How can a heritage policy move beyond the conflicts stirred up by an inheritance that is supposed to unite?
In this fictional communication from a "Ministry of Matri-Heritage," published in the collection FABULA, Dominique Pagani starts from Aristotle: like a family inheritance, heritage divides by the very fact that it unites. He contrasts the implicit pact with the written law Pasquale Paoli wanted, then takes stock of heritage's divisions: natural and cultural, tangible and intangible, old and contemporary, with the example of the STARESO station at La Revellata. Drawing on Heraclitus, he notes the paternal connotation of the French word patrimoine, out of place among a people devoted to the Marian cult. He proposes renaming the ministry and establishing an obligation of matri-heritage innovation.
Translated from the French. Read the original.
COMMUNICATION FROM THE MINISTRY OF MATRI-PATRIMONY
FOR THE INTERMINISTERIAL MEETING OF SEPTEMBER 19, 2012
“Mathematics unites men, politics divides them”
Aristotle reminds us.
The politics of public patrimony, that of its collective management, fails to prove this statement wrong.
Even if it sounds like a paradox, is patrimony not in fact, ex officio, the field of natural or cultural consensus? Is it not in every case the occasion to come to an agreement, beyond the many particular interests, whether personal, professional, or partisan, on values supposed to be so common that they seem to us, so to speak, transpolitical? What Corsican, what Corsican part(y), would openly propose the installation, on the shores of Lake Nino, of a hotel complex of several tens of thousands of beds in the “style” of La Grande Motte? Or turning what remains of the deck of the Ponte-novu into an “open-air” karaoke, blasting 2000 watts of noise pollution on the occasion of Saturday night fevers?
But it seems that things stand here as they do in families at the time of the protocols prompted by the prospect of an inheritance. It is not Corsicans who need reminding of this truth, which anyone can, moreover, verify: the simple fact that the rightful heirs agree in recognizing the value of the inheritance, far from sufficing to unite them over its distribution, is rather the occasion for setting them at odds!
Patrimony: a consensus that divides?
Patrimony divides precisely in that it unites; and it divides to the exact extent that it appeals, as one does with moral or religious values, to a false unity, fusional and sacred, that would transcend all the part(ie)s. When George Bush sets the “Empire of Good” against that of “evil,” he steps out of the political field, and hence out of his mandate, to wade in the murky waters of moral values (who will identify as a subject of “the empire of evil”?); and, believing he is unifying the whole of what is called (starting with the masters of this world) the “International Community,” he rather breeds conflict and multiplies the occasions for war, mourning, and desolation.
This is the moment to recall that in the field of values, within which that of patrimony is inscribed, nothing is worse than this false consensus, that of the fundamentalist, the one that shuts otherness and division out of its own circle, and that by the same token ends in that reverse of political unity which is partisan unanimism, and therefore abstract and murderous. A politically operative consensus, on the contrary, is recognized by the fact that it rather results from these divisions; that it seeks to integrate them, to overcome them, peacefully, in the higher unity of the contract, insofar as the latter is not a mere pact. The contract must not hesitate to clarify, via ad hoc exchanges and consultations, what has always remained obscure in the all too unformulated depths of the pact.
It is not the least of Pascal Paoli’s merits to have judged that Corsican sovereignty lacked a written text. He grasped better than anyone the abyss that separates the pact, the implicit of tradition (which anyone can opportunely pull over to their own side, precisely because it remains obscure and silent, while claiming to refer to it), from the Law, explicit, express, as univocal as the words of the language allow, and which only a charter or a constitution is able to guarantee.
Legislating patrimony
Thus, legislation pertaining to patrimony, if it wishes to avoid getting bogged down in the deadlocks that result from unconfronted contradictions, will rather have to begin by drawing up the inventory of them. For if patrimony divides, it is because it is itself, in itself, divided, split. First of all into “natural” patrimony and “human” patrimony (or “cultural” or “historical,” in whatever way one may wish to call it).
