MNĒME, LĒTHĒ

Yet what is the lethargy—from lēthē—that stupefies the inhabitor of mnēmē? In what does the dullness of dull wits consist? Or the alacrity of quick wits? What is presence of mind? Why is reminiscence or recollection associated with quick and vital presence, memory with a kind of lethargy and passivity? Such questions evoke what is perhaps the original icon or image of memory in our tradition—if it is proper to speak of an image as an original: memory is a waxen surface which, with greater or lesser resilience and elasticity, suffers the imprinting action of sensuous apprehending, “perception,” and preserves traces of that action in the mind. Memory is, as we shall hear Socrates say in Theaetetus, “a good thick slab of wax” in the soul; and what we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, or even think are the signets, the styluses, the protruding edges of stamps and seals, the cutting edge of our experience.

Now, to be sure, the “objects” of mnemic experience in general, ta mnemoneuta, are not of the present but of the past: hē de mnēmē tou genomenou (449b 15). As a neuter substantive, to genomenon (from gignomai, to come into being, be produced, come to pass) means “event” or “fact.” Memory is of facts or events that have been generated or have come to pass; these facts and events are now, as we say, “past.” We tend to understand the past as what is over and done with; but ta genomena present themselves much more forcefully than does something “past.” They are what has come to be. Much later we will hear Heidegger insist on the perfect of the past: whatever is past is what has been (ist gewesen). At all events, says Aristotle, we cannot remember the future, which is “an object of conjecture or expectation.” Nor to all appearances “is” remembrance “of the present” (tou parontos), which is grasped in perception or sensuous apprehending (aisthēsis). “No one could claim to remember the present while it is present [16: paron hote parestin].”

Commonplaces. Why does Aristotle bother to recount them? Because the problem of time is still a problem of being for him. If memory’s objects are not of the present, what is it that becomes present, comes to presence, or presents itself when we remember? Parousia is not simply an empty chronometrical determination for Aristotle; it designates the presence of a thing or, as Sorabji himself suggests (67), the being of a being. Remembrance thus poses an ontological paradox and even “impasse,” inasmuch as it allows what is past to become present as past, transposing us—sometimes faithfully, sometimes not—to what is no longer that which is, performing solo what both perception (aisthēsis) and thought (theōrem, noein) once accomplished, and perfectly assured of its own efficacious performance. Aristotle writes:

But when one has knowledge and perception without their actual exercise [19—20: aneu tōn energeiōn] then one remembers; in the former case remembering one learned or thought a thing and in the latter that one heard or saw it or perceived it in some other way. For whenever a man actually is remembering he always says in his soul that he has heard, or perceived, or thought this earlier [proteron]. (449b 19-23)

Remembrance instigates a peculiar kind of presence. It “has” an object of perception or knowledge without activating perception or knowledge as such and without confusing past and present. For while remembering, a man tells himself that he is now present to something that was earlier. “Memory, then, is neither perception nor intellection, but a property or pathos of one of these, whenever time has elapsed.” Here Aristotle describes memory not as a distinct faculty of the mind but as something that aisthēsis and hypolēpsis undergo, as an aspect of perception and thought marked by time. “All memory therefore occurs across time [29: meta khronou],” and only those creatures that have a sense of time—that is, of passage, lapse, rapture or ekstasis, as an ek tinos eisti³—can be said to remember. They remember metachronically, that is, precisely by means of that awareness of time which underlies our experience as such. Yet that “common perception” of time also accounts for another crucial feature in Aristotle’s account of memory. Aristotle underscores the importance of imagination and psychic “images” (phantasmata) in memory—as in thought (noein) itself. The psychic image is a pathos of the “common perceptual power” (450a 11: tēs koinēs aisthēseōs). The role of images in memory, plus the cognizance of time that we take in memory, time as a bounded magnitude, quantity, or how-much (to poson hōrismenon), and as a kind of motion (kinēsis), elevate memory—which at first seemed a mere aspect of perception—to the status of a “primary” perceptual power (12: tōi prōtōi aisthētikoi).⁴

Aristotle refers to the “common” perceptual power in On the Soul (426b 9ff.) and in On Sleep and Waking (455a 14ff.). It is that power which is able to discriminate (krinein) differences among the objects of various senses—between, forI could smell the bright coldexample, “white” and “loud.” It is also the unifying power by means of which one senses that one sees and hears at all. “For perception is one, and the paramount organ of perception is one [21-22: mia aisthēsis, kai to kyrion aisthētērion hen]”⁵ This unifying power is “closely related” to the sense of touch, although it cannot simply be identified with that sense. The “primary” perceptual power to which memory is ascribed is apparently this same “common” or “master” perceptual faculty.⁶ The ascription of memory to a common or master perceptual faculty that is itself highly reminiscent of touch is dramatically—or rhetorically—supported by the fact that in On the Soul (424a 18ff.) Aristotle employs precisely the same palpable metaphor for perception that he will employ for memory. Sense has the power to receive into itself the sensible forms (tōn aisthētōn eidōn) without the matter, “somewhat in the way wax receives the impression of the signet ring without receiving the iron or gold” of which the ring is made.

Having introduced the phantasm or mental image he regards as essential to the operations of memory, Aristotle now offers his famous formulation of the principal enigma of memory (450a 25ff.). Before we read that formulation, let us review the steps we have taken thus far. We began by noting Aristotle’s effort to distinguish the passive and active powers of memory and reminiscence, respectively, even though the grammar of the verbs resisted his effort, inasmuch as a reminiscence seems to be a (passive) “being put in mind of something.” Aristotle’s motivation seemed to be a pedagogical one, favoring the active, recollective power and reflecting a certain antipathy toward the passivity and sensuousness of his slow-witted fellows, who are mired in a past. For such persons, as we anticipated, possessHe went and pushed Caddy up into the tree to the first limb. We watched the muddy bottom of her drawers. Then we couldn’t see her. We could hear the tree thrashinga muddy, earthy, gritty slab of wax in their souls. We then followed Aristotle to his definition of memory as “of the past” and posed in a preliminary way the question of the presence of the past, the cutting edge of experience, as it were, in our memories. What is at stake is the very being of the beings we have experienced. Aristotle’s discussion of the power of memory in relation to the other powers of the soul—the “facultative” question as to whether memory is an aspect of perception and intellection, or perhaps a protoperception and unifying apprehension that allows us to be aware of time and to bask in the presence of images—should not be allowed to obscure the ontological import of Aristotle’s inquiry. That memory occurs metachronically and kinetically through images has to do with the being of beings in time. Yet precisely that is the enigma.

Aristotle writes (450a 26—27): “One might be perplexed about how, if the pathos is present [parontos] but the thing in question [pragmatos] is absent [apontos], what is not present [to mē paron] is ever remembered.” Aristotle’s solution to the enigma, a solution anticipated in the very introduction of the phantasmata, is to conceive of the pathos or mental image that the soul perceives in memory “as being like a portrait” (29—30: hoion zōgraphēma). The word zōgraphēma derives from the root word for “living being,” whether plant, animal, or human, but also of “figure” or, more generally, “work of art,” and a nominative form of graphō, “to scratch or graze, mark or draw,” “to represent by lines, paint, brand or inscribe,” “to write, express with written characters.” Inscription, marking by incision, is surely one of the earliest meanings of the word, as the various senses of the word hē graphis, (=to grapheion) suggest: embroidery needle, chisel, engraving tool, paintbrush, and stylus for writing on slabs of wax. Plato relies on the word zōgraphēma in Cratylus and Philebus, as we shall see, for his principal clue concerning the mechanics of memory.

Whence this “portrait” of the absent being in question? The motion that took place in the soul and in the part of the body that has the soul, replies Aristotle, “inscribes a kind of imprint [30: hoion typon] of what is perceived, as people do who seal things with signet rings.” Memory is the typography of aisthesis, objective and subjective genitive. Thus the pathology of memory tries to determine the relative hardness or softness of what receives and harbors the imprint (450b 5: to dekhomenon; cf. Timaeus, 50b 6). If the quick-witted youth is too hygrotic, nothing will make an impression on him; and if the old fellow is too sclerotic, nothing will penetrate. Such sclerosis is Benjy’s untimely fate: unlike his brother Quentin, whom we will meet in chapter 6, and who is all waterAnd I could feel water again running swift and peaceful in the secret shadefrom birth to death, Benjy is rude red clay, molded, incised, more than circumcised, and baked hardYou mean, he been three years old thirty yearsearly on. However, typography does not finally resolve the principal enigma of memory, and Aristotle is constrained to repeat his question:

But then if memory really occurs in this way, does one remember the pathos or that from which the pathos came to be? For if the former [the pathos parontos], we would be remembering nothing absent; if the latter [the aph’hou, thus the apo of apontos, the absent], how can we, while perceiving this [pathos], remember the absent thing, which we are not perceiving? If the pathos is like an imprint or trace [typos ē graphē] in us, why should the perception of this very thing be the memory of something else [mnēmē heterou] and not simply of itself? For in exercising memory one contemplates [theōrei] the pathos and this is what one perceives. How then does one remember what is not present [to mē paron mnēmoneuei]? For this would imply that one could also see and hear what is not present. (450b 11ff.)

There is a way, argues Aristotle, in which we actually do see and hear what is absent; he now proceeds to offer his most fully elaborated solution, bringing the first half of the inquiry to a conclusion (450b 20-451a 17). He describes the phantasm or mental image now postulated for memory as a figure sketched or painted on a panel, a figure that exhibits a fruitful ambiguity: the sketched or incised figure (gegrammenon) is, as it were, both an objet d’art (zōion) in its own right and a likeness or icon (eikōn) of a living being. In fact, the word zōion alone in this case embraces both senses of the ambiguity, inasmuch as it means both a living being and the figure or image one might draw or carve of such a being, its portrait or likeness. The phantasmata may thus be viewed, scanned, or “read” in two ways, either as objects of contemplation in their own right, as noemata and theoremes, or as portraits of something else. In the latter case, the phantasm is a kind of icon, a reminder or aid to memory (mnēmoneuma). Whenever the motion that is reminiscent of this “something else” actually occurs, the mind can observe the image either as autonomous—as a mere thought—or as an image in relation to an original. This either/or of our psychic scanning (theōrem) results in a common equivocation: we are often unsure in any given case whether what we “see” in our minds is actually a memory or not. Usually, however, we can enter into reflection, recollection, or reminiscence (kai ennoēsai anamnēsthēnai) and discover that we have heard or seen the thing in question earlier, and so escape equivocation. We do so escape when the autonomous image suddenly is seen in relation to something else (hos allou). To be sure, such shifting sometimes goes the wrong way: there exist people who are always beside or outside themselves—Aristotle cites the example of Antipheron of Oreus—who recount their wildest phantasms as though such things had actually taken place and were now actually being remembered. That is what happens each time a mere picture is thought to be a likeness, a sheer phantasm an icon. We do not know whether Quentin’s remembered conversation with Jason Compson, SeniorI have committed incest I said Father it was Irefers to an event that actually took place; we are even incredulous that the recorded “confession” itself took place; and Robert Mu-sil’s Moosbrugger, who according to the prosecution has murdered and mutilated a young prostitute, recalls only how women passersby have always molested and insulted him; for the rest, he is rapt to the noises in the walls, in his clothes, and in his body. Luckily, Quentin and Moosbrugger, scanning all their phantasms as both/and, rather than either/or, are exceptions to the rule.

It is worth emphasizing once again the way in which Aristotle’s picture of the portrait and image (curious doubling!) itself suggests a solution to the problem of image and original in memory. The phantasm, we said, may be viewed as either theoreme or icon, noema or mnemoneuma, whenever the motion that is reminiscent of the thing in question occurs. What about this viewing? And what sort of kinēsis is being thought here? The viewing is surely not some fortuitous “point of view,” except perhaps in the cases of Antipheron, Quentin, Moosbrugger and, as we shall see, philosophers since Descartes. What is it that determines whether we see the pathos under its own aspect or in relation to an other? Surely, it dare not be a matter at our discretion? Must we not insist that all depends on how the imprint shows itself under its own motion? Is it not the radiance of the typos, no longer held in isolation but radiating outward with revelatory motion, that allows the true being of the absent entity to shine? However, whether the pathos looms in isolation and invites us to take it into our hands, slowly turning it to our rapt gaze; or slips unobtrusively into the moiling stream of irretrievable events; or, finally, as Aristotle hopes, whether it actually succeeds in retrieving by some inexplicable action at a distance a specific absent thing, person, or event, letting it radiate in full presence—no metaphor can say.

