The Archives of Metaphors

The earthworm as archivist

The objects of nature – including ourselves – are both themselves and the archives of their own histories: they function as objects while preserving the traces of their own pasts (it is possible to date the age of trees from their annual rings; fossils are documents of the history of geology and that of the earth; genomes carry the history of descent of living beings, etc.). Charles Babbage, the English mathematician, father of the programmable computer, wrote in 1837: "the air is like a huge archive" in which the traces of the past are preserved, just like each murderer leaves a trace of his act behind."

Archiving is not an innocent activity: it is an intervention into the processes being archived. We live in an archive; and we are part of it. By our help our (natural) history can be reconstructed.

Charles Darwin, in his last and most successful book (The Formation of the Vegetable Mould through the Action of the Worms), published just six months before his death, in 1881, came to the conclusion that the topsoil of the earth, the matter we live on, is a permanently decomposing residue, decaying matter that in turn, makes the soil fecund. The present is thus a parasite on dead traces of the past under our feet. There is an archives beneath us and in order to understand ourselves, our lineage and the direction we are coming from, and where we are heading, we should look for the remains of the dead, – mediated by the worms – for the decomposing archives. Worms are archivists, who preserve, conserve and make usable – although they do not classify – the remains of the past. The apparent permanence and stability covers permanent change: if we choose an appropriately long – as geology puts it "deep" - temporal interval, the almost imperceptible, slow changes reveal the history of life and the earth.

Darwin was influenced by the insights of geology and paleontology of the previous decades. John Playfair, the noted geologist, wrote at the beginning of the 19th century that the fossil records are memory traces of revolutionary changes, preserved in the archives of the earth. Georges Cuvier, the great paleontologist, started his Discours préliminaire with the following words: "I have been obliged to learn the art of deciphering and restoring remains, of discovering and bringing together, in their primitive arrangement, the scattered and mutilated fragments of which they are composed, of reproducing, in all their original proportions and characters, the animals to which these fragments belonged".

The millions of years of history of life and of the earth cannot be studied in an obvious empirical way: fossil remains do not form a continuous sequence, there are whole geological periods which are not (well) represented in the deposits. If the ruins of Herculaneum would be followed in the geological record by the remains of a present day Italian city, one might form the misleading conclusion, as if modern Italian language had emerged directly– without slow changes, adaptations, without the process of evolution – from Latin, spoken on 24 august, 79 AD, the day when the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius buried the city. The study of the life of the earthworms, in part, can compensate for the vacuum left behind in the partial nature of geological, and biological records. If the processes of the present are governed by the same natural laws that had shaped life on earth from the beginning, by studying the life and character of the earthworms, it is possible to demonstrate and understand the history of life on earth. Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species: "I look at the geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect: of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here a there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-changing language, in which the history is supposed to be written, being more or less different in the interrupted succession of chapters, may represent the apparently abruptly changed forms of life, entombed in our consecutive, but widely separated formations." Nature is an (imperfect) archive.

Humans are classifiers

We have good reasons to suppose that people of each culture distinguish the things of the world from each other: the animate from the inanimate, (although at a time when the production of synthetic genome is just a question of production costs, the distinction becomes deeply problematic) friendly from dangerous-looking, edible from poisonous plants, light from dark, etc. Unlike physics, biology has always faced the task of dealing with an enormous diversity of phenomena, which are either similar or obviously or not-so-obviously dissimilar, which – sometimes invisibly – interact with or are related to each other. Without understanding these "family resemblances" it is not easy to find our way in the world, to learn the difference between domestic and wild animals.

Taxonomies attempt to arrange a diversity of entities into a set of classes, based on similarities of the individual objects included in the classes. Taxonomy is the science of classification. Scientific taxonomies are those that are based on or correspond to the fundamental theoretical assumptions of particular scientific disciplines. Pragmatic classifications are developed with practical considerations in mind, to help retrieval or memorializing (alphabetical classifications are such pragmatic ordering systems).

On the basis of Aristotle's idea of classification (inanimate-animate-spiritual), the notion of the "Great Chain of Beings" was born in the Middle Ages, classifying the universe into a tight hierarchy of beings, with inanimate (spiritless) beings at the bottom, humans higher up, angels above human beings, and the Creator at the top.