But no sooner has “cultural” patrimony, for example, been isolated than a new division in turn splits the latter into tangible or material patrimony (essentially, so-called “built” patrimony), on the one hand, and, on the other, into oral or intangible patrimony. The actions of safeguarding, of maintenance, of rehabilitation, or even of bringing up to date the Romanesque chapels, the torre and other castelli, the Ponte-novu, but also the Eiffel bridge or the buildings of the Belgian oceanographic center built on the point of the Revellata (see below), near Calvi, do not come under the same protocols, the same budgets, the same competencies as those that propose the promotion of the polyphonies, the voceri, the maxims and proverbs, or the recipes and know-how in general.
“We therefore posit as a fact that there is perhaps not, in France, at the present hour, a single town, not a single seat of an arrondissement, not a single seat of a canton, where the destruction of some national historic monument is not being planned, is not being begun, is not being completed.”
Victor Hugo
But if we in turn isolate this “built” patrimony, to confine ourselves to that one, we see it at once split into vestiges of traditional know-how (essentially the “historic monuments”) and, at the opposite end, as modern and current as can be, a few gems of contemporary architecture, having confronted, assumed, and therefore overcome the difficulties raised by the preservation of natural sites and/or local human activities.
The Revellata ocean center: an example
The oceanographic center of the Revellata provides us with an exemplary illustration of this. It is indeed a (complex of) building(s), but, in contrast to the vestiges of prehistory or history, it is rather in a resolutely modern and even somewhat futuristic style. An architectural monument that was awarded, in 1974, the Silver Trowel, for having succeeded in designing a complex that, while displaying aesthetic creativity, blends in remarkably, in its form as well as in the colors or texture of its materials, with an exceptionally well-preserved natural environment closed to public traffic. Within the framework of the oceanographic research that forms the core of its mandate, the institution multiplies partnerships likely to employ island skills, to the point of having generated a mini “labor market area.”
Without making a case study of it, this example deserves to be developed for the relevance of the problems it raises and, incidentally, of the solutions it has been able to bring to them within its specific aim. The STARESO center (Station de Recherche Sous-Marine et Océanographiques) can indeed claim to come under the heading of patrimony on three counts: architectural, academic (scientific), and, more and more, economic. The field of patrimony marvelously illustrates this necessity for the legislator not to leave in the shadow of what is merely felt the confusions peculiar to the most familiar representations, and therefore the most fragile when put to the test. The fact that, like the family inheritance, it divides precisely in that it unites, and vice versa, is the best proof of its eminently dialectical aspect.
“It is a very long time now since we despaired of saving all the threatened monuments, and our ambition is to make the best choice possible among the small number of those that we are able to rescue.”
Mérimée
Desexing patrimony
We owe the first formulation of the dialectic of worlds to Heraclitus, a Mediterranean who was very shrewd in matters of the olive trade. It is surely no accident that it is to this same thinker that we owe the famous statement: “Conflict (polemos) is the father of all things.” Thus, legislation pertaining to patrimony, if it wishes to avoid getting bogged down in the deadlocks that result from unconfronted contradictions, will rather have to begin by drawing up the inventory of them. For if patrimony divides, it is because it is itself split. And indeed, if it is a privileged occasion for conflict, it is because, far from expressing “consensual values since the dawn of time,” it divides us from the very outset, one might say, at any rate from the etymological origin—rather sexed, some (wo)men will say sexist—of the word itself: “patrimony” is, literally, the inheritance of the father, in the private sphere, or that of our fathers in what concerns us here, under the heading of the public domain. Let us not imagine that we are seeking here a new and improper occasion for division. There is nothing here to divide. The human patrimony of our island was brought into existence by the fabulous common labor, all ages and sexes together, of the Corsican people. In an economic context oscillating most often, depending on the era and the pieve, between scarcity and frugal abundance, our mothers as well as our fathers, at the oven or at the mulinu, out hunting or in childbed, did not have, like the contemporary bobo, the leisure to add the war of the sexes to their respective worries.
