This essay explores the educational implications of the thought of Michel de Montaigne and Friedrich Nietzsche on the subject of memory. It explores the sorts of cultural memory practices that Nietzsche has called ‘mnemotechnics’, that is, the aspects of memory use that allow human beings to live life more fully. Nietzsche and Montaigne's work is explored because their work offers a different, and much more philosophically oriented, perspective on memory than is commonly discussed when educators speak of memory. Nietzsche (...) and Montaigne show how remembering and forgetting might be understood more thoroughly and deployed with more finesse. The case is made that such deployments, such mnemotechnics, have great relevance for enhancing the agency of students. (shrink)

This essay explores the educational implications of the thought of Michel de Montaigne and Friedrich Nietzsche on the subject of memory. It explores the sorts of cultural memory practices that Nietzsche has called ‘mnemotechnics’, that is, the aspects of memory use that allow human beings to live life more fully. Nietzsche and Montaigne's work is explored because their work offers a different, and much more philosophically oriented, perspective on memory than is commonly discussed when educators speak of memory. Nietzsche (...) and Montaigne show how remembering and forgetting might be understood more thoroughly and deployed with more finesse. The case is made that such deployments, such mnemotechnics, have great relevance for enhancing the agency of students. (shrink)

La production philosophique et littéraire de Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) est traversée par un questionnement constant sur les relations réciproques entre texte et lecteur — l’un se construisant systématiquement par rapport à l’autre. Dans cet article, nous nous concentrerons en particulier sur la comédie italienne Chandelier (1582) et sur le traité mnémotechnique Cantus Circæus (1582) pour montrer comment le rapport texte/lecteur est essentiel pour saisir les implications philosophiques des deux textes. À la Renaissance, la lecture est un véritable exercice d’assimilation et (...) l’ars memoriæ se configure comme un outil pour agir sur l’âme humaine. À travers un lien très étroit avec le lecteur, les œuvre de Bruno visent ainsi à renouveler l’être humain et à conformer son intellect à l’opus magnum de l’univers. (shrink)

In thinking the passage from the “all-human cerebrum” to what one might call the contemporary “all-too-human” cerebrum in neo-liberal societies and beyond to the “all-too-transhuman” cerebrum in the cybernetic society, in contrasting Wells’s idea of a new world order with the dystopia of the disordering un-world, in considering the prospects of a “world brain” faced with the realities of the “global mnemotechnical system”, in highlighting the differences between the global and authoritarian instrument of “control” in Wells and the descriptions of (...) the control society by Deleuze, and finally, in critiquing the “unifying of the general intelligence services of the world” in Wells and the capturing of the “general intellect”, this paper maps the contemporary prospects of the “world brain” against the backdrop of the worldweariness of the present. (shrink)

We are far removed, in this section of the Encyclopedia on memory, from the mnemotechnic icons described by Francis Yates in The Art of Memory and much closer to Augustine's advice about how to remember and to psalmodize Scripture. Memory, for Hegel, is the learning by rote of names, or of words considered as names, and it can therefore not be separated from the notation, the inscription, or the writing down of these names. In order to remember, one is forced (...) to write down what one is likely to forget. The idea in other words, makes its sensory appearance, in Hegel, as the material inscription of names. Thought is entirely dependent on a mental faculty that is mechanical through and through, as remote as can be from the sounds and the images of the imagination or from the dark mine of recollection, which lies beyond the reach of words and of thought[…]No wonder, then, that Hegel's Aesthetics turns out to be a double and possibly duplicitous text. Dedicated to the preservation and the monumentalization of classical art, it also contains all the elements which make such a preservation impossible from the start. Theoretical reasons prevent the convergence of the apparently historical and the properly theoretical components of the work. This results in the enigmatic statements that have troubled Hegel's readers, such as the assertion that art is for us a thing of the past. This has usually been interpreted and criticized or, in some rare instances, praised as a historical diagnosis disproven or borne out by actual history. We can now assert that the two statements "art is for us a thing of the past" and "the beautiful is the sensory manifestation of the idea" are in fact one and the same. To the extent that the paradigm for art is thought rather than perception, the sign rather than the symbol, writing rather than painting or music, it will also be memorization rather than recollection. As such, it belongs indeed to a past which, in Proust's words, could never be recaptured, retrouve. Art is "of the past" in a radical sense, in that, like memorization, it leaves the interiorization of experience forever behind. It is of the past to the extent that it materially inscribes, and thus forever forgets, its ideal content. The reconciliation of the two main theses of the Aesthetics occurs at the expense of the aesthetic as a stable philosophical category. What the Aesthetics calls the beautiful terms turns out to be, also, something very remote from what we associate with the suggestiveness of symbolic form.Paul de Man, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight and Allegories of Reading and is currently completing a book tentatively titled The Resistance to Theory. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Political Allegory in Rousseau", "The Epistemology of Metaphor", and "A Letter". (shrink)

