Abstract :
[en] In his now classic essay on the « Régimes d’historicité », the French historian François Hartog (2003) has very well described the effect of globalisation, democratisation and mass consumerism on our relation with the past and thus, with heritage. In the course of the 1970’s, at a time when the ink of the Venice Charter was barely dry, postmodernity triggered a loss of collective anchoring and memory, paradoxically accompanied by an amplification of the thirst for commemorations, in the name of identity or heritage. Pierre Nora’s great endeavour « Les lieux de mémoire », fully corresponds to this « presentism » era, including aside from monuments, museum and archives, intellectual constructions such as the Larousse encyclopaedia (Nora 1989). It very well illustrates the « extension of the heritage domain » as defined by the sociologist Nathalie Heinich (2009).
In our « post-monumental » era, anything can possibly become heritage, regardless of scale, of artistic qualities, of age or ontological degree – from tangible to intangible. This is a sign of times. Following the example of Nelson Goodman replacing the essentialist definitions of art with the question « When is there art ? » (Goodman 1976), we should consider focusing on a dynamic and operational definition of heritage. The question « When is there heritage ?» better correspond to contemporary cultural studies and our attempt to understand « heritagization »; it contains the idea of a performative action, implying new actors, new dynamics, new process, new research questions, new difficulties and new opportunities. And by necessity new concepts.
We are far from rejecting theories from the past which provided us with effective and stimulating tools. But who could still imagine today, in the situation we described, that any system could fully encompass the heritage reality as the grand theories – Brandi, Riegl,… – succeeded to do? The repeated attempts to get the Venice charter revised from the 1970’s on (Houbart 2014), and the multiplication of thematic documents and charters are the best illustration of this impossibility. But while postmodern thinkers made us suspicious towards large systems, they also made us more modest and above all, more inclined to respect « bricolage », as a most helpful attitude after a shipwreck.
We believe that the current return to a case by case approach – as promoted from the interwar period by theoreticians such as Ambrogio Annoni (1946) – often mostly relying on practical constraints such as reuse and technical performances, combined with the use of decontextualised concepts – separated articles from the Venice Charter, for example – and practices – using the Ise shrine periodical rebuilding to advocate any reconstruction project – doesn’t mean to accept a cynical relativism in answer to the cause of a capital-intensive machine. But in practice, we cannot deny that it has sometimes been the case: the clearest examples are the debates addressing the reconstruction of monuments all over Europe, based on a jumble of arguments confusing the pure mercantilism of the tourism industry or unconfessed political reasons with post-conflict identity issues or religious traditions (Monumental 2010).
Reflecting on such reconstruction projects, raising questions of identity, has convinced us of the incompleteness of the toolkit we inherited from 20th century theoreticians. Though still perfectly relevant to address the issues that were already present at the time when they were elaborated, they might prove inappropriate to address new types of heritage, new concerns, new issues such as cultural tourism, inclusive approaches, modern heritage or the digital turn. In this context, we have been drawn to look at texts outside the conservation sphere, starting from ontology of art and analytical philosophy. We discovered that taking a step to the side could provide a stimulating insight on heritage conservation problems. In fact, it is not surprising that, facing what many have called a heritage inflation, some new actors could help us. Now that heritage has quitted the monuments sphere to encompass any material or immaterial reality worthy of conservation and that the expert point of view is challenged by the ones of a broad range of stakeholders, from the user to the investor, it becomes interesting to look at this reality from different points of view borrowed to a wide range of human sciences such as law, communication, aesthetics, semiotics, anthropology or philosophy, to name a few.
Together with our colleague Muriel Verbeeck, we are currently gathering texts in order to propose an anthology that could complement the existing ones in helping to fill conceptual gaps and throw a reinvigorating light on new problems raising old questions. The originality of the project is to chose most texts outside the conservation world, and to address movable and immovable heritage at the same time. During our presentation, we will provide some examples of the usefulness of these new concepts, some already known by a number of conservators – such as the distinction proposed by Nelson Goodman between allography and autography (Goodman 1976) –, some not – the impact of intention on identity, based on texts by Theodore Scaltsas (1981), for example –, and will encourage the members of the committee who might be interested in this approach to contribute to the project.
