RELATED TERMS: [Of] Grammatography; Hypomnesis, Hypermnesis and Anamnesis; Exosomatisation; Learning
“Cities are made of sedimented strata of memory” (Adams, 2021)
Frances Joseph (2010: 302) points out that mnemotechne is an archaic term for how memory and thought are fundamentally related to the inorganic through the world’s materiality. As such, she comments, it may well be the oldest name for design. Design, from this perspective, is itself fundamentally and primordially a mnemotechne. The human world is remembered, mediated and understood through designs of various kinds and orders, within particular socio-historical design ecologies.
Scott Newstok (2021) comments that contemporary cognitive science validates what ancient memory practitioners already knew: that physical configurations reinforce recollection, whether on the page of a book, on the stage of a theatre or, we would add, in a designed environment. The Romans called their spatial art of memory the method of loci, or method of places; in ancient Greek, this is the method of topoi. This method was widely used by by orators and others from classical, through medieval, up until early modern times.
As Thomas (2014) notes, in discussing the use of imagery in mnemonics, “The method of loci was originally mainly used by orators to remember the points to be made in a speech, in their proper order, although related imagery based techniques would later come to be used for other purposes, such as spiritual exercises.” In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, very elaborate versions of the method of loci were developed. They used specially learned imaginary spaces, called memory theatres or memory palaces, accompanied by complex systems of predetermined symbolic images, often imbued with occult or spiritual significances.
In the context of design practice, it is recognised that we need constantly to be re-minded, we need constantly to be re-called, to be called back into recollection, in order to follow a ‘responsible’ (life-)path and to construct and re-construct a coherent identity.
The mind, without signs in the form of physical markers, image markers or language markers, tends to wandering and errancy, to a different kind of semiosis, one characterised as ‘dreaming’. The experience of embodiment, of which the imaginary and dreaming are creative displacements and counterbalances, is threaded through the mnemotechnics of emplacement. Design practices play upon embodiment and emplacement in their relation to the imaginary and to dreaming.
Design practice, therefore, incorporates and integrates several levels of mnemotechnics or technologies of rememoration: objects, architectures and imagery with particular symbolic meanings combined with graphic, linguistic and alphanumeric signs, to guide visitor-participants through the constructed pathway or pathways. In that sense, they may be called mnemotechnologies, in Stiegler’s sense.
The argument presented in Incomplete … is that designs impact the relationship between living memory and other kinds of memory. This multiplicity of memory types is highlighted by Bernard Stiegler (2004), who states that,
“The brain is not an abstract machine, on the one hand because “abstract machines” do not exist, and on the other, because this organ is in no respect a machine: a machine is not a living organism, and therein lies its force. The brain is a living memory —that is to say a fallible memory, in a permanent process of destruction, constantly under the sway of what I call retentional finitude. This biological living memory is, however, only one memory among others: particularly alive, it is nevertheless nothing outside its inert memories — i.e., its technical memories: the essential point being the relation between what is living in the brain and what is dead in its technics qua memories.”
Stiegler, 2004
In short, designs are ‘technical memories’ but ‘memories’ which nonetheless guide acting and thinking. This is a part of what is meant by the term ‘affordance’, as ‘opportunity’ for thought and action; and part of what is meant by ‘actantiality’, as a moment of acting (or not-acting, remaining impassive) while being acted upon, situated action. Human actantiality is marked by the potential for becoming self-conscious of that moment of acting while being acted upon, that is, of reconfiguring the relationships among organic, living memory, technical memory and social memory, in Stiegler’s terms.
References
Adams, T. (2021) The big picture [Photographer Janet Delaney]. The Observer, 17 October 2021. The New Review p.3
Joseph, F. (2010) Mnemotechne of design – ontology and design research theories [PhD thesis]. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University of Technology. Available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/56361944.pdf (Accessed: 10 February 2019).
Newstok, S. (2021) By going virtual during the pandemic, we’ve lost our sense of place, Dallas Morning News, 28 March. Available at: https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/03/28/by-going-virtual-during-the-pandemic-weve-lost-our-sense-of-place/?outputType=amp&__twitter_impression=true (Accessed: 6 April 2021).
Rubinelli, S. (2009) Ars Topica: The classical technique of constructing arguments from Aristotle to Cicero. Dordrecht, NL: Springer.
Stiegler, B. (2004) Desire and knowledge. The Dead seized by the living: elements of an organology of the libido [Lecture delivered at at a conference at Tate Modern, London], Ars Industrialis. Translated by D. Ross. Available at: https://arsindustrialis.org/desire-and-knowledge-dead-seize-living.
Thomas, N. J. T. (2014) Ancient imagery mnemonics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/ancient-imagery-mnemonics.html (Accessed: 6 April 2021).
Incomplete ... 