Resumo: O pensamento de Nietzsche é recepcionado na Escandinávia, através do historiador dinamarquês Georg Brandes. O historiador é atraído pelo aspecto aristocrático, o qual se depreende da leitura que Nietzsche realiza sobre a cultura. A radicalidade, a originalidade e a minuciosidade psicológica, que se reconhece no espírito filosófico do pensador alemão, permeiam a leitura que Brandes faz do autor de Zaratustra. O próprio Nietzsche dá testemunho do quanto seu nome, graças a Brandes, passa a ser conhecido na Dinamarca, em suas (...) diversas cartas e outros escritos, atestando, inclusive, um correto entendimento de seu pensamento. Esta proposta tem o intuito de averiguar o papel que a memória, em seu sentido aristocrático, tem a contribuir na recepção nietzschiana, efetuada por Brandes. Em que medida a mnemotécnica pode apontar caminhos para uma cultura aristocrática, no contexto da Dinamarca de Brandes?: Nietzsche’s thought is received in Scandinavia through the Danish historian Georg Brandes. The historian is attracted by the aristocratic aspect that emerges from Nietzsche’s reading of culture. Radicality, originality and psychological detail, which can be seen in the philosophical spirit of the German thinker, permeate Brandes’ reading of the author of Zarathustra. Nietzsche himself testifies to how much his name, thanks to Brandes, comes to be known in Denmark in several of his letters and other writings, even attesting to a correct understanding of his thinking. Our proposal is intended to ascertain the role that memory, in its aristocratic sense, has to contribute to Brandes’ Nietzschean reception. To what extent can mnemotechnics point the way to an aristocratic culture for the Denmark’s context of Brandes? (shrink)

In recent decades, memory has become one of the major concepts and a dominant topic in philosophy, sociology, politics, history, science, cultural studies, literary theory, and the discussions of trauma and the Holocaust. In contemporary debates, the concept of memory is often used rather broadly and thus not always unambiguously. For this reason, the clarification of the range of the historical meaning of the concept of memory is a very important and urgent task. This volume shows how the concept of (...) memory has been used and appropriated in different historical circumstances and how it has changed throughout the history of philosophy. In ancient philosophy, memory was considered a repository of sensible and mental impressions and was complemented by recollection-the process of recovering the content of past thoughts and perceptions. Such an understanding of memory led to the development both of mnemotechnics and the attempts to locate memory within the structure of cognitive faculties. In contemporary philosophical and historical debates, memory frequently substitutes for reason by becoming a predominant capacity to which one refers when one wants to explain not only the personal identity but also a historical, political, or social phenomenon. In contemporary interpretation, it is memory, and not reason, that acts in and through human actions and history, which is a critical reaction to the overly rationalized and simplified concept of reason in the Enlightenment. Moreover, in modernity memory has taken on one of the most distinctive features of reason: it is thought of as capable not only of recollecting past events and meanings, but also itself. In this respect, the volume can be also taken as a reflective philosophical attempt by memory to recall itself, its functioning and transformations throughout its own history. (shrink)

These articles address the complex interactions between religion, natural philosophy and magic in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. The essays on the Elizabethan mathematician John Dee show that his angelic conversations owed a significant debt to medieval magical traditions and how Dee's attempts to communicate with spirits were used to serve specific religious agendas in the mid-seventeenth century. The essays devoted to Giordano Bruno offer a reappraisal of the magical orientation of the Italian philosopher's mnemotechnical and Lullist writings of the 1580s (...) and 90s. The three studies on the atomistic or corpuscularian natural philosophy of the Northumberland and Cavendish circles, argue that there was a distinct English corpuscularian tradition prior to the Gassendian influence in the 1640s and 50s. Finally, two essays on the seventeenth-century Intelligencer Samuel Hartlib and his correspondents show how religion alchemy and natural philosophy interacted during the 'Puritan Revolution'. (shrink)

The Middle Ages takes over from antiquity the perception of memory as primarily a rhetoric skill needed for composing. Both the memory of the canon authors and the memory of mnemotechnics are a testament to the enormous significance that education and science were attached to remembering and reminding themselves. Unfortunately, so far we don't know enough about the great role played by monastic inspiration – deriving from liturgy and meditation – in shaping the culture of memory.

