Prelude

I am listening to a recording I made not moments ago of my son hearing his own recorded voice and reacting to it in a very engaged fashion.  He echoes his own recorded voice with great interest and excitement.  At twenty-four months, he is already embedded in the Digital Ages, where banal archives abound in fields of ones and zeros. My digital technology encoded a moment in which my son used his language skills to inquire about another creature’s wants: I recorded him asking our cat if he wanted in. My computer captured a moment of caring by digitizing “Want in kitty cat?  Want in?”  That emotion, “caring,” the daughter of Love, has timelessness about it, an aura that exists only as a radiant gist in the moment of its expression.  By attending to it, by playing with his sounds on my computer, I hope to arrange that moment and care for it over time.  I hope that my present act of mindfulness in recording this moment, now gone, will help me feel the way I felt when I witnessed what I did today. 

Reading Benjamin at the dawn of the Digital Ages has radically changed my perspective and understanding of time, particularly in terms of time’s relationship to technology and to the institutional memories enabled by these technologies that we collectively call “history.”   I hope to use this blog as a forum to flesh out these relationships between Benjamin and other “contemporary” theorists with theorists of ages, ideologies and technologies long since forgotten. 

My main field of study is medieval prayer theory, in which theorists developed pedagogies that developed “machina memorialis”–memory machines that enabled modes of being capable of recording and processing vast amounts of information necessary for cultural agency.  As Mary Carruthers describes them in The Craft of Thought, these machines “are more like a chisel or a pen” than “the ability to reproduce something” verbatim.  This cognitive technology was “the matrix of a reminiscing cogitation, shuffling and collating ‘things’ stored in a random-access memory scheme, or set of schemes – a memory architecture and a library built up during one’s lifetime with the express intention that it be used inventively”(4).  The ultimate goal of these technologies was practical and social; they were not “an art of recitation and reiteration but an art of invention, an art that made it possible for a person to act competently within the ‘arena’ of debate . . ., to respond to interruptions and questions, or to dilate upon the ideas that momentarily occurred to him [sic], without becoming hopelessly distracted, or losing his place in the scheme of his basic speech” (8). 

I see this particular technology as an extremely powerful force in the development of the individual “self” in the late-medieval and early modern periods.  As this technology was “shrunk-wrapped” in monasteries in the twelfth century and shipped to an ever-expanding lay market in the thirteenth and fourteenth century through the growth of lay devotional culture, individuals could tap into the power of liturgical prayer in the privacy of their own domestic spaces.  In short, there was an explosion of technical reproduction of prayers in the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries that mirrors the shift in the status of traditional art described in Benjamin’s essay.  I will be reading his “Work of Art” in light of my understanding of the technologies of medieval prayer.