Closing Forum

CARLO DIAZ

Orpheus Instituut / University of Chicago

JOÃO CARLOS SANTOS

Leiden University

PRIYA SATIA

Stanford University

MICHAEL SHANKS

Stanford University

This article is adapted from a virtual roundtable discussion at the Imagining the Non-Present conference in September 2021. The conference was conducted through a temporary website, with each participant being asked to submit an “opening statement” and then engage in several one-week rounds of asynchronous discussion. The virtual roundtable transcribed below immediately followed these four weeks of written interaction. Silent adjustments have been made to the transcript to aid readability.

João Carlos Santos: First, I’d just like to say that it was a real pleasure for me to go through all the material that was posted on the website. I have to say that the only thing I knew before this was a little bit of Michael Shanks’s work, so it was very beautiful to see how many connections could be made within the topic of the conference not only between the keynote speakers but also between the other participants. My questions are divided into three topics that I think might be interesting for us to discuss. The first concerns, let’s say, more methodological aspects relating to science, art, present, past, imagination; another concerns epistemological questions; and to finish, I have a few questions that are more political.

Now, my first question might best be addressed to Michael, because from what I understood from your presentation, you focus on the pragmatics of archaeology, the methodological aspects, and you gave us a lot of interesting advice and many useful categories to think within. ¹ But what I found particularly intriguing were your illustrations of these methodological points, which to me you could use to approach a few traditional distinctions. One is between science and art—and further between the natural sciences, hard sciences, social sciences, and soft sciences—with an eye towards how these categories can be revised. Another is between the historical and the contemporary—how can your artistic examples within the archaeological method help us revise the difference between contemporary and historical music-making? Of course, most of your examples were of contemporary art-making, but I was wondering whether you could also speak a little bit about how your work relates to music, both historical and contemporary?

That might be too much to take on all at once, but I can focus the question a bit by asking this: how do the methodological points you made help us revise the distinction between art and science, and between natural science and soft science?

Michael Shanks: A major purpose of mine within my initial presentation was to share with you that range of work that comes out of the contemporary art studio and those fabulous artists who came together around what’s actually a very similar topic to what we are discussing here with respect to performance arts (let’s call them that, broadly). And for me, yes, there was in those works, both implicit and explicit, a methodology, although really it’s more a pragmatics. Methodology implies a little bit too much of an algorithm: you do this, then this, then this—a protocol: you follow this, you do that. And so I’m a little looser in my understanding of it. What do we do in doing what we do, and when we are situated where we are, whether that’s in a university programme, an institution, an organisation, a community, a family, or indeed, in terms of one’s own personal practice? So having said all that, let’s just pick up what I have learned from looking at what goes on in studios.

By the studio I don’t mean a broad notion, I mean the art studio. But it’s also the laboratorium—and I’m using the Latin, forgive me, because it is a place where labour occurs. And yet, let’s use labour here in that more creative sense—not so much of alienated work but of creative labour. So it’s a place of work, where things get done, things get made, materials are sought, prepared, research is undertaken, experiments are made, models are built. And perhaps there is something that comes out: a product, an experience, or a service—good grief—I mean, we live in a world obsessed with service and experience, service economy and experience economy.

Therefore what goes on there has been of great interest to me, particularly because I’ve been fascinated by the connections between the art studio and the design studio. And what I see there is a range of activities or processes that we can understand in various ways. The model I particularly like to use is that of production, of making, in the way I’ve described. Indeed, there is a broad economic cycle—and again I’m going to qualify economic as œconomic, so it is our creation of the Greek oikos, which is our inhabitation of the world. I’m using it broadly, of course. And that refers also to an ecology—œcology—understood in this way.

There is a very straightforward cycle, just as I’ve described, going from the acquisition of materials to their processing, their manipulation, and to identifying certain purposes within a project. In product design, identifying purpose may mean needs-finding. In more arts-based approaches, it may be conceptual—that you have a certain concept, a frame, that you wish to pursue. And then processing: what do you do with the stuff you’ve acquired, found, to go in a certain direction? In this respect, the methodology has a few basic principles. One is the way I bring together the arts, sciences, whatever you want. It’s about project management. Project is an awkward term, but let’s just call it project management for the moment. And it involves a pragmatics and, yes, a pragmatism.

So my foundation in a methodology is one that asks very, very straightforward pragmatic questions. With archaeology: what do you do when you visit a place? And again, there were some lovely examples. Mark Dyer discussed Sam Salem and his Derwent visitation, and what he did with the sampling and the combination, the recombination through processes that were partially automated to create an assemblage—let’s call it that, and I’m using the word technically as well as broadly. ² That, to me, is a wonderful example of a method, but also of a pragmatics. What do you do when you visit a place?