Despite the seemingly neutral vantage of using nature for widely-distributed computational purposes, neither post-biological nor post-humanist teleology simply concludes with the real "end of nature" as entailed in the loss of the specific ontological status embedded in the identifier "natural." As evinced by the ecological crises of the Anthropocene—of which the 2019 Brazil Amazon rainforest fires are only the most recent—our epoch has transfixed the “natural order" and imposed entropic artificial integration, producing living species that become “anoetic,” made to serve (...) as automated exosomatic residues, or digital flecks. I further develop Gilles Deleuze’s description of control societies to upturn Foucauldian biopower, replacing its spacio-temporal bounds with the exographic excesses in psycho-power; culling and further detailing Bernard Stiegler’s framework of transindividuation and hyper-control, I examine how becoming-subject is predictively facilitated within cognitive capitalism and what Alexander Galloway terms “deep digitality.” Despite the loss of material vestiges qua virtualization—which I seek to trace in an historical review of industrialization to postindustrialization—the drive-based and reticulated "internet of things" facilitates a closed loop from within the brain to the outside environment, such that the aperture of thought is mediated and compressed. The human brain, understood through its material constitution, is susceptible to total datafication’s laminated process of “becoming-mnemotechnical,” and, as neuroplasticity is now a valid description for deep-learning and neural nets, we are privy to the rebirth of the once-discounted metaphor of the “cybernetic brain.” Probing algorithmic governmentality while posing noetic dreaming as both technical and pharmacological, I seek to analyze how spirit is blithely confounded with machine-thinking’s gelatinous cognition, as prosthetic organ-adaptation becomes probabilistically molded, networked, and agentially inflected (rather than simply externalized). (shrink)

What happens to education when the potential it helps realizing in the individual works against the formal purposes of the curriculum? What happens when education becomes a vehicle for its own subversion? As a subject-forming state apparatus working on ideological speciesism, formal education is engaged in both human and animal stratification in service of the capitalist knowledge economy. This seemingly stable condition is however insecured by the animal rights activist as undercover learner and—worker, who enters education and research laboratories under (...) false premises in order to extract the knowledge necessary to dismantle the logic of animal utility on which the scientific-educational apparatus rests. The present article is based on a semi-structured interview with an undercover worker. It draws on a synthesis of critical education and posthumanist theories to configure knowledge creation and subjectification processes in the “negative spaces” of education. The techne of undercover work includes mnemotechnical and prosthetic devices, calculation of risk, and mimetic labor. The article argues that the agenda of the undercover worker generates a multi-strained mimetic complex that composes a parasitic educational subject-assemblage redirecting scientific knowledge away from the animal stratification logic of the knowledge economy into different viral circuits; different lines of flight. It invites a rearticulation of the formal education state apparatus in more indeterminate directions, provoking scientific-educational knowledge-practices to become a catalytic impulse for their own disintegration. (shrink)

The composition of a timeline depends on purpose, perspective, and scale – and of the very understanding of the word, the phenomenon referred to, and whether the focus is the idea or concept, an instance of an idea or a phenomenon, a process, or an event and so forth. The main function of timelines is to provide an overview over a long history, it is a kind of a mnemotechnic device or a particular kind of Knowledge Organization System (KOS).b The (...) entries in the timeline should be brief and indisputable. Therefore, timelines often identify the first occurrences rather than the most widespread or most qualified instances leaving the fuller and more complex, and possibly disputable story out. But even first occurrences are often difficult to establish. The first occurrence is most often only the first finding of an instance. Older instances may be found and competing definitions develop either within a field or in different fields. This is further complicated since the phenomena, their names, and their meanings may change over time. Former meanings may become redundant, or they must accommodate and coexist with new meanings. The time and place of the composition of the timeline are to be considered in interpreting the things listed. The following note will discuss these issues as they occur in the development of the notions of text, e-text and hypertext, and the origin of machine translation. (shrink)

