Closing Forum

CARLO DIAZ

Orpheus Instituut / University of Chicago

JOÃO CARLOS SANTOS

Leiden University

PRIYA SATIA

Stanford University

MICHAEL SHANKS

Stanford University

This chapter is an edited transcript of a virtual roundtable discussion held 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 rounds of asynchronous discussion. The virtual roundtable immediately followed these four weeks of written interaction. One of the participants, Michael Shanks, gave a keynote presentation at the conference that is not included within this publication as it was primarily designed to stoke conversation during the conference. Silent adjustments have been made to the transcript to aid readability and for length.

João Carlos Santos: Priya, in your essay you scrutinise the heritage of the Enlightenment and Romanticism and how these movements might have created some of the distinctions between art and science and between past, present, and future. Could you discuss how this notion of a more integrated version of pragmatics or methods was conceived before the Enlightenment and the Romantic revolution? 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. The implication, then, is that before the Enlightenment these things were not disaggregated so systematically all the time, and 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 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. 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 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. If we travelled back in time we would notice that it had always been papered over. We’re still legatees of that Enlightenment era. 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: Earlier, we had a great presentation by Jennifer Walshe on her work, and what I particularly liked about it was how she dealt with how her music imparts 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. Could you reflect a little 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 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, ¹ 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 had a major hand in actually shaping events and institutions in the Middle East. You can’t separate them. British cultural ideas 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 shape our reality and vice versa.

João Carlos Santos: Moving this into more political and moral topics, there are some moral issues you raised in your essay, 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. If you merge both ideas—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 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, 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. ² 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. Just in my essay, 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 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. These composers and historians’ actions were shaped by their own belief in great-man history. 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. 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. 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. 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. It’s 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 essay 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 disputed two main terms. 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 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”; ³ 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. 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 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. Historically informed music practice was largely inspired by certain Romantic, post-Romantic, or modernist impulses—Stravinsky, Hindemith, and the rest. Either from an archaeological point of view or from a historiographical point of view, how Romantic would you 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, what do you think?

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. 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 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. ⁴ 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.” ⁵ 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, to use a term from rhetoric, 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, 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 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 Dyer brought in Trinh T. Minh-ha and the project of representation. ⁶ 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, such as 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. 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. ⁷ 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. It’s a great example.

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.

What gave rise to the questions, I think, was that in my keynote 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. 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. ⁸ And absolutely—I wish he were here—Tim Ingold.

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 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. ⁹ 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.

One thing about this conference 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. Once you start unpacking a concept together, it often turns out to be much more capacious than any individual contributor might have articulated at the start.

For my part, I’ve gained new insight about the importance of temporal scale. If I’m thinking about my experience of a single day as the present, I’m going to come up with a different idea of how it relates to the past and future, or the non-present, than if I’m thinking by the second or minute, as when listening to a piece of music, or by the year, decade, or century, as when thinking as a historian. Present and non-present as well as past, present, and future relate to each other differently depending on the scale of time under consideration.

When we were first starting to plan the conference we were primarily thinking of this larger scale of historical time. In this case, a present spanning my entire life sits apart from a past that I can only imagine as I step into a historical archive to look at some music notation that was written by somebody I never met and with whom I share no common ancestry or oral culture. There seems to be a very clear distinction between the present and that past, whereas on the scale of a day or a few seconds this is not always the case.

So I agree with you, Priya, about how there’s not necessarily a clear 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’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, universal—but as one analytical tool among many they can be incredibly effective.

To lead this into a question, Priya, how have you thought of the problem of scaling time in your work?

Priya Satia: Yes, I think it’s such a good question. I’ve only 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 if you’re talking about the nineteenth century then very quickly this field gets out of control, because, this is 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 book The Great Derangement. ¹⁰ I 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.