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Configurations 10.1 (2002) 111-127



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The Dioskuroi:
Masters of the Information Channel

Wolf Kittler
University of California,
Santa Barbara


In order to always find my way to a particular little hotel in Venice, I did not need a map or a name: I simply had to enter the maze of channels and streets through the exact same gate in the enclosure of the Piazza di San Marco. But when it turned out that, without reference to a precise block number, I would never be able to locate the three movie theaters in the gridiron matrix of downtown Santa Barbara, the illusions of infallibility I had harbored in matters of orientation were shattered once and for all. Two types of urbanization, two types of memory—I will return to them.

As the story of the poet Simonides shows, there is no art of memory without an architecture. But for the sake of precision, let me refresh our memory by quoting the famous passage from Quintilian's Institutio oratoria:

The first person to discover an art of memory is said to have been Simonides, of whom the following well-known story is told. He had written an ode of the kind usually composed in honor of victorious athletes, to celebrate the achievement of one who had gained the crown for boxing. Part of the sum for which he had contracted was refused him on the ground that, following the common practice of poets, he had introduced a digression in praise of Castor and Pollux, and he was told that, in view of what he had done, he had best ask for the rest of the sum due from those whose deeds he had extolled. And according to the story they paid their debt. For when a great banquet was given in honour of the boxer's success, Simonides was summoned forth from the feast, to which he had been invited, by a message to the effect that two youths [End Page 111] who had ridden to the door urgently desired his presence. He found no trace of them, but what followed proved to him that the gods had shown their gratitude. For he had scarcely crossed the threshold on his way out, when the banqueting hall fell in upon the heads of the guests and wrought such havoc among them that the relatives of the dead who came to seek the bodies for burial were unable to distinguish not merely the faces but even the limbs of the dead. Then it is said, Simonides, who remembered the order in which the guests had been sitting, succeeded in restoring to each man his own dead. 1

The collapse of the building disrupts the junction between a man's body and his or her name, or, more precisely, between an address and a body—a junction otherwise called a human being, be it alive or dead. What abides after the catastrophe is, in terms of Georg Cantor's theory, two sets and a function that establishes a binary relation between them. 2 First, there is a list of names. Second, there is the foundation of the banquet hall, which, although in ruins, is clearly and distinctly partitioned into singular elements by the remainders of columns or walls. And third, there is a witness whose testimony maps each element of the set of names onto one and only one element of the various sites of the building. As a result, the unrecognizable bodies of the dead can be connected to their epitaphs.

Thus, the art of memory presupposes the distinction between addresses (or names, spaces on wax tablets, call numbers, etc.), on the one hand, and data (or bodies, images, letters, etc.), on the other. And it links the two sets to each other through a relation, which is not necessarily binary as in Simonides' case. The assumption is that addresses are generally shorter, more clearly structured, and, therefore, easier to store or retain than data. There are two ways of constructing such a memory, and the history of the art of memory, as it is traced in...

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