[p2p-research] medieval art of memory

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear Gordon,

in our conversation about the logic of producing the p2p wiki and the p2p
foundation ecology of knowledge sharing, I briefly mentioned the Art of
Memory by Frances Yates, a history of how the ancients used
visualization/imagination techniques to remember and organize their
knowledge,

here's an example of what she talks about, just so you have a historical
reference:
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/journal/v1/n1/full/pmed20108a.html



One such medieval mind-altering cognitive apparatus is the systems of
artificial, trained memory that were widespread in monastic and early
humanist culture (Carruthers,
1990<http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/journal/v1/n1/full/pmed20108a.html#bib3>,
1998<http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/journal/v1/n1/full/pmed20108a.html#bib4>).
Hugh of St Victor's late twelfth-century *Three Best Memory Aids for
Learning History*, John of Metz's thirteenth-century pictorial diagram of
the Tower of Wisdom, Thomas Bradwardine's fourteenth-century *On Acquiring a
Trained Memory*, and Jacobus Publicius's late fifteenth-century ‘Wheel for
Combining Letters’ (existing only as a diagram for making a 3-D model
consisting of a series of printed concentric circles with letters, with a
revolving, serpent-shaped dial that can be turned to produce different
combinations that would enable the user to remember phrases and sayings),
all offer elaborate training programs that are designed to bend the
biological mind into a different shape (Carruthers and Ziolkowski,
2002<http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/journal/v1/n1/full/pmed20108a.html#bib5>
).

Hugh of St Victor's system involves numerical and locational
division-schemes, as well as classification by occasion. His number scheme
for learning the Psalter by heart is a pre-digital memory store and search
engine, a ‘powerful mental device’ (his words) designed to cut the human
labor of counting through endless manuscript pages to find the relevant
psalm text. First he learns the psalms by heart, then ranges them in
numerical order on a mental grid, and then ‘by voicing or cogitation’ he
makes each one ‘of a size equivalent to one glance of my memory.’ And then,
as he says, ‘I imprint the result of my mental effort by the vigilant
concentration of my heart so that, when asked, without hesitation I may
answer, either in forward order, or by skipping one or several, or in
reverse order and recited backward according to my completely mastered
scheme of places, what is the first, what the second, what indeed the 27th,
48th, or whatever psalm it should be’ (quoted in Carruthers and Ziolkowski,
2002<http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/journal/v1/n1/full/pmed20108a.html#bib5>,
37). Hugh's description scarcely counts as cognitive anthropology, yet it is
clear that these extended cognitive scaffoldings dovetailed with their
users’ minds to produce astonishing feats of knowledge retrieval. They are
magnificent systems of order, like that other great medieval invention, the
Benedictine canonical hours: instruments that Freud might have included in
his discussion of the ‘incontestable’ benefits of order, as enabling humans
‘to use their space and time to best advantage, while conserving their
psychical forces’ (Freud,
2001<http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/journal/v1/n1/full/pmed20108a.html#bib8>,
93).

One mind-altering aspect of Hugh of St Victor's scheme is that the user
first confronts it as an opaque technology – one that is immensely difficult
to use – but then transforms it into a transparent technology, one that is
used almost unconsciously, as he moves from the ‘mental effort’ involved in
mastering the scheme of places to the almost unobtrusive merging of the
biological self with the external aid that enables recall of all the psalms
in whatever order, ‘without hesitation.’ It's a shift from
Heidegger's<http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/journal/v1/n1/full/pmed20108a.html#bib12>‘present-at-hand’
tool, one that we are conscious of in its own right, to
the ‘ready-at-hand’ tool, one that we scarcely notice in use. But the
brain-training involved does not assume that all the work goes on only in
the brain. The goal of medieval mnemotechnics is to provide a better
environment for thinking, to immerse the self in a matrix of extended
resources that inform conscious operations: as Clark says, ‘mind, body
*and*scaffolding’ (Clark,
2003<http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/journal/v1/n1/full/pmed20108a.html#bib7>,
11).


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