The aporia of memory as iconography, itself arising from the aporia of typography, compels us to ask: What is it that is present to us, the (mere) icon itself or that of which it is an icon? This question, in turn, opens onto a whole series of queries. What determines how we see the incised or painted graphics of memory? What enables us to scan or read the reminder or memorial in such a way that something else, something different, something original, becomes present? How can the inscribing motion be reminiscent of what has yet—precisely through its agency—to be remembered? What can have taught us to read and write before we remembered well enough to be taught anything at all?

Such questions are already on the very verge of what we might call en-grammatologial questions: What is the self-showing that underlies memorial inscription? What is the presence that we read in memory? Aristotle broaches some answers to these questions in the second half of his treatise—with his treatment of reminiscence or recollection.

ANAMNĒSIS

Recollections or reminiscences flourish, according to Aristotle, insofar as one kinesis generates another and we find what we are trying to remember. Kinesis, “motion,” “change,” “animation,” “impulse,” here means a gradual or perhaps quite sudden coming-to-presence or self-showing of an absent being that till now was also absent from memory.⁷ Not even an icon of it was present to me. When a sequence of such motions or changes occurs, by either necessity or habit, a certain consistency, nexus, or node—the origins of what Dilthey, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty will much later call the Zusammenhang des Lebens, the “holding together” or cohesion of a life—is established. The method of recollection is to proceed either directly, as if by a shortcut, to one’s goal; or more indirectly and painstakingly to the penultimate member of a series, in order to pass from thence on to the goal. We start out from the “now” (451b 19: apo tou nyn) or perhaps from something else, seeking something similar to or opposite from or connected with our starting-point. For the kinetic modes of the presencing of these things are sometimes the same as (autai), sometimes contemporaneous with (hama), and sometimes have a share in (meros ekhousin) one another, so that, if only we can find the proper starting-point, no more than a miniscule portion of what we wish to recollect will remain to be found.

Sorabji (97) refers to Meno’s familiar paradox: How can we select a starting-point that is similar to, opposite to, or in some way connected with what we seek to recollect, unless we have in some sense already recollected it? “The answer,” writes Sorabji, “is that one always knows some answer to the question, ‘What are you seeking?’ ” Sorabji himself offers examples of temporal contiguity: I can remember what I did on Tuesday if I “go back” to Monday; I can remember where I put my hammer if I “recollect” where I put the chisel. Of crucial importance for Aristotle is this search (zētein) for a starting-point of the presencings (451b 30: arkhē kinēseōs) upon which the desired presencing will proceed. “For as the pragmata are related to one another in succession [tō ephexēs], so also are the kineseis.” Often a person cannot recollect at first, says Aristotle; but, seeking, one finds. One generates (ginetai) many presencings, until one of them is followed by (akolouthēsei) the thing sought. What thing? The thing that is doubly absent: absent from presence, from the “now” of knowledge and perception, but also absent from present memory. We should therefore not be blase about the double miracle of these generated presencings. Leaving aside for an instant the problems of the starting-point and the “penultimate” goal, which as we shall see in chapter 3 is a kind of supplementary starting-point, how do we explain the order of succession, this “following” of presencings? It ought to have a somewhat chastening effect on us to realize that in Heidegger’s detailed analysis of Aristotle’s treatise on time the word akolouthei expresses “the apriori foundational nexus of [temporal] motion” with regard to time as both a finite magnitude and a continuum; in other words, that the “following” of reminiscence or recollection derives from the “following” that constitutes time as such (24, 344-45). We should by no means expect to resolve such difficulties here; enough if we note that with memory and reminiscence we are everywhere in their presence. The sequence of motions or impulses that we are calling “presencings” is mysterious in the extreme, inasmuch as it seems to overcome from the inside, as it were, the double absence or exteriority of (unremembered) things:

For remembering [memnēsthai] is the inherence of the power of presencings [or: the presence within of the power that excites changes; or: the potential existence in the mind of the effective stimulus or impulse—452a 10: to eneinai dynamei tēn kinousan]. And this in such a way that the man is moved [kinēthēnai] of himself and because of the motions that he has [hōn ekbei kinēseōn].

Yet we must now seek the starting-point, the arkhē, of all such motions or presencings. The best place to look, says Aristotle, is in the middle (452a 17: to meson). How can a starting-point be in the middle? Perhaps arkhē is not the “starting-point,” conceived of as the initial point of a line-segment in homogeneous space-time, but the ruling center of a particular constellation of memories. The uncertainty of the manuscripts makes speculation on Aristotle’s precise intention with “the technique of mid-points” in the series A B C D E F G H idle.⁸ Perhaps the only matters to be stressed here are two: first, the kinēsis Aristotle intends to describe is not a linear movement from starting-point to end-point but a kind of back-and-forth movement from ruling centers to adjacent, contiguous memories; second, this back-and-forth movement itself ought not to be conceived of as a one-dimensional advance and retreat, since the contiguity of the members in any given triplet is not absolutely decisive. “It is possible to move to more than one point from the same starting-point, for example, from C to F or D.” It is difficult to find any relation of “contiguity” between C and F, except that both are third in their respective sets of triplets. This example, which Aristotle introduces in order to show why when starting from the identical point we sometimes remember and other times do not, suggests that reminiscence or recollection is not inherently linear at all, and that the “series” A B C D E F G H is not a series in any mathematical or grammatological sense at all. At best, this constellation (not sequence) of memories can be described as formed by habit (ethos), a habit so ingrained that it is “already like nature” (452a 29). We can recollect quickly things we have thought of quite frequently; for just as in nature one thing occurs after another, so too in our exercise (energeiai) of recollection. “And frequency creates nature [30: to de pollakis physin poiei].” Our familiarity (with the things recollected) is already in accord with the self-showing movement of those things themselves. For just as there is an “earlier” and a “later” in all self-showing, so too in the setting-to-work of recollection. Repeated motions of presencing (what one might translate as Wiederbolung) brings forth the self-showing itself. Nevertheless, the role of chance is greater in the realm of habit or ethos than in that of physis, “nature” as “upsurgence.” (Even in the latter, of course, we find violent motion, paraphysis.) Hence in our efforts to recollect we are often diverted in false directions. Seeking a particular name, we stumble onto one that is only “like” it (paromoion). Reminiscence hovers in delicate balance between iconic likeness and (mere) eidoletic likeness; its self-showing (physis), even if we think of it as “second nature,” is often enough an obfuscation or closing-off (para physin).

Aristotle now reverts to the subject of memory in general—even though it can hardly be said that his account of reminiscence has resolved its many paradoxes and puzzles—and reasserts the “great importance” of temporality for it (452b 7ff). In memory and reminiscence one must “know the time,” either in units of measure or in some less definite way. Such knowing is analogous to the way we know magnitudes, namely, in proportion to one another. Memory is fully defined as the conjunction of the movements (of self-presencing, self-showing) that are related to things and the motion that is the lapse of time itself: “Whenever the movement of the thing and the movement of time [452b 24: hē te tou pragmatos kinēsis kai hē tou khronou] are engendered simultaneously [hama ginetai], then one is at work in memory [tote tēi mnēmēi energei].”

The delicate and mysterious conjunction of time and things in motion—which philosophers up to Husserl will rely on—is of course also a source of error in memory, perhaps the source of error. “For nothing prevents one from being deceived and believing that he is remembering when he is not.” That is the sort of thing that happened to Antipheron of Oreus, and it happens also to Benjy of Oxford and Moosbrugger of Vienna. Their Lebensuhr or “clock of life” has run amok, scattering fragments of experience in all directions, or uniting them in bizarre concatenations. The distinction by which we order events occurring “at different times” suddenly ceases to cling to Moosbrugger’s experiences “like a red ribbon tied in desperation about the throat of one twin,” and his life is from hence permeated by an uncanny and thoroughly disruptive unity. “One can easily picture a human being’s life as a flowing stream. However, the movement Moosbrugger perceived in his own life was the flow of a stream through a vast body of standing water: driving forward, the stream was also drawn back in eddies, and there the proper course of his life all but vanished.”⁹

Moosbrugger’s difficulty ought to give us pause. Reminiscence and memory function properly, says Aristotle, when the self-showing movement of the thing (hē tou pragmatos kinēsis) and the self-showing movement of time as such (te . . . kai hē tou khronou) are generated simultaneously (hama ginetai). Yet what is the self-showing movement of time itself? And how can anything be generated “simultaneously” with time? Not simultaneously in it but with it? Or does time loop back across itself every time we reminisce? Finally, let us remember what we read at the very beginning of Aristotle’s treatise: memory is of the past, tou genomenou. Memory involves the parousia of ta genomena, not of things present in their presence, but of what has been. However, if we appeal to simultaneity of motion in time and in the self-showing of the thing, does not the entire structure of distance and distancings that Aristotle has been erecting collapse? Will not the hama ginetai, as necessary as it may be for iconography, wreck the distances opened up in time, from pragmata to pathoi, pathoi to kinēseis, kinēseis to the arkhē kinēseōs, and from the arkhē to the eneinai dynamei tēn kinousan?

At the close of his treatise Aristotle distinguishes recollection from memory by designating the former as a specifically human capacity (453a 5ff.). “The cause of this is that recollecting is, as it were, a kind of reasoning [hoion syllogismos].” Aristotle proffers two reasons for this. First, when recollecting, we infer (although Aristotle earlier said that we sensed) that we saw or heard or experienced this thing earlier (proteron). Second, recollecting is, as we have already seen, a kind of search (zētēsis); and the search is deliberative (bouleutikos), “inasmuch as deliberation is a kind of reasoning.”¹⁰ However, Aristotle’s account abruptly shifts from the deliberative, ratiocinative, “syllogistic” nature of recollection to its corporeal essence, as though in a last-ditch effort to frustrate the next two thousand years of philosophical ontotheology. The search inherent in recollection seeks an image (phantasmatos); and the phantasmatic pathos within memory and reminiscence alike is profoundly tied to the body (somatikos). As evidence Aristotle refers to the annoyance we experience when we labor to recollect and yetwithout being able, in the end, to rememberare unable to do so, an annoyance that is doubled—insult added to injury—when we stop trying and “recollect nonetheless.” This sort of thing happens especially with melancholiesWe’ll have to be quiet while Quentin is studying“who are most moved by phantasmata” and who are as powerless to stop recollection as anyone is to intercept a stone once it is thrown, even and especially when that stone will shatter the magic mirrorthere was another fire in the mirrorof memory, destroying all nostalgiaShe ran right out of the mirror, out of the banked scent. Roses. Roses. Mr. and Mrs. Jason Richmond Compson announce the marriage of.The melancholic who is “rummaging and hunting” for something “moves that part of the body in which the pathos resides” (453a 23), and the movement proves to possess its own inertia, almost as though it were generating its own time. Those who are most susceptible to such motions are people whose “region of sensation” is most “fluid,” (hygrotēs); once the fluid is agitatedI could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tide-flats like pieces of broken mirrorit does not cease “until the thing sought comes round again” and the movement can resume its straight course. Aristotle compares such agitations to pulsions resulting from fear and anger, which no countermovement seems capable of ameliorating, and to the curious pathos of a name or tune or saying She smelled like trees that runs through our heads and that we cannot shake. The agitations or disturbances that convulse a melancholic set the objects of recollection in a turbulent rotary motion; the motion does not abate until the object “sought” or rather fled “comes round again” (rhaidiōs) and “the self-showing pursues a straight course” (453a 26).

Aristotle ends on an even more dismal note. Dwarfish people cannot prevent the movements of their recollections from scatteringand we stopped in the hall and Caddy knelt and put her arms around me and her cold bright face against mine. She smelled like treesand dispersing; they do not readily recollect “in a straight course” (453b 4: euthyporein). This perhaps ought to make us reconsider our earlier objections to the linear interpretation of recollection. Will not subsequent tradition appeal to the linearity of recollection, with fixed arkhe and telos, precisely in order to avoid the freakish back-and-forth motion of endless reminiscence? Recall those uncanny concluding words of Aristotle’s treatise, on nature’s natural dwarfs, the young and the old. Here it is not a matter of youth being too hygrotic, senescence too sclerotic. Both are now seen as fundamentally kinetic-metabolic, the former because they grow so rapidly, the latter because He knows more than folks thinks, Roskus said. He knowed they time was coming, like that pointer done. He could tell you when hisn coming, if he could talk. Or yours. Or mine they waste away.

