Both the History of Mentalities and
Psychohistory deal with the phenomena of group consciousness and group
unconsciousness, and therefore find it difficult to assess the role, integrity,
and parameters of the individual “self” in historical situations.[1]
The problem is partly an old one, traditional in the way it presents itself as
necessary to find a way to evaluate the nature of that “self” without
compromising the basic insights of these two analytic discourses, at the same
time as not distorting the freedom of the individual as an autonomous,
organically and epistemologically growing and culturally responding
person. But it is also partly a new
problem that arises as society tries to divorce itself from traditionalist
values and paradigms, and in particular because the parameters of the self vis-à-vis
the group have been shifting in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries under the triple impact of Marxism, Freudianism, and Darwinism,
taking each of these names as very broad categories of modern thinking. Marxism has revalued the individual and the
individual consciousness as both a part and a product of the historical
continuum marked by periods of economic and political change and driven by
inter-class rivalries. Freudianism has
focused attention on infantile and childhood experiences, and marked out
periods of development by stages in self-formation around sexuality, with many
of the forces and consequent responses in the personality being either unable
to attain or to regain conscious awareness.
Lastly, Darwinism has forced modern thinking to take into account, not
just evolutionary changes and choices, but the siting of the individual within
a long term history of species and genera development.
Because
my version of the history of mentalities, and within that discourse system the
way I understand psychohistory, is based on documents and images, the problem
for me has deep epistemological ramifications.[2] My examination of such a history of
mentalities puts focus on the tensions between what can be said and seen and
what cannot, as well as on what can be conceived and what is inconceivable.
To
try to conceive, image and speak of such things I will attempt a series of
schematic illustrations. The first
illustration drawn from psychoanalysis in Freud’s “Diagram of the Crowd” which
William Théaux terms a chassé-croisé,[3] the simultaneous and reciprocal exchange of a
dance cross-step, or, in our own technical language, chiasma plus
chiasmus. The drawing is based on
Freud’s 1921 diagram in Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego (Massen psychologie and Ich-Analyse), but with
the direction reversed to bring it more into alignment with three further
paradigms.
But
my argument in the formation of the history of mentalities moves towards a
modified Lacanian perspective.[4] In Lacan’s model the group has already formed
a mirror-like matrix into which individual experience fits and develops as a
sequence of illusive and delusive acts.
It is a matrix, however, that is best understood in terms of textures of
presence and absence. The “real” (as
Lacan defines the term) does not place inner and outer experience in opposition
as psychic phenomena and sensory consciousness.
That is, the report of the sensoria does not stand as the opposite to or
as mutually exclusive of the construction of mental imagery. Rather, the “real” is itself a
construct. It is a matrix of tension
lines between the individual and the group.
Projected in this way, the individual can experience the imagination of
the group as a sensory reality, and the sensory experiences of the individual
already are an imagined construct of the group.
This
web or tapestry of finely-tuned filaments of tension forms a chiasmus and a
chiasm over the chasms of alienation and isolation. In addition to what is speakable, seeable and
thinkable, there are also those things which are unspeakable, unimaginable and
inconceivable. These are microchasms and
macrochasms, in the same way as there are microcosms and macrocosms. In other words, in the examination of
historical persons and events, the historian of mentalities will look to minor,
almost infinitesimally small gaps between people and their experiences of the
world, as well as small regions of misunderstanding, misapprehension, and mis-judgment,
in the same way as psycho-historians look at the great black holes[5] in
the course of grand political, economic, and religious events, and at the deep
abyss that separates cultures and civilizations. The result can be roughly set out now in a
second paradigm.
This
second diagram schematizes the basic relationships between individual and
group, conscious and unconscious on a cross-shaped chiasma that marks out the
imaginary four points in the compass of a mentality. At the same time, overlaid on this cross
there is another set of lines, the chiasmus which points to the four zones of
micro- and macrochasm and micro- and macrocosm.
While all the lines are shown emanating from the centre, they should
also be seen in a dialectic return to that centre. The point at the centre between what is
conscious and unconscious for both individuals and groups is an area of silence
and invisibility, a black hole. It can
also be seen as the point of convergence of an aporia and a scotoma,
the place where logic runs out and at which insight is blocked out. This black hole is, however, not only be taken
as an absence or gap; it also is an area of mediation between cosmos[6]
and the chasm is.[7] Because there are not only these two
superimposed crosses, but as many lines of tension as there are individuals who
compose the group which defines itself and its constituent members, the space
near the centre is darkened over by a chiaroscuro of mythic consciousness (what
may be articulated, perceived and felt at the horizons of textual possibility).
