AUGUST MNEMOTECHNIC

On our way to modernity and the waxen glands of memory, we might tarry in the spaces that so fascinated and affrighted AugustineFROM THE FATHERS It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That’s Saint Augustineand mnemotechnicians both before and after him.¹ We shall tarry as Augustine rushes through them (“And so I shall go on,” transibo ergo) in his search of his lord and father, a search that in fact elaborates a written memorial to his mother—that formidable mother, that right mother, as Heidegger will say, in the garb of a woman but altogether virile in her faith (IX, 4 and 13). Augustine’s passion to transcend (“I shall go beyond”) the body and the “birdlime of concupiscence” that the mothersmilk of his faith threatens to become, his mad dash (“through all these do I scurry and flit,” discurro et volito, X, 17) in search of the father who will deign to make him a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven (II, 2 and VIII, 1), is certainly germane to our theme—Timaeus has taught us that—but we shall merely linger in the spaces. They are many and vast, and Augustine’s invocations of them awesome: in campos et lata praetoria memoriae, in the fields and spacious palaces of memory . . . ubi sunt thesauri innumerabilium imaginum, where are treasuries of numberless images . . . de receptaculis . . . grandis memoriae recessus et. . . secreti atque ineffabiles sinus . . . aula ingenti. . . penetrale amplum et infinitum . . . remota interiore loco, non loco . . . et miris cellis . . . tan remota et retrusa quasi in cavis . . . quasi venter . . . de ventre cibus ruminando. “Great is the power of memory, a terrifying thing it is, O my God, a profound and infinite multiplicity; and this is the soul, and this am I myself. So what am I, O my God? Of what nature am I? Various, manifold in its ways is this life, and staggeringly immense” (X, 17).

Augustine distinguishes three kinds of treasures hidden in the folds and sinuosities of memory, in the hope of stumbling across a fourth. Behold these caverns full of things generated (rerum generibus) through either (1) images, (2) self-presence, or (3) notions and notations. The first are the imprints of all corporeal things, all sensations, images (as Book XI, chapter 18 says) “implanted in the mind like vestiges as these things passed through the senses.” Such vestiges or footprints we recognise as the typoi discussed in chapter 1: Augustine’s ambulatory typography generates the first class (the lowest class) of objects in the mind. The second class (by no means second in order of rank, however) comprises the objects of all the arts and sciences, generated not by vestiges of preterite time but by praesentia as such. If the treasures we glean through study of the arts and sciences are vestiges of anything, then it is of eternity—in aeterno . . . totum esse praesens (cf. XI, 13: celsitudine semper praesentis aeternitatis). The genesis of such things generated in the mind is perforce mysterious, inasmuch as they are icons of ungenerated being: they occupy the time that “can no longer be divided into even the most minute parts of a moment,” the time of the instantaneous aleph that has no space (XI, 15: Praesens autem nullum habet spatium). Presence in the spaces of memory is a presence that has no space: this is a further aspect of the mysteries of iconography and engrammatology, and we shall have to return to it. The third sort of being that is generated in memory (not at the top of the list, but certainly not at the bottom either) comprises the affections of the mind (affectiones animi)\these are generated through notiones vel notationes. Notio, from nosco, “to get to know something,” is of course the “notion” or “concept” of a thing. Yet Augustine immediately writes vel notationes, “or characters,” that is, written marks incised on tablets of multicolored wax. The affections of the mind—by means of which I can remember in equanimity either joy or sadness—thus explicitly involve engrammatology. Augustine no doubt wants to resist the cutting engram and its ceraceous matrix, and stresses that these affections revert to a power that is the mind’s own, “since the mind is one thing, and the body another” (X, 14). A certain “ridiculous simile” occurs to him, however, and he cannot resist noting it at least notionally: memory of the mind’s affections is like “the belly of the mind,” “ruminating without tasting.” Such Augustinian rumination would disembowel the mind, just as the power to remember joy joylessly would core the heart, and just as the power to think a tune without moving tongue or lips would disgorge the voice from the throat.²

Yet any such radical distinction between memorious mind and body is impossible, for two related iconographic reasons. First, the time of the second class of objects (those of the arts and sciences) is strangely distended in such a way as to encompass all three kinds: future and past times have being and are only insofar as “wherever they are, they are not future or past sed presentia” (XI, 18). Thus there are three times, as it were, praesens de praeteritis, praesens de praesentibus, and praesens de futuris. All three times are in the soul, in anima, the third being “expectation,” the second intuition, while the first is memoria. Yet we do not find three kinds of praesens de praeteritis corresponding to the three classes of objects generated in memory per imagines, per praesentiam, and per notiones vel notationes. Why not? Because being and presence are one. And why are being and presence one? Because there is no iconography (per praesentiam) without engrammatology (per notiones vel notationes), and no engrammatology without typography (per imagines).

Which brings us to the second reason for the impossibility of a radical distinction between reminiscent mind and the memorious body. Whenever past events are narrated truly, writes Augustine (XI, 18), it is not the things themselves that memory proffers, inasmuch as these are past, “but words conceived on the basis of the images of these things,” sed verba concepta ex imaginibus earum. The res ipsae, as they pass through the senses, affix or imprint their verbal footprints or vestiges in the mind. The verba concepta are precisely notiones vel notationes: our notions are notations, marks of presence themselves present insofar as they have been typed in the soul by means of words. Iconography mediates typography and engrammatology, yet each of these two reverts to the other without cease. Just as the “I think” is an “I gather” (cogito/cogo), precisely as a gathering into presence at hand (X, 11: tamquam ad manum posita. . . quasi ad manum posita), so are notatio/notio and nosco/ noto related. Notion is notation, knowing a noting, and noting (N.B.) an inscribing or imprinting. Of what? Of verba concepta, “words” (the third kind), conceived ex imaginibus or per imagines (the first kind), themselves vestiges of things past that are present (the second kind, which is more kin than kind: per praesentiam, ad manum posita adesse). Thus the inscribed image encroaches on the ostensibly pure presence of objects of the arts and sciences, as well as on the notions and names that affect the soul; encroaches on them because the typos marks and effects the presence of them all. In the far-flung fields and spacious quarters, the receptacles, recesses, and sinuses, the vast courts, ample and unending ouvertures, in the cells and in certain secret caves, in the glens and dens and caverns, the cubicles and sanctuaries, in the rumbling belly of the mind, there is nothing unmarked by time and space and linguistic signs. Which is why Augustine would actually be scandalized if he succeeded in finding the father lurking there, even though there is nowhere else for him to hide, “and I did not find you outside of memory” (X, 24). “But where do you lodge in my memory, lord, where do you abide? What sort of chamber have you fabricated for yourself? What kind of sanctuary have you constructed for yourself?” (25). “And so where did I find you?... Place there is none; we go backward, we go forward, but place there is none” (26).

Augustine wanders from place to place in search of signs. He finds himself caught up willy-nilly in the discourse of mnemotechnic, notes Frances Yates, even though he would like to banish this vain art, the orator’s “art of memory,” from his memorial.³ Perhaps that art can serve our own inquiry as a kind of bridge, or staircase, from Greek antiquity to rationalist-empiricist modernity—or, to alter the image, as a metamorphosis of Socrates’ waxen slab of the heart to Descartes’ ceraceous pineal gland.

Mnemonics or mnemotechnicWhat a mnice old mness it all mnakes!has as its legendary sire the lyric poet and epigrammaticist Simonides of Chios (556-468 B.C.), although its known sources are all Latin: the pseudo-Ciceronic Ad Herennium, Cicero’s De oratore and De inventione, and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. Ad Herennium designates memory as the treasure-house (thesaurus) of inventions (20), a word that we recall in Plato and Augustine and that we shall find again later in Aquinas and in Locke.⁴ Treasure-house of inventions? What sorts of inventions? Coins and coinages of one sort or another; or perhaps figurines or icons cast in a mold; all transformed now into rhetorical tropes or figures of speech. The fundamental strategy of mnemotechnic isI presume you shall have remembered what I will have taught you on that head?. . . Stop twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. See, you have forgotten. Exercise your mnemotechnic. La causa e santa. Tara. Tara. (aside) He will surely rememberto memorize a sequence of places (loci) and to insert images (imagines) into them, visual images that are strikingly reminiscent of what is to be remembered. Ad Herennium calls them formae, notae, or simulacra, and compares their installation in the loci of memory to a kind of inner writing: “ ‘For the places are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the oral delivery is like reading’ ” (49-50). Further, it advises that the images be active, animated, vital, vivacious: imagines agentes. These agent images must be “novel” and “striking” if they are to be effective typoi. They must be highly visual, emotional, colorful, and dramatic: a street brawlPRIVATE CARR (loosening his belt, shouts) I’ll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king. . . . I’ll do him in, so help me fucking Christ! I’ll wring the bastard fucker’s bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!would do nicely—“a striking scene in every sense of the word,” Yates observes (25; 29). Such intense visualization indicates that mnemotechnic is bound up with both painting and poetry, as Philebus suggests: Plutarch attributes to Simonides the remark that painting is silent poetry, poetry painting that speaks (42-43). Perhaps the passage that most induces Yates (50) to align the classic art of memory to the general Greek model for memory, the wax slab, is Quintilian’s confirmation of the equation loci = wax, imagines = lettersFresh air helps memory. Or a lilt. Ahbeesee defeegee kelomen opeecue rustyouvee doubleyouin Institutio oratoria XI, ii, 32-33, a confirmation so strong that it tends to replace the equation altogether or reduce it to its original form. The student of rhetoric should, according to Quintilian (40), “learn a passage by heart from the same tablets on which he has committed it to writing. For he will have certain tracks to guide him in pursuit of memory, and the mind’s eye will be fixed not merely on the pages on which the words were written but on the individual lines, and at times he will speak as though he were reading aloud. . . .” Hegel (see chapter 5, below) will not forget this key counselOn the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off. Must get itof Quintilian’s.

Not a word about the many mnemotechnic systems that confirm the engrammatological tradition of “inner writing” in memory—Martianus Ca-pella’s De nuptius Philologiae et Mercurii in the fifth century (64), Peter of Ravenna’s fifteenth-century Phoenix, sive artificiosa memoria (119ff.), or the Dominican mnemonic systems of Johannes Romberch and Cosmas Rossellius (122ff.)—nor any discussion of those Renaissance Neoplatonist transformations of mnemotechnicMnemo?into an occult or hermeticI say so. I say so. E’en so. Technicscience, such as Giulio Camillo’s famous “memory theater,” which has become so significant for contemporary architecture, or Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum (135ff.); nor, finally, even a hint of Lull’s natural, material logic, or Giordano Bruno’s encyclopedic mnemonics in De umbris idearum. . . Ad internam scripturam (199) and his invocation to memory in Cena de le ceneri (300: “And thou, Mnemosyne mine, who art hiddenI could go home still: tram: something I forgot. Just to see: before: dressing. No. Here. Nobeneath the thirty seals and immured within the dark prison of the shadows of ideas, let me hear thy voice sounding in my ear”); but straight on into the seventeenth-century search for a method. Or, rather, at this point I shall abandon altogether Yates’s account of the influence of the art of memoryBut the recipe is in the other trousers. O, and I forgot that latchkey tooon the ars combinatoria, characteristica, and calculus of Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz (35ff.), and proceed directly to Descartes’ account of memory and recollection. For while the art of memory was keeping alive the engrammatological tradition of “inner writing,” the “writing in the soul” of Plato and Aristotle, the typography of memory was preparing to reassert itself in a striking way.

DESCARTES

Descartes’ various accounts of memory, when read in the sequence in which he wrote them, appear to take us farther and farther from typography, iconography, and engrammatology.⁵ For his accounts of memory after the Regulae (ca. 1628) and the Traité de I’Homme (ca. 1633-34?) emphasize a second power of memory that would be housed in the understanding alone, an “intellectual memory” in isolation from the body. However, that second memory preserves traces of the first, very much as in the case of Augustine, and thus exhibits the typographic, iconographic, and engrammatological structures dominant since antiquity.

In Rule Three of the Regulae ad directionem ingenii (44—45/X, 369—70) Descartes concedes that a long chain of deductions can be held fixed in one mental gaze or act of intellective vision, so to speak, only if in some sense they are remembered. The danger of this concession is that it grants hostages—of full presence in intuition—to the fortunes of a weak and vacillating memory. His promulgation of enumeratio, by which we are able to run through the series of linked deductions again and again in order to make the linkages as present to our minds as possible, aims to counteract the otherwise doleful dependence on memory. Rule Seven (57—61/387—92) elaborates the practice of enumeration—which he here also calls induction—in some detail. Descartes reiterates the difficulty of recalling the entire route of a complex deduction, and reports:

To remedy this I would run over them from time to time in one continuous movement of the imagination, so that while it was intuitively perceiving each thing it would pass on to the next; and this I would do until I had learned to pass from the first to the last so quickly that no stage in the process was left to the care of memory [nullas memoriae partes reliquendo], but I seemed to have the whole in intuition before me at the same time. This method both relieves memory, diminishing the sluggishness of our thinking [ingenii. . . tarditas], and enlarges our capacity of mind.

Descartes’ example in Rule Seven is apt—perhaps a bit too apt: if I wish to make some deduction concerning all the classes of corporeal things, I can expect a long enumeration, whereas if I wish to prove that the rational soul is not in any way corporeal, “I do not need a complete enumeration.” The method proves to be an ingenious (or ingenuous) corroboration of the matter—the nonmaterial matter of remembrance in the ingenium.

A further example of enumeration occurs in Rule Twelve (75/410—11), where the crucial issue of a (complete) inventory of the elements of cognition arises. Descartes’ enumeration, which “appears” to him “to be complete and to omit nothing to which our human powers can apply,” begins with the intuited presence of what is present, and proceeds to two derivative forms of cognition: “First, that which presents itself spontaneously [id. . . quod sponte ohvium est]; secondly, how we learn one thing by means of another; and thirdly, what deductions one can draw from each thing.” Presence dominates the hierarchy of cognition, and spontaneity founds the order and assures the success of enumeration.

Rule Eleven (73—75/407—10) reiterates the fact that the certitude of a complex deduction “depends to some extent on memory,” and that enumeratio is therefore designed to reduce the role of memory in reasoning as much as possible: “. . . I pass so quickly from the first to the last that practically no step is left to the memory, and I seem to view the whole all at the same time.” (One wonders of course what Socrates would have made of this oneiric “seem to”!) Meanwhile, Descartes proceeds to summarize the first part of his projected tripartite treatise in Rule Twelve (75-89/410-30), which provides a synoptic account of the four principal powers of the mind—understanding (intellectus), imagination, sensation, and memory. The account of sensation is a classic of typography. Descartes writes:

Let us then conceive of the matter as follows: all our external senses. . . properly speaking perceive in virtue of passivity alone, precisely in the way that wax receives an imprinted figure [figuram] from a seal. And it should not be thought that all we mean to assert is an analogy between the two [Neque hoc per analogiam dici putandum est].

As far as sensation is concerned, typography is neither a model nor a metaphor, neither an allegory nor an analogy. The figure impressed is no mere figure of speech. Descartes forcefully excludes such shadows of presence. Typography is literal: “We ought to conceive [sed plane concipiendum] that the way in which the exterior figure of the sentient body is really modified by the object is entirely the same as the way in which the shape of the wax’s surface is altered by the seal.” “The exterior figure of the sentient body. . . .” Before any impression occurs, the sensing body has a figure, is a figure, a waxen figure that receives the imprint of other figures. And not merely “as it were.”

The second stage in the cognitive process that Descartes is describing is the conveyance of the impressed figure of the object to the sensus communis. Yet the terms in which he portrays the conveyance shift slightly. Descartes now emphasizes the external sense’s being moved or stimulated (movetur); it is in fact that movement which conveys the figure to the common sense faculty at the very instant of its impression. In the following way:

It is in exactly the same manner that now, as I write, I recognize that at the very moment when the separate characters are being written down on the paper, not only is the lower part of the pen moved, but every motion in that part, no matter how slight, is simultaneously transmitted to the whole pen. All these diverse motions are traced in the air by the upper end of the pen, although I do not conceive of anything real passing [etiamsi nihil reale. . . . transmigrare concipiam] from one extremity to the other. Now, who imagines that the connection between the different parts of the human body is slighter than that between the ends of a pen, and what simpler way of expressing this could be found?

