In The One Will Kill the Other, Hugo links the the death of the symbolic power of buildings and monuments with the invention of printing and the mass circulation of books. He organizes his argument around what he imagines edifices and monuments to represent and even embody, namely, the rise of certain theocratic civilizations and the unity of ideas and people. With the rise of printing, however, comes the twilight of architectural innovation and the proliferation of endless derivatives of earlier forms of building. Conversely, in the world of human ideas, the printing of books allows for a multiplicity of opinion: even the possibility of dissent and revolution.
I found it curiously ironic that Hugo uses a/the book as a metaphor for both architecture and printing. He calls one the "Bible of stone" and the other, the Bible of paper" (180). That analogy reminds me of former ideas of the indisputability of truth in writing, which like architecture, was considered a sacred practice (think of the Mosaic tablets and rituals of the Freemasons.) Of course I can't speak of the emergence of the printing press without speaking about current ideas of computer and information technology, desktop publishing, and the Internet representing, for some, the death of the text as a fixed, non-editable "whole." I don't agree with ideas that books are dead, necessarily, or that they existed as some pure form of knowledge- the writing, editing and publishing of books have always been a messy affair, in terms of problems of translation, access, and distribution.
Yates credits the anonymous author of the Latin text, Ad Herennium, with first describing the historical technique of memorizing sequences of images and ideas in accordance with the mental placement of these ideas on selective locations. This technique was instrumental to orators and scholars who 'mentalized' knowledge with great effort, since they did not have the ways and means of conveniently writing their ideas down and bringing them around. People practiced generating ideas, remembering their sequence, and finally delivering their speeches convincingly; in some ways, they made their minds a kind of portable locus of patterns of ideas and images that could be easily expressed in speech. Yates even mentions how the art of memory had significant ethical value, and how Thomas Aquinas attributed the virtue of prudence to artificial memory.
The chapter reminds me of how much current literature in education stresses conceptual thinking over memorization of small details (or curriculum based entirely on memorization without understanding.) Memorization of ideas and words is still desired in many areas of study, including anatomy or other biological sciences, as well as in language acquisition. Also, memorization practices and techniques are still critical today to the performing arts (theater, music and film), though the techniques for music and theatre are more related to kinaesthetic and syntheaesthetic memory- bodily repetition- than merely mental imaginings to trigger a pattern of thought.
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People stored wide range of information before the invention of the printing press. And people stored more knowledge before the invention of digitalization. I wonder what our memorization capacity would be in about a hundred years from now.
ReplyDeleteI can't tell if you think that the de-emphasis of memorization in schooling is a good or a bad thing, or if you think that it has its place. As Makila was saying in class last week, perhaps there is something to be said for some old-fashioned memorization in school. After all, surely there are just some facts - historical, for example, or geographical, that students should just plain KNOW.
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ReplyDeleteI think that all theories and practice go through a period of dismissal before they are "revived" or reevaluated. If I might generalize, we are currently in a period of time in educational thought where constructivism is still predominant, and many institutions like our own recommend that teachers inquiry-based curriculum for certain subjects and areas of learning. I think that rote memorization will still maintain some amount of importance in K-12 learning- after all we do need to learn how to read and recognize patterns of characters or numbers so that they become automatic, as well as important facts like "The sun is the center of our universe." Hopefully teachers will be well trained enough to learn where its context is appropriate.
ReplyDeleteActually, I really do not think that students should be taught the 'fact' that the sun is the center of our universe. 1, it's one of the two epicenters of our solar system, def not the universe--[sorry, had to catch those slips. Kepler worked hard for it. (Even though Galileo DENIED it) ]. But more importantly, 2, I think that students should be subtly put through paces that move them from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican perspective, so they can understand the questions the ancients had to deal with, and to fully appreciate the genius of the Copernican shift.
ReplyDeleteTo those rolling their eyes, screaming "pedantic much?!", I apologize. But then again, I'm a crazy paranoid math teacher who won't let his students 'know' anything that they haven't figured out or proven to themselves (well, not in every case). In fact, 2 of them are angry at me right now because I wouldn't tell them the formula for the area of a trapezoid. And anytime I hear the word "gravity", I annoyingly make certain that they are aware that they are saying that they really, truly "believe" that my teacup is currently attracting Alpha Centauri, not just that "things go down".
Also, how are we to deeply understand metaphors such as the one that Anderson uses on p. 4 regarding the "Marxist anomaly" if we don't deeply understand the Ptolemaic and post-Ptolemaic attempt to "save the appearances"? Ha Sophie, I bet you didn't think you were going to receive arguments over that tiny piece of your post! What a maroon!
On a more sane note, I agree with your ideas regarding criticism, submerging, resurfacing, and reevaluation of different ideas (such as constructivism, rote-learning).
And then again separately, I think there are several acting techniques that rely heavily on memory as an emotional/physical trigger, not just a movement thing, albeit by different approaches (a la Strasberg vs. Meisner). I used to do a lot of that.
And I noticed you took down a post. Was it inflammatory? Did FoxNews send you a takedown notice? http://rawstory.com/2009/11/fox-shuts-liberal-bloggers/
And that's it.
thanks Dan, for the correction. The blog of Sophie Lam would like to append a correction: the Sun is not the center of the universe. We don't really know where the center of the universe is, do we?
ReplyDeleteNice.
ReplyDeleteWe will only ever find epicenters. So sayeth the Oracle at Copenhagen.