I prefer those pragmatic questions over the more, let’s say, rationalised obsessions we sometimes hear about. “What is a site in archaeology?” We’ve had that over and over again. “What is an artefact?” Oh, my goodness. “We need an object-oriented ontology because we have neglected objects; let’s redefine them.” That’s fine. It’s great.

These are, though, the debates, the practices, in and around what I would call the management of a particular kind of project that is funded in certain ways, that has certain purposes, certain ends, some of which might be more justifiable, some less.

João Carlos Santos: Thank you, Michael. And how does this methodological or pragmatic revision that is very strongly suggested in your work relate specifically to the topic of our conference, which is this relationship between different versions of past, present, or future temporalities? Can this merging of pragmatics or methods help us understand how imagination deals with time?

Michael Shanks: Of course. And it’s not inappropriate to talk about what we mean by imagination. I, again, am inclined less towards that and more towards looking at the body of work that you’ve all shared. The works that you’ve shared, and your unpacking of what is going on and what the implications are.

What I found to be very, very nice in many of your sharings was the role of concept. There was a lot of it in your work—and this is not unfamiliar in our arts world. Maybe it’s the corporeal. Maybe it’s the incorporeal. Or, as we’re circling around, maybe its time and temporality, and especially how we can find a more nuanced approach to those concepts through trying out different things. Because of the topic of the conference, I found a key issue in many of our discussions to be that which returns: the revenant. That’s present in a lot of them. And of course it brings us indeed into many questions about historiography, the writing of the past in the present, which introduces notation.

But I would say that what we are looking at is a very appealing way of exploring concept through works. It’s practice—arts practice, musical practice, composition—that helps us research these ideas, these concepts. I think it’s important if we want to go into the purpose of what we’re doing that there are a whole series of questions here as to what we are enabling in this presentation of a practice. The distinctions you introduced at the beginning—of science and the arts—become less important for me. Not that they’re not important; they’re just not upfront. And I’m comfortable with that. I’m a bit bored with them. I don’t think it’s a particularly great question to ask, just “What is science?” I’m much more interested in how science has been conceived and used rhetorically today in different kinds of practice, politics, and daily life.

João Carlos Santos: Thank you, Michael.

Priya, in your keynote you scrutinise the heritage of the Enlightenment and Romanticism and how these movements might have created some of the distinctions I was just describing between art and science and between past, present, and future. Could you speak a little bit about how this notion of, let’s say, this more integrated version of pragmatics or methods was conceived before the Enlightenment and the Romantic revolution, if you want to call it that? And given you speak so much about it in your work, I especially wonder if you see a connection here with poetry and myth?

Priya Satia: Well first I should say I’m a modernist, so I wouldn’t know in a fully expert way, but you can definitely see in the eighteenth century a newness being asserted. We are going to think differently about the study of the past from this point onward. We are going to think differently about where nature and the imaginative arts fit in relation to how we’re going to conceive the real world. So the implication, then, is that before the Enlightenment these things were not disaggregated so systematically all the time, and that there was more of a presumption that they are intertwined.

You can imagine it has a lot to do with an effort to compartmentalise religious belief. You’re separating the real from the speculative, unreal, imaginative, or mystical realms as something different. There’s an abstracting out of the real. And so the implication is that before the Enlightenment, it’s not abstracted. If you want to understand history, you’re not going to object to the idea that there might be a divine hand at work in there, or that there might be mystical or magical beings involved. And this would vary across the world. But there’s such a concerted effort in the eighteenth century to redefine the relationship between the real and the magical. If you think of the seventeenth century in England, during the civil wars, there is this urge to rethink concepts that we now look back to and call civil liberties and natural rights and things like that, but that came out of a sense of the end of times, that Christ is about to come again. There’s a unity of religious beliefs and conceptions of how history is unfolding in one’s own time. They’re not separated.

However, in the eighteenth century, there was an effort to think about these as different realms; although there’s still, as I wrote in my book, this lingering kind of imprint of the old apocalyptic vision on conceptions of history in particular. They’re not saying that Christ is about to return, but they’re still saying that history is moving in a particular direction that leads to some chiliastic end. So that’s the contrast. In the eighteenth century, there’s a bifurcation of the world—there’s a place for the imagination and for mysticism, but it’s understood as having a compensatory function, to help us deal with the worldly reality, which is “worldly” because it’s thought of as completely empirically accessible. You don’t need your imagination to understand the real world, but there is a place for the imagination and the pleasures of the arts.

