A Name By Any Other Smell Would Rose As...

    As someone who can read a novel from beginning to end without ever knowing the names of the main characters therein--except as unvoiced graphemic cyphers, visual landmarks upon a textual landscape, with no content or indeed meaning onto themselves--I found that the opening of Istvár Rév's Retroactive Justice read not unlike a calculus textbook, full of undefined variables awaiting practical applications to assign value to them.  

    The spurious footnote on the bottom of pp. 71-72, however, completely threw me:  here our author posits a theory of generalized mental representation to explain differential recall, among certain "elderly" individuals, of names and characteristics: demonstrating a startling naive ignorance¹  of now classic neuroscientific research involving corpus callostomy (i.e., "split brain") patients, in whom it is clearly demonstrated that different parts of the brain typically handle the tasks of speaking names, on the one hand (namely, the right, which transmits data to the left hemisphere of the brain), and recognition of semantic characteristics, on the other (the left).²    For Rév, it is taken as a given that both personal names and characteristics of persons named operate at the same order of things one knows and/or can recall, only different in that one might typically know more characteristics about a person then that person has names.

    Delving deeper into the text, we move from a cryptonomical necronomicon (a cypher-puzzle of so many names concerning the dead) to a historical accounting of intense political investment in... dates.  Here it went from reading like a calculus textbook to a biochemistry textbook, so many superficially indistinct labels that become a jumble of syllabic nonsense to my eye and my ear.  

    By this point I understood that this incessant recounting and auditing of names and dates was not just a peculiarly incomprehensible obsession of our author, but that in some real way these labels were the ethnographic objects of note here.  Rév is at great pains to catalog the historical process by which individuals and bodies sought to characterize these names (for dates are essentially names for objectified moments in time) because in the culture he is writing about, such names are deeply meaningful in and of themselves, so much so that they (and not necessarily what they name) take on characteristics in the social imagination!  

    The appeal to a general theory of memory in his earlier footnote now takes on a much more profound profile.  Here we have a culture where representation is not simply a trope of how a people explain their own social reality (as it often appears to be in the culture I encounter more regularly), but where, rather, representation has been fully elevated and reified as the substance of material sociality itself.  We have perhaps a genre-embodiment in which no signifier is ever allowed to go empty, except insofar as is buried deep enough that only the worms might empty it.³ 

notes

¹ Although perhaps, given the author's identification of himself as intimately situated within his site of study, and his sometime equally surprising characterizations of what is "normal" in a West that he compares his own context too, his unfamiliarity with scientific touchstones that I take for granted should not be quite so startling as it was at first encounter.

² Indeed, among the latest additions to a rich literature dealing with specialized memory and language capacities (and not discounting literature that criticizes claims regarding the localization of any such capacities), recent research by evolutionary psychologists at UC Santa Barbara suggests--in direct relevance to the footnote in the subject text here--that social traits may likewise be retained to and recalled from specialized memory systems specific to traits relevant to social interactions, as distinct from semantic memory regarding other environmental categories.

³ Or, if such signifier were buried in Siberia, those kneecap collecting badgers.