Up to the 17th century it was received wisdom that the number and variety of beings – as a consequence of the divine Principle of Plenitude – was constant. Science, based on antique traditions, registered only a few hundred plants, the characters and names of which could be kept in mind and remembered. (A trained naturalist is capable of recalling the specificities and names of 500 species.) The invention of printing and the discovery of the new world resulted in an information explosion in botany and zoology that made it necessary to replace the so-far descriptive presentation with ordering and classification, with taxonomies. Long description was replaced by short taxonomic tables, graphic tables and other taxonomic images. By the beginning of the 17th century naturalists had described several thousand plants, and Linnaeus's predecessor, the English botanist, John Ray, tried hard to order 18,600 plants in 126 "natural" classes. According to present-day estimates there are about 250,000-400,000 plant species, of which we have sufficient knowledge of about 100,000. (An on-line collaborative undertaking, called the Encyclopedia of Life, aims at classifying 1,8 million living beings with the help of volunteer classifiers.)

The Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus prepared his short (at the time of its first publication in 1735, only 11-page) classification on the basis of morphology, observable (formal and/or functional) similarities; he classified plants according to the features of the plant's reproductive systems, the male stamen and the female pistil. Linnaeus adhered to the idea of external fixity of divine design in nature, which excluded the possibility of change or the potential for evolution. The tenth edition of this Systema Naturae ordered 4,400 animal and 7,700 plant species. Linnaeus's Species Plantarum, published in 1753, made use for the first time of the so-called binomial nomenclature, whereby the taxonomic name of each species if formed by binomial Latin words: the name of the genus (the generic name) - which behaves like the family name among humans – and the "Christian" name identifying the species.

At Linnaeus's time a blind man could become a mathematician, but he could not be a naturalist; the 18th century could be characterized by the preeminence of observation. The naturalist was supposed to take each individual plant "in hand", and observe it in close-up, using his expert gaze. Only the trained naturalist was able to see the essence beyond the visible signs, to choose the most typical plant, to find the most suitable "natural name" suit the character of the plant. The aim of the classifier was truth-to- nature, instead of "objectivity", to find and select the typical, possibly the most typical plant as the representative of the species. From the middle of the 19th century, objectivity took over from truth-to-nature. The particular, the individual took over the role and place of the typical. Instead of drawings, emphasizing the (ideal) typical characteristics of the species, the herbaria and botanical atlases used photographs, images "not made by human hands". Instead of the carefully chosen specimen, selected by the expert naturalist, the collections of the 19th century became populated by accidentally found representatives of the new species. In order to prevent the proliferation of many names designating the same species, in order to avoid the curse of Babel, the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature was accepted at the 1930 congress in Cambridge, which tied the name of the taxa (the genus, the species or other taxon), to a single, concrete individual specimen, designated by the person who first published a newly discovered species. The specimen was to be deposited in a known herbarium or at a respected natural history collection, in order that this specific individual might stand for the whole group, the species or for the genus. Thus the many are compressed into one, "the type specimen", with the help of the so called "type method".

Linnaeus's method produces the visible and demonstrable – not just describable – system of continuous similarities and differences; in this system the role of words is occupied by botanical gardens, herbaria, collections; taxonomic tables and catalogs take the role of previous descriptions. The classification of living beings leads to the proliferation of classifications of non-living things, to library indexes, to archival repertoria and lists of fonds, finding aids and museum catalogs.

In the classical taxonomic tables and card catalogs each object has just one, single, designated place, it is physically not possible to place the same object into multiple classificatory places. As opposed to the classical card catalog, digital taxonomies can assign multiple places to the same object, based on the needs of the user, instead of the wishes or the authoritative decision of the cataloger.

The similarity between the objects classified in the same category was obvious for Linnaeus, however, besides the wish of the Creator, there did not seem to be any obvious explanation for the order of nature. In 1859, the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species provided an explanation for the mysterious "natural affinity": according to the theory of evolution, (one of) the most important reasons of similarity is common descent.

Darwin classified those populations – and not individuals – into the same group that are the descendants of the closest common ancestor. The ranking of the Linnaean system – still in use – is now defined not only, and not primarily, by the degree of similarity, but by the age of common descent. Living organisms that are descendants of the same ancestor, are usually, though not necessarily, similar to each other.

The Darwinian earthworm accomplishes part of the tasks of the archivist, the other part remains for the archivist herself, following Darwin's footsteps: the most important organizing rule of the archive is the principle of provenance, according to which archives should respect the original order that had been created by the originator (institution or individual) of the document. Documents originating from the same institution or from the same individual should be classified according to the original order in which the records were created and kept, and records of the same provenance should not be mixed with those of different provenance. The principle of provenance that privileges the common origin of documents is a close kin of Darwin's theory of common descent. The principle of provenance was first officially introduced into French and Prussian state archives around the time when the theory of evolution, including the importance of common descent, was born. One of the first manuals to introduce the principle of provenance, Aimé Champollion-Figeac's Manuel de l'archiviste des préfectures des mairies et des hospices was published in 1860, just one year after the publication of The Origin of Species.