João Carlos Santos: How do you see this dismemberment, as you called it, let’s say, in our day? Do you think we are reconciling things? And if so, is it in a nostalgic way—“let’s go back to what it was in the past”—or is it in a totally different way than it was ever thought to be?

Priya Satia: Even though this new understanding emerged in the eighteenth century, I don’t think it ever fully persuaded everyone. Even within my area of expertise, in Britain, you still see, for example, occultists before and after World War I—people who are talking to the dead in seances. That’s a whole new kind of spiritualism. It’s like an invented new religion fuelled by the crisis of mass death that is World War I. This is just one example of the ways in which, despite the Enlightenment effort to render the world empirically accessible and to compartmentalise the imaginary, it didn’t fully work culturally, in the whole realm of society.

There’s a constant tension there. So if we feel today that the old division is now being papered over, I think probably if we travelled back in time we would notice that it had always been papered over. We’re still legatees of that Enlightenment era. I don’t think people are aware enough of the modern effort to bifurcate those realms for them to consciously say that that was not the right way to apprehend the world. It’s just that we’ve always had lingering commitments, without a sense of contradiction, to the idea that the world is a mystical place or that God does intervene in the world. It’s too much to think that everyone just got on the same page in the Enlightenment and agreed.

João Carlos Santos: I have a question now for both Michael and Priya. Earlier, we had a very beautiful presentation by Jennifer Walshe on her work, and I think what I particularly liked about it is how she dealt with how her music actually imparts some knowledge about our present condition—about algorithms and AI and robots—and how that actually reveals something about what she called a structure of feeling—our perception of the present moment. Can each of you reflect a little bit on the function of the arts in your own work, in archaeology and historiography, how they’re important for you in the sense of how they impart knowledge about either a specific period or a site or whatever thing is relevant in your work.

Priya Satia: I think of myself as a cultural historian, so for me, just as a source base, I’ve always looked to literature, art, and music because I think the imprints of the things I’m interested in—British Orientalism, for instance—can be found in those realms too, insofar as they are popular forms. Also because in the period I’m interested in, a lot of the people involved in artistic and cultural production are moving in the same elite circles as those who are making major political decisions.

Virginia Woolf, for example, is married to Leonard Woolf, and Leonard Woolf is involved in all kinds of administrative capacities in the British empire in that period. Vita Sackville-West, who Woolf was very close to, is also moving in the same circle—she’s married to an ambassador. So those worlds are not very far apart, just in terms of their social production. The production of policy and the production of culture in this period are mutually informing one another.

So if we’re trying to understand, as in my first book, Spies in Arabia, ³ how the British dreamed of aerial policing as a way of maintaining control in the Middle East, you can look at the way the Middle East is depicted in, say, Virginia Woolf’s books, or T. S. Eliot’s, or any of the literature of the time. T. E. Lawrence is a very important artist, patron of artists, author, and literary figure in his own right, but he also is someone who had a major hand in actually shaping events and institutions in the Middle East. You can’t really separate them.

One of the arguments I make is that British cultural ideas really shaped the outcome of the aerial policing regime that was set up specifically for the Middle East. I think most cultural historians would answer the question in a similar way, which is that methodologically the arts are very important sources that shed light on how cultural representations—this is the way it’s often talked about—shape our reality and vice versa.

Michael Shanks: What I found very interesting was how so much of the discussion we’ve had these last few weeks is circling around a field—let’s call it that—which has been with us a long, long time. And that field is rhetoric. I have a great deal of interest in how the field, rhetoric, as practised, has evolved over a few millennia now. And it still remains, I think appropriately, an object, a field of interest, because it has enormous relevance in relationship, indeed, to your question.

Rhetoric is, for me, a kind of theory of a particular field of practices, and it’s been traditionally divided into different components, one of which, inventio, means not only creation but also discovery. And it is essentially the processes that generate the materials with which you are going to work in your rhetorical production. The other components include dispositio, how you arrange things, which is composition. One aspect of dispositio may be narratio, the telling of a narrative, and everything that hangs from that. It may involve different purposes and modes, because, yes, your audience, your purpose, your location is fundamentally important to the production of a rhetorical project. Of course, we’ve long known and long been familiar with the aims of logos, a rational account of an approach, which is a small focus on ethos, an ethics, and what to do; and then pathos, which is working in and around emotion, sensation.

