"Beyond
Mnemotechnics: Confession and Memory in Augustine." Philosophy and Rhetoric 39.3 (2006): 233-53.
For this experience is in our power, whenever we want: to bring something before the eyes, as do those who range things under
mnemotechnic headings and picture them for themselves.
The reply goes thus: "In consequence of defective
mnemotechnic" (17.
Burtea makes a very interesting observation, namely that works of this genre assume much knowledge on the part of the reader about the relevant prayers and rituals, which are only partially described, suggesting that the function of these manuscripts was primarily
mnemotechnic. It would be highly instructive if some scholar were to pursue this angle, to see how the Mandaean priests themselves make use of this manuscript, and compare the instructions within it to the actual ritual praxis.
This sort of
mnemotechnic may explain why some people disliked the exhibition.
Yet the poetic process, which recalls the past and culls from it, is also as much a testament to the power of memory as it is witness to the enduring influence of the
mnemotechnic arts.
Again, like the other cultural artifacts the author examines, these gardens were replete with "imprese, conceits and
mnemotechnic theater" in their "iconographic and spatial deployment" (172), with the intention of producing admiratio, as well as beauty and sensory delight.
The art of memory opens with the triumph of Simonides' mnemotechnic by allowing each of the dead their proper burial.
The materialization of memory in architectural form represented a significant change in mnemotechnics -- of the architecture of memory -- because in these new memory theatres, buildings were referents with the power to incarnate memory for a wide audience of spectators.
Claudia Mesch demonstrates how Vostell's de-collages were deployed, in postwar Cologne and Paris, as "
mnemotechnic" for reinserting a memory of catastrophe, of ruination/deterioration and failure into the smooth (functioning) surface of the postmodern, reconstructed city.
The "primitives" like poets and like Montaigne know that everything human is metaphorical and not metaphysical, and that the singularity, the uniqueness of all humans and all groups are a fiction protected by a
mnemotechnic, and not by an identity essence.
