Discours. Livres XXXIV, XXXV & XXXVI by Libanios, and: Libanius: Ten Mythological and Historical Declamations by Libanius (review)

Abstract

book would be superior to Johnson’s as a mobilization of the history of the arts of memory for the present. And I do think Long’s book is the better one. That said, a longer and deeper history makes for more labor and more liability. Such investments can make it all the more difficult to pivot quickly at the end of a book to “the now” in ways that do justice to both the history and the now. Just so, at the end of Long’s book we encounter some fairly thin optimism about the work of “curation” that goes into “social media” accounts. There are particular platforms that make this possible more than others. (Think of Pinterest, for example; and think of Pinterest as read through the history of rhetoric by Cory Geraths and Michele Kennerly.) But as soon as we mention the image table made possible by Pinterest as a platform and think of it, as I imagine Long would have us do, as a digital memory palace, we recognize the litany of problems that emerge in environments generated by the specific procedures and affordances of other apps. Sure, my Facebook memory palace—construct the phrase, see the problem—is informed by my clicking in some ways, but most of the “curation” here is algorithmic, hidden, and not mine. Will “my” digital memory palace be a memory infrastructure dedicated more to the infinite doom scrolling of a permanent hyperpresent (Twitter, maybe), or will it be an environment that facilitates practices of commonplacing for oneself and other specific or even local communities (Roam Research, perhaps)? Like all the best media critics, we should refuse both blanket optimism and blanket pessimism and attend instead to the articulation of specific exclusions, constraints, and possibilities. The books from Johnson and Long attest to the importance of a long durée approach to memory studies that draws on the history of rhetoric, but they also both demonstrate the degree of difficulty involved in such research.