Transience and the objects of heritage: a matter of time

Let me start by briefly recapitulating Sigmund Freud’s short but seminal essay from 1915 on ‘transience’ (Freud 1957b). In this essay, Freud relates a conversation with two friends as they are strolling in a beautiful countryside setting. Freud describes how one of his companions – a poet – admires the beauty of the scenery, but how he cannot feel any real joy in the beauty of the landscape, because he knows that the beauty will vanish some day and be doomed by the transience of all things material. For the poet, the transience – or Vergänglichkeit – of whatever is beautiful means that it loses its worth. In the essay, Freud advocates an entirely opposite attitude. He argues that the temporal limitations of an object do not devalue the object, and that transience may indeed increase the importance of the object. Seeing things perish may of course be difficult – as in all cases of true mourning – but if we are not capable of letting go, Freud argues, then we end up in the pathological state of melancholia (Freud 1957a). Freud’s position on mourning and melancholia has been challenged by more recent research on bereavement and grief (Klass et al. 1996, Howarth 2007, see also Bjerregaard et al. in prep.), yet I believe that it is worthwhile – if not necessary – to return to Freud’s praise of transience in light of the widespread paranoia of losing material culture characterising much contemporary heritage management and heritage politics. In the present issue of Danish Journal of Archaeology, Jes Wienberg offers a very stimulating and for some readers probably also provocative perspective on the dismantling of heritage objects. Wienberg makes the interesting suggestion that certain heritage sites – in his case architecture – can be ‘creatively dismantled’; a managerial practice located somewhere between ‘preservation’ and ‘destruction’. I believe that Wienberg’s discussion of four churches and a lighthouse on the coast of north-western Denmark needs to be set in a greater conceptual discussion, relieving the architecture of the limited geographical and thematic confines within which Wienberg has chosen to delimit the scope of his article. I would argue that two aspects of Wienberg’s argument in particular hold the potential for further elaboration and critique: first the notion of ‘creative dismantling’ and second the notion of threat. In the following, I explore these issues through a critique and an example.