Yet this simplest way, leading so quickly and effortlessly from typography to engrammatology, invoking the sympathetic motions of the verge itself, is perhaps too simple, too quick. There is something odd about the way it reverses the direction of its attention, from the characters traced in ink back up the quill to the tip of the feather, instead of proceeding in the direction of the inscription, advancing to the incision and thus exhibiting depth-through-the-matrice. At all events, the mysterious third stage of the cognitive process is now reached, whereby the figure of the body is both affirmed and denied—the stage of imagination and memory. Oddly, the text now reverses directions once again, from feathery engrammatology back to incisive typography:

Thirdly, we must believe that the sensus communis has a function like that of a seal, impressing on the fancy [phantasia] or the imagination, as though on wax, those very figures and ideas that come uncontaminated [puras] and without bodily admixture [et sine corpore] from the external senses. Yet this fancy is a genuine part of the body [veram partem corporis], of sufficient size to allow its various parts to assume various figures distinct from one another, and to let those parts become accustomed to retaining the impressions for a considerable time. In the latter case we have what is called memory.

Memory retains over time the sense-impressions that are conveyed to the phantasia, which is thoroughly corporeal; the impressions themselves, however, are now purged of all corporeal admixture. A conundrum. Yet why does Descartes revert to the wax/signet model when describing the action of the sensus communis on the phantasia, thus abandoning the purer breezes stirred by the top tip of his quill? Surely, in order to rescue for imagination and—above all—for memory the selfsameness of the figures eventually remembered and those impressed on the surface of the exterior sensibility. The entire cognitive process would grind to a halt at the point where our assurance—our certitude—concerning the identity of the figures, the perfect efficiency of iconography, began to waver. Descartes now (in step four) reverts to the figure of the pen or quill, the figure of the verge, in order to show how airy fancy can itself influence the nerves and the senses, can itself reverse the direction of the movement; in so doing, he stresses that such reversal is independent of the power of reason. We shall soon follow him in that direction, but not before completing the series with the fifth step.

“Finally, fifthly, we must think that the power by which we are properly said to know things is purely spiritual, no less distinct from every part of the body than blood is from bone, or hand from eye.” A troubling equation, or analogy of proportion, one that enumerates the noncorporeal nature of intellection in terms of two corporeal differences. That blood is bred in the boneWhat’s bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly / And Olivet’s breezy—Goodbye, now, goodbye!and that hand and eye are engaged in a long-standing contract—one hinted at by Descartes himself when he chooses to fix objects in the cognitive gaze with the cooperation of the writing hand—Descartes here ignores. Yet when he introduces the ingenium, seal and wax again come out on the table, this time however strictly by way of analogy in a looser sense, analogy as mere figure of speech:

It [the mind] is a single entity [unicamque esse], whether it receives impressions from the common sense simultaneously with the fancy, or applies itself to those that are preserved in the memory, or forms new ones. . . . In all these operations this cognitive power is at one time passive, at another active, and resembles now the seal and now the wax. Yet the resemblance on this occasion is only one of analogy, for among corporeal things there is nothing wholly similar to this faculty.

Let us not pause to wonder about a single entity that can be passive as well as active, wax as well as seal, and which, although it constantly has to do with the wholly corporeal fancy, is itself wholly spiritual. And let us note only in passing that the resemblance by way of analogy—the analogy of the figure, the figure of the analogy—expresses itself in and as the very same typographic resemblance that earlier spurned analogy—the literal wax and seal, seal and wax. Let us abandon this early work of Descartes after noting one final use of writing in enumeration, a use that explicitly implicates memory.

Rule Sixteen (107—11/454-59) urges the researcher, who can attend to only one thing at a time, not to try to remember matters that do not require immediate attention; these matters, represented by highly abbreviated symbols (per brevissimas notas), are to be committed to paper as written notes. Writing thus serves as a substitute, and not merely as a supplement, for memory. Writing by hand rescues the mind’s eye from excessive strain. For memory seems to be a power “created by nature for this very purpose,” and writing is its corresponding art.

But because this faculty [i.e., memory] is often unstable, and in order to obviate the necessity of expending any part of our attention in firming it up while we are engaged in other thoughts, the art of writing [scribendi ars] was most opportunely invented. Thanks to this resource [cujus ope freti], we confide nothing at all to memory, but, liberating our imagination to receive the ideas occupying us at present, we trace on paper [in charta pingemus] whatever ought to be preserved, employing the most abbreviated symbols. . . .

Although writing by hand corresponds to the mental power of memory, the highly abbreviated written note liberates the imagination and spurns the shaky reed of memory: “. . . we confide nothing at all to memory.” And Descartes adduces the following lines several pages later, in the rule’s penultimate paragraph: “. . . none of those things that do not require perpetual attention ought to be committed to memory if we can set them down on paper, lest any part of our mind be distracted from the object that is present to our thought by some superfluous recollection.” If the invented art of writing is more a substitute for than a supplement of memory, it is because memory itself is a supplement of intuition, and intuition the putative interior (non)space of pure presence.⁶

In Descartes’ correspondence a dozen years after the composition of the Regulae we find several detailed references to “intellectual memory.”⁷ Such a notion is in fact a natural development of the position in the Regulae, by which Descartes asserts the radical difference between cogitation and the complex of imagination, memory, and sensation. And it is fraught with all the difficulties of the initial position. In the letters of 1640 to Meyssonnier andWhat was the name of that priesty looking chap was always squinting in when he passed?. . . Pen something. Pendennis? My memory is gettingMersenne, Descartes admits that the seat of intellectual memory, the pineal gland—to which we shall soon wend our way—must somehow suffer those “convolutions” or “folds” that one finds on the cerebral surface, like figures impressed on a waxen surface. Such convolutions account for the mind’s disposition to remember with the help of guidelines, tracks, or traces, which he here compares to folds in a sheet of paper. And yet any such convolutions or corrugations in the pineal gland or conarium, however necessaryWhat reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow? Reminiscences of coincidences, truth stranger than fictionto account for mnemic conservation and the anamnesic process, mar the surface of the gland: Descartes does not doubt that those who suffer the largest number of folds on the surface of the gland are the most dull-witted, bestial, bedazzled, and benumbed of humans (1067, 1070: hebete, grossier). Conservation of impressions inhibits the reception of new impressions, so that Descartes will have to worry about the Conservation of the spirituality of this waxen gland or, in Véronique Fóti’s apt words, “the virginal purity of the conarium” (76). Precisely how difficult the preservation of that purity will be Descartes indicates in these astonishing lines to Mersenne (1071), which postulate not only an intellectual memory ensconced in the pineal gland but also a somewhat grosser sort of memory within the convolutions of the brain, a handy sort of memory located in the luthier’s digits (cf. 1067), and also “what one might call local memory outside of us, in the manner that when we have read a particular book, not all the elements [especes] that can help us to remember what is in it are in our brains; but that there are also several [such elements] in the paper of the particular copy we have read [il y en a aussi plusieurs dans le papier de l’exemplaire que nous avons lu].” The paper itself, on which we have written nothing, to which we have committed no sorts of reminders by way of abbreviated symbols, nonetheless possesses—as Quintilian well knew—mémoire locale. At this point, the point at which the power of memory is externalized beyond the outermost exterior of the sentient body, Descartes hastens to revert to “yet another memory” besides the one which “depends on the body,” a memory “altogether intellectual, which depends on the soul alone” (1071; cf. 1083).

In his reply to “Hyperaspites” in August of 1641, Descartes recounts that process of corporeal memory by which “cerebral particles” produce “a trace” in the brain. Once that account has drawn to a close, he refrains from using the word remember at all when it comes to matters purely intellectual: Des choses purement intellectuelles, il ny a pas de souvenir a proprement parler.. . . However, as Descartes will soon indicate, “properly speaking” is what we seldom do. He now (1131) predicates of those purely intellectual things the timelessness that would remove them utterly from the realm of memory, asserts it in backward fashion: “. . . but the first time that they [purely intellectual things] present themselves to the mind [se présentent à l’esprit] they are thought every bit as much as the second time [aussi bien que la seconde].” Yet that apparent timelessness, which seemsI wanted then to have now concluded. . . . But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then morrow as now was be past yesterto allow us to confuse or conflate second and first presentations to the mind, immediately points back to a corporeal relation—that of language, of names. Intellectual things are “allied with certain names which, being corporeal, cause us to remember again [ressouvenir] the things themselves.” Yet there would be much to say on this point, writes Descartes, and his letter is “not the place” for it. Oddly, Descartes employs the same abnegation in his 1644 Principles (I, 74, cf. 44), where it is a matter of discussing the relation of memory, speech (parole), and the human proclivity to error. It is apparently never in place to discuss language and names, even when memory reminds us of it constantly. We shall have to wait for Hegel’s account of names in the “hierarchy of transition” from sensation to thought, considered in chapter 5, below. Yet we can bring this brief account of Descartes’ even briefer accounts of “intellectual memory” to a close by considering his letter to Pere Mesland, written on May 2, 1644.

After invoking the piece of wax and its impressed figures as his simile for the sole difference between the soul and its ideas—“I do not posit any other difference between the soul and its ideas than that between a piece of wax and the diverse impressions [figures] it can receive”—Descartes again attempts to elaborate his distinctionWhy was the chant arrested at the conclusion of this first distich? In consequence of defective mnemotechnicbetween bodily and spiritual memory (1164—5). Memory of material things depends on the “vestiges” (what Augustine knew—and left—as “footprints”) these things leave in the brain; memory of intellectual things “depends on some other vestiges, which perdure in thought itself.” The latter constitute an altogether distinct “genre,” one that no comparison with corporeal beings in space can capture, as Descartes’ letter demonstrates when it lets the remainder of the paragraph (on corporeal memory) hang suspended on the phrase au lieu que: “. . . whereas, contrariwise, the vestiges on the brain take it on themselves to move the soul in the same way that the brain had moved the soul previously, thus causing it to remember something; in altogether the same way that the folds in a piece of paper or linen cause them to be more readily folded the way they were folded earlier than if they never had been folded thus.” Yet these curious references volens nolens back to corporeal memory, the inability of intellectual memory to express itself in any other way than parasitically, incarnately, should perhaps make us more willing to consider corporeal memory at greater length. Whereas Descartes’ “mature philosophy” appears to disdain it, corporeal memory, as we shall see, has its own seductions.

Although the Treatise on Man, written in French, first appeared posthumously in 1664, Descartes had already formulated his thoughts on human physiology prior to the 1637 Discourse on Method, as he himself relates in a letter to Pere Mersenne dated 23 November 1646. The fifth part of the Discourse, on “physical questions,” bears many notable resemblances to the Treatise. Both betray a debt to William Harvey’s inspired mechanics of general circulation, De motu cordis (1628-29), althoughA pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. . . . Old rusty pumps: damn the thing elsefor Descartes the heart itself is not a pump but the kettle it had always been in traditional physiologies. Harvey’s mechanics of circulation is present in full force, however: Descartes’ favorite images for human physiology prove to be the artificial fountain, the mill, and the clock, with its weights and wheels, spindles and verge. Except that the body’s organs themselves tend to be almost waxlike in substance: Je suppose que le corps n’est autre chose qu’une statue ou machine de terre (807/XI, 120).

The Treatise, most likely composed in 1633-34, remains incomplete, and yet its mechanical torso casts a shadow across the centuries to come—Malebranche was certainly not the last to be captivated by it. On its penultimate page Descartes writes, “Before I proceed to a description of the rational soul. . . .” Yet his automaton functioned so ingeniously without the contrivance of a rational soulThe machines clanked in threefour time. Thump, thump, thump. Now if he got paralyzed there and no-one knew how to stop them they’d clank on and on the same, print it over and over and up and back. Monkeydoodle the whole thing. Want a cool headthat most rational souls of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were perfectly willing to let the Treatise end where it in fact ends. In the body of Descartes’ text, to be sure, some space is reserved for the rational soul, which is like the fontenier who sits at the place where all the pipes of the fountain meet, adjusting their valves to the tempo of royal Water Music (815/131). The rational soul, when it wills something (854/179), causes the gland to lean in this or that direction, or else it scans the surface of the gland, “considering” the forms and images that play on its surface (852/177). What truly inspires Descartes however is the vast repertory of activities in which the body can engage independently of I’âme raisonnable. The repertory opens with the circulation of the blood and the distribution of the animal spirits, and does not end even with acts of senseperception, imagination, and memory. Nothing like a complete account is possible here, where it is simply a matter of tracing the typographic, iconographic, and engrammatological physiology of memory.⁸

There is one aspect of this “mechanical torso,” the fragmentary text of Descartes’ Treatise on Man, that one dare not overlook at the outset; namely, the fact that it is a fiction. The opening words of the text, Ces hommes, are in fact the first words of the eighteenth chapter of the text entitled The World, or Treatise on Light. The sixth chapter of that treatise begins as follows: “Permit your thought then to exit from this world awhile, in order to come to see another altogether novel world, which I shall bring to birth in its presence within imaginary spaces [que je ferai naître en sa présence dans les espaces imaginaires]” (AT, XI, 31). And the thirteenth chapter, on light, ends as follows: “Thus one must recognize that the men of this new world are of such a nature that when their eyes are pressed in such fashion... etc.” (97). “These men” at the opening of the Treatise on Man are thus (in the words of Charles Adams and Paul Tannery) inhabitants “of this artificial world, which Descartes is constructing whole and entire in imaginary spaces, and not in the real world where we live” (iv). The text itself is therefore a kind of automaton, a simulacrum or icon of the “real” world in which “we” “live,” a mere contrivance. Unless of course the real world for which Descartes was writing, the world of ecclesiastical and court authority, was itself a world fabricated of fictions, so that only a “fiction” could exercise the freedom of truth. Or of “truth.” At all events, the text and its novel tale are mimes, reminiscences, icons, and hypomnesics rather than embodiments of the full presence of objects themselves in memory as such. It would be ironic if, as we begin to read the text, we forgot this cardinal (fictional) aspect.

The arteries that transport blood from the heart to the brain in “these men” divide off “into an infinity of tiny branches”; these branches or threads “compose” in some unexplained way nerve-fibers, “tissues stretched like tapestries at the base of the brain’s convolutions.” (These tapestries may be inspected in Descartes’ Figure 24 [Plate 1], to the left of the letter G.) The most vital, forceful, and subtle parts of the blood are free to circulate among the “concavities” of the brain itself—for the brain is like a vast, multichambered cavern or mineshaft in the earth. There the particles of the blood yield “a certain quite subtle wind, or rather, a very lively and pure flame, to which the name animal spirits has been given.” The animal spirits, introduced in late antiquity by Erasistratus of Chios, confirmed by Galen, and omnipresent until Harvey, hovering ever in a state of agitation, “gatherThis morning the remains of the late Mr. Patrick Dignam. Machines. Smash a man to atoms if they got him caught. Rule the world today. His machineries are pegging away too. Like these, got out of hand: fermentingabout a certain tiny gland situated at about the middle of the substance of the brain, at the very entrance of its concavities.” (It later proves to be important for Descartes’ account that the gland is slightly off-center, being positioned only at “about” the fulcrum of the brain.)⁹ Here a vast “network” of tubes enables the most subtle parts of the blood, those containing the spirits, to flow into the pineal gland itself. The gland (labelled H and visible in all the illustrations in Figures 27, 28, and 29 [Plate 2] may be imagined as “an abundant well-spring” from which the animal spirits are able to streamEXIT BLOOM Begone! he said. The world is before you.—Back in no time, Mr. Bloom said, hurrying outto all the portions of the brain. Itself the form of a flame, the conarium receives and dispatches the tinier flames of the spirits in perpetual Pentecost. Having arrived at the appropriate regions of the brain, the animal spirits penetrate the pores of the brain’s substance, passing from them into the nerve tubes and thence to all the organs, limbs, and muscles of the body. The pores of the brain are like “intervals” between adjacent threads of the cerebral tapestry. These subtle spirits enter them, “always looking back at [or “facing”: regardant; see 844/170; cf. regardent, 851/176], the gland” which is their “source.” They are “readily able to turn hither and thither toward the diverse points of this gland,” Descartes assures us, although he does not explicitly relate what it is they are looking for or at. It is as though they were awaiting a signal of some kind, a somatic/semantic signal. Be that as it may, the “very delicate threads” of the tapestry, into whose interstices, pores, or intervals the spirits pour, converge, and interlace in the region labelled B (see Descartes’ Figures 24 and 27 on Plates 1 and 2), where memory has its seat; the longer threads, along which the spirits wend their way, proceed to region D, nearer the exterior surface of the brain (see Figure 27), and pass from there to all the parts of the body.

