Abstract
Re-encountering certain kinds of artworks in the present (re-listening to music, re-reading novels) can often occasion a kind of recollection akin to episodic recollection, but which may be better cast as ‘phasic’, at least insofar as one can be said to remember ‘what it was like’ to be oneself at some earlier stage or phase in one’s personal history. The kinds of works that prompt such recollection, I call ‘still lives’ - they are limited wholes whose formal properties are stable over time. In the first part of the paper, I spell out a way of making sense of the peculiar power that certain artworks have to occasion such recollection – it is, as I explain, a power or ductus that derives from the form of the artwork, though possession of such a power is not limited to art. I then detail three dimensions along which episodic recollection and phasic recollection as occasioned by re-encountering ‘still lives’ differ: metaphysical, phenomenological, and descriptive. In the second half, I explore a challenge for my account of phasic recollection, which in turn helps make more vivid my proposal as well as the spectral analogy at the heart of it: Just as one can see regions behind one by looking in the direction of a mirror located in the same space in which one is, sometimes by re-encountering certain kinds of artworks now, past intervals or phases ‘behind one’ can be ‘made present’ in a way that the paper aims to make plain. I also explain to what extent phasic recollection might be understood as a form of mental time travel, and what the attendant phenomenology of ‘transportation’ involves.
Highlights
Re-encountering certain kinds of artworks in the present can often occasion a kind of recollection akin to episodic recollection, but which may be better cast as ‘phasic’, at least insofar as one can be said to remember ‘what it was like’ to be oneself at some earlier stage or phase in one’s personal history
I will suggest that sometimes re-encounters with artworks occasion what I will call phasic memory – that is, they involve the recollection of past phases in one’s personal history
I focus entirely on artworks that are ‘still lives’, though I consider that phasic memory on re-encountering stable form or structure is occasioned by many other stable forms that were repetitively engaged with at a distant interval in one’s past personal history – for instance, the childhood home, places that one used to frequent as a teenager, perhaps even a well-known forest at a certain time of year. One reason for this limited focus is that artworks, because of their normative status, are more likely to survive with their form in-tact
Summary
When Marcel tastes a tea-soaked madeleine, the town of Combray springs into being from his teacup; a region of space is recollected. I will suggest that sometimes re-encounters with artworks occasion what I will call phasic memory – that is, they involve the recollection of past phases in one’s personal history. Insofar as what is sometimes occasioned when one undergoes phasic recollection is, as I will show, a way of occupying and relating to the space one currently occupies - albeit in a way that is characteristic of a past phase of one’s personal history - such recollection can serve to orient future action and movement in actual, non-imagined space and across time. I close by saying something about the phenomenology of transportation that such experiences involve
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