Evidence of a similar complication of the
paradigm of the historically textualized individual and group already is
signalled in the writings of the German philospher Martin Heidegger,
particularly in his study of Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics, where he says:
In
any philosophical insight what is decisive is not what the articulated [ausgesprochenen] sentences say
but the unsaid [Ungesagtes] that is
laid before the yes by the said…. And, to be sure, since the words surround
that which they want to say, every interpretation must use force [Gewalt].[8]
The important point is that the “decisive”
element is in the text but not in what is articulated, in what the words
surround but not what they say. For that
reason, the history of mentalities uses a methodology to break up the site of
the text into a complex and dynamic suite of textualizations and untextualizations,
texts, anitexts and untexts, as well as feeling the force-field, as it were, of
the non-text, that which resists the process altogether and thus sets its
horizons and limites,[9]
not just what has been repressed, suppressed, forgotten and misplaced for each
individual, singly and in groups, but what for the group, as a separate
phenomenon in history, cannot be articulated or recognized without, in that
very extreme epistemological crisis, disintegrating the group, sometimes at the
physical expense of all its individual constituents.
Arthur
C. Danto, following art-historian Erwin Panofsky[10]
further than Keith Moxey, points to this group phenomenon under the code term
of “period” and so argues
a
period has a complex philosophical structure, rather like what a person has,
with an outside and an inside so to speak, and the concept of a historical
horizon may roughly correspond to the latter, in the respect that the internal
structure of the period is only accessible, as an object, when it ceases
functioning as a determining symbolic form.[11]
The analogy between individual and group
(“period”) is not so easy, and Danto shows that in his hesitations (“roughly”,
“so to speak,” etc.). But the difficulty
resolves itself when we see that the chiasmus involves four dancers in the
paradigmatic choreography: not just the
individual and the group, but the single person and the cluster of individuals,
on the one side, and the group as a historically developing and changing
tradition and as a particular mass acting at specific times and places, on the
other. Hence a more complicated diagram
is called for to capture some of these involved or “infringed” lines of
tension:
We thus have to deal with more complex issues
than dichotomies and gaps, even the so-called deconstuctionist’s gap (béance) between art and the world,
indicated by Steven Z. Levine in an essay on the French painter Monet.[12] Diagram 3 looks at the place of this béance.
This split, in a sense, reveals the gap between the Freudian and the
Lacanian sense of memory, insofar as these memories really have to cover cosmos
and chasm, individual and group in the senses indicated by our paradigm. Levine remarks of the artist who is his
subject:
Far
from painting the world with an elusive but alluring directness of perception,
Monet paints the world in a split and doubled gesture of recognition. This recognition is at once a primary form of
acknowledgement and a secondary form of knowing. On the one hand, there is the oedipally
ambivalent, Freudo-Bloomian recognition of the enabling anteriority of the
master [Lacan] (and of the master’s master [Freud]; on the other hand, there is
the narcissistically disenabling, Lacanian recognition that the imaginary
possession of one’s own private vision of the world depends upon the prior
existence of a symbolic system whose repetitions and reflections one must be
taught to know.[13]
The painter stands here as an extremely
articulate version of the individual, and one for whom perception is privileged
words or actions or thought. Yet he is
caught in the cross-lines of the group that comes into being through a
combination of teaching, both as a conscious pedagogical effort and as an
implicit consequence of historical circumstances, and so is the individual who
is both unique in his own autobiography and a cipher in the palimpsest-like
text of the collective individuals.