TYPOS

If we want to know where Aristotle found his typon and eikona, as well as his graphics, as possible means of surmounting the ontological aporia of memory, we do not have far to look. Plato’s Theaetetus had introduced both notions in ways the tradition would never be able to forget—ways it therefore would never be able to recollect freely and, as it were, head-on. Republic, Parmenides, Sophist, and Timaeus will prove to be further sources of Aristotelian iconography and engrammatology, and we shall turn to them as soon as we introduce a number of further details concerning the typos.

We remember that the Atomists, especially Democritus, were much occupied with the typos both in their “philosophy of nature” and in their “psychology,” though they too inherited the notion from a hoary past. The word ho typos probably derives from—and at all events is related to—the verb typtō, “to beat, strike, or smite,” in the sense for example of striking a coin. (The Greek word for hammer is hē typas, hē typis.) In Homer the noun typos refers to a blow or to the beat of horses’ hooves, and by extension to the effects of such a blow or applied pressure: ho typos may be the impression made by a signet ring, the stamp on a coin, and an imprint or trace of any kind. It may be a figure worked in relief, a carved or modeled image, such as figures of Centaurs and Lapiths on a pediment frieze, a cast or replica formed in a mold, and even the hollow mold or matrix itself. Thus ho typos shares many of the equivocations we noted in the word virga, the verge. And no doubt one could easily expand typography to include characterology from Plato to Leibniz: kharassō, to sharpen, notch, furrow, scratch, or stamp, is perhaps a loan-word from the Hebrew haras, to engrave; kharax, pointed stake, palisade, cutting, slip or graft, is also that cutting edge of an engraving. Kharaktēr (cf. kharagma) is both engraver, engraving tool, die or stamp, and the mark engraved, the impression, in one. Thus it comes to be associated with letters, and Plutarch can speak of ho typos tōn kharakterōn. As a replica, the characteristic typos may be quite exact, the “spittin’ image” of an original—as childrenCaddy’s head was on Father’s shoulder. Her hair was like fire, and little points of fire were in her eyes, and I went and Father lifted me into the chair too, and Caddy held me. She smelled like treesare sometimes said to be the typoi of a parent. Or, referring back to the matrix, the typos may be a pattern or model—indeed, an arche-type—capable of more or less exact duplication and iteration through many instances. For a later epoch, ho typos may be a form of expression or style, either as a general characteristic, approximate indication, and vague outline-sketch, or as a precise form with a specific function, for instance, a royal decree or legal summons. These are some, but by no means all, of the recorded meanings of the word.¹¹

(A postscript on the verb typtō. During the games held in honor of the dead Patroklos (Iliad 23, 764), Odysseus races so close to Ajax that “his feet strike Ajax’ footprints [ikhnia typte] before the sand can fall back into them.” Yet perhaps the most striking appearance of the verb typtō has to wait for the Tristrapaedia of eighteenth-century England, which describes Tristram Shandy’s early education:

But now I typtō my way back to Democritus and Plato.)

Aetius (I, 3, 18; I, 26, 2) ascribes to Democritus the view that necessity (anankē, whom we will also meet in Timaeus under the guise of khōra) operates according to “resistance” (antitypia) and “blows” or “collisions” (plēgē) of matter. He also recounts Democritus’ doctrine that the atoms move through the unbounded “as the result of striking one another [allēlotypia].” Alexander of Aphrodisias reports Leucippus and Democritus’ teaching that “the atoms move by mutual collisions [allēlotypousas] and blows.” Theophrastus (On the Senses, 50—52) mentions an aspect of atomotypia that is particularly germane to the present topic: he attributes to Democritus the view that vision results from the formation of an image when “the compressed air between the eye and the object of sight is stamped [typousthai] by the object seen and the seeing.”¹³

While only the barest trace of Democritean typography survives in Plato’s account of vision (see Theaetetus 154a), the typos impresses itself powerfully on the Platonic account of memory. Memory is introduced in Theaetetus to refute the notion that knowledge is perception: we cannot say that when a man closes his eyes it is impossible for him to know anything. When Socrates begins to speak on behalf of Protagoras in a spirit of “fair play” (166), one of the first questions and replies he puts into Protagoras’ mouth broaches the problem of mnemic presence. “Do you think you will find anyone to admit that one’s present memory [mnēmē pareinai] of what was experienced in the past [tōi hōn epathe] is the same as what one formerly experienced, even though one is not now experiencing it?” No doubt the entire project of knowledge sustained over time hangs on this question, and the Protagorean reply is potentially devasting: “It is nothing of the sort” (166b 1-4). Much later in the dialogue (191cff.) the presence and the mechanics of the pathos in memory are discussed in greater detail, in the hope of proving Protagoras wrong:

SOCRATES: Imagine, then, for the sake of argument, that our minds contain a slab of wax [191c 9: kerinon ekmageion], which in this or that individual may be larger or smaller, and composed of wax that is comparatively pure or muddy, harder in some, more liquid in others, and sometimes of just the right consistency.

THEAETETUS: I’ll imagine it so.

SOCRATES: Let us call it the gift of Mnemosyne, Mother of the Muses, and say that whenever we wish to remember something we are seeing or hearing or even thinking in our minds we hold this wax under the perceptions or thoughts and imprint them on it [191d 6: apotypousthai], as we might impress the mark of a signet ring [7: sēmeia ensēmainomenous]. Whatever is so imprinted we remember and know as long as the little image [9: eidōlon] remains; whatever is rubbed out or has not succeeded in leaving an impression we have forgotten and do not know.

THEAETETUS: Let it be as you say.

Plato’s metaphor is of course subtly different from the later Aristotelian model. Socrates speaks of wishing to remember and of holding the waxen slab, gift of Mnemosyne, under what we intend to remember. Aristotelian kinesis, the movement of presencing and self-showing, is far less subject to human will, except perhaps at the point where Aristotle says that granted the appropriate self-showing we may scan the engram either for its own sake or as a portrait of something else. Another difference is that Plato’s discussion remains wholly within the context of Sophistic discourse: Socrates uses the metaphor not so much in order to explain what memory is as to show how false judgments are possible. If a man has the marks or signs (sēmeia) or little images (eidōla) of both Theaetetus and Theodorus imprinted in his soul, and if he sees the youth and the old man at a distance, he may, while trying to align the proper mark with what he sees, “like fitting a foot into its own footprint to effect a recognition,” jumble the imprints, juggle the idols, and get the signs mixed up, “like a man who thrusts his feet into the wrong shoes.” A rather pedestrian approach to false judgment, we may say, yet one that survives over centuries, as we shall see. Even though Socrates has preserved a certain amount of distance between body and soul in his construction, emphasizing that the slab of wax is Mnemosyne’s gift, not the great goddess herself in person but a sort of eidōlon, so that false judgment cannot actually be blamed on memory as such, he now develops a pathology of memory that scrutinizes the vicissitudes and frailties of the body. False judgment will be accounted for not by the soul’s juggling of idols but by the quality of the waxen matrix of those lesser idols. Theaetetus 194c 4-195b 1:

SOCRATES: . . . When a man has in his soul a good thick slab of wax, smooth and kneaded to the right consistency, and when whatever comes from the senses is stamped on these tablets of the heart—Homer’s words hint at the soul’s likeness to wax [i.e., to kēr, “heart,” is reminiscent of hē kēra, “wax tablet”; Schleiermacher rescues the sense neatly by speaking of the ceraceous “marrow of the soul”]—then the signs [ta sēmeia] are clear and deep enough to last a long time. Such people learn well [d 3: eumatheis; cf. Aristotle, On Memory, 449b 9] and also have good memories, and in addition they do not interchange the signs of their perceptions but opine truly. These signs, being distinct and well-spaced, are quickly assigned to their particular places, which we call “beings” [onta], and such men are said to be wise. Don’t you agree?

THEAETETUS: Most emphatically.

SOCRATES: But when a person has what the poet in his vast wisdom commends as a “shaggy heart” [cf. Iliad 2, 851 and 16, 554: lasion kēr, a hirsute, manly breast], or when the slab is muddy or made of impure wax, or oversoft or hard, then matters stand in this way: the people with soft wax are quick to learn, but forgetful, those with hard wax the reverse. Where it is shaggy or rough, a gritty kind of stuff containing a lot of earth or filthCaddy took her dress off and threw it on the bank. Then she didn’t have on anything but her bodice and drawers, and Quentin slapped her and she slipped and fell down in the waterthe traces obtained are indistinct; as they are when the stuff is hard, for they have no depth. Impressions in soft wax also are indistinct, because they melt together and soon become blurred. And if, besides this, they overlap through being crowded together into some narrow little soul, they are still more indistinct. All such persons are likely to opine falsely. When they see or hear or think of something, they cannot quickly assign things to their particular places. Because they are so slow and sort things into the wrong places, they constantly see and hear and think amiss, and we say that they deceive themselves with regard to beings and are incorrigibly stupid.

THEAETETUS: You speak as the best informed of men, O Socrates.

The stamps or seals (sēmeia¹⁴) of the signet ring are beings themselves, ta onta, in all their trenchant purity and clarity. Yet when they are stamped on human hearts—even the heart of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled shaggybearded and generously hirsute Homeric hero, perhaps the heart of well-versed Odysseus himself—the resulting traces are marred and imprecise. Plato’s jolly sideswipe at Homer should not be overlooked: the poet’s “vast wisdom” is not equal to the epistemological sophistication and refinement of which Western man will be so proud, a sophistication he will embrace as his best defense against sophistry. Oddly, Plato himself does not seem so complacent, inasmuch as he has Socrates respond to Theaetetus’ praise by saying that he is disgusted with himself. For now he cannot explain how errors in unalloyed thought—for example, mathematical calculations—are possible. Apparently dissatisfied with both his sarcasm concerning the shaggy heart of perception and his buffoonery over memory getting its shoes on the wrong feet, Socrates pursues the question of what it means to possess knowledge. He is led to the second grand metaphor for memory, memory as the container of knowledge, and thence to truly monumental problems of iconography. However, before we follow Socrates into the birdcage, we ought to ask whether Plato’s slab of wax has anything to do with Aristotle’s and our own problem—the presence of the past.

Indeed it does. For the possibility of false judgment is the possibility of equivocation concerning presence. At 194a the words parei, parousēi appear, and they are contrasted with absence, to tēs apousēs: “Now, when perception is present to one of the imprints but not to the other; when [in other words] the mind applies the imprint of the absent perception to the perception that is present; the mind is deceived in every such instance” (my emphases). The matching of the trace or imprint with the living perception involves precisely the problem of the copresence of the present perception of that man there in the distance and the somehow “past” vestige or mark of that man in our memories. Indeed, as soon as we enter the cage Socrates will further define such copresence in terms of presence at band (198d 7 and 200c 2: prokheiron).

Socrates and Theaetetus now take up (197bff.) the question of what it means actually to have (ekhein) rather than merely to be in possession of (kektesthai) knowledge. They are led to Socrates’ second paradigm for memory, the aviary. While it presumably has nothing to do with typography, the aviary has everything to do with iconography. For those once wild birds are knowledges and ignorances, presences and absences, self-showings and obfuscations. Presuming that the second member of each of these pairs can be said to be.

SOCRATES: Now consider whether knowledge is a thing you can possess . . . without having it about you, like a man who has caught some wild birds—pigeons or what not—and keeps them in an aviary he has made for them at home. In a sense, of course, we might say he “has” them all the time [aei ekhein] inasmuch as he possesses them [kektētai], mightn’t we?

THEAETETUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: But in another sense he “has” none of them, though he has got control of them, now that he has made them captive in an enclosure of his own; he can take and have hold of them [labein kai skhein] whenever he likes by catching any bird he chooses, and let them go again, and it is open to him to do that as often as he pleases.

THEAETETUS: That is so.