There’s a fourth that sometimes is forgotten, kairos, which is what a lot of you were talking about in terms of the event of performance. Kairos is of course a Christian term as well— referring to the second coming of Christ. It is the moment, the Benjaminian jetztzeit, the time of the coming, or indeed the return. In rhetorical terms, it is that the moment of your delivery—your presentation to and with an audience, in a particular location, the site specificity, the temporal specificity, the actuality of your production—is critical. It matters. It is an intrinsic component of your rhetorical delivery. To me, and I won’t go any further because there are production values involved in rhetoric, there’s even of course memoria, which is a massive component of rhetoric, and is not just how you remember a speech that is a declamatory understanding of rhetoric; rhetoric is much bigger. Memoria are the practices, the processes of inscription, of retrieval, of archive, of publication, and a certain aspect of mediation.

So rhetoric, for me, offers a kind of way of navigating some of these issues. And it includes knowledge engineering, knowledge building. But part of what I’ve been sharing with you is to focus on pragmatics. What do you do, to certain ends, to persuade, to cajole, to make an intervention through composition, which we can call rhetoric.

João Carlos Santos: I’d like to emphasise the relevance of kairos to the topic of this conference, because it might be the most interesting concept rhetoric can give us to understand exactly this relationship between past and present. So I’m very happy you mentioned that. It is, of course, implicit in much of what you just said, but could you focus in on the more epistemological consequences of what you’re saying? Maybe because of a bad reading of Plato that many people did, we’ve stripped rhetoric of its epistemological powers, let’s say. I don’t think this is what Plato actually meant. If you read the Phaedrus, for example, it’s clear that rhetoric still has a very important role to play in terms of truth. So what are your thoughts on rhetoric and epistemology?

Michael Shanks: If we see rhetoric as a pragmatics of discourse—in a Foucauldian sense—it’s about the production of things. It delivers statements. It can deliver all manner of things. It is, actually, I would argue—and I’m not alone in this—a way of understanding design. Richard Buchanan made a great deal of this in the wake of Herbert Simon on the rhetoric of design as practice, design as production. But anyway, if we see rhetoric in that respect as how we might understand the components of a mode of cultural production—let’s say it’s that—then, yes, a statement for which you make a knowledge claim is part of that.

So, yes, you can perform a rhetorical project. It can be a talk, it can be a journal paper, it can be a blog entry. And it is open for you, of course, to organise, to deliver, to structure your statement, your whatever it is, in such a way that you feel it’s appropriate to claim that this is a statement of knowledge or a candidate for knowledge. And then it is circulated—or of course, it might not be, it might just get ignored—but it might circulate within certain milieus, certain media, which are forms of memoria, in material forms—a journal paper or a YouTube video—and become a subject of discussion around its status as a knowledge claim.

Is this fantasy? Is this actually a new breakthrough on the basis of its machine-learned algorithms of the history of music? So they’re claims. And of course, they may be accepted, in which case they can then become part of, indeed, an archive that may be the source of further inventio. That is, when you reach into journals, you pull out the papers you wish, you arrange them in a certain way—that’s the dispositio—you deliver them with certain production values. Peer review, for example, delivers certain kinds of production values inscribed—supposedly, whatever they are, and we can argue about that—in the paper. And the paper is then subject to circulation, perhaps within fields of what is claimed to be abstract knowledge, practical knowledge, applied knowledge. These are all up for negotiation, potentially, more or less.

João Carlos Santos: Fantastic. Thank you, Michael. And now maybe moving to a third topic, which of course we have already mentioned here in many ways, of the more political and moral topics. Priya, there are some moral issues you raised in your paper, for example, the question of how Romanticism has privileged a sort of big-man history as opposed to a more collective history. And you seem to imply here and there, if I understood you correctly, that contemporary composers are still searching for a Romantic individualised notion of genius. Again, I might have misunderstood—I read this more in between the lines. So if you merge both ideas—let’s say, the fallacy of the Romantic hero with the notion that we’re still searching for this in contemporary art—do you think we need to revise this modern attitude or that we have to democratise it or level it up a little bit? And did you see any of this in the papers that were presented at the conference in any way?

Priya Satia: Yes, sure. I was talking I think about the way the history of musical composition is written, and that it is often habitually told in a great-man way, because practically speaking that’s just how it’s understood—I was thinking in terms especially of classical music. It could be that things have changed since I last looked at this question, but that was my impression when I did look at it a few years ago.

João Carlos Santos: Well, maybe just to interrupt: Taruskin, who wrote the biggest “full” history of music—the most recent one, let’s say—he says he’s not going to do that, but then he does. So I think that’s a very good sign of exactly what you’re saying.

