We do not know whether anyone ever put the artifices Gesualdo recommended into practice, but we are entitled to suspect that all these stratagems made it easier to remember than to forget whatever it was the practitioner wanted to forget, and to remember it with even greater intensity—as occurs when lovers try to blot out the image of the person who has abandoned them.45
The physiological and psychological reasons why an Ars oblivionalis is impossible depend on the contiguity/similarity dialectic on which the classical mnemotechnical systems are founded. If object x has been imagined to be in contact with object y, or if object x is in some way homologous with object y, every time object x is evoked so is object y.
But if this is how the Artes memoriae work, it is hard to see how one can imagine an object x that, when evoked, somehow acts on our cerebral cortex by canceling y. Jakobson (1956) described the structures of the different types of aphasia and how they manifest themselves, but he did not say how they can be produced artificially. It is no accident, however, if Jakobson, in order to explain the internal mechanics at least of a neurophysiological problem like aphasia, if not its causes, should appeal to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, two categories from the linguistic and semiotic domain. This suggests that we could view the arts of memory (of forgetting as well as recalling) in semiotic terms.
1.9.3. Mnemotechnics as Semiotics
There can be no doubt that any mnemotechnical strategy belongs to the field of semiotics, if one accepts a definition of the sign as something that stands in the eyes of someone in place of something else in some respect or capacity. To associate in some way a y with an x means to use the one as the signifier and expression of the other. To make a knot in one’s handkerchief is certainly a semiosic strategy, as was the trail of white pebbles or beans that the character in the fairytale dropped making it possible for the children to find their way back out of the wood. These are two different kinds of strategy, because the knot in the handkerchief is an arbitrary sign for whatever one decides to associate with it, whereas the trail of pebbles institutes a vectorial homology between the sequence of pebbles and the path to be followed and stands for that specific path and not for any other possible path—but all this tells us is that different mnemotechical strategies call into play different semiosic procedures.
The earliest Greco-Roman mnemotechnics present themselves as a sequence of empirical solutions based upon associations inspired by rhetorical criteria—relying, in other words, as Aristotle suggested, “on something similar or contrary or closely connected.”46 We have the hint of a system when these same classical mnemotechnics propose the organized institution of places, such as a memory palace or a city, even though the organic structure of the loci is often used to accommodate random series of res memorandae or things to be remembered. But the more elaborate systems certainly present themselves as a semiotics in the Hjelmslevian sense of the term, in other words as a system that posits a plane of expression, form, and substance correlated with a plane of content, form, and substance. Now, speaking of the form of the content implies speaking of a systematic organization of the world. And this is not all: in principle there is nothing that is constitutionally expression or content, given that, if, in a function of signs based on a system A, x is the expression of y, in another system B, y can become the expression of x—or, to give another example, nothing prevents us conceiving of two semiotics, in one of which visual images stand for sequences of letters of the alphabet while in the other letters of the alphabet stand for visual images.
Mnemotechnics that exhibit some aspects of a semiotics are those systems in which: (i) on the level of expression there appears a system of loci designed to accommodate figures that belong to the same iconographic field and exercise the function of lexical units; (ii) at the level of content, the res memorandae are in their turn organized into a logical-conceptual system such that, if this system could be translated in terms of another visual representation, the mnemotechnic could function as the plane of expression of a second mnemotechnic whose contents would become the system of loci and images that made up the plane of expression of the first mnemotechnic.
For example, in the Thesaurus artificiosae memoriae of Cosma Rosselli (Venice, 1579), the theater of planetary structures, celestial hierarchies, infernal circles, organized in detail, that he presents is at the same time a lexical system and an organization of the world. Rosselli’s mnemotechnics is a semiotics because what institutes something as expression and as content is its sign function, not the nature of the thing. Anything at all can become functive expressive or content functive. A frequently recurrent expression in Rosselli is e converso and its equivalents: x may stand for y or e converso. Incidentally, entities previously placed among the loci may be used as figures and vice versa.47
The objection could be raised that many mnemotechnics are not semiotics in the Hjelmslevian sense because their planes are conformal: the correlation between unit of expression and unit of content is not between one term and another and is in any case not arbitrary. There exists an isomorphic relationship between the planes, and therefore for Hjelmslev these mnemotechnics, more than semiotics, would be symbolic systems. Take, for instance, the convention (found in a number of authors) by which the system of grammatical cases is associated with parts of the body—in which it is not arbitrary, at least in the author’s intentions, to associate the nominative case with the head, the accusative with the breast that can be beaten, the genitive and the dative with the hands that hold and offer, and so on.
Nevertheless, it should not be a matter of excessive concern whether a mnemotechnic is a symbolic system. In the first place, because we have reached a point where we consider as semiotic systems, albeit with their own particular characteristics, systems that Hjelmslev would have seen as symbolic, giving up on analyzing their possible articulations. And secondly, because the conformity of the mnemotechnical planes is either doubtful or weak and ambiguous; while the presumed iconic relations that they bring into play are fairly debatable. Rosselli, for example, claimed that the correlation must be based on similarity, but he failed to exhaust the many ways in which one thing may be similar to another (“quomodo multis modis, aliqua res alteri sit similis”) (Thesaurus, p. 107).
There was, for instance, a similarity of substance (the human being as the microcosmic image of the macrocosm) and of quantity (the ten fingers for the ten commandments), correlation by metonymy and antonomasia (Atlas for the astronomers or for astronomy, the bear for irascibility, the lion for pride, Cicero for rhetoric),by homonymy (the four-legged dog for the constellation of the Dog Star), by irony and contrast (the fatuous individual for the wise one), by vestigial traces (the wolf’s spoor for the wolf, the mirror in which Titus admired himself for Titus), by a word pronounced differently (sanguine for sane), by similarity of name (Arista for Aristotle), by genus and species (leopard for animal), by pagan symbol (the eagle for Jove), by peoples (Parthians for arrows, Scythians for horses, Phoenicians for the alphabet), by the signs of the zodiac (the sign for the constellation), by relation between an organ and its function, by a common accident or attribute (the crow for the Ethiopian), by hieroglyphic (the ant for foresight).
At this point the criteria become so vague that, as many mnemotechnical theorists recommend, it is advisable to commit to memory the relationship that connects a place or a figure to a res memoranda. Which is tantamount to saying that practically all mnemotechnics were based on relationships chosen almost arbitrarily and were therefore, more than symbolic systems, semiotics, however imperfect. But however imperfect they might be, they were, nonetheless, tentative semiotics. To say that in a functive of a symbolic nature the correlation is badly formulated does not exclude the possibility that the functive be proposed as such.
It is the semiotic nature of mnemotechnics that makes it impossible to construct an art of forgetfulness on the mnemotechnical model, because it is a property of every semiotic system to permit the presentification of absence. It is a venerable topos to recognize that that all semiotic systems are characterized by their ability to actualize, if only in the possible world circumscribed by our assertions, the nonexistent. This is why, as Abelard points out, the sentence nulla rosa est (“there is no rose”) actualizes to some extent, at least in the mind’s eye, the rose.48
Worth