The crucial questions of course revolve about the difference between the two kinds of acquisition involved in learning (that is, capturing for the first time) and in recollecting (that is, grasping again the bird one already possesses), and the two kinds of possession of knowledge (one in which, we might say, knowledge is merely idling, the other in which what we have learned is explicitly “there for us”). Socrates inquires here with a view to the classic sophistic ploy, to wit, that mistaken judgments are not possible at all. Both Theaetetus and Socrates affirm that mistakes are readily possible, and that one often takes his pigeon for a falcon; but Socrates pushes the argument further—or, rather, the argument has its will of them, as Socrates has said earlier, “like a sailor trampling over seasick passengers.” He, or it, proceeds (at 199d):

In the first place, that a man should have knowledge of something and at the same time fail to recognize that very thing, not for want of knowing it but by reason of his very knowledge, and in the second place that he should judge that thing to be something else and vice versa—isn’t that absurd, that when a piece of knowledge presents itself [epistēmēs paragenomenēs] the soul should fail to recognize anything and should know nothing?

Theaetetus tries to help by admitting some Birds of Ignorance into the aviary; catch hold of one and you are inevitably in error. Socrates objects that their rude critic will now have a hearty laugh at them—and at both of their metaphors for knowledge. He mimics the critic as follows:

Are you going to tell me that there are yet further bits of knowledge about your bits of knowledge and ignorance, and that their owner keeps these shut up in yet another of your ridiculous birdcages or waxen slabs, knowing them as long as he possesses them, although he may not have them at hand in his mind [me prokheirous ekhei en tēi psykhēi]? On that showing you will find yourselves perpetually driven round in a circleempty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from right to left; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard, each in its ordered placeand never getting any farther. (200b—c)

And so the two protagonists begin again, entering the third round of questioning concerning what knowledge is. We shall soon follow them, in a direction we shall have to call engrammatological, but not before dwelling awhile on, or in, the Platonic birdcage. As we noted, the image has at least a dual function, although its duplicity threatens to become boundless multiplicity. It is an image of memory, containing winged creatures of true knowledge, themselves images of true beings. The mnemic aviary is a likeness of likenesses, a treasury, vault, or chamber of icons. It will endure through the ages as Augustine’s cavus and thesaurus, Hegel’s pit, black as night, eine nächtliche Schacht, and as the multilayered Rome of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. Yet what can such containment and all hoarding of reserves be if memory is reduced to airy likeness? What is likeness? Or at least what is likeness like? one might askCaddy smelled like leavesif only to hear the door of the cage slam shut.

EIKŌN

An eikōn is a likeness or image, portrait or statue, perhaps even a mirror-image. In Greek tragedy the word assumes the haunting sense of a specter or phantom; it possesses the numinous quality that emanates from every dark niche of every tiny Greek country church we stoop to enter today. And it is one of Plato’s favorite words for one of his favorite themes, “likeness” being at issue in Phaedo, Republic, Cratylus, Philebus, Parmenides, Sophist, Timaeus, and perhaps everywhere else. Nor does Aristotle forget to use this word when he wants the soul to scan or read what is imprinted on it as a likeness of something else—the phantasm, we recall, being more than a mere objet d’art. Of the many Platonic dialogues that treat of likeness, I shall briefly consider only four—Parmenides, Sophist, Republic, and Timaeus—before taking up the final inquiry, the engrammatological, of the present chapter.

The problem of likeness (as of dissimilarity) and sameness (as of difference) recurs throughout the dizzying discourse of Parmenides (see 148a-b, 161a—b, and 165c—d for particularly vertiginous examples). Likeness in the strong sense of homoiosis is in fact the first difficulty raised by the young and feisty Socrates, who here is made to defend that theory of separable eidē which the tradition has generally attributed to Plato himself. (Nowhere is the ascription of various opinions represented by personages in a dialogue to the author of the dialogues so hazardous, nowhere is the intentional fallacy so hair-raising in its consequences, as in the case of Parmenides.) “Do you not recognize,” demands Socrates of the zealous (and jealous) Zeno, “that there exists just by itself a form of likeness [129a 1: eidos ti homoiotētos], and again another contrary form, unlikeness itself [2: anomoion], and that of these two forms you and I and all the things we speak of as ‘many’ come to partake [3: metalambanein]?” Socrates further asserts that such forms do not blend with their contraries, whereas things do, so that the meaning and the limits of “partaking” become crucial. In response to Parmenides’ prodding, Socrates proposes that participation occurs on the basis of a kind of likeness—here not only in terms of eikones, images, but also the more abstract “likeness,” homoiōsis—with the following devastating results:

. . . O Parmenides, the best I can make of the matter is this—that these forms are as it were patterns [132d 2: paradeigmata] fixed in the nature of things [or: standing in the very upsurgence of things, hestanai en tēi physei]. The other things are made in their image [3: eoikenai] and are likenesses [homoiōtata], and this participation [hē methexis] they come to have in the forms is nothing but their being imaged [4: eikasthēnai] upon them.

Well, said Parmenides, if a thing is made in the image of a form [5: eoiken tōi eidei], can that form fail to be like [homoion] the image of it, insofar as the image was made in its likeness? Or is it possible that the like is like something unlike?

That is impossible.

And is it not quite necessary that the like must have taken up the one and selfsame [form] that it is like?

Necessarily.

But that in virtue of which like things are like, taking it up into themselves, is it not the form itself?

By all means, of course.

If so, it is not possible that something be like a form, or a form like something else. Otherwise another form will always make its appearance over and above the first form, and if it too is to be alike, yet another. And there will be no end The shapes flowed on to this appearance of new forms if the form is to be like that which has taken it up into itself.

What you say is most revealing.

Hence it is not through likeness that the other things take up the forms; rather, we must look for another way of partaking.

Likely so.

Likely so: Eoiken. As lightheaded as the discussion may seem—because of the appearance of the eidē and the classic aporia of participation—it does show how difficult it will be for us to understand what we mean when we say that what we remember is like what once was. Aristotle’s explanation—that we see or read the mnemic phantasm as an icon or likeness when we view it (in its presence) with a view to something else (in its absence), something different, hence unlike—will seem only more perplexing than before. An inquiry into memory as iconography must therefore confront the problem of likeness and difference with some perseverence—even if it should prove to be an exercise in futility.

Perhaps the most penetrating and yet most strikingly futile discussion of likeness occurs in the dialogue Sophist.¹⁵ Here the Eleatic Stranger and Theaetetus seek to “capture” the sophist by distinguishing him from the genuine philosopher. The problem of likeness and difference arises as one of original versus imitation and authentic versus counterfeit. The Stranger and Theaetetus agree (at 234c) that the sophist is primarily an imitator of being and truth, one who exhibits idols or sheer phantasms in discourse (234c 6: eidōla legomena; 234d 1: ta en tois logois phantasmata). Their strategy for capture is to divide the art of idol-making (235b 8—9: eidōlopoiikē) according to two forms of imitation (mimētikē). One is the making of faithful likenesses (d 6: eikastikē), exemplified in those works of sculpture or painting in which the portrait preserves the proper proportions and colors of the person portrayed, the other the making of semblances (236c 4: phantastikē), as in colossal works which perforce distort proportions in order to make the portrait appear to be well-proportioned. However, the Stranger immediately recognizes the difficulty of this division: “Such ‘appearing’ [to phainesthai] and ‘seeming’ [to dokein] but not being [einai de mē]; and such gathering of something in discourse [to legein] which does not truly show itself [alēthē de mē]; all of this has always been and still is the greatest of aporias.”¹⁶ He is of course referring to the Parmenidean proscription of the utterance that nonbeing somehow is (to mē on einai), a proscription that the two will proceed to revoke. The Stranger demonstrates that to speak of nonbeing requires the use of the word “being” (nonbeing being unutterable) and of number (as being singular or plural). Yet to refrain utterly from speaking of nonbeing, hence to acquiesce in the putative impossibility of falsehood, is to grant the sophist an “impenetrable lurking place.” For the sophist will demandWhat is it, Caddy said. What are you trying to tell Caddyto know what an image or idol is. And it will be useless to appeal to the examples of images in water or in mirrors, or to paintings and sculptures (as the Stranger has just done), for the sophist will always confine himself “to what can be gathered from discourse.”

Theaetetus now bravely tries to define the eidōlon as “another thing made in accordance with something that shows itself without distortion” (240a 8: to pros talēthinon aphōmoiōmenon heteron toiouton). The Stranger demands to know what Theaetetus means by that other “thing”—which presumably also shows itself. The reply is that this other thing does not truly show itself but is only like the original (b 2: eoikos). Likely story. By alēthinon Theaetetus means a being that comes to presence truly in its being, ontōs on, but he has thereby consigned what is only like genuine self-showing to nonbeing, ouk ontōs ouk on, even though, as he insists, as a likeness the image comes to presence and is truly in being (11: eikōn ontōs). Yet the unsalubrious mixture of being and nonbeing remains, and the conversation now must turn to the perplexity of being (to on) as such, its unity and multiplicity, motion and change, sameness and difference. The conversation culminates in the discovery of dialectic, that is, the engrammatological blending or mixing of forms in discourse (251ff.), and the recognition that, as with the grammata of the alphabet, some forms will blend well together, while others will not (253). Being, motion, rest, sameness, and difference all pass in review, and the principal aporia receives a new shape: being is not (ouk estin), in the sense that “while it is its single self, it is not all that indefinite number of other things” (257a). To say me on or to employ the negative ou is therefore not to assert the opposite of being (b 3: ouk enantion . . . tou ontos) but to indicate a particular aspect that is different from every other (heteron monon). Difference (to thateron) is therefore distributed throughout the language and the knowledge of being, however grave the impact of difference on iconography threatens to be.

Now (26ocff.) the Stranger returns to the problem of likeness by asking whether “nonbeing” can be blended with belief and discourse. For if it can, falsehood is possible, “and idols and images and phantasies will be rampant” (260c 8-9). (Note the conflation of eidōla, eikones and phantasia here; however, if the twofold division of eidōlopoiikē into eikastikē and phantastikē is to be maintained, these would have to be carefully differentiated!) Referring tacitly to an earlier series of divisions in the dialogue, the Stranger now inserts the first division of image-making into another preliminary division, that of production (poiētikē) into divine and mortal kinds. The first is a production of selfsameness (autopoiētikē), the second a production of little images or copies (eidōlopoiikē). We are now occupied with the latter, of course, and have been throughout. However, this preliminary division is undercut by the admission that even divine production involves idols “which also owe their existence to daimonic contrivance” (266b 7: daimoniai mēkhanēi), idols such as dream images, shadows, reflections of light, and so on. The problem as to how such daimonic idols could be divided into likenesses and semblances remains unsolved, and it is at this juncture that the division of eidōlopoiikē into eikastikē and phantastikē is made. As though the genre “idol-making” could sustain a neat division into icons and phantasms! Be that as it may, phantastikē is then (267) further divided into two, a semblance produced by means of tools and another by means of the body itself, for example by the voice in mimicry or ventriloquism (mimēsis). Mimēsis or ventriloquism is further divided into two because some mimics are aware of the fact that they are imitating, others not. Thus gnōsis, knowing, distinguishes one kind of mimicry—which is itself a division of phantastikē. Thus “mimicry by acquaintance,” ventriloquism proper (267c 2: historikē mimēsis), proceeds on the basis of knowledge (met’epistēmēs)! Now, the sophist cannot be said to have knowledge, so he must be located under “mimicry by conceit” (doxomimētikē), which is again severed in twain: one kind of ignorant mimic is utterly credulous, the other is suspicious of his own wisdom. The latter, the “ironic” mimic (268a 7: eironikos), also may be divided into two, the one preferring long orations before an assembly, the other firing off rapid arguments in private in order to force his opponents into contradiction. The former is less a ventriloquist than a demagogue and the latter is. . . . What? Or who? Wise man (sophos) or sophist (sophistikos)? Has anyone here seen Socrates?

Theaetetus’s answer, which forces the entire discussion into a Teufelskreis or demonic circle, is that the short-winded ironic type is “a mimic of the wise man” (268c 1: mimētēs . . . tou sophou); he can be “truly described as in every way the selfsame existing sophist” (3: touton . . . alēthōs auton . . . pantapasin, ontōs sophistēn). Here all the words of self-showing (truth), presencing (being) and sameness (identity) are applied to the sophist—who nonetheless hides himself in absence, nonbeing, and otherness. His art is enantiopoiologikē, the art of making all discourse work against itself—in a word, making all discourse contradictory. The parentage or genealogy of his art: ironic, conceited mimicry, child of semblance-making, child of idol-making, itself a child of human production as eidōlopoiikē. What then is mimicry of the wise man? Is it likeness or semblance? Who is the mortal wise man? Is it the one who instigates all these divisions, the Stranger, the one Socrates thought might be a god, a master of autopoiētikē (see 216a)? To whom is such a “method” of binary division “congenial” (see 265a 2)? Perhaps at the end of the dialogue it is important to remember the Stranger’s words at 259—260, words that conclude the long excursus on being and knowledge:

Yet, good friend, the desire to separate everything from every other thing strikes a discordant note, and at all events pertains only to one whom the Muses have abandoned and who is utterly unphilosophical. . . . For the isolation of each thing from all the others amounts to the total annihilation of discourse, since discourse can come about only through a weaving together of forms, one into the other.