The
concept of memory has, of course, come under a great deal of scrutiny recently,
with a rhetorical perspective added to that of the psychoanalysts and the
anthropologists who have mostly been dealing with it since the turn of the
century.[14] The completion of Pierre Nora’s monumental
seven volume history of France Les Lieux
de mémoire (Memory Places) highlights the significance of this shift in
perspective for historiography, and particularly as Nora’s team of contributors
have been engaged in a history of mentalities.[15] By placing the centre of attention on these
memory-places, rather than on individuals, groups, events or ideas, the French
team make the focal point a matter of psychohistory and history of
mentalities. Arthur Krause translates
the expression significantly as “cross-roads sites”,[16]
in the sense of a carréfour, that is, a kind of traffic-circle where many roads
intersect. Philippe Levillain speaks of
the symbolic memory that, as a critical instrument, deals specifically with
ambivalence, making this memory place a locus of symbolic activity.[17] This ambiguity is made even more complex by
Jean-Francois Chanet, when she sees the memory place as the topos of contradictions and existing
outside of chronological history, a site not just of activity in diverse times
which centres on a particular object, celebration, geographical spot or
architectural construct location; but a kind of zone for public dreaming and
re-animations of the past.[18] Therefore, nature by itself cannot be such a
place, any more than can a street or a building; it is only the act of
inscription of symbolic meaning that separates out the memory place from the
other features of the landscape or city, of experience and of history. In fact, Mona Ozouf goes so far as to say,
“The places of memory are inscribed in the evidence over a long interval.”[19] Thus, in Krause’s terms,
The history of representations
that unfolds the past, entirely compensating for its modalities of re-use, is
much more than an inventory. We can
rather see in it a new history of the present, at the heart of all the
investigation into memory, identity, patrimony.[20]
Chanet also says that the lieu de mémoire is the place where the present enters into
dialogue with the people of the past, and where, therefore, there is a struggle
between the power of the ancestors who have achieved a status as almost
mythical beings and that of the people in the present whose memories,
activities, and imaginations give shape and meaning to that mythical past.[21] This shape may be so deeply embedded in the
space itself already that neither the individuals nor the group is aware how
much of what they think of as real memory, or real history, is nothing but a
screen memory, an historical text written into the interstices of previous
inscriptions and not at all on a tabula
rasa.
The
contrast between people of the past and people of the present partly covers
what we have said about the two senses of group, the on-going dynamic of tradition,
often institutionalized by explicit techniques of instruction in meaning and
evaluation and at the same time existing in implicit codes hidden in the
contours of language, child-rearing practice, and domestic or gender
relationships. But as Yves Lequin
remarks, there is also an epistemological rupture signaled by Nora and his team
of historians, between the view of France considered as one person—that is,
taking the life of the nation to be inscribed in the same space set aside
generically for the biography of individuals—and the nation as diverse
conglomerate bound together by ties that only partly effect the individual qua individual, namely what the
seven-volume history calls in the plural Les
France. This epistemological
rupture,[22]
says Lequin, runs through the middle of the school of Annales, where the problematic of group versus individual is most
sensitive.[23] Once the group (the nation in this case) is
hypostasized into an allegorical person, there is danger of putting ideal
structures in place of detailed and concrete historical evidence. The past loses its textures through
oversimplification, and memory is replaced by a scholar’s daydream.
That
is why it is important to be reminded by Francois Hartog that the memory place
has its antecedents in the memory systems taught by the classical rhetoricians,
such as Cicero, and of which Francis Yates has written so cogently.[24] In Yates and later writers on this important
technique of mind-formation and mentalities development, the locus is chosen
because it is plastic, variable, and striking, with the series of icons places
in each niche of the memory place—cathedral, temple, or other large public
building—distinguished by often violent and grotesque features, figurae constructed for the purpose not
so much out of representational images as out of fantasy and punning
playfulness. If that is so, then, indeed
the lieux de mémoires are also
elaborate conceits—in the Renaissance sense of metaphysical poetry—to be
constructed by all the techniques of rhetorical analysis. So Hartog is correct to say, in reference to
Nora’s project, that history is a sort of renewal of historical philology. But we would add that it is also a history of
“the imaginary”[25]
and in that way a kind of inconography, a history and typology of images that
is on the verge of a psycho-iconography:
which is where—and why!—we feel it proper to revivify the French term mentalité in English as a dynamic plural mentalities.
In
an interview with Hélène
Monsacré, March Augé compares his own attempt to write an anthropology of
contemporary France with Nora’s Lieux de
mémoires, and sees that he shares much with the historian, particularly the
notion that a group of people inscribe their presence on their territories in a
symbolic way:
They symbolize
them in diverse ways, marking them with their historical points of view,
establishing the frontiers between the sacred and the profane, having plans for
settlement andresidence which in effect determine social organization. All this is prescribed and at the same time
transcribed into space.[26]
What is most significant for
us in this discussion by Augé is his indication that Nora and his team have
established a relationship where the real and symbolic stand in a particular
relationship, a relationship which, he says, is not that of parellelism or of
symmetry; rather the proceedings are in a chiasm.[27] In this relationship, the territories of the
group not only overlap, as in a symbolic palimpsest, but map out the
configurations of time, whether the life-experience of the individual, the
mythical eternity of the group, the timelessness of a person’s unconscious
mind, or the apparent page of event-driven history. The cross-step in the dance of history as the
story of the memory places is also the chiasmus of textualization, creating in
its choreography the outlines of the mentality englobing individuals and groups
within its horizons and limites. Let me attempt a last complex diagram of the
carréfour: this crossroads or
intersection of memories and texts.