Fig. 24.

PLATE 1

Fig. 27.

Fig. 28.

Fig. 29.

PLATE 2

At this point I should pause to observe that it is not always easy to link up or distinguish between Descartes’ tubes and pores, avenues and intervals: the animal spirits threaten to evaporate into the entire inner space of the body.¹⁰ It is as though Cartesian physiology were not careful enough about its intervals, as though a faithful graphic illustration of the system would look something like a staircase painting by Albers or Escher, or like a Gestaltist puzzle, where the lines ambiguously comprise both figure and ground. The importance of interval and difference in Cartesian physiology is not restricted to the pores of the brain tissue, however, but extends to the very core of the system, the pineal gland and its parties of animal spirits.

Gland H is the seat of both imagination and the sensus communis. Both faculties belong to the five “interior” sense faculties listed by Avicenna, which traditionally possess a peculiar power of discrimination, an ability to distinguish differences, as we saw in chapter I. This sensus communis, which Aristotle calls the “common,” “primary,” “ultimate,” or “master” perceptual power, orders the perceptions of the five senses precisely by “sensing that they are different” (On the Soul, 426a 14); it allows a creature to sense that it is sensing in general; supplies images for thought; senses the lapse of time; and presumably senses the differences among all these sensible activities. Aquinas (Summa theologiae, I, q.78 a.4 ad 1, 2) distinguishes the sensus communis from the sensus proprius, attributing to the former a peculiar kind of “discernment.” The “proper” inner sense of any given exterior sense cannot differentiate among the objects of the various senses; neither vision nor taste is able to distinguish white from sweet, an ability that would require discernment or even cognition. “Thus it is necessary that a discretionis iudicium pertain to the common sense, to which are referred, as to a common term, all sensuous apprehensions,” a referring that is handsomely illustrated by the figure from Reisch’s Margarita philosophiae (see Plate 3).

PLATE 3

Corresponding to its differentiating function, the pineal gland in Descartes’ physiological system possesses a differentiated structure. It is composed of “very soft material,” perhaps (as we might imagine) the consistency of wax in a very warm chamber; its material is not embedded firmly in the substance of the brain but is attached to it solely by delicate, pliable arteries. The force of the blood propelled through these arteries by the beat or heat of the heart holds the gland in approximate balance, like a flame dancing on a candlewick. The elastic arteries enable the gland to incline first in one direction, then another, 360° in a circle, spilling the animal spirits in the particular direction they are to pursue, toward this or that region of the brain (see Figures 27, Plate 2, and 25, Plate 4).

What actually causes the gland to tip in different directions? Descartes cites two causes in addition to the altogether mysterious influence of the rational soul, here bracketed from his account. The second is an exterior—albeit not extrinsic—cause, to wit, the action of objects imprinted on the senses in perception. The first is an intrinsic cause, that is, one that operates entirely within the circuitry of blood and brain, tube and interval; namely, the “difference” in force encountered among the parties of animal spirits bursting from the gland. The animal spirits, Descartes stresses, are “almost always different in some respect” (854—55/180). Difference—and I am tempted for the second time to write the word as difference in Derrida’s sense, with a pineal a—dominates the system dynamically (in the hydraulic standing or leaning of the gland), topographically (in the gland’s position slightly off-center as well as in the intervals among the threads of substance in the tapestry of the brain), and energetically (in the gradients of force empowering the animal spirits). The sheer distinction between internal and external causes implies the most striking difference of all, inasmuch as it enables gland H to be the seat of both imagination and the sensus communis. Nevertheless, sense-perception does win the upper hand in Descartes’ mechanical system, for reasons inherent in the typographic dispositive itself. What “ordinarily” causes the gland to move is “the force of the object itself” on a given sense organ, the sense organ in turn “acting on” the apertures of the appropriate tubes leading to the brain. If these tubes may be compared toHOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT“the porte-vent in our church organs,” then sensible objects in the external world are “like the organist’s fingers” (841/165). The little man, the homunculus who normally serves as the mascot of the immanent rational principle, is now catapulted outside the body and the mind into the world where we live. (Presuming for a moment that Descartes’ fiction has something to do with the world where we live.) The organist and fountaineer, the little manDIMIN ISHED DIGITS PROVE TOO TITILLATING FOR FRISKYFR UMPSwho now plays upon the sense organs of the body, is banished from the body’s interiority, is marked and brandedthe one handled adultererby the chronic practice of typography.

Fig. 25.

PLATE 4

Vision may serve as an example. Objects strike (frappent)¹¹ the eye. More specifically, rays of light press upon selected points of the eyeball; they then “trace at the rear of the eye a figure that corresponds to the figure of the object” (see Figure 35, Plate 5 for this and the following stages). Sundry threads of optic nerve tissue transmit this figure to the brain tubes upon which the threads open and are thus “also able to trace the figure in the interior surface of the brain.” At this juncture the animal spirits sally forth from those points of the gland that are inclined toward the tubes in question, that is to say, the points that “face” or “look at” the tubes toward which the gland is now leaning. Precisely when or how, by whom or by what, the gland is inclined remains unclear: at times Descartes describes the gland as inclining in a particular direction in order to cast the animal spirits to the proper region (854/179); at other times he describes the spirits’ departure from the gland as a gratuitous “heading toward” the requisite tubes, their spontaneous egress “attracting” the gland, drawing it in their jetstream, as it were (863/188). Whatever the case, in sense-perception it is the object at hand (the organist’s or fountaineer’s hand) that initiates the motion of the spirits and the gland, via the sense organ and nerve tubes, until the animal spirits “trace a figure” corresponding to the figure at the rear of the eye, which is the figure of the object, onto the “interior surface” of the brain—that is, “on the surface of this gland.” Sense-perception itself is thus multiple typography and iconography, and it ushers in a new kind of engrammatology.

Fig. 35.

PLATE 5

We should pause a moment at this “interior surface,” this outside-inside, that is the surface of la petite glande. Iconography is possible only through the maneuver of this impressive yet impossible interiorization. For the slab of wax must now produce an inner writing. It will not do simply to pass from the waxen slab to the inner spaces of the aviary and cavern. The slab itself must be transported to the inside; the surface, exposed to the roses and arrows of outrageous fortune, must now become an inner surface; only through such doubling or duplication of surfaces will iconography and engrammatology succeed. The little gland, so very reminiscent of a candle flame, is in fact the most porous of waxes, allowing the animal spirits ingress and egress, just as its surface was imported from outside to inside. The gland is in fact very much like the foetus in Mother Mnemosyne’s womb, that most startling outside-inside, which Descartes here briefly invokes. Images perceived by the mother, because they are borne by the blood to all the parts of her body, may “sometimes” be impressed on the brain and the very limbs of the foetus “by certain actions of the mother” (852/177). Descartes declines to account for this iconography within the matrix, however, even though it promises to illumine a goodly portion of the mysteries of eternity and alterity; he “contents” himself with an account of how images “are impressed in the interior part of the brain marked B, which is the seat of memory.”¹²

We shall follow Descartes’ account in the direction of memory proper as soon as we remind ourselves of one further iconographic point. As in the texts of Aristotle, Plato, and Augustine, so here with Descartes, it is always a matter of the présence des objets, or rather, of the transference of that presence to the presence of their traces within us, which is a transference by blows. Descartes insists that imagination too, and not merely the presence of objects—and, to be sure, the rational soul as well—can effect the presence of ideas. Yet we shall see how iconography reverts to typography, regardless of the “several causes” Descartes wishes to reinstate. And if one should ask where the new kind of engrammatology has disappeared to in all this, I can only wonder whether it will emerge in Descartes’ account of reminiscence. First, however, memory. Descartes writes:

Think of it in the following way. After the spirits emerge from gland H (Figure 29), having received there the impression of some idea, they pass thence by the tubes 2, 4, 6, and tubes similar to them, into the pores or intervals among the tiny threads that compose this part B of the brain. The spirits have the power to enlarge these intervals somewhat and to bend and variously deploy the tiny threads they encounter on their paths, according to the diverse ways they move and the diverse apertures of the tubes along which they pass. The result is that the animal spirits trace there too the figures that correspond to those of the objects. They do not always do so here as easily or as perfectly at the first stroke as they do on the gland H, but little by little they get better and better, as long as their action is robust and long-lasting, or is reiterated several times. That prevents these figures from being readily erased, and conserves them there in such a way that by virtue of them the ideas that were formerly on the gland are able to take shape there once again long afterwards, without requiring the presence of the corresponding objects. And in this memory consists. (852/177-78)

It is clear that not only the sense organs, the tubes, and the gland receive impressions, but so also in some way do the animal spirits themselves. Whether the animal spirits are stamped passively, or whether they somehow actively see and scan the figure on the gland to which they always turn their gaze, as if awaiting a sign; whether in other words the animal spirits are more spectating spiritA typesetter brought him a limp galleypage. He began to check it silently. Mr. Bloom stood by, hearing the loud throbs of cranks, watching the silent typesetters at their casesthan branded animal; whether the spirits need the gland at allthe obedient reels feeding in huge webs of paper. Clank it. Clank it. Miles of it unreeledin order to see or to be impressed, inasmuch as they themselves have transmitted the figures there in the first place; whether the gland needs them, since it clearly has the impression in its possession—all these are arresting questions. The spirits’ power to enlarge the intervals and to weave the threads into a picturesque tapestry is hardly surprising; what seems odd is that they should require these threads to work on, and that their tracings should not always succeed at the first stroke. Since they have already transmitted the figure from the sense organ to the gland, they are surely capable of remembering it well enough without weaving the threads, or well enough to weave them expertly. (Capable of remembering it! What am I saying?) The animal spirits in any case should prefer the gland as a medium, and stick with it, as it were, rather than messing about with the rest of the brain. Figures and images are easier to apply to the gland and more perfect in the execution. Higher quality wax. Less grit. Why the spirits should head for region B (not how they do so, since clearly they remember the way), and why they should toil away at their own artistic education, typtoing at it seven long years and more—these things too remain enigmatic. That the gland’s future recollections depend on the images woven by animal spirits in the Ghobelin of memory is indisputable. Yet why the spiriting animal spirits should have to depend on the animal apparatus at all is not clear.

Descartes therefore illustrates. With an image. Not to be forgotten. He writes (853/178) that the animal spirits have the power “to form certain passages” in brain tissue “which remain open” after sensation has ceased. Even if these passages should close they leave “a certain disposition” in the slender threads of the brain by which the route can be reopened. (This “disposition” will return to trouble us later.) Descartes appeals to the image of puncture or perforation (see Figure 30, Plate 6), a particularly violent yet strikingly efficient form of typography. Even after the punch or stamp is removed—Muchibus thankibusthe tiny holes in the stretched canvas drumhead perdure; or, if they seal over again, the canvas still bears stigmatic traces of the holes and a “disposition” to reopen them. There is doubtless something odd about this image, both its canvas and its punch. Canvas is normally used for painted portraits, such as Franz Hals’s likeness of the haughty philosopher, or for objets d’art of some kind. Yet here a punctuated pattern appears, not exactly a paint-by-numbers canvas guaranteeing a standardized image, but something very much like it: a sort of child’s sewing card. Or do the holes indicate that this model for memory is a kind of sieve? A sieve, Socrates would have said, for milking billy goats.

Fig. 30.

PLATE 6

Let us now scan the entire series of figures reproduced in Plates 1—6, unless we already remember them well enough: the highly complex threads, tissues, and tubes of the brain, the pineal flame at its heart, the enthroned gland bowing regally in all directions to its court; the flame now like the bud of a bursting thistle, the conarium in dehiscence; the almondshaped flame pondering whether to sniff roses or take the measure of an arrow; the gland, having made up its mind, now all eyes (and memory) for the arrow; and finally, as though the arrow had sown dragonseed, the punch, the punch to the brain. Note the graceful hand that wields it as though it were a verge. Are these the fountaineer’s or organist’s digits? Digits of external objects? Digits of the gland? Or is it the laced cuff of the animal spirits themselves? Perhaps it is the gentle hand ofMEMORABLE BATTLES RECALLEDPlato, winning by subversion and irony the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns? In any case, the hand manipulates the instrument that impresses or inscribes mnemic images on the brain. The problem of the retrieval of those images nonetheless remains. How do we get from the holes back to the stamp? How do we get from the stamp to the presence-at-hand of the hand itself, in order to beat it to the punch, as it were? How does Descartes account for reminiscence and recall?

In the Treatise on Man accidental or involuntary recall alone receives treatment; recollection as such, as we shall see later, is taken up in article 42 of the later Treatise on the Passions of the Soul. Gratuitous or involuntary recall, dependent on neither the rational soul nor external objects, occurs as follows:

For the rest, it must be said that when glandK.M.R.I. H leans to one side, due solely to the force of the spirits, without the rational soul or the external senses contributing to its motion, the ideas that take shape on its surface proceed not only from the inequalities encountered among the small particles [or “groups”: parties] of these spirits—inequalities that cause the differences among the humors, as was said above—but also from the impressions of the memory. For if the figure of a particular object is impressed much more distinctly than any other at the region of the brain toward which the gland now happens to be leaning, then the spirits that are headed there cannot fail to receive the impression. It is in this way that things past occasionally return in thought as if by accident, without the memory of them being excited by any object that touches the senses.

Here the spirits’ egress from the gland—an exodus that is always differential in its ejaculatory force—causes the gland to incline toward the memorial region. There the spirits that (for whatever reason) tend toward this part of the brain receive an impression. And here Descartes’ account ends. Yet it must be that the animal spirits return to the gland—unless their looking back to it can communicate telepathically, televisually—in order to transmit to it the received mnemic image. And why did the spirits sally forth from the gland in the first place? They were clearly on their way somewhereWait. . . . Remember. . . . I am almosting itwhen archaic impressions distracted them and then sent them on their way with useless baggage. Gratuitous remembering is the animal spirits’ forgetting what they are about. Such oblivion leads Descartesin order to exercise mnemotechnic. . . he remembered by mnemotechnicquite naturally to castigate those people who daydream and allow their fancy to wander nonchalantly through the halls of memory; they absorb impressions higgledy-piggledy in the palimpsest of their minds, in this way producing all the monsters that populate myth and legend. Waxen glands, for all the marvels they produce, are prone to moral turpitude, lassitude, lethargy, and benumbment.

Descartes now reverts to the theme of “disposition,” reaching that point in his account where the supplementary or substitutive nature of the typographic apparatus—which is both essential to and superfluous for Descartes’ account—compels far larger questions, questions of anthropology and ontology. We cannot stay to elaborate them, but let us at least read the following passage, perhaps the most disarming of a disarming treatise:

Yet the effect of memory that seems to me most worthy of consideration here consists in this: even if there be no soul in this machine [sans qu’il y ait aucune âme dans cette machine], it [this machine] can [peut] naturally be disposed to imitate all the movements that true men, or rather, other similar machines, will make in its presence.