Priya Satia: Yes, I just think it’s challenging. Let’s say you want to write the history of the historical discipline, like the book I did. As much as I’m criticising great-man history, there is sort of one intellectual after the other in this story, even in my critical account of what they did—even though I’m trying to make the point that it’s not any particular one who produced this great-man understanding of history. It’s a collective cultural phenomenon. So I think even in this little paper I mentioned Carlyle saying one thing, and then from a very different direction you get Marx saying something similar, and then Kant. They have very different politics, obviously, and they’re from different moments, different places, but I hope in there I’m conveying that it’s a collective intellectual culture, and it’s not just this man said this and then this great man said this. I think there are ways in which you can tell histories that involve collectives … The thing is, these composers and historians’ actions were shaped by their own belief in great-man history. They are influenced by that idea. It is shaping how they actually act. I think that’s very true with someone like Marx. And I think composers in the same period, with the same Romantic ethos influencing them, also probably had an outsized sense of their importance and their role in the history of music.

You have to deal with that somehow when you’re telling the history, but without extending the belief that that’s the only way for the history of music to progress and evolve in our time and in the future. So you have to account for the way that this idea influenced the actual composition of music in the past, without extending further than it needs to be the influence of the idea that music is only made by a series of great men. I think one way to do that is with cultural-historical techniques where you’re acknowledging that composers are shaped by this particular culture and this particular understanding of creativity and genius, and they’re collectively shaped by that. They’re shaped by certain class notions—and so many European composers in the nineteenth century do emerge from a middle-class sensibility. So there are ways to sort of broaden the history of composition and explain even composers’ individual greatness in terms of broader cultural and social factors. And I think one could think much more consciously about this.

Many of you in your responses actually shared such interesting stories of your own work in composition—I think Caroline Wilkins also shared this—where you’re performing in very consciously different ways, or composing in very consciously different ways, to get away from this sensibility and make composition something that acknowledges the inherently collaborative and collective nature of the production of art, however much artistic people sometimes exaggerate the importance of their own contribution. I might think that I came up with this idea of the discipline of history having evolved in this particular way, but if you read the book [Time’s Monster], I’m influenced by so many other thinkers, and I see this idea echoed again and again in a lot of things that are coming out right now. So there is such a thing as a zeitgeist. There is such a thing as a lot of people arriving at the same idea. And that’s good. That means that you’ve got the mutual support of that. It’s just a less egotistical way of thinking about how to make something new and how new things have appeared in the past. I hope that addresses your question.

João Carlos Santos: Yes, it does. Could you speak a little bit more about how that idea—specifically this acknowledgement you were just referring to—refers to the other issue you brought into your text about the relationship between past and future and future and past, that you cannot understand the past without this dependency that you refer to.

Priya Satia: Yes, I was disputing two main terms of the conference goal. One was to think about how creative processes transpire through the self, so what we just talked about was to question what we mean by self and how porous that self is. And the other thing I was questioning was the presumption that the non-present is something we access through our imagination unlike the present; what I was trying to explain there is that the present itself is something we also can only access through the imagination.

Neurologically, it was only after I submitted the essay that I actually discovered how we apprehend the world, through something I read in The New York Times on the latest neurological science, and I’ll just read you a sentence from that: “it turns out, reality and imagination are completely intermixed in our brains;” ⁴ therefore, even when the brain is seeing, it’s partly constructing what’s out there based on imaginative experience. Even when you imagine something, you’re drawing neurologically on fragments of empirical data that are in your mind; so if somebody says “imagine a tomato,” some other tomatoes you have seen are going to be filling in the space in your brain. And vice versa as well: if you see a tomato, you’re recognising it based on your imaginative experience of having dealt with tomatoes. I’m not a scientist, so I can’t quite capture exactly what it is. But it was just a really interesting kind of scientific confirmation of what I was trying to express in my essay that actually there is a kind of sense of the fullness of the past, and that when we’re in the present it’s always seeded with the past, and we have access to that—we experience it constantly in our experience of the present.

And music is really interesting—this also occurred to me only after I wrote the essay—music, unlike art, maybe more like literature, is something that unfolds itself in time. The art of music is in the gaps in time, between the notes. You hear a note and then there’s another note after. The art itself depends on its unfolding in time. And that is something that I believe is worth thinking about more, too. Then what does that mean? That there is no music that’s ever only purely present, because literally every note you experience is based on how far it is spaced from the note that just passed and the note that’s just coming. Music is actually the one art form—maybe more than any other—that can never only be experienced in the present, or only in the past, or only in the future. It’s always connecting all those temporalities. It depends on connecting the moment that passed, the moment that’s here, and the moment that’s coming.