The one thing that is clear at the end of Sophist is that, just as we must have some idea of the meaning of being if nonbeing is to make any sense at all, so must we know what wisdom is and who the wise man is if we are to distinguish the sophist from him. The genealogy of the sophist, however, leaves the other side of the family tree wholly mysterious. Is there a divine production of idols? What in either divine or mortal production constitutes the likeness of idols to originals? What is eikastike? Or at least to what is it similar? What is mimicry by acquaintance, with knowledge? What is the quality of that ironic ventriloquism by which Socrates squeezes his interlocutors into corners of contradiction? These things await a discourse that weaves together rather than unravels. Perhaps the discourse of Statesman, or the silence of Philosopher. They wait long.

Yet presumably one of the above questions—the one our account of memory as iconography most needs to pose, namely, “What is eikastikē?”—has already been answered, if only in terms of the “likenesses” fabricated in painting and sculpture. The artist produces a likeness when he or she “reproduces in accord with the symmetry of the original [235d 7-8: kata tas tou paradeigmatos symmetrias] in length, breadth, and depth, and applies the appropriate colors.” Contrasted with such production is that of the artist who executes “colossal” (e 5: tōn megalōn) works, and who must alter the proportions of the work in order to make it appear (to us mortals) to be well-proportioned. We might think of those two glories of Athens, Pheidias’s gigantic sculpture of Pallas Athena and the temple that housed it, the Parthenon. Of the latter we know that each column was shaped asymmetrically and affixed to the porch at unequal intervals in order to evoke an illusion of equidistance. The “golden mean” of sculpture and of architecture is a human geometry, not a science of unearthly coordinates in empty, abstract space. Is the Stranger here insisting that colossal works of art are inferior likenesses and thus should be spurned in favor of works of which man is the pint-sized measure? Should Pheidias have stuck to “true proportion” and demanded of the Athenians that they wax to the stature of the statue in order to look on the goddess? In that case, eikastikē would be megalomania, oblivious of the difference between divine and mortal productions, perspectives, and proportions. Worse, the result of a megalithic artistry without the deliberate distortion of proportions which we call “perspective” would be even more disconcerting: a freak Pallas, massive in her nether parts, miniscule in head and arms. A kind of dwarfAnd folks don’t like to look at a loony. Tain’t no luck in itor little image—an idol. The Stranger himself recognizes the irony: If the artists of the colossal “wanted to render the self-showing symmetry of the beautiful” (235c 6—7: tēn tōn kalōn alēthinēn symmetrian), the result would be monstrous. If alēthinē is understood as exact and literal replication, then the measure of symmetry as such goes awry. The problem would then be to find a way to include mortals in the measuring, to remember them, without making man himself the measure. Yet the Stranger does not revert to the problem discussed at the outset of Theaetetus. Taking aletheia to be a mirror-image of some original, he asks rhetorically, “Do not the artist-craftsmen wave good-byeKeep your hands in your pockets, Caddy said. Or they’ll get froze. You don’t want your hands froze on Christmas do youto the true [236a 4: khairein to alēthes], and go off in search, not of the proportions of being [5: ou tas ousas symmetrias], but of those proportions that will really only appear to be beautiful [alia tas doxousas einai kalas]?” But, again, what is the alternative? Does the artist bid adieu to the self-showing when he makes his object seem as beautiful as its paradigm is? Even though Plato uses the word kheirein (principally) to mean farewell and dismissal, he is surely also aware of its Homeric sense: to greet, welcome, and rejoice in a thing or person who is now truly present and, as it were, at hand, prokheiros.¹⁷ The question then would be whether the true—understood as what shows itself as it is—does indeed fare well precisely when the craftsman distorts proportions and shatters his celebrated but really rather silly mirror. For the art of mirroring is the sophistic art par excellence. In the tenth book of Republic the following memorable exchange between Socrates and Glaucon occurs (cf. Sophist 233e-234e):

But now consider what name you would give to this craftsman.

What one?

The one who makes all the things that all handicraftsmen severally produce.

A truly clever and wondrous man you tell of.

Ah, but wait, and you will say so indeed, for this same handicraftsman is not only able to make all implements but also produces all plants and animals, including himself, and in addition earth and sky and the gods and all things in heaven and under the earth.

A most marvelous Sophist, he said.

Are you incredulous? said I. . . . Or do you not perceive that you yourself would be able to make all these things in a way?

And in what way, I ask you, he said.

. . . You could do it most quickly if you should choose to take a mirror and carry it about everywhere. You would speedily produce the sun and all the things in the sky, and speedily the earth and yourself and the other animals and implements and plants and all the objects of which we just now spoke.

Yes, he said, the appearance [596e 4: phainomena] of them, but not, of course, the beings in their true self-showing [tēi alētheiai].

Here the artist-sophist is portrayed as altogether a mirror: his eikastikē is nothing else than phantastikē. He traffics in the purely phenomenal (in the restricted sense); his practice is sophistic, and it is impossible to see how a distinction between likeness and semblance could be maintained for such a practice. Yet it is even less possible to see what mimēsis has in common with “production,” to see how one could “produce” with a mirror, unless Heidegger is right when he identifies the three kinds of production—the god producing the idea, the craftsman producing the thing, the painter producing the image—as a pro-ducing or leading forward into radiant outward appearance or profile, a bringing out of concealment and into presence. In the three “turns” of presencing only the degree of nondistortion differs; that is, in terms of our own discussion, only the symmetry varies, and it is essential that the modes of self-showing themselves be seen symmetrically, as being like one another.

The more firmly we hold on to the selfsameness, the more significant the distinction must become. Plato here is wrestling with the conception of the varying tropos, that is, at the same time and above all, with the determination of that “way” in which on [being] itself shows itself most purely, so that it does not portray itself by means of something else but presents itself in such a way that its outward appearance, eidos, constitutes its being. Such self-showing is the eidos as idea.¹⁸

Heidegger is also right to ridicule us for being “quick on the uptake” when we say that some kinds of production are “real” while others are “merely apparent.” The problem of likeness, iconography, compels us beyond that handy distinction to the realm of unconcealment (alētheia) and upsurgence (physis) as such. The problem is to visualize “how the selfsame shows itself in various ways: three ways of self-showing; hence, of presence; hence, three metamorphoses of being itself” (182). Once we have seen what the three modes of presencing have in common, however, it is inevitable that the hierarchy be reestablished. The portrayed object shows an idea and a “thing,” but shows both of them “in something else, in shades of color,” something that muddies the radiance of pure showing.

What is decisive for the Greek-Platonic concept of mimēsis or imitation is not reproduction or portraiture, not the fact that the painter provides us with the same thing once again; what is decisive is that this is precisely what he cannot do, that he is even less capable than the craftsman of duplicating the same thing. It is therefore wrongheaded to apply to mimēsis notions of “naturalistic” or “primitivistic” copying and reproducing. Imitation is subordinate pro-duction. The mimētēs is defined in essence by his position of distance; such distance results from the hierarchy established with regard to ways of production and in the light of pure outward appearance, being. (185)

The artist’s “position of distance” reminds us of those structures of distantiation that Aristotle erected in his analysis of memory—the distance of the “force within us” from the “source of motion,” and of the latter from the pathos, as of the pathos from the things (pragmata) themselves. Yet the Platonic hierarchy here discussed by Heidegger is as mysterious as Aristotle’s iconographic distantiations. To inquire into both adequately we would have to take up the question of homoiōsis once again, this time in the context of Aristotle’s famous opening words in Of Interpretation, 16a 3-8. In chapter 4, below, we shall take up the homoiōsis of pathēmata, pragmata, symbols, and sounds—the entire machinery of iconography as engrammatology.

Finally, the discussion of mimēsis in Book Ten of Republic has consequences for the entire analysis of eidōlopoiikē in Sophist. Heidegger introduces the problem in this way:

What art produces is not the eidos as idea [physis), but touto eidōlon. The latter means a little eidos, but “little” not just in the sense of stature. In the way it shows and appears, the eidōlon is something slight. It is a mere residue of the genuine self-showing of beings, and even then in an alien domain, for example, color or some other material of portraiture. Such diminution of the way of pro-ducing is a darkening and distorting.

We are familiar with Plato’s description of images in the central books of Republic (509e 1: eikones) as shadows or reflections in water. Such likenesses occupy the lowest sector of the divided-line, eikasia being the poorest form of knowledge, the penumbrous showing of things. Philosophic education is therefore understood as a clambering up the divided-line, as though it were the ladder of love, in order to nest amidst the Good, Beautiful, and True. Submerged are the compelling images of Plato’s own text, the icon of the sun (509a 9), the image of the divided-line itself (533a 3), and the allegory of the cave. How out of place such icons are! we are likely to exclaim, as Glaucon does (515a 4), as soon as he and we see them as images, as soon as we remember that they are likenesses and simulacra rather than the things themselves. Yet it may well be that once we have diligently gone up and down the divided-line, and forth and back through these central books, it will become clear to us that all attempts to escape eikones are futile, that the forms themselves, the eidē, are figurines, eidōla, and that devotion to philosophy is inevitably idolatry.¹⁹

We have been pursuing for some time now the sources of Aristotelian typography and iconography in Plato’s Republic, Parmenides, Theaetetus, and Sophist. Even in these dialogues the guiding metaphors of eikōn and typos, likeness, imprint, and coinage, are more than “epistemological” matters. Their function is primarily ontological, in that they have to do with structures of beings, their presencing and self-showing. Plato’s Timaeus—the gossamer burlesque and cosmogonic midsummer night’s dream that coined Western man’s image of the universe and the self for two thousand years—tells us that the very kosmos, the universe of beings, is “a likeness of something” (29b 2: eikōn tinos); that in it the relationship of copy to original, image to paradigm, genesis to ontōs on obtains. Plato’s Timaeus—and we will insist that Timaeus is a work of Plato’s, even though Diogenes Laertius (VIII, 84) reports that Hermippus suggests that somebody else knows full well that when Plato went to Syracuse he purchased a Pythagorean tome from Philolaus of Croton’s relatives and cribbed the entire Timaeus from it—insists that a discourse involving the eikona can only be eikota, “probable,” “likely,” not privy to the logos itself but “analogous,” ana logon (29c 2). (Whether the homologous structure of analogon and anamnēsis is significant, whether the ana- in each case implies incessant motion and perpetual iteration rather than arrival at a fixed destination and perfect presence, are arresting questions—yet we will not stop for them.) How improbable and unlikely it all is, this comedy of Pythagorean loquacity and Socratic silence! How singularly odd the ostensibly iconic relationships are throughout!²⁰ The most famous of these relationships is that of time and eternity, most famous because it is decisive for the difference between being and becoming as such. In fact, that difference cannot be expressed except through some tacit reference to time (or transiency) and eternity (or immutability), so that the icon-paradigm relationship is especially here caught in a curious circularity. Timaeus tells us that the Demiurge “considered that he would make a moving simulacrum of eternity” (37d 5: eikō [a poetic Ionic form of eikon] . . . kinetōn tina aiōnos). He thus ordered the heavensThen I looked at the fire again and the bright, smooth shapes went again. I could hear the clock and the roof and Caddyin such a way that they yielded “a likeness [7: eikona] of eternity—which is at rest in One—in motion according to number.” Thus the co(s)mic craftsman models motion on rest and number on unity. That circular motion should approximate rest, and that numbers—especially to a Pythagorean—should be accretions of monads, causes no astonishment. Yet that one of these should and could be the paradigm for the other, and that Rest and the One should be granted priority, these things resist every explanation. The circularity of ouranian divinities becomes the spiral of mortal interpretation.²¹

Yet the modeling or generating, fabricating or begetting of time—and it is difficult to distinguish the poietic from the generative powers of the craftsman-father, difficult to know whether here we have to do with tiktō or tekhnē—is not the only bewildering execution of a likeness by a likeness. Generated beings are everywhere imaged after eternal paradigms whose primary trait is that they are ungenerated. The immortal technician generates gods and things divine (theoi, theon) who are “neither immortal nor altogether indestructible” (41b 2). He then instructs these quasi-immortals to help him generate three classes of mortals. He specifically admonishes them that in their production of the mortal parts they are to “imitate” (41c 5) his production of them, and he insists on planting the immortal seed in mortals himself.²² All this in a universe where like generates like! For the universe is a visible divinity modeled on the intelligible (92c 7: eikōn tou noētou theos aisthētos), so that, in spite of all the damage that differences and diseases and birdbrain astronomers can do, that universe remains one of a kind, perfectly monogenous (31b 3; 92c 9). Such is Timaeus’ eloquence, tying the ties that bind—and blind.