Archives as the institution of memorializing

We can imagine the emergence of the archives as if it had been tied both to the "art of memory", i.e., the technique of memorializing, and to the urge to classify. Memorializing, storing, and sorting memories in places were issues of high concern already at the time of classical antiquity. Without widespread literacy, and especially after the proliferation of writing, in the absence of properly classified libraries, the practical and ethical need to remember (the dead, - their lives, deeds, and last wills – the right words needed for rituals, sermons, and prayers, oratories and scholarly arguments) forced the men of antiquity to deal with the burden of information. The spread of literacy has created an even greater need for memorializing, as exact wording is rarely crucial in oral societies but often a great importance in literate ones.

We have two well-known surviving metaphors of memory as developed by western antiquity: memory as a written surface, a wax tablet – the earliest documented use is in Plato's Theaetetus – and memory as a concrete place, building, storehouse, referred to as "Ciceronian mnemonic" (Frances Yates) or "architectural mnemonic" (Mary Carruthers).

The "architectural" metaphor, memory as a thesaurus, storage-room, refers both to the content and the organization of memory. In 44 BC Cicero wrote in his Topica: "It is easy to find things that are hidden if the hiding place is pointed out and marked; similarly, if we wish to track down some argument, we ought to know the places or topics..." Cicero's contemporary, the unknown author of the Rhetorica ad Herrenium, a piece that would become an influential rhetorical manual in the Middle Ages, calls memory thesaurus inventorum, "the treasurehouse of found-things". Quintilian's comprehensive textbook on rhetoric, the Institutio Oratoria, written more than a century later than Cicero's De Oratore, and which influenced humanist scholars, suggests that memories should be kept in definite locations in memory, in an orderly fashion, so as to avoid confusion.

After Quintilian, the "architectural" metaphor of mnemonic lost its popularity, until de Herrenium was rediscovered around the 12th century, and extensively used and commented upon, especially in monasteries, first perhaps by Hugh of St. Victor in the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris.

Besides the strongbox, the thesaurus, men of the church usually turned to specific synonyms when using architectural, spatial metaphors, like cella, meaning storeroom, "cellar", in modern English. As Mary Carruthers writes in The Book of Memory, "the Latin word cella has a number of more specialized applications that links it complexly to several other common metaphors for both the stored memory and the study of books, as well as word like arca..." Arca refers both to the Ark of Covenant, and to the arch-metaphor of the archives, the Ark of Noah.

Although, etymologically the word "archive" might originate with the Greek arkheion, the home or office of the Archon, where official documents were stored and filed by the official of the city, from which the term arkhé, the official document derives, the emergence of the archive has a common origin with the "architectural" mnemonic imaginary that, as we see, goes back at least as far as the Roman rhetorical tradition. In order to remember and recollect subject matters, one has to place them in well-defined places (topoi, loci, arca, cella, thesaurus), in a particular schematic arrangement, with differentiation, and distinction. The arrangement should be sequenced, and exhibit discriminability and distinctiveness.

The archives, which is sometimes loftily referred at as "the institution of memory", is in fact and institution of mnemonics, memorializing, of remembrance and recollection.

The archives is thus the physical embodiment of Cicero's "method of loci", or the 17th century Jesuit priest's Matteo Ricci's "palace of memory", the different rooms and corridors of which hold a series of images of different concepts that needed to be remembered. The archives is – in a literal sense – the architectural mnemonic, where memory for words and memory for things are practiced. The archives emerges together with and as a reflection on the art of memory, as a real thesaurus or words and images to place, store, arrange and classify, in order to be recalled and remembered. The mental image, the Aristotelian phantasm, the Latin imago that the mind's eye of the practitioners of the classical arts of memory perceives in the cells or palaces of memory, turns into a real, tangible, and perceptible document on the shelves of the archives. The similarity between the fantastic, imaginary constructs of classical mnemonics and the architecture of the institution of the archives is astonishing; it is as if the physical layout and the structure of the archives had been conceived in the manuals of mnemonics, evoked by the daughter of Gaia and Uranus, Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, the personification of memory.

It would be advisable, however, to be cautious and not to exclude the possibility of reasoning from the opposite direction: the available and reasonable arrangement of storing documents on shelves, in pigeon-holes, in cells, in different and distinguishable locations, had – most probably – a profound influence on the philosophers and authors of manuals of rhetoric, when they were coining their images and metaphors of the most efficient way of training memory. The experience they gained in the office of the Archon, or in the offices of republican and imperial Rome, in the storerooms and libraries of the Dominican, Franciscan and Jesuit houses , provided a readily usable model for the perceived workings of human memory.

István Rév