It is a particular effect of memory that informs the Cartesian anthropology, at least in the Traite de I’Homme, as such. Which effect? The effect of mimēsis. The production of an imitation so iconographically perfectNightmare from which you will never awakethat the difference between true human beings and automatons can be reduced to an ou bien: true men, “or rather,” other machines semblables. The sameness or similarity of the other machines rests on that “natural disposition” toward imitation in them all.¹³ The iconography of memory is hence not limited in its effects: it stamps machine and man alike, banishing the soul to the subjunctive mood of mere hypothesis, provided only that the movements to be imitated occur in the machine’s presence, en sa présence. It is not the apparatus of memory that succumbs to the logic of the supplement but the soul itself—and those idols of the soul, the animal spirits, who although they try to read and speakSllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its fly board with sllt the first batch of quire folded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too silt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Slltare themselves mere instruments of waxen mimēsis.

We therefore dare not close before reintroducing the rational soul and voluntary memory by grace of article 42 of the Treatise on the Passions of the Soul, where there may be, we speculated, some hope of encountering engrammatology. No doubt we shall reintroduce the rational soul, the scanner of icons and reader of signs, only to be compelled to bid it adieu once and for all.

Art. 42. How we find in our souls the things we want to remember.

Thus when the soul wants [veut] to remember something, the will causes the gland—by inclining successively to different sides—to thrust [pousse] the spirits toward different parts of the brain, until they come across [rencontrent] that part where it finds the traces left there by the object it wants to remember. For these traces are nothing other than this, that the pores of the brain, by which the spirits have formerly followed their course because of the presence of this object [i.e. présence in some former, actual sense-perception], have by that means acquired a greater facility than the others in being opened once more in the same way by the spirits that approach them. Thus the spirits, coming in contact with these pores, enter into them more easily than into the others, by which means they excite a particular movement in the gland, which represents the same object to the soul and causes it to know that this is what it wanted to remember.

There is some reason to wonder whether the soul is not indeed the mere supplement of a powerful mimetic operation over which it has no control. How does the soul cause the gland to lean? Does not the differential ejaculation of the animal spirits function sufficiently as a cause? And are not these spirits themselves wholly at the mercy of the distended pores over whose disposition to be differentially open the spirits have no say? How do the animal spirits “excite” the gland telepathically? What interior or exterior surface of the gland (—does it have an interior surface? does any surface of the body become interior? does mimesis achieve the miracle of an outside become inside?) can receive a typos or engram for the soul’s spectation, its scanning or gleaning, when the soul itself is sitting in the gland? Finally, must we not say that there is something topsy-turvy about all this? If the will wills to remember, why does it causePoor, poor, poor Pyrrhusthe gland to spill in all directions? Because the will does not know what it wants to remember. Why does the gland—which ought to know better—allow itself to be bullied? Because it does not knowPyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pierwhat the will wills to remember. Why do the spirits run amok, hoping for the encounter of their dreams but ready to fallYes, yes. They went under. Pyrrhus, wished by an oracle, made a last attempt to retrieve the fortunes of Greeceinto any pores that will gape for them? Because they do not know what the will wills to remember. Why must the news of their random movements, their tumbling into intervals, when conveyed back to the gland, retrace the representation of the absent object? Because the animal spirits still do not know and they never will know, even when they are fully present to the traces of the remembered objects, what the will wills to remember. It is the gland that will read their frenetic motions and re-present them—the same gland that helplessly tipped and spilled its contents an instant ago. And now all these inept automatic creatures who live their lives backwardsHe stayed in his walk to watch a typesetter neatly distributing type. Reads it backwards first. Quickly he does it. Must require some practice that. mangiD kcirtaP. Poor papa with his haggadah book reading backwards with his finger to mewill “cause” the soul “to know” what it “wills” to “remember.” The soul now joins the ranks of all these mechanical stumblebunnies. Presumably it is now content. But in the rough and tumble it marks the waxen pallor of its once lambent flesh.

HOBBES AND LOCKE

Away then from these Continental confusions! Away to England, which is less bemused, more sober and stern, though every bit as faithful to the ancient lessons of typography, iconography, and engrammatology. Away then once more to Shandy Hall:

Pray, Sir, in all the reading which you have ever read, did you ever read such a book as Locke’s Essay upon the Human Understanding? -Don’t answer me rashly -because many, I know, quote the book, who have not read it, -and many have read it who understand it not; -if either of these is your case, as I write to instruct, I will tell you in three words what the book is. -It is a history. -A history! of who? what? where? when? Don’t hurry yourself.-It is a history-book, Sir, (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man’s own mind; and if you will say so much of the book, and no more, believe me, you will cut no contemptible figure in a metaphysic circle.

But this by the way.

Now if you will venture to go along with me, and look down into the bottom of this matter, it will be found that the cause of obscurity and confusion, in the mind of man, is threefold.

Dull organs, dear Sir, in the first place. Secondly, slight and transient impressions made by objects when the said organs are not dull. And, thirdly, a memory like unto a sieve, not able to retain what is has received. -Call down Dolly your chambermaid, and I will give you my cap and bell along with it, if I make not this matter so plain that Dolly herself should understand it as well as Malebranch. -When Dolly has indited her epistle to Robin, and has thrust her arm into the bottom of her pocket hanging by her right side; -take that opportunity to recollect that the organs and faculties of perception, can, by nothing in this world, be so aptly typified and explained as by that one thing which Dolly’s hand is in search of. -Your organs are not so dull that I should inform you -’tis an inch, Sir, of red seal-wax.

When this is melted and dropped upon the letter, if Dolly fumbles too long for her thimble, till the wax is over hardened, it will not receive the mark of her thimble from the usual impulse which was wont to imprint it. Very well: If Dolly’s wax, for want of better, is bees-wax, or of a temper too soft-though it may receive,—it will not hold the impression, how hard soever Dolly thrusts against it; and last of all, supposing the wax good, and eke the thimble, but applied thereto in careless haste, as her Mistress rings the bell;-in any one of these three cases, the print, left by the thimble, will be as unlike the prototype as a brass-jack.¹⁴

When Descartes surrenders his second lump of wax to Locke, the wax of the second of his Meditations, surrenders it because it fails to retain any imprint and because he can think just as well or ill without it, the great English philosopher holds it once again to the firelight of reason, feeling the Softness and Warmth of its secondary properties. Locke need not employ the wax after the crude manner of Socrates; by now the slab of wax has itself become the very stamp and sign of cognition. Everywhere in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding¹⁵ we encounter impressions—Ideas imprinted or stamped on the soul either by sensation or reflection. To be sure, the typography is more attentuated than it used to be. For example, the understanding “deepens” a child’s impressions concerning the operations of its own mind (II, 1, §8), and it is difficult to see how such reflexive “deepening” could occur by mere punctilious repetition of the imprinting action. Further, even straightforward perception itself requires that impressions “reach” the mind and “be taken notice of within” (II, 9, §3). One wonders whether such “notice” depends on notio or notatio in Augustine’s sense, or on Aristotelian theōrem, the very “scanning” or “reading” of a typos as an engrammatological eikōn. Whatever the case, neither the sense organs alone nor the combined apparatus of neural conduits and animal spirits can account for perception. Impressions—better, impulses—must be conveyed from without “to their Audience in the Brain, the mind’s Presence-room (as I may call it)” (II, 3, §1). “Audience”: the royal reception wherein the mind deigns to hear and entertain the suits of its subjects. “Presence-room”: the chamber or receptacle occupied by the monarch who will read, scan, or in some other way heed all other beings that attain to presence, parousia.

There is much however in the Essay that will not jibe with our tristrapaedic notions of British Empiricism, and this is nowhere more striking than in Locke’s treatment of memory and retention. Precisely why it is that the Essay here achieves its profoundest pathos—there are passages on memory and retention which despite Locke’s proscription of eloquence are little short of threnody—I am unable to say. Memory is second in importance to perception in an intellectual creature; yet its mysteries elevate it to the very highest rank as an object of inquiry. The principal enigma remains the Aristotelian-Platonic-Augustinian aporia of the presence of what is past or absent; the principal image of mnemic space remains the neo-Hellenic and medieval thesaurus or treasury-house. “This is Memory,” writes Locke, “which is as it were the Storehouse of our Ideas.” He continues:

For the narrow Mind of Man, not being capable of having many Ideas under View and Consideration at once, it was necessary to have a Repository, to lay up those Ideas, which at another time it might have use of. But our Ideas being nothing, but actual Perceptions in the Mind, which cease to be any thing, when there is no perception of them, this laying up of our Ideas in the Repository of the Memory, signifies no more but this, that the Mind has a Power, in many cases, to revive Perceptions, which it has once had, with this additional Perception annexed to them, that it has had them before. And in this Sense it is, that our Ideas are said to be in our Memories, when indeed, they are actually no where, but only there is an ability in the Mind, when it will, to revive them again; and as it were paint them anew on it self, though some with more, some with less difficulty; some more lively, and others more obscurely.

Memory serves as a repository for ideas that have ceased to be anything, a storehouse whose stores are nothing stored nowhere. Loco, non loco. Call it then a faculty or power in the mind to revive perceptions, to limn them anew (typography as restoration of old monuments) and then tag them, date them, by means of a second perception. Such restorations vary in degree of successful execution. Some are “more lively” than others, the revivification or restitution to living presence achieving or being achieved by a higher degree of verisimilitude. Verisimilitude? To what should the restoration—which, after all, is each time a novel construction—approximate? Apparently memory is a storehouse, not simply of lackluster copies, but of originals? Thus, in modern guise, the Aristotelian dilemma of the present pathos and typos of a past and absent being. Yet even if we were to grant Locke thatAt the housesteps of the 4th of the equidifferent uneven numbers, number 7 Eccles Street, he inserted his hand mechanically into the back pocket of his trousers to obtain his latchkeymemory is more construction than conservation, and so engage ourselves to the project that has shaped much of the history of empirical psychological research into memory, will we be content to say that memory is an ability in the mind “when it will” to revive memories? Is Locke himself so certain of his voluntarism? Let us recallWas it there? It was in the corresponding pocket of the trousers which he had worn on the day but one preceding. Why was he doubly irritated? Because he had forgotten and because he remembered that he had reminded himself twice not to forgetthe key “pathetic” passage in the Essay, of which Sterne’s sieve is a ludic reminder. Locke reflects (II, 10 §4) on the difference in the degree of perdurance of memories and on the universal tendency of impressions to fade. Some impressions are produced in the senses only once; others, though produced repeatedly, fall on a heedless or distracted mind, “as in Men, intent only on one thing, not setting the stamp deep into itself.” Bodily illness occasionally debilitates the mind, which then has not the strength to hold impressions. “In all these cases, Ideas in the Mind quickly fade, and often vanish quite out of the Understanding, leaving no more footsteps or remaining Characters of themselves, than Shadows do flying over Fields of Corn; and the Mind is void of them, as if they had never been there.” Total effacement of vestiges of the past, eradication of entire periods of one’s own history, is therefore eminently possible. Echoing footsteps that leave no prints, reverberating to silence; clouds and birds flitting over the landscape as shadows, never alighting. Decay of impressions, argues Locke, is in fact the rule:

The Memory in some Men, ’tis true, is very tenacious, even to a Miracle: But yet there seems to be a constant decay of all our Ideas, even of those which are struck deepest, and in Minds the most retentive; so that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated Exercise of the Senses, or Reflection on those kind of Objects, which at first occasioned them, the Print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen. Thus, the Ideas, as well as Children, of our Youth, often die before us: And our Minds represent to us those Tombs, to which we are approaching; where though the Brass and Marble remain, yet the Inscriptions are effaced by time, and the Imagery moulders away. The Pictures drawn in our Minds, are laid in fading Colours; and if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear. How much the Constitution of our Bodies, and the make of our animal Spirits, are concerned in this; and whether the Temper of the Brain make this difference, that in some it retains the Characters drawn on it like Marble, in others like Free-stone, and in others little better than Sand, I shall not here enquire, though it may seem probable, that the Constitution of the Body does sometimes influence the Memory; since we oftentimes find a Disease quite strip the Mind of all its Ideas, and the flames of a Fever, in a few days, calcine all those Images to dust and confusion, which seem’d to be as lasting, as if graved in marble. (§5)

The miracle of memory, resurrecting the past and rescuing it from the ravages of time and death, pales before a decay against which even print proves helpless; the deaths of our children, the irreversible evanescence of our own youth; Ralph Waldo Emerson burying in quick succession his wife Ellen, his brother Charles, his son Waldo; the mind itselfThe least differences in intellect are immeasurable. This beloved and now departed Boy, this Image in every part beautiful, how he expands in his dimensions in this fond Memory to the dimensions of Nature!looming as a tombstone without inscription or graven symbol, devoid of letters and images; the final irony of the ancient soma-sema, the body as tomb and engraved sign, subtly altered in that all the once legible tracings are effaced. Even marble tombstone—the most durable of waxes, one would think, the most heavenly material for glands—burnsI comprehend nothing of this fact but its bitterness. Explanation I have none, . . . only oblivionto calcareous ash. Even the hardiest of memories reduces, as Locke writes, “to dust and Rudy! confusion.”

As Locke proceeds to discuss active reminiscence (§6) his text exhibits a kind of upswing; yet the more sober and even somber tone soon reasserts itself. Memory can retain certain ideas, namely, “those that are oftenest refreshed,” the putative “original Qualities of Bodies” such as solidity, extension, figure, and so on. Reminiscence, which is not so much painting the ideas anew as viewing them again, although engrammatological viewing means reviving them, whatever such typographic revivification can mean, Locke describes as follows:

§7. In this secondary Perception, as I may so call it, or viewing again the Ideas, that are lodg’d in the Memory, the Mind is oftentimes more than barely passive, the appearance of those dormant Pictures, depending sometimes on the Will. The Mind very often sets it self on work in search of some hidden Idea, and turns, as it were, the Eye of the Soul upon it; though sometimes too they start up in our Minds of their own accord, and offer themselves to the Understanding; and very often are rouzed and tumbled out of their dark Cells, into open Day-light, by some turbulent and tempestuous Passion; our Affections bringing Ideas to our Memory, which had otherwise lain quiet and unregarded. This farther is to be observed, concerning Ideas lodg’d in the Memory, and upon occasion revived by the Mind, that they are not only (as the Word revive imports) none of them new ones; but also that the Mind takes notice of them, as of a former Impression, and renews its acquaintance with them, as with Ideas it had known before. So that though Ideas formerly imprinted are not all constantly in view, yet in remembrance they are constantly known to be such, as have been formerly imprinted, i.e. in view, and taken notice of before by the Understanding.

Mind then may be more than merely passive, may assert itself in a willful search, setting itself to work by turning its inner eye—the escutcheon of spirit having as its armorial bearing Esprits animaux en regardant—toward some hidden memory. Locke anticipates that the hidden memory has always already been unearthed, so that the eye can shine upon it; he presupposes that the search for an arkhē kinēseōs and the whole series of movements of presencing that Aristotle took pains to describe have always already taken place. At all events, active reminiscence is given short shrift in Locke’s account. For a kind of passive, second-order perception now asserts its rights. Occasionally remembrances emerge “of their own accord,” as though they had a mind of their own. Often our passions or affections rouse them. And in each case, Locke concludes, now following Aristotle quite closely, reminiscences give or show themselves as ideas that “have been formerly imprinted.” Indeed remembrance “constantly knows” the pastness of its memories, even when such memories have long been forgotten, long been unknown.