What accounts for the slippage between paradigm and icon, the difference in rank between being and becoming? If the second is modeled on the first, what intervenes to make the copy inferior? What bitches the modeling? Such questions take us to the shaggy heartand Caddy put her arms around me of Timaeus’ discourse, his “second beginning” at 48e, which proposes the “receptacle,” hypodokhē, of becoming as a solution to the problem of the gap between the visible and the invisible. Whereas during the first part of his speech Timaeus of Locri has named only two kinds, first, a paradigmatic eidos, intelligible and eternally the same in being (48e 5—6), and second, an imitation (mimēma) of that paradigm that is visible and generated (48e 5-6), he now needs a third kind, a third eidos to embrace Benjy, Caddy said, Benjy. She put her arms around me again. But I went away the first two. It is difficult to find words for the third kind. Timaeus calls it “the receptacle of generation, a sort of nurse” (49a 5 —6: geneseōs hypodokhē . . . hoion tithēnē). Hypodokhē means the reception or entertainment of a thing, its Unterbringung and Unterhaltung, or a means for admitting and harboring it. Timaeus has already mentioned that cup or mixing bowl (4id 4: kratēra) in whichthe bowl steamed up to my facethe craftsman-fatherFather took me up. He smelled like rainblends the elements of soul that are destined for the universe and for mortals, and it is apparently something of the sort he now seeks for all becoming. However, the image shifts. It is not mere containment that is needed but something more supple andVersh’s hand dipped the spoon insubtle. Something consisting of a material very much like wax. The receptacle must be “of a nature that receives all bodies” (50b 6: ta panta dekhomenēs sōmata physeōs), something like gold, which can be hammered, stamped, and coined in sundry forms. However, the receptacle must never abandon its own essence, even as it opens itself to all things; it must be “a natural recipient of impressions” (50c 2: ekmageion), set in motion and transmogrified by what enters into it, though untouched in its essence; it must embrace and release “imitations” of perdurant being (50c 5: tōn ontōn aei mimēmata). (Ekmageion, according to its second sense, means that on or in which an impression is made: it is the very word that was used earlier to describe the mnemic slab of wax at Theaetetus 191c 9ff. and 196a 3. Timaeus also employs several verbs derived from typos, designating the mimēmata [at 50c 5, for example] as typothenta, so that at crucial moments this dialogue too reverts from iconography to typography.)

Such then are the three eidē of Timaeus’ second effort (50c—d): that which is generated (to gignomenon), that in which it is generated (to d’ en hōi gignetai), and that of which the generated is a naturally derived resemblance (to d’ hothen aphomoioumenon phyetai to gignomenon). The first may be likened to an infant, the last to its father, and the “in which” to its mother or to the mother’s womb (5od 2—3: to dekhomenon mētri). Because she must entertain all traits, receiving them from without, the mother must be amorphous and altogether neutralCaddy smelled like trees. We don’t like to perfume ourselves, Caddy saidlike the base of a perfume. Summing up what he has said so far, Timaeus concludes that the universal mother and receptacle of becomingCaddy smelled like trees in the rainmay not be called earth, air, water, fireIt was rising and falling on the wallsor anything generated from these, and that she is “an invisible and characterless form which receives all things and which somehow participates in the intelligible in the most perplexing and baffling manner” (51a 4ff.). Of all aporias, the mother is most aporetic: an invisible eidos without form, she embraces all form and visibility; an eidos sharing in the intelligible, she defies all but the dreamiest of discourses. Matters only get worse when Timaeus (52a 8) tries to describe the “in which” as khōra, or more fully, on to tēs khōras, “being [or the self-showing presencing] that is eternally of the room.” For it soon becomes clear that the slippage between paradigm and copy that prevents that which is generated from perfectly matching that of which it is a copy reverts to that in which the copy is generated. The last is said to be utterly characterless and neutral, yet we recognize here the source of that “veil of melancholy” that Schelling will findThen I saw Caddy, with flowers in her hair, and a long veil like shining wind. Caddy. Caddydraped over all nature. At the core of the shapeless receptacle lies some invisible and nameless adversityI wasn’t crying, but I couldn’t stopthat makes Timaeus fear and despise the female parts.

The same extended metaphor that constitutes epistemology as a flight from passivity to activity, from affection to action at a distance, as the dream of perfect presence, makes ontology a flight from the female toI got undressed and I looked at myself and I began to cry. Hush, Luster said. Looking for them ain’t going to do no good. They’re gonethe neutered male. Which would mean that the tradition, for all its glorification of Mnemosyne, who (as Heidegger will assure us) is a right mother, is not so much phallogocentric as it is gynephobic. And the phobia exacts its price. The failure of Timaeus’ discourse means the failure of iconography and of all ontotheology A door opened and I could smell it more than ever, and a head came out. It wasn’t Father. Father was sick there as such.

GRAMMATA

How we can have strayed so wildly on our course from typography to engrammatology I do not know. Let us abandon iconography to its crisis, at least for a moment, and return at long last to Theaetetus, which now describes the weaving (symplokē) of forms in terms of letters.

After the boorish critic has shooed Socrates and Theatetus out of the birdcage (200d), our two heroes ask a third time what knowledge is. They dress the birds as particles of knowledge compounded of “true belief” and logos. The latter is composed of molecular names, any given onoma being a collocation of unutterable and unknowable “elements of writing,” the atomic letters (202e). Knowledge is thus reduced to a hiss of the tongue—and a snake devours all the birds. We are compelled to confront problems of grammatology, the science of letters, or, if the lessons of typography be remembered, of engrammatology, the science of engrained or incised letters. The science of letters conducts us willy-nilly to the realm of differance, diaphora, inasmuch as a logos consisting of words and letters implies a hermeneutic of radical differences. At 209a 5 we read Socrates’ astonishing words: Logos de ge ēn hē tēs sēs diapherotētos hermēneia. Logos is essentially an account or explanation that puts the proper difference into words; that is, in the present case, the logos must explain how Theaetetus is different from Theodorus or, for that matter, from Socrates. For it has already been ruled out that such difference could reside straightforwardly in the differences among the syllables and letters of their respective names.²³

However, that is to anticipate the outcome of a long and difficult discussion. We must backtrack a bit. Socrates’ dreamy discourse at 202a—c recounts something he has heard, the hearsay, namely, that the primal elements (letters?) of all things, the prota stoikheia, have no logos, no rhyme or reason, and cannot be explained. For everything adduced to them would contest their status as primal. They may have a nameWhat is it, Caddy said. What are you trying to tell Caddybut they can have no logos, since logos is itself woven of names. Theaetetus and Socrates now (202e 6) discuss the elements of writing proper, the stoikheia tōn grammatōn, syllables and letters. While the name Socrates can apparently be explained or calculated—that is, outfitted with a logos—as consisting of the syllables Sō-kra-tēs, and the syllable Sō- can be explained as consisting of the elements S and ō, Theaetetus understandably despairs of providing “the elements of an element.” The “aphonic” sigma is not even a proper sound—it is, we said, the hiss of a serpent that threatens to devour all knowledge—and the omega, like the other six vowels, while “phonic,” has no logos. Whether a single idea or eidos can be constructed out of such elements, or whether the “form” is a whole (holon) that somehow exceeds all its parts, is Socrates’ question, a question he cannot induce Theaetetus to unravel in a way that will rescue the difference between whole and agglomerate. Yet whether the elements of logos are taken as syllables or letters ultimately makes no difference, according to Socrates (205e), perhaps because the two interlocutors (quite plausibly) insist on dividing rather than weaving.

It is doubtless time to let Theaetetus and Socrates go, and to bring this chapter to a close. For their effort to provide a hermeneutic of difference goes on and on, Socrates to Theaetetus, Theaetetus to Socrates, frogeye to frogeye, snubnose to snubnose, windbag to windegg, their circle dissolving to a final ironic identity: Theaetetus sets off for the battlefield where he will be infected with dysentery and mortally wounded—the dialogue began, we recall, with him on his shield—while Socrates heads for the law court to face the indictment of Miletus. Before we let them go, however, two details from the final part of their discussion may be remembered for our own purposes. The first of Socrates’ efforts (at 2o6d) to define the logos that will ostensibly turn true opinion into knowledge brings us back to typography—if only ironically. Perhaps logos makes our thought transparent in nouns and verbs, says Socrates; by virtue of logos we stamp (3: ektypoumenon) our doxa onto the stream of words that flows through our lips. We can of course imagine the fate of this typography practiced on “streams” of “water,” as on a “mirror,” so reminiscent of the watery typography of writing that we are about to hear criticized in Phaedrus (276c 7—8). Learning to know and being able to remember the difference between Socrates and Theaetetus will require something solider, or at least more viscous. Socrates speaks:

No, I imagine that Theaetetus will not be the object of opinion in me until this very snubnosedness has engraved and deposited in me [ensēmēnamenē katathētai] a memorial different from [diaphoron ti mnēmeion] all other cases of snubnosedness I have seen, and the same with everything else in your makeup. For if I should meet you again tomorrow this would cause me to be put in memory of you [anamnēsei]and to have a correct opinion concerning you.

However, before we agree—out of exhaustion—to countenance this regression to typography and iconography, we must give engrammatology three more brief chances to explain itself, chances of waxing complexity, as we shall see, in Cratylus, Phaedrus, and Philebus. The first is important for us as an explicit attempt to execute an iconography of names and the elements of names—since it is by reading the signs or marks imprinted on the wax slab of our souls that we remember, or hope to remember, the same. The second is vital because it conjoins the themes of memory and writing, although we will touch on it only cursorily here, taking it up once again in chapter 4. The third will show us how difficult it is to get a proper mixture—whether of pleasure or of letters—without memory.

In Cratylus Socrates and Hermogenes engage in the futile and comic effort to construct a mimetic theory of names, whereby names would imitate beings, as though names themselves were composed of syllables and letters that imitated the being of beings (424b 9-10: hē mimēsis . . . ousa tēs ousias). Their hypothesis is that the letters “resemble” things (424d 6: kata tēn homoiotēta). Socrates concedes that it seems “ridiculous” (423d 1) to search for such a resemblance, but he feels constrained to look for it, even if the search should prove to be not so much laughable as “hybristic” (426b 6). He then launches bravely into his physiology of phonemes—kinetic rho, sighing sigma, windy phi and psi, occluding tau, and liquid lambda—to the delight of Cratylus and to his own dubiety and discomfiture (428d 1—3): “Excellent Cratylus, I have long been wondering at my own wisdom. I cannot trust myself. And I think I ought to stop and ask myself, What am I saying?” Socrates and Cratylus can agree that both names and pictures or portraits are imitations of things, although in different senses, but the peculiar kind of likeness or image (eikōn)involved in either sense baffles them:

SOCRATES: How is it now with one who imitates the being [ousia] of things in syllables and letters? Will it not be the same with him, that when he reproduces everything that is appropriate to the thing his icon will be fine—and in his case this is the name—but if he leaves something out or perhaps adds a touch he will still get an icon, but not a beautiful one? . . . (431b 2-7)

CRATYLUS: Perhaps.

An image dare not differ too greatly from its original, for it would be a poor icon if it did. Yet ironically, or iconically, Socrates now insists that perfect likeness would in fact destroy the image-original relationship: unlike a number, to which addition or subtraction is fatal, and which thus cannot be “imitated” but only given originally, an icon dare not be conflated with its original, “it dare not reproduce every particular if it is to be an icon” (432b 1—4). What one must learn to see is “the extent to which icons fail to possess the same [ta auta]as that of which they are icons” (d 1—2).