The investigation presents a hermeneutics of memory in Nietzsche’s mature texts in the light of contributions of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. At the First Dissertation of Towards the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche introduces the influence that memory exerts on the capacity for reflection and action. The mnemotechnical procedure that the German philosopher analyzes is Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on Aristotle’s reminiscence. Aquinas identifies the ordering of what is wanted, the investment of the spirit, frequent meditation and the taking of the chain (...) of pending issues as fundamental points for the activity of memory. And, at these points, Nietzsche identifies morality as a key component in the memorization process. It will analyze some approximations and distances between the Nietzschean and Thomist theses and to what extent morality operates in the sense of detecting memory activity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 168-172 [Access article in PDF] Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language. Paolo Rossi. Trans. Stephen Clucas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. xxviii + 333. $32.00 cloth. Of the traditional five canons of rhetoric—inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and actio—the most circuitous and fascinating history belongs to memoria. From its propulsion of Homeric lore to its grounding of (...) rhetorical invention to its exile under print culture to its recent revival in public memory studies, the promiscuous and perplexing history of memory in the West may be one of the least appreciated, and perhaps least understood, elements of rhetorical and intellectual history. The publication in 1966 of Frances Yates's highly praised The Art of Memory drew the attention of contemporary scholars to the importance of mnemotechnics to the culture of late medieval and early modern Europe. 1 Yates persuasively argued that the art of memory is an integral element of European intellectual history, one that can enrich our understanding of everything from Dominican theology to Shakespearian theater. However, six years earlier, in 1960, the Italian intellectual historian Paolo Rossi published in Italian an important precursor to Yates's work entitled Clavis Universalis: Arti Della Memoria e Logica Combinatoria da Lullo a Leibniz. The book traces the encyclopaedic and mnemotechnical traditions from Aristotle through Cicero and Raymond Lull and into the early-modern period, arguing that the art of memory provides an important antecedent to the advent of method in seventeenth-century philosophy, especially in the works of Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz. Yates, in her preface to The Art of Memory, acknowledges her debt to Rossi's work, and now this work has been made available in English translation. Stephen Clucas's translation, under the title Logic and the Art of Memory, will no doubt stimulate and supplement research into the mnemotechnical tradition in the English-speaking world, and perhaps lead us to reconsider the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric.Rossi argues that the neglect of the mnemotechnical tradition in its Ciceronian and Lullian strands has distorted our understanding of the "new" science and philosophy of the seventeenth-century, which is often interpreted as constituting, in a Kuhnian sense, a drastic paradigm shift from a [End Page 168] Renaissance worldview that still retained occult elements. Rossi places the work of Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz within the historical strand of the logico-encyclopaedic and mnemotechnical traditions, suggesting that these figures culminate late medieval and early modern intellectual and cultural ambitions as much as they give rise to new ones. Rossi makes his argument by providing a history of mnemotechnics from Aristotle into the fifteenth century in chapter one; by examining the fascination with encyclopaedism, combinatoria, and memory in the sixteenth century in chapters two and three; by investigating the role of artificial memory in the works of key intellectual figures in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in chapters four through six; and by tracing the impulse toward universal knowledge and its connection to mnemotechnics among seventeenth-century Cartesians, Baconians, and in the work of Leibniz, in chapters seven and eight.Chapter one, after showing the pervasiveness of Renaissance mnemotechnical literature, surveys its classical and medieval antecedents in philosophy and rhetoric. Rossi argues that Aristotle's De memoria et reminiscentia, Cicero's De oratore, Quintilian's De institutione oratoria, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the works of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were each important to the mnemotechnical tradition into the seventeenth century. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century treatises on the ars memorativa and the ars predicandi, drawing on these classical and medieval theories, emphasize the importance of memory places (loci), images (imagines), and order or arrangement (dispositio) in mnemotechnics. Additionally, they intimately link the memory to the imagination, stressing the importance of exciting and stimulating the imagination in memorization. The Italian Pietro da Ravenna, for example, attributed the might of his memory to, in his own words, turning "the images of the most beautiful virgins into memory places" (22). Such imaginative mnemonic techniques were considered to... (shrink)