This last diagram sets out a
rather complex picture of the relationship between the individual and the group
in terms of several psychohistorical and mentalities factors. It is, as in our previous illustrations, based
on the intersection of both a chiasmus and a chiasma. This time, however, the point of
intersdection for both the criss-cross and the cross-over lines of tension
occurs in the midst of a darkened area, which is black at the centre. This centre signals the black hole of
non-textualizability, where the scotoma of
consciousness reinforces the aporia
of unconsciousness.
The top half of the diagram is the region of individual
experience, both as a microcosm and a microchasm, the single person and his or
her own personal relationships, whether of a formal and sustained or of a
spontaneous and ephemeral kind. Ths
cosmos here also indicates the conscious world of the single person’s organic
growth and education and all subsequent experiences that register on consciousness,
even if later they are repressed. The
chasm signals the unconsciousness of that same single person, and indicates a
region where both effects and affects have either not risen to consciousness
(as in the id) or have subsequently been repressed and are at best experienced
as distortions and surrogate feelings.
The focus does not back to narrative or event-history, but to the place
where nothing is seen or heard but “moments of extreme tension.”[28] It is on the side of the microcosm that the
personality articulates itself as a conscious force in the psyche, while it is
on the other side, that of the microchasm, that dreamwork, with all its
cencorship mechanisms, occurs, filling
out the second main aspect of the personality, the part that is below the level
of awareness.
The lower portion of the diagram illustrates the group
psychology of culture. It is again
composed of a micro and macro section.
The macrocosm represents the conscious institutions of civilization,
that is, those groups to which individuals belong in which the constituent
elements are derived from experiences prior to the lifetime of any of tis
current members and which is consciously experienced as likely to extend in
time beyond the lifetime of those same members.
The macrochasm, on the other side, signals the region of myth, that is,
the zone of long-term unconscious forces impinging on the groups that are
experienced not as formally-constituted institutions but as natural and organic
categories of true being, as primary essences justified and confirmed by the
discourses of myth.
The two chasms on the right side of the diagram are
bounded by the limites of possible
consciousness, both the individual and the group psyche unable to see, say or
think beyond the possibilities of dream and myth without destroying the very
structures of the mentality which gives to them meaning, value, and
articulation. At the same time, the two
cosmos constructions on the left side of the illustration are bounded by the
more self-conscious horizons of cultural and psychic probability, any
transgression of which would, rather than immediately deconstructing the
mentality, lead to deep feelings of anxiety, intellectual confusion, or
artistic and scientific unease.
While we must try to imagine this diagram as
three-dimensional and dynamic, always pulsating in and out along the twin lines
of tension, the chiasma and the chiasmus, we also have to see it in our mind’s
eye as filled with a spectrum of colour, the colours running in through a
chiaroscuro to the black hole of non-textualizability. This is because the chiasma of cultural
relations, where forces confront one another head on, has the stronger and more
articulate elements deriving from the group, the power of the super-ego, able
to repress, cancel and hide the weaker forces.
Although at any given moment, the processes of textualization may thus
be interfered with or be held in check, there are always residual documents of
prior moments available,[29]
and these are subject to a variety of interpretive and censorial strategies to
make them seem to fit with the hegomonic demands of the ideal or “real”
paradigm in power and to take up ironic postures in order to sneak in
counter-hegemonic articulations.
The chiasmus shows the dialectical energies that
displace, distort, and recreate the constituent elements of both living
individuals and groups and the deeper, often hidden powers of continuing
personal relationships and social organizations. As they intersect and interact, in both
conscious and unconscious ways, these lines of tension spread the colours of
experience and memory into such a wash of apparent confusion that most of
psychic and cultural awareness seems to be undifferentiated and therefore most
individuals are unaware of any distinction between their own real affects and
those which are constructed by memories and the group forces controlling them.
Yet at the very centre of Diagram 4, at the heart of the
mentality, the scotoma and the aporia collide and reinforce each other
into the black hole where nothing can be textualized, that is, become
articulate or be recalled. The scotoma, or blind spot, occurs where
the individual can see, as single person and as intersection of personal
relationships, cannot see where and how the experience is sustained or
textualized as an historical construct.