We might interrupt at this juncture to note the consequences for the iconography of memory: memory and reminiscence can never be arithmetic, for, if they were, the self-showing of the remembered thing could not be distinguished from the original self-showing. Memory and reminiscence have to be engrammatological rather than arithmetical: the exigencies of iconography demand it. And thus the dream of a perfect division of eidōlopoiikē into eikastikē and phantastikē is a dream from which we must awaken. Every icon needs a touch of the phantasmatic about it, lest it thoroughly confuse past and present. But to return to Cratylus.

Socrates must now strike a compromise between the natural suitability and the conventional character of letters (435 a—d). Yet the compromise is an equivocation, indeed another “dream.” Although Socrates encourages Cratylus to give up the search for beings in iconic names and to turn to ta onta, the self-showing presencings themselves, he momentarily forgets the objection he has just raised against Cratylus: “But if things are to be known only through names, how can we suppose that the givers of names had knowledge, or were legislators, before there were names at all, and therefore before they could have known them?” (438 5-8). When he sends Cratylus off with the injunction to seek not names but “far rather the things themselves from themselves” (439b 7: auta ex auton), Cratylus can only rejoin that Socrates must do his part “to think more closely about these things.” Socrates’ part is not to play with names butHis name’s Benjy now, Caddy said. How come it is, Dilsey said. He ain’t wore out the name he was born with yet is he. . . . Folks don’t have no luck, changing names. My name been Dilsey since fore I could remember and it be Dilsey when they’s long forgot me. How will they know it’s Dilsey, when it’s long forgot, Dilsey, Caddy said. It’ll be in the Book, honey, Dilsey said. Writ outto name the things themselves. Yet Socrates has no access to the origin of the names uttered in his naming. His is not the god’s vision and banquet, but the poor feast and meager reception of discourse, the restless search for being—which “name” itself implies: onoma is on hou masma (421a 10), “being for which there is a search.” The name is that self-showing which we must seek.

Having mentioned the banquet, we ought to recall if only briefly that for Plato’s Phaedrus the power to gather, tie, and weave by means of forms is nothing else than reminiscence or recollection (249c 2: anamnēsis). For Plato certainly as much as for Aristotle, reminiscence is not merely one among several powers of the soul; it sustains a privileged relation to the being of beings. The gathering and binding of philosophic discourse constitute the recollection of what our souls once saw before they took on human form. They are recollection of being (3: einai), which we once surveyed in the train of the god, gazing upward to the perfect presencing of all that comes to presence (4: to on ontōs). The philosopher’s thought takes wing insofar as, to the full extent of its powers, it is “always mindful” (5: aei. . . mnēmei) of those presencings by virtue of which divinities are divine. Through devoted service to the means of remembrance, reminders or memorials (7: hypomnēmasin, cf. hypomnēma), the philosophic soul comes to proper perfection and attains its end (7—8: teleous aei teletas teloumenos, teleos ontōs monos gignetai). Yet, as we recall, devoted service to memorials or monuments is fraught with dangerI was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say and trying and the bright shapes began to stop and I tried to get out. I tried to get off my face, but the bright shapes were going again. . . . But when I breathed in, I couldn’t breathe out again to cry, and I tried to keep from falling off the hill and I fell off the hill into the bright, whirling shapesand may be closer to death than to life. Certainly such service is close to madness. Remembrance is the fourth kind of mania, divine mania, most beneficial to mortals, they say. As the philosophic soul gazes on beautiful things, it remembers what was once fully revealed (249d 5-6: tou alethous anamimneis-komenos; cf. Meno 81cff. and Phaedo 73d-eff.), and it sprouts wings. Like Keats’s sick eagle, however, it is unable to fly, and can only gaze longingly upward. Yet even that is difficult: although each human soul must by nature have already viewed beings as they come to presence, it is not easy for it to remember (250a 1: anamimneiskesthai); to varying degrees, all are steeped in oblivion (4: lethe), and there are ultimately only a few human beings—such as Er—in whom the remembrance itself remains sufficiently present (5: to tes mnēmēs hikanōs parestin).

Let me pause to note that here again it is the parousia or presence of the mnemic by which its adequacy is measured. However much anamnesis may suggest the prolonged and laborious approach to memories, mnēmē itself remains that to which one must be present—even and especially if it reposes a world away. All of which makes the service to reminders and memorials particularly uncanny. Even though these pages of Plato’s Phaedrus have been much on the contemporary mind of late, let us remind ourselves once again of Thot’s memorials, namely, the letters by which we write.

The god Thot proclaims to King Thamus of Egyptian Thebes the virtues of his recently invented letters, ta grammata, devised as a kind of medicine for the mind, in order to make it wiser and more capable of memory (274e 6: mnēmēs . . . kai sophias pharmakon). King Thamus rejoins that the effect of letters on the soul will rather be deleterious. They will induce oblivion (275a 2: lethe) and a neglect of memory (3: mnēmēs ameletēsiai).²⁴ Memory will be debilitated if remembrance is provoked by means of an extrinsic confidence or belief in the extraneous written word (3: pistis graphēs exōthen), which is merely an alien imprint (4: hyp’ allotriōn typōn), rather than by an intrinsic effort of the soul to remember (endothen autous hyph’ hautōn). Thot’s remedy is therefore an elixir not for remembering (5: mnēmēs) but for reminding (hypomnēseōs pharmakon). As a hypomnesic, the letter produces only the appearance of wisdom (6: sophias . . . doxan) but not true remembrance (ouk alētheian). “True remembrance” is of course a pleonasm. The Greek word for “true,” as we have noted, means precisely what is rescued from oblivion, what is remembered. Further, “remembered” is to be thought as “granted unconcealment,” so that sophias alētheian suggests “wisdom that shows itself as what it is in undistorted presence.” Presencing is what is opened to view in anamnēsis, namely, to on ontōs, the being of beings in the most perfect of its “turnings.”

Again we should pause, in order to remind ourselves how strange the story or myth of Phaedrus is. Earlier on, the dialogue assured us that the only way a mortal soul (as opposed to a god) could be ever mindful of those presencings which are the gods’ daily fare is through devoted service to memorials or reminders (hypomnēmasin, hypomnēma). Now we are told that mere memorials are not enough, and are even vitiating: we must aspire instead to the banquet itself. However, to Thamus’ warnings one must pose a more carefully construed typographic question. If belief in the written letter is extrinsic, if its exterior, extraneous, and hence superficial typos or imprint is alien to the soul, how is it that memory itself—from the inside, as it were—can ever have been portrayed typographically? Does not the cutting edge of the typos itself confound outside and inside right from the start?²⁵

Socrates himself goes on to discuss the notorious disadvantages of the written word, so reminiscent of a mute portrait, disadvantages every reader of the Platonic dialogues has come to know: its obstinate refusal to answer questions, a refusal that is only aggravated by its promiscuity (inasmuch as the taciturn text flaunts itself at anyone who cares to ogle it). Yet, insolent as they may appear to be, the written letters are actually helpless orphans: “If they are insulted or unjustly maltreated, they always need their Father’s help; for by themselves they do not know how to protect and help themselves” (275e 4). He concludes with an extended metaphor: Writing will be the philosopher’s form of play, though certainly not the object of his devotion, while his labor will be dialogue. Writing will be a kind of puttering about in the garden; dialogue will be serious, scientific agriculture. Never will writing be the philosopher’s earnest pursuit (276c 7: ouk ara spoudēi), for it is absurd to write in water (en hydati grapsei: recall the effort to stamp imprints on the stream of words flowing from a mouth in dialogue), absurd to sow inky seeds through a reed (8: speiron dia kalamou), inky seeds of impotent words (logōn adynatōn). For such printed words can neither help themselves by means of speech (9: logōi) nor competently instruct others in the matter of self-showing proper (hikanōs talēthē didaxai). Such competency would of course depend utterly on the compelling presence of the being of beings in the philosopher’s memory; the competency (hikanōs) of the philosopher is a certain sufficiency of presence—as indicated above (250a 5: hikanōs parestin).²⁶

However harsh the condemnation of orphan writing may have seemed just now, Socrates soon gives ground in a strange, if playful, way. The man of knowledge will sow seed in the child’s garden of letters, will write solely for the sake of play (276d 1—2), and yet such play will not be utterly mindless. For it will assemble a store of treasures, reminders (3: hypomnēmata thesaurizomenos), for the sake of old age, inasmuch as old age tends toward forgetfulness (eis to lēthēs gēras). And this playful puttering in the garden will fill the man of knowledge with joy when he sees what he has sown flourishing quietly there (5: phyomenous apalous), as though the written word did have an upsurgent life all its own. While others indulge in merry games at drinking parties—not that drinking parties cannot offer occasions for fecund play of their own kind—the philosopher will pursue fruitful play in logoi and in telling stories about things like justice.

Which leaves only the materials in Philebus which I promised to relate—briefly, in order then to summarize and come to a conclusion, or at least a close. Perhaps I can best introduce these final materials by referring to Aristotle once again, as I did at the outset, albeit this time to his treatise On the Soul. For there he tells us most clearly what is at stake in the preference of (putatively active) anamnēsis to (ostensibly passive) mnēmē. Aristotle states:

Mind [nous] in the passive sense is such [namely: something that has both matter and maker in it] because it becomes all things [panta ginesthai]; but mind has another aspect in that it makes all things [panta poiein]; this is a kind of positive state like light; for in a sense light makes potential colors into actual ones. Mind in this sense is separable, impassive, and unmixed [ho nous khōristos kai apathēs kai amigēs], since it is essentially an activity [ōn energeiai]; for the agent [to poioun] is always superior to the patient [tou paskhontos], and the originating principle [arkhē] to the matter [tēs hylēs]. (430a 14-25)

The active, productive mind alone is “undying and eternal,” and thus capable of existence apart from the body. Yet for all its supremacy the active mind, as we embodied mortals know it, is limited precisely in its knowledge of self in the presumably superior state of separation. In a parenthetical remark Aristotle explains that “we do not remember” (23: ou mnēmoneuomen) anything at all of what the mind experiences in separation, because active mind receives no impressions, is apathes, while passive mind (pathētikos) is perishable. An odd situation results. While burdened with the body and its senses, phantasms, and fate, the active mind feasts almost uninterruptedly on impressions; when at last it is free to enjoy its essential nature wholly without interruption at the divine banquet, the purely active mind is perfectly and literally apathetic. Separation of soul from body may be fulfillment or frustration: we simply do not remember.

Yet if for Plato knowledge is remembrance, this particular incapacity to remember would appear to be devastating. Or, on the contrary, that very incapacity might account for the omnipresence of myth in Plato’s dialogues wherever memory and reminiscence—not to mention writing—are in question.

In the middle of Philebus (33dff.) memory and recollection are defined in terms of body and soul, respectively, that is to say, in terms of the distinctness of soul from body. Socrates calls mnēmē the preservation of aisthēsis, and distinguishes from it anamnēsis, which retrieves the soul’s experiences “without the body, in and for itself” (34 b 7: aneu tou sōmatos autē en heautēi). The purpose of this distinction, Socrates insists, is to teach us about “the pleasure of the soul apart from [c 6: khōris] the body,” and thus the nature of the soul’s isolate desire. Yet such separation proves to be fatal to desire and pleasure alike, for here remembrance and the body are and must be intimately related. And not only here. For when we consider the typography, iconography, and engrammatology of memory, mnēmē too, for its part, is as much a matter of the soul as of the body.