Sections 8 and 9 of the Essay, to which I shall refer only in passing, demonstrate the importance of memory “in an intellectual Creature,” but also its precariousness. We may lose ideas completely to oblivion, or not find them quickly enough when we need them, the second defect proving almost as crippling as the first. And in Locke’s view there is no “intellectual memory” that could conveniently cancel time and make each intellection the first of its kind, its virginity renewed by some mysterious lustration. Indeed, his account ends by ascertaining a third defect of memory, if a fate can be called a defect. Whereas God and his angelic hosts can be present to “the whole Scene” at once, mortals—as Hölderlin’s Empedocles discovers—are fettered by the law of succession. Even Blaise Pascal, that “prodigy of parts” and monster of memory, who, “till the decay of his health had impaired his memory,. . . forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought in any part of his rational Age,” was condemned to the straits of succession. Whereas the angels may enjoy “one Picture” encompassing all their past knowledge, a capacity that would be “no small advantage to the knowledge of a thinking Man,” human beings confront the inevitable dispersion of their knowledge in sundry spaces and times. However, even though we doubtless share memory with the lower animals, who remember in virtue of “traces in their Brains” (§10), and even though the advantage of having everything present in one picture seems almost palpable, there is something in Locke’s account that is so resolutely and unabashedly mortal that one wonders whether the disadvantages of the seraphic “one Picture” were not every bit as palpable to him. How would a prodigy not merely of Parts but of the Whole fare? Locke will not have had the advantage of being able to recall Luis Borges’ Ireneo Funes—“Funes el memorioso” (1942)—and yet he may have anticipated something of Funes’ fate. Which is, one must say, bound to be funereal. A prodigious memory is perhaps a prodigal memory, Locke suggests in his remarks on language:

But it is beyond the Power of humane Capacity to frame and retain distinct Ideas of all the particular Things we meet with: every Bird, and Beast Men saw; every Tree, and Plant, that affected the Senses, could not find a place in the most capacious Understanding. If it be looked on, as an instance of a prodigious Memory, That some Generals have been able to call every Soldier in their Army, by his proper Name: We may easily find a Reason, why Men have never attempted to give Names to each Sheep in their Flock, or Crow that flies over their heads; much less to call every Leaf of Plants, or Grain of Sand that came in their way, by a peculiar Name. (III, 3, §2, cf. 1, §3)

The memorious general is of course Cyrus of Persia, as reported in Pliny’s Natural History, the very book that Funes is studying at the moment of his collapse. Funes’ fall and subsequent paralysisla inmovilidad era un precio minimoembody the condition of his mind, burdened now by implacable perception and memoryesa rapsodia de voces incortexas. . . , el vertiginoso mundo de Funes. . . , la presion de una realidad tan infatigable.Unable to gather his perceptions, unable to think—that is to say, as Nietzsche reminds us in “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense,” unable to forget differences—Funes describes his condition to the narrator of the tale in three remarks that rise in a crescendo of fatal self-understanding:

He told me: I alone possess more memories than all human beings have had since the world became the world. And also: My dreams are like the wakefulness of the rest of you. And also, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage-dump.

Having no power to resist the incessant hammering of the world, no capacity to parry the blows of numberless typoi, Funes is less an immortal than a pummeled witness of mortality. Unto his own predictable end, which we might telescope in the following extracts:

His own face in the mirror, his own hands, each time they surprised him. Swift relates that the emperor of Lilliput discerned the movement of the sweep hand; Funes discerned continually the silent advances of corruption, of cavities, of fatigue. He noted everywhere the progress of death, of humidity. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a world that was multiform, instantaneous, and all but intolerably precise. . . .

Ireneo Funes dies in 1889 of pulmonary congestion.

These hardly triumphant accounts of memory in Locke and Borges, emphasizing mortality and decay, should perhaps induce us to remember Hobbes—for whom memory is decayed sense. Recollection of Locke’s great predecessor reveals that Sterne’s satire of the sealing wax is perhaps better directed at him. Sensation, imagination, and memory all move within Hobbes’s Galilean universe, move within what we might think of as modern, not Hebraic, “Galilean turbulence.” For sensationWhat? Where? I cant remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensationsin Hobbes is in fact highly reminiscent of the state of nature, which is a state of siege. External bodies “press” upon the appropriate sense organs and, through the network of the nerves, penetrate to the citadel of heart and brain. Having well-nigh breached the walls, the external body “causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart, to deliver itself.”¹⁶ Because the endeavor to resist presses outward, as though to expel the invader, “it seemeth to be some matter without.” “And this seeming, or fancy, is that which men call Sense.” Neither the body nor the soul is therefore actually comparable to a slab of wax, since the erstwhile signet-ring is now merely brandished as a mailed fist and makes its impressions through action at a distanceHe rushes towards Stephen, fist outstretchedon cowed flesh. One is reminded of Kafka’s In der Strafkolonie, although the Hobbesian pummeling produces no excruciating incision or script, no legible law, and only makes us see stars. Such bruising yet ethereal impressions are caused by “divers motions,” several of which Hobbes now enumerates: “And as pressing, rubbing, or striking the Eye, makes us fancy a light; and pressing the Eare, produceth a dinne; so do the bodies also we see, or hear, produce the same by their strong, though unobserved, action.” We are reminded too of Democritean antitypia, although theSOPHIST WALLOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE ON PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMPaction in Hobbes seems even more violent than in the world of the Greek. Typography has become bombardment. Even after the external object is removed and the all-clear siren wails, the motions induced in us continue, “as we see in the water, though the wind cease, the waves give not over rowling for a long time after” (I, 2). Hobbes defines imagination as this “decaying sense,” especially when the word sense (which is fancy) is emphasized. “But when we would express the decay, and signifie that the Sense is fading, old, and past, it is called Memory.” Imagination and memory “are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names.” Thus Hobbes appears to demolish the ancient aporia of memory, that figment of “Aristotelity,” inasmuch as only memory’s reference to the past and to absence plays a role in his account, not the presence of that reference. At the same time, all activity, scanning, reading, and regarding seem to have ceased in the inertial world of external motion; all is passivity; all resistance is eventual acceptance of inflicted punishment, as body and mind suffer at the hands of whatever in the belligerent world places them under siege.

However, a less violent typographic simile emerges in Hobbes’s third chapter, on “Mentall Discourse,” a simile we would have to call engrammatological, no matter how unadorned it seems. “All Fancies are Motions within us,” Hobbes begins, in a familiar vein, “reliques of those made in the Sense.” These motions of imagination and memory proceed in the precise order they had in sensation. They do so by virtue of the “coherence of the matter moved, in such manner, as water upon a plain Table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger.” The power of this icon in Hobbes’s text—the finger drawing water in a rivulet across a smooth tabletop—establishes the plausibility of the explanation while simultaneously concealing the engrammatological problem. The lines of Hobbes’s own text work on the limpid, lymphoid reader by capillary action and cohesive attraction: they induce in the reader the obedient motion of all the water that ever spilled on tabletop, so that all he or she can do is adhere and follow. It is as though Hobbes were introducing the typographer’s mark called “the fist” or “index”, the fist to pummel the reader with Hobbesian motion and the indexto draw and fix the reader’s attention—much in the way Sterne uses the fist or index in Tristram Shandy (II, 12) to draw the reader’s attention to the gentle humanity of Uncle Toby, the Military Man, Knight of the Mailed Fist, who would not hurt a fly. Yet Hobbes’s icon also effectively suppresses the question as to how spilled water can be read and retraced back to our earlier experience. No use reading over spilled water. That such mnemic motions must be read is clear from Hobbes’s own remarks on “Speech” in chapter four. He begins with an iconographic regress from Printing, which, “though ingenious,” is “no great matter,” through Letters, which are a “profitable Invention for continuing the memory of time past,” to Speech, “consisting of Names or Appellations, and their Connexion,” which is assuredly divine in origin. Hobbes’s interpretation of letters is in the classical grammatological tradition that we shall be discussing in chapter 4, inextricably tied to the mnemotechnic and anamnesic traditions. Not only do the letters in some general way “continue” the memory of time past by monumentalizing it; they are our way to remember “the divers motions of the Tongue, Palat, Lips, and other organs of Speech.” “Divers motions,” as though tongue, lips, and larynx were themselves external bodies pressing on the heart and brain, mimicking sensation and sense. The letters, reminiscent of the motions of the organs of speech, enact at a second level, mimetically, remembrance of decaying sense.

Most intriguing in Hobbes, as in Locke (see Essay II, 2, §2ff.) is the iconographic and engrammatological interpretation of speech itself. The “first use of names” or appellations, writes Hobbes (I, 4), “is to serve for Marks, or Notes [recall Augustine’s notio/notatio] of remembrance.” Locke (Essay, III, 2, §1-2) calls spoken words “sensible Marks of Ideas” which function for “the Assistance of their own Memory” or “for the recording of our own thoughts for the help of our Memories, whereby, as it were, we talk to our selves. . .” (9, §2). For both Hobbes and Locke, spoken names are written records, that is, memorials or monuments lodged or erected in memory. Memory is linguistic through and through; moreover, it is scriptural, as though spoken names were, prior to all speech, a kind of originary writing. Yet since the motions of the organs of speech are somehow reminiscent of the motions induced in us by the world of (fancied) invading external bodies, motions that unerringly produce the index of sense, the full sense of Hobbesian memory is engrammatological. What remains unclear is the relation of those two levels of motion—speech and sensation—between which memory is caught. The metaphor of motion, or the motion of metapherein, from state of siege to index on tabletop, receives no further treatment in Leviathan, since metaphor for Hobbes, as for Locke, is an abuse of speech. Hobbes excoriates metaphor with the help of a brilliant simile: “Metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui;¹⁷ and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention, and sedition, or contempt” (I, 5). Hobbes therefore chooses Perspicuous Words, transparent terms, those that submit to calculation and accountancy (= ratio). Yet to insist on submission, on the capitulation of language, is to forget the motions of both fist and index, both the Galilean world and words. The world of Galilean turbulence is too busy warding off attack to be mindful of the provenance of such a ratio: its modernity consists in what a much later thinker will call “the high-velocity expulsion of Mnemosyne,” inasmuch as “modern man. . . puts all his stock into forgetting as quickly as possible.”¹⁸

COLERIDGE, ERWIN STRAUS, AND
MERLEAU-PONTY

It would be possible to trace in detail the typography, iconography, and engrammatology of memory from Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke through La Mettrie, Holbach, and David Hartley into the mechanistic and epiphenomenalist philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to our own day. Possible, yet time-and-space-consuming.

Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and Treatise on Human Nature (1739), while doubtless philosophical milestones in their own right, would only corroborate the iconographic and typographic traditions.¹⁹ (Coleridge tells of his surprise at finding how reminiscent Hume’s account of association is of Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s treatise on memory in the Parva naturalia. He then tells us of the discovery in Hume’s library of a copy of the Parva naturalia “swathed and swaddled” inside a copy of Aquinas’s commentary! A story that suggests in scullery-maid fashion the continuity of ancient typography, iconography, and engrammatology.) In the Enquiry (II, 11) Hume argues that memory can “mimic” and “copy” perceptions, although neither memory nor imagination achieves “such a pitch of vivacity” as even the dullest perception attains. In the earlier Treatise (I, 1, §1) Hume appears to adopt wholeheartedly the typographic model for impressions of “all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul”; yet he later (I, 3, §5) insists that the “ultimate cause” of impressions must remain an open question. At all events, memory (I, 1, §3) “repeats our impressions” in such a way that the resulting object is “somewhat intermediate betwixt an impression and an idea”; if an idea, then one that is considerably more “lively and strong” than any idea of the imagination. “When we remember a past event, the idea of it flows in upon the mind in a forcible manner; whereas in the imagination the perception is faint and languid, and cannot without difficulty be preserv’d by the mind steddy and uniform for any considerable time” (9). A second difference is of course that memory “is in a manner ty’d down” to the order of the original perceptions in a way that imagination is not. Indeed, Hume calls it the “chief exercise of the memory” to preserve the “order and position” of the simple ideas. The engrammatological character of memory, that is, the relation of impressions to those “marks” of spoken or written language, appears to be considerably less present in Hume than in his forebears—a fact that might be of importance for Hume’s scepticism.

Perhaps two reminders by way of indirection and opposition will compensate for the lack of any further detailed historical tracings—first, Coleridge’s refutation in his Biographia literaria of David Hartley’s “associationism” and then in more recent times Erwin Straus’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of the prevailing neurophysiological models for both perception and memory. Each of these, and certainly all of them taken together, will push the engrammatological question to the point where the dominant models for memory will find themselves on the verge of collapse. In the following chapter we shall find Freud occupying that very verge.

Coleridge replies to David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749) in the fifth and sixth chapters of his Biographia literaria (1817).²⁰ In the tradition extending from Locke and Boyle to Joseph Priestley, Hartley had developed an intriguing alloy of mechanistic psychology and deistic philosophy. Both of his principal psychological and philosophical themes, sense perception and the “association of ideas,” appealed to “vibrations” and “vibratiuncles” in the medulla oblongata as their ultimate explanatory point of reference. While embracing Malebranche’s “occasionalism” and Leibniz’s “preestablished harmony,” thus avoiding the full consequences Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now of the mechanist philosophy, Hartley had nonetheless attempted to explain all the operations of the mind in terms of these mechanical vibrations. Coleridge was in fact an admirer of Hartley’s—he had named his first child, born in 1796, David Hartley Coleridge—while resisting the mechanistic tendency of all his mentor’s ideas. In the fifth chapter of his Biographia literaria Coleridge inveighs against Hartley’s Hobbesian and Cartesian background and takes up the banner of Aristotle’s theory of association as developed in On the Soul and On Memory and Reminiscence. Aristotle’s theory, Coleridge affirms, makes no use of “particles propagating motion like billiard balls” or “nervous or animal spirits. . . that etch and re-etch engravings on the brain.” Such mechanistic models do not rank as hypotheses; they are not mere “suppositions”; they are rather “suffictions,” hypopoiēseis. Fictions superimposed or foisted on the phenomena, on what Coleridge calls “the circumstances of life.” Fictions beyond the Cartesian fiction. “From a hundred possible confutations,” writes Coleridge (166-67), “let one suffice.”

According to this system the idea or vibration a from the external object A becomes associable with the idea or vibration m from the external object M, because the oscillation a propagated itself so as to re-produce the oscillation m. But the original impression from M was essentially different from the impression [derived from] A: unless therefore different causes may produce the same effect, the vibration a could never produce the vibration m: and this therefore could never be the means, by which a and m are associated. To understand this, the attentive reader need only be reminded, that the ideas are themselves, in Hartley’s system, nothing more than their appropriate configurative vibrations. It is a mere delusion of the fancy to conceive the pre-existence of the ideas, in any chain of association, as so many differently coloured billiard-balls in contact, so that when an object, the billiard-stick, strikes the first or white ball, the same motion propagates itself through the red, green, blue and black, and sets the whole in motion. No! we must [i.e., would have to] suppose the very same force, which constitutes the white ball, to constitute the red or black; or the idea of a circle to constitute the idea of a triangle; which is impossible.

Coleridge now proceeds from Hartley’s theory of association to the neural mechanism undergirding it. He rejects forthwith the vocabulary of “habits” and “dispositions” in questions concerning the nerves, however unavoidable that vocabulary becomes whenever we try to relate mechanistic theory to everyday experience, to “the circumstances of life.” The “nerve” itself, far from supplying an Archimedian point for psychology, proves to beArchimedes. I have it! My memory’s not so bada fiction. Coleridge compares the “nerve” (and one must wonder whether the situation would change at all if he spoke of “neural states,” much beloved in contemporary analytical philosophical discussions) to “the flint which the wag placed in the pot as the first ingredient of his stone-broth, requiring only salt, turnips, and mutton, for the remainder!” Even if we grant the existence of atomic nerves, however, two alternatives emerge. Either the nerve is restricted to one vibration, one idea, in which case the “propagation” required by association creates an anarchical situation of purely arbitrary concatenations; or the nerve is capable of several vibrations, and it becomes impossible to say why at any given time precisely this or that vibration is preferred to the others. Were the mechanistic psychology of associationism true, Coleridge concludes, “our whole life would be divided between the despotism of outward impressions, and that of senseless and passive memory.” The lordly law of mechanical association “would itself be the slave of chances” (171).