João Carlos Santos: I think there were many contributions that touched exactly on this aspect of music and how that is reflected in a specific compositional technique. I just have one concluding question, again for both of you, but starting this time with Michael. Not many of the contributions dealt with it, but this conference was supposedly organised with people dealing with historically informed musical practice—if that term is allowed anymore, I don’t know. And this was a movement that was largely inspired by certain Romantic, post-Romantic, or modernist impulses—so Stravinsky, Hindemith, and the rest.

And I was wondering whether, either from an archaeological point of view or from a historiographical point of view, how Romantic you would consider this historically informed performance practice movement still to be, even when some of the conclusions that might be derived from attempting to go back to the past are exactly that it’s not so Romantic. Music was a much more collective activity, less genius oriented than Romanticism might have thought it was.

Michael Shanks: We’ve circled a little bit around these terms, Romanticism and the eighteenth century, the seventeenth century, and the antiquarian. I don’t want to call it a movement, but I think antiquarianism is a useful reference point in these kinds of question. It’s interested in two essential components of the past. One is sites and monuments in the landscape, what you do with them, how you approach them, how you encounter them, how you depict them, and what they mean in terms of region, locality, inhabitation. And it is a predisciplinary continuum. The other is collection; that is, sites in the landscape and collecting stuff. And these drive all sorts of debates in and around who we are, where we’ve come from, what remains, and what you do with it in relationship to whatever your current contemporary projects are. And particularly if you take the end of the eighteenth century for example, with various shifts in how we give a foundation to what were increasingly becoming the major polities of European nation states and the development of museums there, you can bundle Romanticism in with all that.

One thing I found fascinating, for example, is the growing interest from the mid-eighteenth century in ballads—musical ballads that have lyrics—and how these became such a focus of debate in and around authenticity, originality, and what you do with these oral remains of community. But they’re not oral because they’re all in manuscripts or they’re transcribed. It goes with an ethnomusicology, too, and the debate around the significance of voice. And it was not actually a straightforward argument that material remains are the better foundation for our historical understanding. Far from it. There was a very, very strong argument made that it’s oral tradition that, treated appropriately (i.e., through a scholarly apparatus), can lend the best foundation to our understanding of regional community pasts.

It was summed up in one of the foundational texts of what we can call European Romanticism, Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which was a collection of ballads from a manuscript. ⁵ Its frontispiece is a quotation, perhaps from Horace [in fact, Ovid, Amores 3.9.29—Ed.], which runs “Durat opus vatum”—“It is the work of the poet that endures.” ⁶ That is, the voice of the poet—maybe it’s inscribed, but actually the point is not that, it is transmitted orally through a living community and its memoria. Now, that implies an active reworking of the remains of the past and the present. It’s not about preservation, actually. And so Percy and a whole bunch of them, including Walter Scott, were quite happy to reconstruct using their poetic skill and imagination.

And that was entirely appropriate. It went with, in fact, the restoration of ancient sculptures. It was entirely appropriate to take a chisel to the marbles of the Parthenon. And that was actually Elgin’s plan until it was stymied by a shift in taste. So this issue of reworking the past, I find, has some very, very interesting historical roots. And I think what we are looking at now is about those issues of re-enactment, reworking, returning, or the word that I’ve come to like because it’s got a nice classical foundation, the revenant, and how this—and this has been raised many times—is inevitably future oriented. Why do we care so much about working with this material for our current purposes, which involve anticipating alternative futures? That was absolutely at the heart of a critical Romantic project at the end of the eighteenth century, I would say. You can look at Marx as a critical Romantic philosopher (cum economist, if you want to call him that as well) and you can look also at those whole political movements that are reworking an understanding of, for example, the Roman state, the res publica—this is an active reworking to current political purpose, anticipating better futures. So this critical Romanticism that takes the past and reworks it without necessarily representing—that is, in the sense of describing, without re-enacting—is a foundation for a creative reworking, revisiting.

This is where I liked how Mark brought in Trinh T. Minh-ha and the project of representation. ⁷ I liked this speaking nearby, the gap, you could almost call it a kind of Humean empiricism, which of course completely acknowledged the fundamental importance of conjecture, of joining the gaps, of bridging the gaps, which is a critical component of building knowledge, but involves leaps that may be unjustified.