At 38e 12 Socrates compares the soul to a book (biblios). In the book of the soul, memory, sensations, and the affections “inscribe discourses” (39a 3: graphein . . . logous). Thus the soul contains an “internal scribe” who “writes” the soul’s experience (6—7: grammateus grapsēi), sometimes truly, sometimes falsely. Socrates also detects the presence of a second artist-craftsman in the soul, “a painter [b 6: zōgraphon] who comes after the writer and paints in the soul icons of these discourses [6-7: tōn legomenōn eikonas toutōn graphei].” Thus the graphics of the soul (and not merely of the body) include the incising of both words and pictures: there is a sense in which we can “see icons in ourselves [c 1: eikonas en autōi] of what we have previously believed or said.” Both the writing and the portraiture that transpire within the soul point to the intrinsic mediation of the body on which the soul depends. Just as in the effort to seek unity in the many and a manifold in the one—that is, the effort to make sense of the interconnections between forms and things—it is the intermediates that count (see 16c), so here as well Socrates and Protarchus find themselves en mesōi, in the middle, “in between.” It is always a matter of mediation and measure, of a mixture, as Socrates later says, that exhibits the metron and symmetry (64d 9). Thus Socrates demonstrates to Protrarchus that pleasure requires at least a momentary memory of pleasure. The honey of pleasure must be mixed with the salubrious water of intelligence, insight, or thoughtfulness (61c 6: phronēsis), the water—we must add—being drawn from the fountain of Mnemosyne. As the two men begin to mingle honey and water for the sake of the good life, Socrates invokes the aid of two gods, Dionysos and Hephaestos, who may have something to do with mixtures, the latter forging links of steel, the former binding with ribands of love. And in their search for intermediates and interconnections, the interlocutors are no doubt remembering what the dialogue has said about letters, ta grammata. For in his account of intermediates and the in-between (ta metaxy), Socrates chose as his prime example the letters of the alphabet and their relationship to the infinite possibilities of sound:

The unlimited variety of sound [phōnē] was once discerned by some god, or perhaps some godlike man; you know the story that there was some such person in Egypt called Thot. He it was who originally discerned the existence in that unlimited variety [en tōi apeirōi] of the vowels [ta phōnēente]—not in the singular but in the plural—and then of other things which, though they could not be called articulate sounds, yet were noises of a kind [i.e., the consonants]. There were a number of them too, not just one; and as a third class he discriminated what we now call the mutes [aphōna]. Having done that he divided up the noiseless ones or mutes until he got each one by itself, and did the same thing with the vowels and the intermediate sounds [ta mesa], (18b 6ff.)

The sounds intermediate between sounding letters or phonics (vowels) and silent letters or aphonics (mutes) are the consonants. We recall the subsequent tradition—extending at least from Rousseau through Saussure, and including Schelling, for whom consonants in the creative Word pronounced by God represent the principle of darkness and gravity²⁷—that disparages consonants as marks of death, as eminently thanatological signs. Remarkably, Plato’s Socrates here identifies the consonants as beings that are not independent and yet are not nothing; he locates them precisely in the intermediate position of genesis and of mortality. But to return to the tale of Thot:

In the end he found a number of all these things [i.e., phonics, mutes, and consonants] and affixed to the whole collection, as to each single member of it, the name “letter” [stoikheion]. It was because he realized that none of us could ever get to know any one of the collection all by itself, in isolation from all the rest, that he conceived of “letter” as a kind of bond of unity, uniting as it were all these sounds into one, and so he gave utterance to the expression “art of letters” [grammatikē tekhnē], implying that there was one art that dealt with the sounds.

The letters are thus elements, stoikheia, each with its proper identity, yet bound to the whole collection; the grammatikē tekhnē treats of the entire manifold of commingled sounds. Understandably, Philebus and Protarchus complain early on about Socrates’ “roundabout methods” and the seeming irrelevance of all this. Yet, as we have just seen, the doctrine of the intermediates—between the one and an indeterminate number, between sound and silence—in fact proves highly relevant to the discussion of the soul’s pleasure and desire, both of which require memory and reminiscence. Yet let us be a friend to Philebus—and stop here.

If we now look back on this meandering chapter we can discern five stages on our way thus far. In the first, we saw how Aristotle wished to distinguish active reminiscence from passive memory, and we wondered at the ostensible lethargy of memory proper. For the objects of memory and reminscence alike are past. Thus the “presence” of such objects in memory quickly emerged as the central enigma. Aristotle associated memory with the “common” and “paramount” perceptual power by virtue of which memory knows both time and images, phantasmata. And just as protoperception seemed to relate closely to touch, so did both time and images touch on memory—as a signet ring touches sealing wax. Yet typography alone failed to resolve the ontological aporia of memory—the presence of typos to pathos, and pathos to pragmatos. Typography therefore issued onto iconography. The phantasm or imprint is an icon of the absent thing. Yet the icon can function only by virtue of some motion by which we can eventually either see the icon under its own aspect or “read” it as referring to an other. With this reference to reading we found ourselves on the verge of engrammatology: the typos is an engram, an inscribed or incised letter, element, or portrait, purporting to be an icon.

In the second stage we examined the sequence of kinetic presencings in reminiscence, anamnēsis, a sequence that is neither strictly linear nor (except in pathological cases) entirely circular. A number of problems arose concerning the search for an arkhē kinēseōs, that is, for a “tonic” for the whole series of musical movements that would bring us to the desired end of remembrance. For even “natural” self-showings can be distorted by paraphysis, and every icon can turn out to be a “mere likeness,” paromoion. In the end, the major difficulty with Aristotle’s boldest solution to the enigma of recollection or reminiscence—the simultaneous generation (hama ginetai) of the pragmata and of time as such—was not that it failed but that it worked too well: even if we restrict the sense of time to mean the time-of-the-pragmata, the expression hama ginetai appears to close all the distances. Yet memory and reminiscence are of the past and require the distance that will prevent their collapse into perception and intellection. Aristotle’s treatise, while it sets the pace for investigation into memory for the next two millennia, fails to clarify the enigmas it so deftly reveals. What is the typos, such that it can be an eikōn of the things themselves, whose presence—whose very being—we read from the grammata engraved on the wax slab of the soul? At this point we set off in search of the imprint, icon, and engram in Greek philosophy prior to Aristotle.

Our third step took us to some likely sources of Aristotle’s typography and iconography in the Greek Atomists and in Plato’s Theaetetus. The latter is perhaps the classic source of those slabs of wax, produced no doubt in one of the back rooms of the Platonic pharmacy. Yet the problem arose of the relation of those traces in the wax which Socrates himself calls idols, not icons, to the beings or self-showings of the past. Socrates’ efforts to blame it all on the wax—a substance that is depressingly gritty and filthyCaddy was all wet and muddy behind, and I started to cry and she came and squattedin the common mortal—will not distract us from the aporia of presence/ absence in memory. Socrates himself advances from the typographic slab to the aviary in order to get closer to the mysterious presence, parousia, and the being-at-hand, prokheiros, that would guarantee a perfect grasp of beings in episteēmē. Yet this second grand metaphor for memory, the properly iconographic metaphor, also fails—for the reason we usually associate with the “Third Man argument” in Parmenides. While this likeness of a container of likenesses has a certain seductive charm, such that it has made its mark on the Occidental mind for centuries, likeness itself remains mysterious. As though the question What is? ti esti; quid est? were not itself implicated in the problematic presence of memory, we asked of several Platonic dialogues the question What is likeness?

Our fourth step—actually a series of rather wearying iconographic excursions into four dialogues—resulted in the following difficulties:

(1) The “likeness” of two things, conceived of in Parmenides as the participation of those two things in some form of “likeness,” participation by “likeness,” became stranger than ever.

(2) All talk of “likeness,” according to Sophist, had to be interrupted by a full discussion of dialectic, which weaves the forms. Such weaving (symplokē) would have to eschew the oppositional thinking of being/nonbeing (or absolute presence, absolute absence) by paying heed to multiple differences. It is precisely mimēsis that will not submit to capture in the binary divisions of the Stranger’s diacritical method. Weaving on the verge of the loom—and not stamping, printing, or painting icons—will be the art.

(3) The critique of the artist-of-the-colossal in Sophist reminded us that mimēsis cannot be the straightforward mirroring of self-showing (vide Book Ten of Republic); nor does the use of iconography in the central books of Republic cause us to cherish the illusion that at some point images will be left behind forever and perfect self-showing attained.

(4) The botched icons and bitched generations and fabrications of Plato’s Timaeus demonstrated the failure of all efforts to rescue presencing from becoming and transiency; the need to conjoin kinds, to interweave them, here found its most perfect parodic expression.

By this time—that of our fifth step—the futility of the question What is likeness? became apparent, and we undertook an approach to engrammatology by way of Plato’s Cratylus, Phaedrus, and Philebus, remembering that Theaetetus describes the weaving of eidē in terms of letters. Yet it was far easier to say what such letters cannot be than to explain why an account of memory and reminiscence persistently has recourse to them. Our fifth step took us through a discussion of logos in Theaetetus as a hermeneutic of “proper difference” and even of differance. Yet that hermeneutic had less to do with syllables and letters as such than with typography—the imprinted memorial that would allow Socrates to remember Theaetetus and not to believe he was looking in a mirror. In waxing desperation we turned to Cratylus, where a kind of death knell of iconography sounded: an icon can never possess the same (ta auta) as that of which it is an icon, no matter what Timaeus’ Demiurge may have dreamt; and the Stranger’s dream of distinguishing sharply between the production of likenesses and the production of semblances also evanesced. We then turned to Phaedrus, which first invoked hypomnēsis not in order to disparage it but to laud it as devoted service to all the means of remembrance, service that conducts the philosophic soul to its fitting end—which is to be ever mindful of the divine. Only then did we proceed to the familiar condemnation of writing precisely as hypomnesis, as “extrinsic” and “external” to the soul, that is, as disruptive of the soul’s “sufficient presence to memory.” We then asked about the relation of outside to inside, of absence to presence, and wondered whether the typography of memory—now taken in its full engrammatological import as the soul’s own writing, which it can read—does not from the outset frustrate any such condemnation. The typos confounds outside and inside, absence and presence, from the very beginning. That is its brief. That is its cutting edge. And so it seems that writing is of memory and memory of writing before there is writing in the usual sense—since time immemorial, as it were.

These results will not be surprising to readers familiar with the early work of Jacques Derrida. In chapter 4 we will have occasion to take up the notions of trace and arche-writing, and the somewhat later notion of dissemination, seeing in them crucial implements for weaving a discourse on memory, reminiscence, and writing. Perhaps it is necessary to reinvent the Derridean wheel—and the loom and the verge—in order to be struck by the vast amount of time that had to elapse before engrammatology could flourish. If memory is of writing, why do Plato and Aristotle, askers of all the questions that need asking, fail to inquire into the essentially scriptural parentage of typos, eikōn, and grammataf Certainly the child’s garden of graphics depicted in Phaedrus does not stake out such an inquiry. Philebus offers us tantalizing bits of such an investigation, as do Theaetetus, Sophist, and Cratylus. If the only way to weave forms with forms and forms with things is through the science of interconnections and intermediates, then the means and mediation of letters, their eminently mortal status inbetween, becomes crucial. The Derridean analysis of “good” and “bad” writing, which we shall also take up in chapter 4, tells us what is essential here: as long as the urge to separate soul from body prevails—interiority from exteriority, life from death, spirit from sensuality, nourishment from offal, vociferation from the gorge, speech from writing—and as long as Western metaphysics ignores Aristotle’s warning and tries to remember or to conjure the divine banquet of the soul’s splendid isolation, no explicit engrammatology is possible. Schelling, who resisted the urge to separate only to fall afoul of the tradition’s insistence on an ultimate and total scission (die endliche gänzliche Scheidung),²⁸ spins out the dream in his Stuttgarter Privatvorlesung of 1810; and since it is a memorable dream about memory by memory for memoryThen the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says that I have been asleepI feel no compunction about reproducing it here. In the course of his oneiric speculations on the afterlife, the life of the soul in splendid isolation, Schelling writes:

One question is: What will it be like as regards the power of memory [Erinnerungs-kraft]? Remembrance will not of course extend to everything possible, inasmuch as a just man even here would give a great deal in order to be able to forget at the right time [zur rechten Zeit vergessen zu können]. There will be a kind of forgetful-ness, a Lethe, but with a different effect: when the good arrive there they will have forgetfulness of everything evil, and thus of all suffering and pain; the wicked, on the contrary, will have forgetfulness of everything good. And further, it will surely not be the power of memory we possess here; for here we must first interiorize everything [alles innerlich machen], whereas there everything is already interior. The phrase “power of memory” is much too weak to capture the sense. One says of a friend, a beloved with whom we were of one heart and one mind, that we remember them from within [or are inward with them: man erinnere sich ihrer]; they live perpetually within us; they do not have to enter our heart of hearts [Gemüth]; they are already there. And thus will remembrance be in the afterlife.

You can always spot the Blessed: they are the ones with the complacent, inane grins on their faces. It is of course the Damned who are more troublesome, like the Birds of Ignorance: because their power of remembrance has nothing to which it can contrast its malevolence, because their remembrance is either so interior that it too enjoys the intimacy of its beloved or so exterior that no pain of dispossession can make the slightest impression on it, the Damned sport precisely the same grin. II fautCarry Maury up the hill, Vershimaginer Sisyphe heureux.