Coleridge’s critique of psychophysical mechanism is one of the grandparents of contemporary phenomenological and “humanistic” psychological critiques. Both are unmistakably of the lineage of German Idealism, which never succumbed to the allures of the machineBut I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging formsand which preferred to cultivate links with ancient Greek, Cabalistic, and Gnostic thought. Both of these traits are clearly visible in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Erwin Straus’s phenomenological critiques of mechanistic neurophysiology—if only because the neurophysiologies to which they are responding are themselves direct descendants of Hartley’s, Hobbes’s, and Descartes’ mechanistic conceptions of sensation and memory. Before taking up their critical analyses, we should therefore try briefly to characterize contemporary neurophysiology as a culmination of the typographic and iconographic tradition, a tradition that founders in the rough seas of ancient engrammatological problems.

The neurophysiologist tries to determine what sorts of biochemical changes occur in and among the neurons of the brain during various stages of the memory process. His or her guiding question is how perceptual experience is consolidated and conserved, whether by means of “traces” or “engrams” in the cerebral cortex, by “reverberating circuits” of neurons there, or by “protein synthesis” (through RNA) within individual neurons supported by surrounding glia cells. No one can gainsay the advances made in the technical penetration of the neuron and its molecular constituents. Even where results are disputed (as in transfer-of-training studies, in which injections of RNA or homogenate extracts of brain tissue from trained animals seem sometimes, though not consistently, to transmit learning to untrained ones), the insights gained are impressive. Whatever criticisms follow, the fact remains that neurophysiology has helped to demonstrate in a convincing way that the rememberer—like the painter of whom Valéry and Merleau-Ponty speak—always “takes his body with him” when he remembers. How that living, working body is to be described remains the bedeviling problem.²¹

Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of reflex theory, worked out almost fifty years ago in La structure du comportement, to a surprising extent still applies to neurophysiological research into memory phenomena—with some minor qualifications. For example, it would have been impossible fifty years ago to hear a researcher assert that behavior theorists “all seem agreed” that the two principal elements of the classical reflex arc, stimulus and response, are to be regarded as “inextricably tied together,” viewed as “two continuously interacting factors in a continuous process.”²² Whether contemporary neurophysiology always remembers this self-imposed limitation is doubtful, however, since in practice it usually begins by asserting the existence of “an” electrical impulse leaping from the axon of one neuron to the dendrites of another. A second area where progress in conception seems to have been made, although again its impact on laboratory practice seems doubtful, is that of “localization.” Neurophysiologists today are more receptive to the notions of “structure” and “form” with regard to the central sector of the nervous system, and are likely to consider strict localization of functions in specific parts of the brain more a trap than an itinerary for research.²³ Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty’s description in La structure du comportement (22) of neurophysiology’s general approach to the organism remains all too relevant in the case of current research into memory:

The functioning of the organism is analyzed by proceeding from the periphery to the center; nerve phenomena are conceived on the model of discrete stimulations which are received at the surface of the organism; the discontinuity of these sensory terminations is extended into the interior of the nervous system, so much so that the functioning is finally represented as a mosaic of autonomous processes which interfere with and correct each other.

To be sure, neurophysiology no longer relies exclusively on the models of classical physics and mechanics in the tradition of La Mettrie’s Homme machine (1748) and Descartes’ Traité de l’Homme, models which, at the time Merleau-Ponty wrote, were already “obsolete” thanks to quantum mechanics and relativity theory. To what extent the notions of separate sectors of space and time, atomic units of matter, and linear causality through contiguity persist in neurophysiological theory and practice remains a disturbing question—hence the quotation marks or “scare-quotes” around the word “obsolete.” The prevailing models nowadays are those of data-processing (information theory, feedback mechanisms, cybernetics), artificial intelligence, cognitive science, electronics technology, and, strange though it may sound, business management. The seventeenth-and eighteenth-century French and English models have been superseded by twentieth-century American ones. No matter what their nationality, researchers tend to define memory in terms of “registration” or “encoding,” “retention” or “storage,” and “retrieval.” Just as an earthquake “registers” (typographically) on the Richter Scale, so are “selected sensory data” that have been reduced (iconographically) to a “code” registered (engrammatologically) in the nervous system. Such encoded data are “filed and stored for later use.” Finally, and most mysteriously, “we” can rummage through those files in response to a “call” for “specific information,” read or scan their contents (engrammatology reverting to iconography translating back to typography), retrieve what “we” are looking for, and (presumably) lay it on the desk of the Chairperson of the Board of Directors of the Mind. (If my readers should think it accidental that the model of office management is employed throughout neurophysiological research, let them apply to any government agency or to industry for funds to carry on such research: the predominance of the business model reflects the omnipresence of business investment in all contemporary scientific research; and any account that would neglect altogether the social-critical aspects of such research regresses to the status of what Marx called “German Ideology.”) With respect to the processes of encoding and storing these novel mnemic icons in the brain, models of electronics technology and data-processing take over. The ten to twelve billion neurons of the human brain and the network of over 4 × 10¹² synaptic connections among them are described as a “wiring pattern.” (Transistorized circuitry and microchip technology will of course already have made all talk of “wiring” obsolete.) Then a theoretical attempt is made, regressing to classical physics, to reduce each neuron, or at least each synapse between the axon and dendrites of any two neurons, or at the very least one chemical transmitter in the vesicles of the dendrites, to the reception of only one type of “electrical nerve impulse.” To explain various “patterns” of memory, as of perception, some sort of “interaction” among the atomic units is then postulated.

It is important to stress the imaginative character of such hypotheses based on models built on metaphors incised on wax tablets—less hypotheses, as Coleridge insisted, than hypopoiēseis, “suffictions”—and to identify the places where such a constellation appears to answer questions that the research itself cannot even properly pose. For instance, the path of impulses that effect perception of light—forgetting for a moment that the eye directs itself towards the reception of such impulses, so that all talk of “effecting” is really a subterfuge—has been traced as far as the sensory cortex of the brain. At that point even the simplest neural impulse vanishes into what researchers with a taste for classical literature call “the labyrinth,” those with a more highly developed culinary sense, “a mass of spaghetti.” Needless to say, the paths of the sundry impulses that must be postulated in cases of higher-order perception, thought, imagination, and memory are even less penetrable. The lack of direct or even indirect observation by means of electron microscopy, micropho-tography, and so on does not prevent the neurophysiologist from assuming that the “encoding” process depends on two factors: which synapses transmit the impulses, and how much activation occurs. In other words, specific localization and quantification remain the typtopical guidelines for research even when new models and metaphors appear to replace the old, when the wax turns to steel, plastic, or silicon. Nevertheless, the nature of neural activation, the type of circuitry established among neurons, and the kind of change instituted within the neuron or in the glia cells remain unsolved mysteries. One wishes that the candor shown by researcher K. S. Lashley back in 1950 were more common among neurophysiologists in our own day of public-relations optimism: after reviewing the neurophysiological evidence for memory, Lashley (cited by Pribram: 7) concluded that memory was really quite impossible. If we focus now on the engrammatological phase of recall or “retrieval,” where the enigma of memory and reminiscence comes to the fore, we may be inclined to agree with him.

For the model of memory based on the conception of typographic sensation, starting at the periphery of the nervous system (with receptors being activated by some sort of external stimulation) and moving toward the cerebral cortex (on the heels of electrical impulses), the phenomenon of recall—the fact that I can remember—is the most riddlesome of all. Because the model functions on the basis of external stimulation, the researcher must appeal to an invasion by similar or identical electrical impulses in order to account for retrieval. Thus in D. O. Hebb’s model for memory the “reverberating circuit” (shades of Hartleyan “vibratiuncles” and Hobbesian “rowling waves”!) of any given memory-content is declared to be “self-exciting” and closed; nevertheless, the circuit is set in motion typo-iconographically by the influx of identical or at least similar sensory data. Everyday experience does of course provide instances of such remembrance triggered by sensation. The night Joe Christmas breaks into Miss Burden’s kitchen and locates by smell and touch a bowl of food which he then begins to bolt down, the combination of smell, touch, and taste induces in him remembrance of his puritanical stepfather:

I’ll know it in a minute, I have eaten it before, somewhere. In a minute I will memory clicking knowing I see I see I more than see hear I hear I see my head bent I hear the monotonous dogmatic voice which I believe will never cease going on and on forever and peeping I see the indomitable bullet head the clean blunt beard they too bent and I thinking How can he be so nothungry and I smelling my mouth and tongue weeping the hot salt of waiting my eyes tasting the hot steam from the dish. “It’s peas,” he said, aloud. “For sweet Jesus. Field peas cooked with molasses.”²⁴

And yet to say that recall always depends upon sensory input is to deny what our experience also shows; namely, that Joe can think back to that indomitable bullet head even in the absence of field peas. Neither he nor we are wholly at the mercy of external stimuli when we remember. However, because the power of revery or reminiscence to bring those images back is inconceivable in terms of the prevailing model, the phenomenon is shunted aside in favor of what ostensibly can be more easily explained. Pribram’s admission that the customary model for memory consolidation and storage possesses “no satisfactory mechanism for information retrieval” is surely correct. Moreover, it exposes the bankruptcy of his own appeal to “computer programming” (61).

The difficulty in conceptualizing recall or retrieval, in accounting for mnemic output rather than neural input, arises from the dilemma we observed at the heart of the Cartesian account of memory. Descartes’ theory of “memory traces”—that is his term, we remember, so that it is no recent invention—and the neurophysiology descended directly from that theory presuppose what they wish to explain as “retrieval.” That is the basic lesson of the critical portions of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perceptual behavior, and it is a lesson that would bear repeating in a phenomenology of memory.²⁵ An implication for our pursuit of the sciences is that conceptual models often confound research at the very point when they appear to be most helpful, since they have a way of suggesting that research already knows what it has not yet even properly asked. The neurophysiologist says that after sensory experience has been registered, encoded in the neurons, and stored in the filing cabinets of the cerebral cortex, “we” can, upon demand, search for and retrieve the desired information. Who desires and demands? Who is the Chairperson of the Board? Who serves as his or her retrieving “we”?

In his contiguous papers on “Remembering and Infantile Amnesia” and “Memory Traces,”²⁶ Erwin Straus insistently poses the question of the “we” who read or scan the engrams. At least initially there is no question of altering in any fundamental way the terms of the traditional engrammatological aporia: “The trope of the engram belongs, it seems, to the archetype of interpretation” (59). Among Straus’s objections to the trope is one that restates the Aristotelian aporia, which Straus later identifies as “the fundamental problem” of a phenomenology of memory (62, 77). It involves the mysterious co-presence in the mind of typos and eikōn—in modern dress:

In fact, how could a memory image welded to a trace represent anything of the past? At the moment of sensory stimulation the impression was actual; with the activation of a trace, a memory image should become actual; impression and image each has its own particular place on the line of physical time. This certainly poses a formidable problem to any theory of traces: an engram, though generated in the past, functions in the present; and, in accordance with the theory, the corresponding memory image must be present. Taken in isolation, an engram cannot represent another thing. Belonging exclusively to the present, it cannot represent the past.

We shall in a moment confront the related problems of the time-line and representation, the latter of course to be taken quite literally as the problem of re-presentation. Straus provides two striking images of the typographic neurophysiology of memory: it is as though goods were being stored in a warehouse, or guests lodged in a metropolitan hotel, without anyone “keeping a record” of what, who, or where they are (63). What is missing from such accounts is a certain ill-defined yet irrefragable “continuity” in the personal existence of the one doing or suffering the remembering; what is missing is the “nexus” that Heidegger (after Dilthey) and Merleau-Ponty (after Heidegger) called the Zusammenhang des Lebens. (See chapter 6, below.) The continuity, cohesion, or coherence of a life, according to Straus, resides in the capacity for a gleaning or gathering, perhaps a very general sort of reading. And yet in “the modern interpretation of the engram,” from Hobbes to the present, “the reader is eliminated” (77). In the “dynamic trace theory” of Hobbes, our awareness of the past is reduced to a passing sensation; the of in the phrase “awareness of the past” is now a purely subjective genitive, and the remembered qualities are soon to become “secondary qualities.”

In his critique of contemporary neurophysiological trace theory—a theory more miraculous than the story of Lazarus’s resurrectionKnocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the jobinasmuch as it purports to be a description of natural events—Straus (96) distinguishes three stages. First, a trace or engram, defined as “the more or less lasting alteration of the nervous tissue,” is engraved or impressed. Second, in preparation for the eventual reawakening of the trace, the trace itself is placed in cold storage and thus made to disappear: “What has happened is undone.” Third, the impression is struck once again in retrieval, the trace drawn once more. In this “magical physiology,” the cycle of engrammatological miracles goes on ceaselessly. It is perhaps the second phase, however, the temporary obfuscation of the trace (which Straus compares to a footprint in the snow, a “vestige” in the literal Augustinian sense), that is most miraculous.

However one may imagine the reactivation of a trace, it can only begin to have effect where the impression had ended, i.e., to stay with the example of the footprint, deep at the bottom of the impression. A trace, from the physiological or physical point of view, cannot return to the starting position by itself. . . . Its reactivation needed a preparatory process by which the “more or less lasting changes” would become erased, so to speak, and had then to reproduce themselves by themselves (97).

In Straus’s own slipping into the imperfect tense (“Its reactivation needed. . .”) the imperfection of the model is marked. In this “ping-pong game of misinterpretations” nothing is won except by ruse, inasmuch as the explanation everywhere makes secret appeals to what it is supposed to explain. Straus’s recapitulation highlights two such subterfuges: first, the iconographic belief and confidence that the perceptual image and the mnemic image are as identical as two prints produced by the same typographic plate; second, an unending confusion concerning the plate itself as both signet and image, both cutting edge and primal print, such that the reactivation can be thought to occur by virtue of an alternation of self-effacement and “a kind of phosphorescence” (98). Whether the stimulus is portrayed in terms of closed or open circuitry, that is to say, whether it is held to be exposed to other external stimuli or to interference from other regions of the brain, the identical problem remains. How does one explain the way in which a trace could ever find its way backBeen walking in muck somewherefrom its final to its initial state, find its way back without losing contact with that final state, “so that it swings back there,” the sole of the boot raising the crushed snow or squished muck only to depress it again? We shall not linger over Straus’s proposed solutions to these dilemmas in what he calls “The Phenomenology of the Trace” (83-90). Let it suffice to note three things that he reserves for the “long preparatory work” that will have to precede “a new physiological theory of meaning” (99).

First, any effective theory of the trace must be able to make manifest the course and flow of past events by going back, as it were, beyond the discrete units of the preterite to the pluperfect tense in which their history is written.

Second, such a regress would have to establish something similar—although the comparison here is mine—to what Heidegger in sections 17 and 18 of Being and Time calls the Verweisungszusammenhang and Bewandtnisganzheit, the nexus or node of references within a significative whole.

Third, the significative whole of constituted memory would itself have to be scanned by something like a gleaning consciousness: “Traces must be read.” But this means that the functioning of traces does not found memory; rather, the reading of traces presupposes memory (98—99). Memory must therefore be a constituent of the global phenomenon of being-in-the-world.

