Date: Sun, 17 Jan 1999 13:20:18 -0500 (EST)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: "Memories of Citizenship"


Dear Chris Mills,

Sorry for the long delay; I haven't had time, till now, to do any work on this;
but now, yes. 

> how do you figure monumentality into
> your project? i am working and thinking and working on these subjects
> and i can't move away from the drive to create monumemts as both
> repositories and signals of a construction of memory in service to
> notions of citizenship and democracy.

"Monumentality" seems like a somewhat unsimple notion.  On one level, since 
the word "monument" comes from "monere", to remind, it seems to be open to 
the possibility of referring to any kind of reminder -- a knot in one's
handkerchief, for example.  But of course that's not what it does.  Its primary
meaning, it appears, at least in English, right away has to do with funeral 
monuments and tombstones and death -- with being a reminder of dead things.
Which also brings to mind the much-invoked fact that Simonides, the supposed
father of artificial memory, earned this title by being able to recall 
who had sat where at a banquet of which he became the only survivor -- and, by
means of this memory of each person's place, could identify the mangled bodies.

Then there is the notion of "monumentality" with its connotations of grandeur,
massiveness, imposingness, etc.  Now the ancient "art of memory" stressed two
principles: the body's propensity for remembering being in, and moving 
through, architectonic spaces; and the propensity for remembering striking, 
bizarre, emotionally charged visual assembleges.  So that in order to remember,
say, the otherwise bland details of a law case (the mnemonic art started out 
as a branch of rhetoric) one would mentally appropriate a building, or another 
architectonic object, as a "memory palace", and populate it with striking, 
fanciful statues and other objects that would commemorate -- encode -- the 
various details one wanted to remember.  Then, when it was time to make one's 
speech, one would perform a mental walk through the memory palace and make 
each object yield back the thing that it was supposed to commemorate.

So one might perhaps say that monumentality is a combination, for purposes 
of creating "public memory", of the two principles -- the mnemonics of the 
body's relationship to the enclosing space, and the mnemonics of the striking 
and the fanciful.  Perhaps one might say this.

Another question is whether there is a kind of inversion between the
"artificial memory" of the ancient rhetors and the "civic memory" of monuments.
One might say (perhaps) that in the ancient art of memory the rhetor inscribes
his body, for his own purposes, into a public space -- appropriates the space.
While on the other hand a monumental monument has an aspect of Kafka's Penal 
Machine: its purpose is to inscribe a certain "social memory", or social 
conscience, on the body -- i.e. to appropriate the body.  You can see that 
this is all quite tentative and perhaps dreadful bullshit to boot.

-m