João Carlos Santos: So Priya, we have these heritage movements, let’s say, which Michael referred to, or critical Romantic movements, and of course it might have led us to look at the past through this perspective of the big heroes and the big geniuses. But how Romantic do you still feel we are in these heritage movements, or even specifically in the early music movement?

Priya Satia: I agree with what Michael was saying and I would highlight the inherently political nature of all these efforts to creatively rework the past: that is, in these heritage movements, what’s often being searched for is a way to boost some claim to authenticity in the name of finding legitimacy for some present-day political project that is going to lead to one of the alternative possible futures. And I think this is something that can happen from the right or the left.

A figure that I’ve worked with a lot is E. P. Thompson, a historian who was very Romantic in his sensibilities and who in particular found the work and thought of the Romantic thinker William Blake really helpful and inspiring. What he was doing was looking for a kind of alternative heritage to what the right was putting forward as British heritage in the post–World War II era. So he’s saying, no, if you want to see English heritage—and he did mean English, actually, more than British—go back to the collective values and communitarian values of the working classes in the eighteenth century. This is heritage, and this is the heritage I’m summoning into our present to inform our collective activism today, in the 1950s and ’60s. He was himself an activist trying to work in that mould as much as he also had a kind of great-man hangover at the same time. There’s a tension between those two things.

This is why whatever we do in art and literature is always political. And once you’re aware of that, you should be conscious of that—of what possible alternative futures your work is supporting and who you’re partnering with in giving that support.

Michael Shanks: I think it’s fabulous, Priya, that you introduced E. P. Thompson. I think this is a great example of these themes, even in just simply the title of The Making of the English Working Class. ⁸ It’s the making. It’s a story of fashioning. It’s a story of agency. It’s a story of a community, of people bootstrapping, creating movements, shifts, creating spaces where things might happen. And that, I would say, is his critical romance of the routine of history in these basic, everyday, quotidian experiences. And it’s very Marxist, of course: people are creating their own history, albeit under conditions that they inherit from the past. So it’s a great example. Marvellous.

If I may, I’d like to bring back one question from earlier in the conference, which I think is an important one in relationship to Jennifer Walshe’s very inspiring music, and that’s the question of phenomenology. We’ve already heard elements of this come in today with the body of the performer, the corporeal location of the composer. The embodiment of our practice implies the questions of phenomenology and of human experience. And one of the things I hear and see in your work is a question of what we understand by the sensing, feeling, thinking body. And of course it’s a great big question and we’ve seen all sorts of variations on it, but we’ve also seen a great deal of interest in the phenomenology of all sorts of practices and the phenomenology of knowledge as such. But what I was signalling in my keynote and what gave rise to the questions, I think, was that I mentioned post-phenomenology.

I don’t like going with these terms, but sometimes when you have a thirty-minute talk you use some shorthand. And we see this shift, questioning just what our sensing body, thinking body, knowledge-building body is—and questioning its boundaries. That’s simply the point. The exploration of a distributed body—that is, we are connected and that makes us what we are. And it runs both ways. We are distributed. We are environmental. We are collections, communities within ourselves, but we’re also part of milieus and however else you want to describe them. And of course this has been an appropriate matter to be investigated and celebrated, and it raises questions of the performer. Are there boundaries? Where are the boundaries?

My background is not the philosophical—oh let’s question a Husserlian notion of the phenomenological body, nor Merleau-Ponty. Rather, it’s been to work with performers and to see how their practices are distributed. That we are assemblages. We are extended relationally through our actions, our engagements with things with others. And this implies, also, of course, some questions about the corporeal and the incorporeal. If you’re raising questions about relationality—that is, it’s what you’re connected to that is a critical component of who you are and what you aspire to be—what is the status of those connections? Because they are not inherent in the body. Or are they? These, I would say, are post-phenomenological questions, in which we’re starting to look at relationality, to look at process. My interest at the moment is in philosophical traditions that take in Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and—I hesitate to mention these next two names because they raise all sorts of other things—Deleuze and Guattari. But it also takes us into Jane Bennett and Vibrant Matter. ⁹ And absolutely—I wish he were here—Tim Ingold.

So that was the point behind the phenomenological.

Carlo Diaz: Thanks very much for bringing this up, Michael. I want to bring in that it also relates a bit to something Priya said earlier about the basic constitution of this conference within a question of present versus non-present and how that’s actually not a useful distinction in all cases. The neurological research you mentioned, Priya, sounds very much like the relationship Maurice Merleau-Ponty problematises between perception, memory, and imagination. He suggests that when you look at an object, your perception of it includes a perception of what is behind it as well. One could suggest that what’s actually happening is that you’re imagining what’s on its back side based on your memory of other objects you’ve seen before that look similar, so you are seeing only half of it and imagining the other half. But for Merleau-Ponty it doesn’t make sense to distinguish the physiologically seen from the psychologically imagined. They are entirely fused into your singular perception of the object. ¹⁰ This is similar to your example of tomatoes, Priya. You’ve seen tomatoes before and that informs what a tomato looks like to you now. So, Michael, it is very interesting to hear you address that point about phenomenology.