Straus does not himself appear to be fully convinced that phenomenology as such will be able to guide and undertake such research. We have already heard him invoke the “long preparatory work” that he deems essential. His “Conclusion” ends with these words: “Should we ever regain the clearing in this forest of problems, then we will have returned from our long wandering not with a new answer but with a new kind of questioning” (100). That new kind of questioning, at least as far as the phenomenological tradition is concerned, is perhaps to be found less in Husserl than in Heidegger (discussed in chapter 6, below) and in Merleau-Ponty, to whom we shall now turn.²⁷ However, lest by now we have lost hold of the aporias and enigmas of memory and reminiscence—and after delving into so much detailed material, never mind how superficially, there is every reason for our having forgotten them—we may find it useful to invoke a straightforward and powerful hypomnetic. Even though Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of temporality in Being and Nothingness is perhaps the least memorable of his long work, his presentation of the classical problem of memory is matchless. He would forgive us for following the advice he himself proffered: after hearing him pose the problems we shall turn to Merleau-Ponty’s efforts to redefine—if not resolve—them. “Them,” I say, putting the “aporias and enigmas” of typography, iconography, and engrammatology into a cautionary plural, even if, as Straus has shown, the problem since Plato and Aristotle is the presence in memory of the past. Sartre writes:

All theory of memory implies presuppositions concerning the being of the past. These presuppositions, which have never been elucidated, have obscured the problem of memory [souvenir] and that of temporality in general. Once and for all we must pose the question: What is the being of a past being [or a being past: un etre passe]? (. . .) We say that the past is no longer [n’est plus]. From this point of view it seems that one would want to attribute being to the present alone. This ontological presupposition has engendered the famous theory of cerebral traces: since the past no longer is, since it has foundered in nothingness, the continued existence of our memory [souvenir] depends on the present modification of our being; it will depend, for example, on an imprint presently marked on a group of brain cells. Thus all is present: the body, the present perception, and the past as a trace present in the body. All is in act, inasmuch as the trace does not have virtual existence qua memory [souvenir], but is altogether an actual trace. If the memory [le souvenir] is reborn, it is in the present, in consequence of a present process, namely, the rupture of protoplasmic equilibrium in the cell group under consideration. Psychophysiological parallelism, which is instantaneous and extratemporal, is there in order to explain how this physiological process is correlative to a strictly psychic yet equally present phenomenon: the appearance of the memory image in consciousness. The more recent notion of the engram adds nothing to this, but only adorns this theory with pseudo-scientific terminology. Yet if all is present, how explain the pastness [passivite] of remembering; that is to say, the fact that in its intention a consciousness that reminisces [se rememore] transcends the present in order to aim at the event back there where it was.²⁸

One way of describing Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical project as a whole would be to say that the phenomenologist endeavored to show that the “we” cited earlier can effectively transcend the present, though never by free-floating anticipations of the future or wistful absorption in the past. The “we” can be neither mechanism’s bundle of responses nor transcendental philosophy’s homunculus hovering in the mind. Commenting on Descartes’ Dioptrique in a working note of September, 1959, Merleau-Ponty asks: “Who will see the image painted in the eyes or in the brain? There must in the end be a thought of this image—Descartes himself realizes that we always posit a little man inside man, that our objectifying view of our body always obliges us to search farther inside [plus au-dedans] for this man who sees, whom we thought we beheld beneath our eyes.”²⁹ Merleau-Ponty is fully aware that homunculus’ position is impossible: shooed out into the world in order to be the organist’s or foun-taineer’s digits—the digits of the objects that press on the senses—he is then chased back into the machine so that his own digits can sketch, paint, punch, and weave, his own eyes read, so that “our” soul can cognize.

Yet what he [Descartes? homunculus? both?] does not see is that the primordial vision at which one must arrive cannot be the thought of seeing [pensée de voir]—This thought, this unveiling of being which ultimately is for someone, is once again the little man in man, but this time compressed to a metaphysical point. Because in the end we only know of that vision which pertains to a composite substance, and it is this subtilized vision that we call thought—If being is to unveil itself, it will be in the face of a transcendence and not an intentionality, it will be brute being caught in the shifting sands [I’être brut enlisé], a being that reverts to itself [qui revient à lui-même]: it will be the sensible hollowing itself out [qui se creuse]—

The dwindling, shifting punctuation of the note reflects the unfinished character of the thought—eking out for itself a kind of hollow. Yet we dare not stamp Merleau-Ponty’s as simply one more type or icon in the engrammatological tradition, as though the “primacy of perception” ever meant to provide a final fixed abode for homunculus. The creux or hollow Merleau-Ponty has in mind as the site of transcendence, a site caught forever in brute immanence, has everything to do with memory: se creuser la tête means to make a great effort to recall something, to reflect intensely (Robert). This hollow in the flesh is not an engram in the wax slab or waxen gland, nor a container for catching birds and icons; it is on the verge of a very different kind of thinking. Merleau-Ponty uses the word creux in (at least) two crucial places late in chapter four of The Visible and the Invisible, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” (VI, 193, 198), to indicate a pit or hollow that opens of itself in the otherwise too solid flesh of the world, a concavity that allows there to be visibility; he also uses the word to designate “a certain interiority, a certain absence, a negativity that is not nothing” in the otherwise too crystalline flesh of ideas. Nor is this pit or hollow—the immemorial cavern of memory from Augustine through Hegel—absent from Merleau-Ponty’s earlier work. His Phenomenology of Perception invokes it (again, at least) twice in the chapter on “Temporality,” identifying a hollow within the ecstatic subject, the hollow “where time is made.”³⁰ Thus the hollowunder the sacred rooftree, over the bowls of memory where every hollow holds a hallow, with a pledge till the drengs in the Salmon Househas everything to do with memory.

While exposing the constructivist fallacy or “experience error” in the accounts of perception in classical psychology and neurophysiology—which borrow from perceptual experience the very elements they use to “construct” such experience, elements such as “association” and “the projection of memories”—Merleau-Ponty is led to a kind of gap or fissure that allows him to pose what he calls “the true problem of memory”:

It is a matter of understanding how, by its own life, and without transporting complementary materials within a mythical unconscious, consciousness can with time alter the structure of its landscapes—how at each instant its former experiences are present to it in the form of a horizon which it is able to reopen, if it takes that horizon as its theme, in an act of reminiscence [remémoration], but which it can also leave “at the margins,” from which point it grants to the perceived a present atmosphere and significance. A field always at the disposal of consciousness and which, for that very reason, encompasses and envelops all its perceptions, an atmosphere, a horizon or, if you will, a series of given “montages” that assign to it a temporal situation—such is the presence of the past which renders possible the distinct acts of perception and reminiscence. . . . To remember [se souvenir] is not to restore under the gaze of consciousness a tableau of the self-subsistent past; it is to ensconce oneself in the horizon of the past and to unfold little by little the perspectives contained there until the experiences bounded by that horizon are, as it were, lived anew in their temporal place. (PP, 30)

Yet this field “always at the disposal of consciousness” becomes increasingly problematic in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology. The capacity to live the past “anew” is not only limited by the present perspectives of consciousness but also radically dependent on what might be called “an immense Memory of the world” (PP, 84), to which our own memories constantly appeal. Our access to that mysterious capital Memory, itself reminiscent of what Descartes called local memory, is less a matter of consciousness than of the lived body, which is our anchorage in the world. It is perhaps more properly reminiscent of the memory in the luthier’s fingers, not grasping the punch but plucking the strings, dancing a Gavotte. In his chapter “The Body as Expression, and Speech” (PP, 211), that access to memory—with considerable help from Proust—receives its finest expression in Merleau-Ponty’s work: “The role of the body in memory is understood only if memory is not the constituting consciousness of the past but an effort to reopen time, starting from the implications of the present, and only if the body, being our permanent means of ‘adopting a stance’ and of thus fabricating for ourselves a range of pseudo-presents, is the means by which we communicate with time as well as space.” At this point in his text (211) Merleau-Ponty inserts these famous lines from the “Overture” to Swann’s Way, the overture to Combray and to Proustian recollection as such:

. . . when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from them the direction of the wall, the position of the furniture, in order to piece together and give a name to the house in which it must be living.³¹

Here we have perhaps the finest creative interpretation of those words from Cratylus with which we began: the body rescues and preserves the soul by signaling to it, or giving it signs, granting it an index on the world. Without the body the sleep of the soul is long. Merleau-Ponty continues to cite the Proust passage as follows:

Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulderblades, offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room imagined, whirling madly through the darkness. [Merleau-Ponty deletes a number of lines, then takes up the thread.]. . . My body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally preserving from the past what my mind ought never to have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the nightlight in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimneypiece of Sienna marble in my bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt’s house, in those far-distant days which, at the moment of waking, seemed to me to be actually there without my representing them precisely.

The human body and its memory, the body as lived rather than the pallid cadaver with waxen glands or volatile paraffin ones, remain for Merleau-Ponty the secret guardian of that “thickness,” “opacity,” and “depth” in the hollow (creux) that both limits and guarantees our being in the world. And Proust remains for him the exemplary witness of those “musical ideas” that resist capture and reduction to pure presence. The lived body and its memory serve as the sentinels of what at the conclusion of his chapter “Sensation,” which traditionally might have concluded with the sharp, snapping report of punch perforating taut canvas, Merleau-Ponty quietly invokes as “an original past, a past that has never been present” (280). Un passé qui n’a jamais été présent. With that phrase (which we are accustomed to attribute to Levinas and Derrida, but not to Merleau-Ponty) we find ourselves at the closure of the tradition I am calling typographic, iconographic, and engrammatological, and on the verge of something quite new and difficult to think. Nor should Merleau-Ponty’s reference to “an original past” deceive us. “My” possession of “my” time, writes Merleau-Ponty at the outset of his chapter “Others and the Human World,” is “always deferred,” toujours différée (398). The “originary past” is a matter not of possession but of “opacity” (403). If there is a past for us, it is only as an “ambiguous presence”; we experience its ouverture precisely as an opening upon “this opaque mass” (418). Existence “assumes” its past, whether by accepting or rejecting it, so that we are always, as Proust says, “perched on the pyramid of the past” (450). And yet such a perch offers no bird’s-eye-view either of the world around us or of our own past, so that if the pyramid seems to elevate us to that “atmosphere of time” which we call “eternity” (451) it will be important to remember the precariousness of our foothold (475). The sentiment of eternity, nourishing itself on time, is hypocritical (484). Thus the cohesion of a life is not perfect pyramidal equilibrium, with each declining plane supporting the others, the apex formed by their interrupted fall pointing beyond itself into lovely blueness. It is not a matter of perches but of difficult and sometimes dangerous descents:

But the continuous interlocking of fields of presence, by which this access to the past is itself guaranteed to me, is essentially characterized by the fact that it can only be effected little by little and step by step. Each present, because it is by its very essence of the present, excludes juxtaposition with other presents; even in the far-distant past I can embrace a certain period of my life only by unrolling it afresh according to its own proper tempo. (483)

That “my” past, the past of my body and its memory, its hollow in being, has its own time and tact, its own tempo, is perhaps one way to characterize those musical ideas of Proust’s Recherche. If we recollect a moment longer and in somewhat greater detail Proust’s famous mémoire involuntaire, it may well lead us to the verge of Merleau-Ponty’s hollow, that creux or crucible of time and space which Timaeus calls hypodokhē, kratēra, and khōra.

So much emerges from the fragrance of that cup of tea and taste of madeleine—not simply the contents of the four final pages of the “Overture” but the whole of Combray, the entire narrative that follows. That fragrance and taste, renewed at the end of “Combray,” open onto the story of “Swann in Love.” Fragrance and taste are not facts sought out by intelligence; Proust compares them to Celtic burial grounds of moments once lived.³² It is not intelligence or even sense that calculates their pastness. Rather, the emotional incandescence of the emergent memories themselves, pulsing on a wave of jouissance, yields whatever “real presence” the past may yield up; and the sheer basard of our crossing those burial grounds again, that is, of our encountering the objects, odors, noises, and cracked pavements where they hide, determines whether or not this “resurrection” prophesied by a “magical pact” will in fact occur. Thus the narrator of Remembrance portrays a familiar section of Paris but confesses himself unable to contribute to it an “element” he has “long lost”: “. . . the feeling that makes us not merely regard the thing as a spectacle but believe in it as in a being without equivalent. . .” (50/66). The upsurgent wave of joy—the arkhē kinēseōs—marks not the end but the onset of the search. For however much the narrator of Recherche and the theoretician of Contre Sainte-Beuve disparage the intellectual search, it is intelligence itself that must confirm its own inferiority and attest to the eminence of “instinct” or “sensibility.” Hence the narrator carefully arranges a mise-en-scène for the possible recurrence of the flood of recollections that accompanied “the first mouthful”; he alternates highly disciplined repetitions of effort with periods of rest and recuperation. That said, for all his pains there is no telling whether or when the directives will succeed. At first, and for long stretches, nothing. Then: “I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place [qui se déplace] and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not yet know what it is, but I can feel it rising slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed [j’entends la rumeur des distances traversées]” (35/46). The narrator anticipates that it is a “visual memory” on the rise, an “image” somehow linked to the fragrance and the taste of tea and madeleine, wedded to them, but not, we might add, incised or inscribed typographically and iconographically in them. The image is at first wholly without contours, “and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it—it being the one possible interpreter—to translate me to the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea” (35/46). As he pens the words inseparable compagne, the narrator—if it is the narrator who is writing—finds himself on the verge, the absolute suspense and suspension of the memory that may or may not be mounting. Clearly, the narrator or writer who appears to wield the verge as pen or plume, though never as scepter, is not wholly in control. He is like the dreamer of whom Merleau-Ponty says (PP, 196), “La verge du rêveur devient ce serpent.” “Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness,” the narrator continues. Hence the repeated, bootless efforts. “Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down towards it.” It is thus not a matter of windlass and spike and the old heave-ho, but of inclination, straining, and above all, waiting. He struggles only against the inveterate faintness of heart (lâcheté) that urges him to quit the verge, shoo the serpent, and assume the rounds of dailiness. Waiting. Vigilant. “And then suddenly [tout d’un coup] the memory returns” (36/46). Not simply “the memory” returns, but the whole of Combray. It seems incredible that so much can arise from so little, and we are perhaps wise to remember all the writer’s ruses—since the verge is as much stylus as it is snake and abyss. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past stands there, itself a work of art as much as a memorial. We are perhaps suspicious of Proust’s Celtic burial ground and his mystic resurrection.

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists; after the beings are dead, after the things are broken and scattered; alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to recall; waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; ready to bear unfalteringly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence [goutelette presque impalpable], the immense edifice of recollection. (36/47)

The lip of the narrator’s teacup is itself a curved porcelain crater, a verge gathering the vapors that quite by chance ensure the cohesion of a life—or at least the cohesion of a work of art. The rim of that verge marks the ouverture upon Combray, the Combray that was. “And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour, differentiate themselves. . ., so in that moment. . . the whole of Combray. . . sprang into being, town and gardens, from my cup of tea” (36/47-48). The question of course remains as to what this oriental amusement, so imbued with gardens and flowers and writing, involves. All the cunning and discernment of the writer wielding the verge, no doubt; and all the patience and helplessness of the one who waits upon the verge. It would be foolish to think that we could ever simply opt for one rather than the other. Perhaps memory itself works as do those authors to whom Merleau-Ponty refers when he says that they begin to write their books without knowing what they will put in them.³³

The duplicity of the verge gradually emerges in the final chapters of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology and throughout The Visible and the Invisible. The hollow in being where time and space are made is formed by dehiscence and explosion (PP, 480, 487). The “now” of time is no more than a synthesis of transition, and time itself is as much ecstasis as coherence. The “field of presence,” in which alone, according to Merleau-Ponty, I can find my way back to a past time, is not monolithic. A crack or fissure, une fêlure interne (PP, 515), reminiscent of what Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art” calls der Riss, invariably marks that field.³⁴ Time is (ambiguously) both the cycles of the body’s organic functions and the surge and thrust (jaillissement: PP, 517) of my personal existence. My lived body is both center and diffusion, both personal existence and “double anonymity,” that is to say, an anonymity arising from the “generality” of a shared intercorporeal world but also from the very “individuality” of my existence (PP, 512). Perhaps the most telling evidence of such anonymity, as of the ambiguity that haunts every field of presence, occurs in what Merleau-Ponty comes to call “the problem of passivity.” He invokes that problem in the Phenomenology of Perception in the context of a discussion of Husserlian “passive synthesis” and Heideggerian ecstasis (487—88). In the first place, what we call passivity is not an “alien reality” imposed on us by some causal action “from the outside.” Rather, it is an investissement, the very situation of our being, “which we recommence perpetually.” Passivity is the “acquired” spontaneity of our existence: Merleau-Ponty does not shy from the oxymoron of an acquired spontaneity, “this monster,” which Sartre confronts but forthwith rejects (489). Indeed, the problem of passivity that lies at the heart of the phenomenology of temporality poses the ultimate challenge to any dialectical philosophy. Or, as we shall say in chapter 5, any hyperdialectical philosophy.