The aporia, or point at which
logic runs out, is sited at the place where the culture and the civilization
cannot perceive themselves as artificial, arbitrary, and non-eternal systems of
myth, rather than the products of logical thought, perception, and
articulation.
The history of mentalities therefore attempts, not only
to describe the way in which the textualized “event seems to arrive like
something that stupifies the voiver of commentators,” as Pierre Rélat puts it,[30]
but to redouble the perception—cosmos and chasm—and to interpret both
disturbing phenomena.[31]
 |
[1] Special thanks to Dr
William Théaux for the many
conversations in person in France and New Zealand and the long hours of written
communication by old fashioned letters and then by email. All this happened in the 1980s and
1990s. I don’t think this essay was ever
published. However, the ideas and the diagrams became part of the way I think
about mentalities.
[2] Norman Simms, Invisibility
and Silence (Washington, DC: Three
Continents, 1986), Points of Contact
(New York: Pace University Press, 1991),
The Humming Tree (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992), and My Cow Comes to Haunt Me (New York: Pace University Press, 1995).
[3] The text is spoken in a video issued by Dr. Théaux entitled
“Psychanalyse et Ecologie,” Lyon, 1993.
[4] William Théaux trained as a psychoanalyst under Lacan and then I learned from
him., although, to tell the truth, I still find Lacan as inexplicable as I do
incommensurate with my own views. My tendency
is towards the work of Henri Ey, the man whom Lacan helped to oust from his
role in the French and then the International Psychoanalytical
Association.
[5] These are the areas of the unconscious, group fantasies, and other
manifestations of powerful forces not registered in standard (positivistic)
historiography.
[6] What is and can be spoken, seen and thought.
[7] What not yet experienced or long since forgotten and therefore
unspeakable, unimaginable and inconceivable.
[8] Kant und das Problem der
Metaphysik (1925) cited in the translation of Keith Moxet in “Panofsky’s
Concept of ‘Iconology’ and the Problem of Interpretation in the History of
Art,” New Literary History 17:2
(1986) 267; the German text is cited on p. 273, n. 14.
[9] Like other technical words used here, the precise meanings are
explained at length in my books, especially those mentioned in Footnote 1. This term is derived from the Franco-Romanian
sociologist Lucien Goldmann’s works.
[10] Panofsky, as well as WErnst Gomnbrich and their mentor Aby Warburg
will be discussed at great length in my forthcoming book The Jewish Imagination: How it Challenged and Changed the World.
[11] Arthur C. Danto, “Commentary” on Moxey’s essay, see above, New Literary History 17:2 (1986) 277.
[12] Steven Z. Levine, “Monet’s Series:
repetition, Obsession,” October 37
(1986) 66.
[13] “Monet’s Series,” 66.
[14] To name but a few of the more recent books: Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of
Matteo Ricci (New York: Elisabeth
Sefton Books/Viking, 1984) and Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A
Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
[15][15] See the dossier of essay-reviews collected in Magazine Littéraire No. 307 (février 1993) 16-57, as well as the
overview review by Anthony Krause, “The Unfinished Adventure of the Annales” in Budapest Review of Books 4:3 (Fall 1994) 106-110.
[16] Krause, “The Unfinished Adventure,” 106.
[17] Philippe Levillain, “Les France: la
traversée achevée des apparences,” Magazine
Littéraire 307 (1993) 20.
[19] Cited in Krause, “The Unfinished Adventure,” 106.
[20] Krause, “The Unfinished Adventure,” 106.
[21] “Le passé recomposé, 24.
[22] Yves Lequin, “Une rupture
Epistémologique,” Magazine Littéraire
307 (1993) 25.
[23] Lequin, “Une rupture,” 26.
[25] Krause, “The Unfinished Adventure,” 109.
[26] Hélène Monsacré, ed., “Une histoire du
présent…Entretien avec Marc Augé,” Magazine
Littéraire 307 (1993) 32.
[27] Monsacrè, “Une histoire de présent,” 34.
[28] Krause, “The Unfinished Adventure,” 109.
[29] These may be either oral, written or printed texts. What is important is there memorizability and
reproducability.
[30] Cited in Krause, “The Unfinished Adventure,” 109.
[31] See especially the opening chapters of My Cow Comes to Haunt Me where I develop the idea of this kind of
“double-infringement.”
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