Going back to this conference as a proposition of a topic or a problem and a convening around that, one thing that struck me right at the outset as I was reading the keynotes and opening statements, was that one of the more fruitful things about a conference in general is how a topic presented for discussion is so often just immediately turned around in three or four different ways. A consensus can so quickly form that maybe the proposal that brought us together doesn’t quite articulate our shared problem. It’s really interesting to see that play out.

For our topic, what I learned is that it seems really important to define the scale of the temporalities we’re investigating. If we’re thinking about one’s experience of a single day as the present, you’re going to come up with a different idea of how it relates to the past and future, or whether a non-present is distinct from it, than if you’re thinking about one’s experience from second to second, as when listening to a piece of music note by note. Present and non-present relate differently to each other depending on the scale of time under consideration.

I can share that what I had in mind when I was writing the conference abstract was a much broader scale of historical time. A present moment that spans my own lifetime sits apart from a past that I can only imagine as I step into a historical archive and look at a piece of music notation that was written by somebody I didn’t know at all and share no common ancestry or oral culture with from hundreds of years ago. There seems to be a very clear distinction between this present and this past, while that may be less the case for the scale of a day or a few seconds.

So of course everything you say is also absolutely true, Priya, about how there’s not a distinction between present and non-present, and yet I will still advocate for that conceptuality to be developed because there are some cases in which it might be revealing to deploy it. It’s a bit like putting up disciplinary boundaries—they more or less arbitrarily cordon off some subject so that it can be talked about clearly. It can be tempting and dangerous to start to naturalise these boundaries as flatly true—certain, immutable, and universal—but as one analytical tool among many they can be incredibly effective.

So I’m curious how you, Priya, have thought of this problem of scaling time in your work. Is it something you think about? Is it useful to make bigger or smaller the idea of scales of temporality in relation to the artists, historians, and politicians you talk about in your work? Or did they themselves have this sense of shifting scales of time?

Priya Satia: Yes, I think it’s such a good question. I’ve only just recently started to think about it because of the climate change issue, which forces us to think on a vast scale. For a modernist like me, we typically deal with such a short time span. But then climate change forces you to contend with geological and astronomical time scales that are very different. I was thinking about what you were just describing about how you thought about the present in your life and the past before you, and I also wanted to bring up Tim Ingold’s keynote to connect to what Michael was saying about the performer and the embodied experience of performing. What I found so lovely was when Tim was reminding us of how calligraphers train—that that is so dependent on emulating someone from the past who’s passing on the embodied practice to you. And so any time you encounter a performer today, you’re already encountering their lineage—the series of people who train them.

And if you grew up with parents or grandparents or you knew people like that in your community, we have very immediate ties to at least the nineteenth century still. And then very quickly this field gets out of control, because if you’re talking about the nineteenth century, the period in which modern museums and the collections of ancient artefacts in them first start to be assembled the way they are, or if you think about the Iraq War and the way it threw up all these artefacts all over the world in a whole new way, and they’re circulating in our present, I think that these vastly different time scales are actually always entangled with each other and all very much together in our present. And this is true of the climate especially. Everything we’ve emitted in human history is contained there and is literally hanging over us. This is how Amitav Ghosh described it in his lovely book The Great Derangement. ¹¹ And I just feel that a lot of us modernists have to get used to being much more aware of the co-presence of these different timescales when we think about telling even the story of the recent past. But I think it’s part of our humanity to be engaging with different timescales all at once.

And the oral traditions that are passed on that have come up again and again today are another thing. I grew up listening to the Mahabharata—I don’t even know what time scale that’s on; that’s like on a mythical, prehuman historical time scale. But those are real characters in my mind. And if you listen to Bible stories, or what have you, we’re always negotiating with different time scales in our present. And so, yes, they are different. The way the immediate past, the way the Civil Rights Act affects my present in a very practical, different way from the way my grandmother’s refugee experience did, and then before that the way the British arrived in Punjab. There are more immediate and more and less practical ways in which these different paths affect you. But in the sense that climate change connects us to a geological time scale, all that is very practically affecting all of us right now.