On Preserving the Openness of the Monument

This is the second special issue of Future Anterior on rethinking the monument. The words "monument" and "preservation" are so inextricable, it is almost impossible to consider them separately. For what would a monument be in the absence of preservation and vice versa? The canonical histories of preservation suggest that before the emergence of a preservation consciousness, monuments were considered raw material, something to be quarried or destroyed, as so many ancient buildings were in medieval times. But that view is somewhat self-serving. Monuments have always shuttled between mere matter and ideology, oddly resistant to either pole. They have attracted passions, produced admiration, envy, and even fear, mobilized political will, benchmarked geographies, helped to found nations, and called forth alternative futures. If they were quarried or destroyed, it was most often precisely because of their perceived associations, meaning, and symbolic power, and their material resistance to new ones—the same precise reasons, one might argue, that are the rationale for preservation. Indeed, preservation is only one of myriad possible responses that monuments grant. It simply happens to be the dominant response in our historical moment.

Thus, we might provocatively ask: what would preservation be in the absence of monuments (let us call it preservation's intransitive sense)?¹ Perhaps it could be defined as a pure temporal orientation, vector, or tendency. If preservation always implies a "future audience," to use a phrase from Stuart Burch's essay, this does not merely affirm the fundamental relationship between preservation and a vision of what is "to come" rather than solely with what "has been." More importantly, it suggests that acts of preservation are ongoing events that upset basic spatio-temporal coordinates, such as before and after, here and there, then and now. It is often assumed that preservation comes after some moment of originary creation, that it saves something already constituted that is in danger of subsequent decay, loss, or destruction.² In other words, we often assume that preservation needs an object—and the ur-object that it requires to justify its existence is the monument. But what if the reverse was true, and it was the monument that needs preservation? Then one might consider that the monument's "preservers" would, as Heidegger notes, "belong to its createdness with an essentiality equal to that of the creators."³ This claim does not necessarily imply any creative agency at work, whether on the side of creators or preservers, nor does it insinuate their fundamental unity. Rather it suggests that the ontological status of a monument is that "it preserves" and that it is essentially in need of preservers. The question, then, is not how a preserver finds a monument to "save," but rather how does a monument solicit preservers who are responsive to its possibilities, dispositions, and truth claims. Monuments require those sensitive enough not merely to sustain them in what Heidegger calls a "state of preservation"—acting to ensure their continuity and endurance within and as a "routine cultural phenomenon." They are in greater need of preservers who can facilitate their ability to grant possible human and nonhuman responses and meanings. If monuments are objects of another time, then they have the capacity to unmoor themselves from any fixed meaning. One might say that preservation is simply the capacity to facilitate spatio-temporal complexities within material things. It acknowledges and grants monuments their essential generosity, their openness to multiple tenses and tenors, such as the future anterior, anterior past, or "eventual" present (which cannot be simply reduced to the merely present), just to address a few of these possible complexities.

The essays in this special issue forcefully demonstrate that monuments should not be primarily engaged with modes of self-preservation—conservative attempts to embed them in a self-enclosed logic, thus operating as anchors for preestablished traditions—but instead involved in generating myriad acts of preservation, which would attempt to "keep open the openness of what the work grants."⁴ All of the essays in this special issue demonstrate that monuments do not simply gather and open a historical world, thus constituting...