The fact remains that this reduction to patriarchy, slyly enunciated in the syntagm “patrimony,” if it results from an imported lexical tradition, borders on incongruity within a nation that grants so eminent a place to the Marian cult, that intones a Dio vi salvi Regina as its national anthem, which from the second line of the hymn places itself under the sign of the “Madre universale.” This fidelity to Marian sensibility, such a privilege granted to a central, feminine, and maternal figure, insofar as it extends, in the minds and hearts of Corsicans, well beyond the populations positioning themselves around a strictly religious point of view, is itself the sign of a patrimonial legacy that is doubtless one of the oldest. It expresses, indeed, the enduring hold of a pre-biblical cultic patrimony, closer to the cult of Isis, of Demeter, or of the Mesopotamian Ishtar (the Astarte-Aphrodite of the Greeks). Popular sensibility had been unable to bring itself so easily to give up listening to the maternal figure, compassionate and inclined to forgiveness, in favor of a jealous, exclusive, and domineering God. And the Corsican wo(man) faithful to the Marian figure might just as well cry out, like the poet:
“Jehovah! the last one vanquished by your genius
Who from the depths of hell cried out ‘O tyranny!’
It is my grandsire Belus or my father Dagon
They plunged me three times into the waters of Cocytus
And all alone protecting my Amalekite mother
I sow again at their feet the old dragon’s teeth.”
Matri-patrimonial measures:
Accordingly, the first bill that our department intends to submit to the Corsican National Assembly concerns nothing other than the title designating the ministry itself. In calling it “MINISTRY OF MATRI-PATRIMONY,” we certainly do not aim to reduce in any way whatsoever the value accumulated by our fathers, but to repair a two-thousand-year-old injustice by adding to it the material and moral inheritance perpetuated by their wives, sisters, daughters, or companions.
The second amounts to proposing the institution of an obligation of matri-patrimonial innovation. It is in fact imperative to take patrimonial policy beyond the mere preservation of the past. Patrimony is not a corpse that one wears oneself out embalming, and its management cannot be reduced to that of a Conservatory. To conserve is at least necessary; and that is saying something. The conservatories of the maritime coastline, of traditional vocal music (in Sartène, Calvi, or elsewhere), of instrumental sound traditions (in Pigna), etc., must certainly be ceaselessly encouraged and developed, but they are as necessary as they are insufficient.
Our time of crisis, of uncertainties, even of threats regarding the future, too often imposes on us, and more and more without our knowing it, the mask of a mutilated Janus lacking the face turned toward the future. In so doing, we betray our ancestors, who were not content to preserve the natural and human arrangement they had found on coming into the world, but, on the contrary, wore themselves out producing in the present, with a view to an immediate future, the patrimony we enjoy. When the building of Notre-Dame de Paris was undertaken, an old quarter of half-timbered houses, built according to a predominantly Germanic, Picard, or Anglo-Norman tradition, had perforce to be razed beforehand. Each of these houses, were it located today in one of our town centers, would be listed as a “historic monument.” But one must clearly realize that if, at the time the cathedral was being built, around the twenty-second century, an association of local residents had organized a series of demonstrations against the erection of the cathedral and had won their case, Parisians, Europe, and the World would today have to deplore the absence of this marvel.
The obligation of matri-patrimonial innovation amounts to defining and imposing standards applicable to all building sites, public or private, so that the master builder of a road or of a single-family house strives to incorporate into it one or more elements conceived as so many small stones added to the national casa cumula. The administrative departments concerned will not fail to advise him, either directly or by putting him in touch with resource people.
In the long run, the essential objective of the measure would be to make commonplace the notion of matri-patrimonializing development.
Our other bills will be specified before the autumn council, between the start of the school year and mushroom picking. It will comprise, among other provisions, precisely a project for the capitalization of the island’s mycological patrimony, the densest and at the same time the most diverse in the whole Mediterranean region.