 She described the manner in which the humanist tradition from ancient times onwards bounded truth, knowing, thinking, and recalling, and the role of visual, spatial, and semi- cartographic ordering in the maintenance of the humanist tradition; humanism and memory are bounded. As Pierre- Fran ç ois Moreau wrote:
Humanism is constructed on an idea of a constitutive, fundamental, memory, the only available manner to man in order to access directly that which, for him, is essential: the texts of the past appearing as founders, and the relationship with them that lies at the principles of the constitution of the self. 44
It was Bergson who pointed out that the most pressing task of late modern men-tality is, simply, to learn how to remember. 45 Bergson’s philosophy of memory can be taken as a plea for a return to the humanities and their mnemotech-nics. 46 As mentioned, all the four humanist matters carry mnemonic content, in the sense that they are construed so that they are able to preserve knowledge about some past reality. Th e humanities themselves are an art of memory: an ever readdressed and refi ned set of mechanisms whose task is simply to remem-ber. Th e concept of the art of memory is needed to be integrated in a systematic manner into the conception of the humanities, as memory is the central, if not the exclusive, faculty allowing us to approach the reality of the past. Michael Dummett, in his Truth and the Past (2004), says:
It is not only the living who may report their past observations. … Dying does not deprive anyone of the status either of an observer or of an informant: the dead remain members of the community …. Admittedly, most of their messages have been obliterated by time; but many of the dead still communicate with us, not in spiritualist s é ances and only rarely in visions, but through their words that have been preserved, their writings, their works of art, and their scientifi c and philosophical theories. 47
Recollection of the past can be gathered through the memory of others.
Dummett’s view of memory is neither “personal” nor “collective”: our “per-sonal” memory is always and necessarily also collectively constructed, and vice versa. Th is is also why I prefer to abstain from talking about a cultural memory, suggested by Jan Assmann. 48 Memory is a human faculty basic and elementary enough to exist beneath and beyond the personal/ cultural dichotomy. It is not a “cultural” memory, but simply the work of memory that makes the task of the humanities. Th e agent of memory does not possess a fi xed form. It takes shape always as a pluri- agent reality. It is not “personal” and not “social,” nor is it a priori national or universal. Memory happens when something is being registered, rehearsed or, as Foucault said, rewritten.
Similar to the natural sciences, the propositions of the humanities advance through true/ false arguments about the past. Only that at the outer end of the humanist chain sits a special verifi er, no other than our erudite, whose task is to gather the material, to recollect the transmitted material, and in the fi rst place make seen and then drop all the hypotheses that must be wrong regarding a cer-tain past state of aff airs, again, like the archaeologist digging in his excavation site wiping away those propositions that do not carry a suffi ciently demonstrable verifying element at their beginning and end. Th us, the humanist should do what she can in order to correct misconceptions about the past. Th e humanist’s only task is to remember well.
Recollecting a contingent occurrence
Th e historian magnetizes the past into his practice, by following a continuum binding the past to his own actions. 49 Yet then, as Meillassoux has poignantly emphasized, one is faced with the problem of retelling a contingent occurrence. 50 Th e art historian Otto Paecht wrote of the same diffi culty to be found in giving a historical account of invention:
In describing events as governed by an inner necessity, the historian falls prey to self- deception. He knows how it all ends, so he constructs an evolutionary logic that leads to that goal. Wise aft er the event, he assumes the air of a prophet who has fathomed the decrees of fate, and who would have predicted what actually happened. 51
In Paecht’s approach, evolutionism and retronarration do not exclude each other: because evolutionary selection is hazardous, one can tell in retroaction all sorts of stories that should or may have led to the work resulting from this
process. Yet the validity of a historical scientifi c explanation is at risk when one admits the unavoidable element of retronarration in historical writing:
… we must check whether an established sequence of works or styles/ a genealogy— is really signifi cant, or whether we are simply using hindsight to interpret what may be a fortuitous outcome as a necessary one. In our attempt to understand the dynamics of a historical process, are we simply imagining a force that drives the wheels round …, and thus committing the vulgar error of mistaking post hoc for propter hoc? 52
A possible coming to terms with this challenge could be suggested by the notion of “tinkering,” brought- up by the biologist Francois Jacob:
Th e tinkerer manages with odds and ends. Oft en without even knowing what he is going to produce, he uses whatever he fi nds around him … to make some kind of workable object … what the tinkerer ultimately produces is oft en related to no special project. … What can be said about any of these objects is just that
“it could be of some use.” 53
Evolution, according to Jacob, works as a tinkerer, and tinkering can be endorsed to the framework of the sciences investigating it. Utility is not alto-gether excluded from the tinkering process, but neither is the latter exclu-sively modeled in advance and nor are the instruments that cooperate in the process. Contingency is part of the humanities, yet it is a contained contin-gency, ordered according to certain triggers arising from specific states of affairs, found or met on the way of the productive procedure: “… In pro-gress there is radical contingency, an incommensurability between what goes before and what follows.” 54 Work, therefore, is a retroactive capacity; it demands one to be an alert keeper , tinkering one’s prototypes nevertheless knowing that no worker is absolutely “free to pick and choose their proto-types at will.” 55