That at least is the theme of Merleau-Ponty’s “Monday Course” in 1954-55, a theme that reemerges in his chapter “Interrogation and Dialectic” in The Visible and the Invisible.³⁵ The problem of passivity—of sleep and dreamlife, the unconscious, and memory (la mémoire), all of which testify to the acquired spontaneity of existence—is the ultimate obstacle for modern metaphysical reflection. This is not to deny what he says elsewhere, namely, that once one is “installed” in such reflection and proceeds to reduce sleep, the unconscious, and memory to the subject’s constituting consciousness, these cease to be obstacles to reflection. And it remains true that even outside the philosophy of reflection the subject is not utterly undone by these obstacles: the subject is not a mere link in that causal chain which the natural sciences assume to be cosmic order. Here as elsewhere Merleau-Ponty is bound to navigate the straits between mechanism and intellectualism, although this of itself tells us nothing about his relation to typography, iconography, and engrammatology, inasmuch as that tradition has bridgeheads on both shores of these straits.

Perceptual experience displays “a genre of being with respect to which the subject is not sovereign, but without its being imprisoned in it” (R, 66). “Perceptual experience” here of course has an expanded sense, not simply because it includes memory (memory was included from the start, even by classical psychology), but because Merleau-Ponty now wishes to elaborate an “ontology of the perceived world” beyond the realm of “sensuous nature.” The course thus tries to understand how consciousness can be “inspired by a past that apparently escapes it” and how it can “finally reopen an access to the past” (R, 66-67). Passivity—also to be understood as a sense of “pastness”—becomes possible for consciousness insofar as consciousness “realizes a certain gap [ecart], a certain variant in a field of existence that is already instituted, a field that is already behind us” (R, 67). Such realization is not Husserlian Sinngebung, a term that is exhausted in and by the chapter “Temporality” in the Phenomenology, but an operation at once more technical and more playful. The “weight” of this field of existence, “like the weight of a volant, comes to play a role precisely in those actions by which we transform it.” The volant may be (and here I eliminate all but a few of its many meanings) a shuttlecock in a game of badminton, veering in mid-air both according to its own center of gravity and in response to the blow of the racquet; or the slanted blade or “wing” of a windmill, turning on the oblique, slantingly; or a sort of “flywheel” in a piece of machinery, or the strange rotating butterfly that operates the chimes of a clock; or the steering wheel of a car; all of which combine weight and motion—a sort of acquired spontaneity—in order to assure to a given operation a measure of equilibrium; or, perhaps stemming from this last sense, a “reserve” or “margin” of play that one might gain. (See VI, 257, where Merleau-Ponty speaks of philosophical reflection as an essentially limited reflexivity, calling it a “prolongation of the volant of the body.”) At all events, if it is a shuttlecock, our existence is not designed for high-altitude thinking; if a steering wheel, not designed for infinite manipulation; if a reserve, one that constantly feeds motion. Living is not primarily “giving a meaning” to things and “imposing significations” on events. It is rather a “vortex of experience that is formed with our birth at the point of contact between the ‘outside’ and the one who is called upon to live it” (R, 67). Merleau-Ponty places the “dehors” in quotation marks, precisely in the way Heidegger writes “draussen” in section 13 of Being and Time, presumably for the same reason: the subject is always already on the “outside,” even when it appeals to its “sphere of immanence.”

Turning specifically to memory, Merleau-Ponty notes that phenomenology of memory is “idling,” in neutral gear, inasmuch as the fundamental aporia of “conservation” versus “construction,” which I touched upon in my remarks on Locke, can be neither resolved nor circumvented. Memory seems to be construction insofar as we can read or scan only those “representations” that consciousness has put there—that is, translating into the language we have been using, engrammatology allows us to construct each time as though for the first time the icon typographically impressed there. Yet memory seems equally to be conservation, inasmuch as the icon is read or scanned hos allou, with a view to something else, something that was. Thus even if memory were construction, notes Merleau-Ponty, there would have to be another memory behind the constructivist one, measuring the value or verisimilitude of its constructions; constructivist memory would have to have access to “a past freely given and in inverse proportion to our voluntary memory” (R, 72), which is perhaps what the “immense Memory of the world” was to have granted. Now comes the decisive statement of the course summary: “The immanence and the transcendence of the past, the activity and the passivity of memory, can be reconciled only if we refrain from posing the problem in terms of representation.” If “representation” here means the entire process according to which an eikōn is typed into the wax slab of the soul, or an engram incised in the waxen glands of the Cartesian machine de terre, then Merleau-Ponty is calling for nothing less than an end to the tradition of typography, iconography, and engrammatology. That he is calling for such an end is corroborated by the remarks in his “Monday Course” that follow.

Not even the present is an object of representation or Vorstellung, Merleau-Ponty insists, so that the parousial underpinning of the tradition is itself undermined. The present, as a field of presence, a field of existence, is “a certain unique position of index for being-in-the-world.” Our relations with it, and thus with the past as well, can be attributed only to “a postural schema that possesses and sketches out [détient et désigne] a series of temporal positions and possibilities.” We might pause to wonder whether the “detaining” and “designing” of the postural “schema” can successfully resist traditional inscriptions, which do not have their power for nothing. Merleau-Ponty tries to resist slipping into the marks and traces of the metaphysical—that is, parousial—past by attributing the postural schema to the lived body. It is the body that enables us to respond to the silent questions “Where am I?” and “What time is it?” These questions, cited by Paul Claudel as queries posed and answered by the body, Merleau-Ponty reiterates in “Interrogation and Dialectic” (VI, 140). The reiteration is indicative of the fact that the problem of passivity or acquired spontaneity opens onto the most general questions of Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. A phenomenology of passivity would deceive itself, he warns us at the conclusion of the resume, if it simply persisted in playing off against one another the positive and negative poles of dialectical philosophy. It is a matter not of reconciling opposites but of causing the traditional categories to tremble; it is a matter not of “supplementary clarifications” but of a new way to philosophize. The consequences for the question at hand, memory, are as follows: the alternatives of construction and conservation and the representational thinking on which both are based must fall away, as must the apparent evidence of the very word memory. Remembering is not the contrary of forgetting. “True memory” is found at the intersection of remembrance and oblivion, “at the instant where the memory returns which was both forgotten and preserved by our forgetting,” à l’instant où revient le souvenir oublié et gardi par Youbli (R, 72). That instant of intersection is the verge—presuming that one could find it and name it while being on it. On the verge, remembering and forgetting are “two modes of our oblique relation to a past that is present to us only by the determinate emptiness it leaves in us.”

“Both forgotten and preserved.” “Determinate emptiness.” “Acquired spontaneity.” We are left with these paradoxes and flights of hyperdialectic. If Merleau-Ponty expatiates on them at all it is in that same “Monday Course” of I954-55.³⁶

Even when I appear to renew myself, it always happens through an application of my past, my earlier history. I am passive when I move myself and am active even when I am subjected to events. Passivity is bound up with our proper being.

Yet how is it with the problem of memory? Memory is the irruption of other things in us. Of course, memory is often conceived as conservation. However, because of the very dimension that is proper to it, i.e., the past, it is utterly impossible that this past should be a diminished, debilitated, and pallid being, preserved somewhere in consciousness.

The past is no longer. Yet it is no mere meaning. For it is neither a weakened being nor a nothing nor a not-being. It is being-that-has-been, a modality of being, of that being which while separated from the present remains nonetheless in contact with the present. A theory of memory demands that one repeat from top to bottom the analysis of the present.

If the present becomes past, this by no means happens by virtue of a weakening of the present time. For it is through the body that we have access to the past. How does one remember an earlier bodily state and an earlier mode of being? My present body possesses variations that I may realize in the future; the earlier modes of my embodiment become the history of my current being in the world. The body schema implies that my body is currently polarized by particular attitudes and modes of behavior. That is true with regard to both space and time. Thus the past cannot be deduced, inasmuch as it cannot be grasped. It is encompassed by the present, “I can.” One can actualize the past, but one cannot realize it. Thus the body assumes the role of a mediator in memory. Time is read off from the body because time incorporates itself in the body, is sedimented there: the body appears as temporality, sedimentation, temporalizing, corporeal mediation between me and the past. Thus the earlier problem is transformed: it is no longer a matter of memory as conservation of images, memories; just as little is it a matter of the transcendental faculty of memory. Here the experience of a memory that is returning from oblivion stands at the center. It appears that thanks to this conception we may be able to overcome the problematic alternative between a consciousness that conserves and a consciousness that constructs the past. For we bring both concepts into positive interrelation, and we say that through forgetting the past is present [durch das Vergessen ist die Vergangenheit gegenwärtig]. This of course presupposes a new philosophy. . . .

There is no way we can linger here with this “new philosophy,” which is more interrogation than dialectic, more a holding-at-a-distance than an approximation (VI, 137—38). Again Merleau-Ponty invokes the word creux, the hollow or “free space” that both enables interrogation and prevents its perfect fulfillment. Merleau-Ponty’s reflection itself becomes increasingly memorious of mortality, not because he will have died while engaged in it, but because it is the very “unrolling of our life,” our life en train de vivre (VI, 140), Coleridge’s “circumstances of life.” Nor can we follow Merleau-Ponty along the via regia of his reflection into “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” past its various cairns and pathmarkers: the element of flesh, the doubling, dehiscence, invagination, and “quilting” or “clustering” (capitonnage)—each of these serving as a signpost toward “a differentiation that is never fully achieved,” an ultimate “reversibility.” Let it suffice to remember that the “absolute truth” of reversibility, the flesh of the world, is for Merleau-Ponty not a termination or even an approximation but—as he was fond of saying—the index of a problem. Not the index that imperiously draws spilled water across a tabletop, but the index that points unwaveringly to the ambiguous semaphore that is the human body. Which Merleau-Ponty always remembers never to forget.

We began the chapter by inquiring into the spaces of memory’s graphics, whether reputedly psychic or somatic. Plato’s Cratylus and Philebus encouraged us to insist that somatic space remains crucial for all graphics, even when the soul is said to be emancipated from that space. Precisely because the pristine sign is the herm, a gravemarker, it is the living body that salvages the soul and that signals. Perhaps it is also that which grants the signs of memory, reminiscence, and writing.

Augustine’s caverns of memory and mind are dreams of a presence devoid of somatic space. Thus the three dimensions of time reduce to one praesentia, and praesentia corresponds to one of the three classes of objects in the memory, to wit, those of the arts and sciences, perfectly interior, occupying “no space.” However, only by a series of typographic, iconographic, and engrammatological maneuvers can all three classes of objects be subsumed under presence—the presence that is proximate to the absent father (I, 4: “most hidden and most present”), as close as Augustine will get to the father, the father who receives all the maternal accolades (IV, 1: “sucking your milk”) and who is approached in speech (X, 1: ideo loquor) and above all by wielding the verge (X, 1: in stilo).

A brief excursus on the art of memory and its long-standing tradition of “inner writing” brought us to Descartes. We examined his not altogether successful distinction between two powers of memory, the corporeal and the intellectual, finding that from the period of the Regulae onward the identical engrammatological and figural model served both. Nor was it simply a matter of the identical model prevailing: rather, the crucial problem proved to be communication from the outside to the inside, exterior to interior, superficies to depth, no matter whether the memory in question was said to be wholly intelligible, wholly corporeal, or a mixture of both. As the ready substitution of writing for memory in the Regulae suggested, writing is remembering and reading the essential form of reminiscence.

In the Treatise on Man, that fiction which in its account of memory tries to get on without a reader, the animal spirits, the petite glande, and the soul must nonetheless retain the power to scan and glean images. They must retain the power of regard, even if such a power resists description as a mimetic effect of the machine. The soul itself appears as a mimetic effect, and that means an effect of memory, so that memory in Descartes’ mime seems to exercise the most powerfully reflexive and perhaps even disseminative effect. It becomes impossible to tell which is the most expendable item in Descartes’ model for memory: the animal spirits, the animal spirits, the cerebral tapestry of region B, the nerve tubes, the intervals, the rational soul and its “will,” or the gland. An account that seems to presuppose at each stage what it means to explain, if indeed strategies of fiction can be said to cloak the will to explain, Descartes’ impressive machine de terre nonetheless survives across the ages. Perhaps the most intriguing aspects of the machine—this Rube Goldberg of memory and reminiscence—are the series of barely adumbrated differences that go into its making. The explanatory power of the contrivance resides less in its perfect centeredness, identity, and selfsameness than in differences (1) as identified by the sensus communis within the gland, (2) in texture or substance between the tissues of the brain and the gland itself, (3) between the bilateral nature of every other part of the perceiving-remembering machine and the monogenic gland, (4) in the gland’s slightly off-center, highly mobile situation in the brain, and (5) in the variable ejaculatory force and vitality of the parties of spirits. Yet these very differences threaten to demolish the machine—for example, by making it impossible to distinguish nerve tubes from intervals, so that the animal spirits may rarify and evaporate to the surface of the body, the exterior surface, inasmuch as the porous skin can hardly be expected to contain what penetrates the taut weft of the brain. If not only the fountaineer’s digits but also the spirits themselves are spilled, catapulted to the outside, this machine will meet oblivion. It will be the death of us. Or at least of “these men.”

We took up Hobbes’s and Locke’s conceptions of retention as faded sensation and fading memory, respectively, noting the latter’s tragic sense and the former’s siege mentality. It is no doubt the Galilean-Hobbesian account that prevails in later empirical-scientific accounts of memory. Before proceeding to these, however, we paused to remark on the mimetic-mnemonic nature of letters in the doctrines of them both. Each develops an eminently engrammatological account of retention, privileging the role of archival “marks” or typoi even when it is speech he is discussing. By way of transition, we recounted Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s spirited refutation of David Hartley’s associationism.

That refutation anticipates the fundamental thrust of later phenomenological and humanistic-psychological criticisms of the theory of engrams and traces. Contemporary neurophysiology remains typographic, iconographic, and engrammatological, however much its models for memory may have altered. The problem of recall or retrieval proves to be the stumbling block of such theories, which first do away with the “reader” in order to be wholly empirical, then reintroduce “him” in order to explain how “we” remember. Erwin Straus shows how trace theory can preserve its explanatory power only by the double maneuver of self-effacement and repetition through “phosphorescence.” Merleau-Ponty in his Structure of Behavior and Phenomemology of Perception demonstrates the ways in which neurophysiology and empirical psychology consistently presuppose what they claim to explain.

However, Merleau-Ponty became important for us less for his criticisms of traditional accounts of memory than for his own venturing to the verge of a new kind of thinking. To which, no doubt, we shall have to return repeatedly. His invocation of a “hollow” in visibility and in subjectivity, a kind of space where time is made, and from which we—unlike Augustine—do not dream of escaping; his depiction of the past not as a tableau but as a horizon, margin, or atmosphere of my present; and his insistence that one can approach one’s past only step by step, little by little, like those fledgling weavers, the animal spirits, in accord with a tempo not of one’s own choosing—these were the first rudiments of a new way to think about memory and reminiscence. And it had something to do with both writing and the body’s efforts to reopen a past time, the body and the writing serving as guarantors and as limits of my access to the past. In his most radical reflections on the lived body as a hollow in being, a hollow not only of perception but also of memory, Merleau-Ponty gestured toward the idea of a past that has never been present. And when elaborating the problem of passivity he called for the abandonment of what Heidegger analyzes and decries as vorstellendes Denken, “representational thinking.” Reminiscence would not be the scanning or reading of representations; memory would not be their coinage in the psyche through typography, iconography, and engrammatology. Are we on the verge of discovering what they would be?

Our inquiry into waxen glands and fleshy hollows has led us to the verge. Yet we shall take a detour, a circumscription or circumnavigation about the rim, before confronting the question of the verge. We shall now raise the question—already prompted by Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke, and especially by contemporary phenomenology—concerning the relation of memory, reminiscence, and writing to the economy of the organism’s life-death as elaborated in Freudian psychoanalysis. That detour may in fact prove to be the most direct routeby a commodius vicus of recirculation backalong the rim to the theme of the verge “itself.”