Paul Eggert is Professor of English at the University of New South Wales. As an academic, his specialism lies in the field of scholarly editing. With Securing the Past, Professor Eggert has produced an ambitious book, which deploys his analytical strategies in a novel way. The book’s key innovation is to study conservation practice across a range of disciplines - building restoration, artistic conservation and literary editing - in order to draw out their shared methodological and philosophical underpinnings. This is a valuable project; practitioners necessarily operate within their respective disciplines using methods that can seem arcane to non-specialists. Eggert suggests that these practitioners have not always been eager to evaluate the philosophical bases on which they operate. By analyzing the respective arts of conservation, the book reveals that these fields do indeed have much in common. The chapters examine pertinent themes such as the role of buildings as historic witness, questions of authenticity in literature and painting, and the agency of conservators. In the wake of postmodern theory, Eggert tries to find a valid basis for future conservation practice. He sets his sights high, dealing with such imposing examples as the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Leonardo’s Last Supper, the Rembrandt Research Project and the editing of Shakespeare.

Conservation is by definition an ongoing, long-term practice, and as such it is vulnerable to changing intellectual climates. Eggert outlines how practice has continually been undermined by paradigm shifts, particularly the advent of post-structuralist and postmodernist theories in the late 1960s and 70s. This discourse disputed the existence of objective historical fact, arguing that knowledge is mediated by the framing devices employed by the author. The past must therefore be understood as a construct of the present. Recognizing that history is a dialogue between the past and the present, historiography of the 1960s and 70s began to question the ordered teleological narratives of written history, and to address the discontinuities of the past, the breaks and ruptures of lived historical experience. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), for example, Michel Foucault investigated the methodological and theoretical strategies employed in his previous books Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), which dealt with the discourses of psychiatry, medicine and the human sciences respectively. Offering an exegesis on these works, Foucault argued that the history of a discourse is not that of its ‘progressive refinement’ towards an ultimate rationality or state of ‘pure’ knowledge, but a series of breaks, interruptions and thresholds in which knowledge is interpreted according to successive conceptual models. Foucault was primarily concerned with understanding the relationship between knowledge and power. He argued that discourses structure and distribute knowledge in ways that reinforce the power of dominant groups. History can therefore be seen as a discourse that represents the past according to the exigencies of the present. Eggert invokes Foucault’s ideas to demonstrate that museums position historical artefacts in a relationship to the viewer, thereby organizing the past into persuasive narratives and constructing the viewer as a coherent subject.

Eggert acknowledges that post-1968 discourse represented an important breakthrough, but suggests that its influence has been disabling. In particular, the methodologies of restoration practice are incompatible with postmodern theory. He demonstrates that postmodern skepticism has often paralyzed conservation, resulting in a number of crises. Eggert cites the example of Leonardo’s Last Supper, which underwent restoration between 1970 and 1999. This project concentrated on removing all previous restorations, stripping the work back to reveal the hand of Leonardo in a rather anachronistic appeal to the authority of the author. Eggert wittily interprets this as an ‘end-of-century protest’ against post-structuralist theory, particularly Barthes’s notion of the death of the author. This is an acute instance of the problems facing restorers, where the protracted timelines of restoration are clearly at odds with the more transitory nature of intellectual discourse. Eggert states that we are ‘armed but simultaneously disabled by postmodernist skepticism’ and aims to find a way beyond this impasse. His solution is to revive the concept of the work, displaced by the post-1968 idea of the text, and to reintroduce the dimensions of time and agency.

In Eggert’s model, the work is constructed by multiple agencies: ‘The document is the textual site where the agents of textuality meet: author, copyist, editor, typesetting and reader.’ Indeed, Eggert gives a generous discussion of the role of the reader in this process. Using Heidegger, he shows that works change their meaning and status as they past through successive frames of reference. The importance of a diachronic perspective is illustrated by reference to the Ecclesiologists’ concept of restoration, which aimed to regress the building back to its real or imagined ‘original’ form. This process was frequently allied with the desire to suspend Gothic architecture at the celestial peak felt to have been achieved in the fourteenth century. In literary editing, this problematic rationale is paralleled by the belief that authorship constitutes a stamp of authenticity. Ruskin proposed an alterative practice, introducing the metaphor of the ‘life’ of the building, in which change and decay are part of an inexorable process that occurs over time. This obliged restorers to see themselves as custodians of buildings they had inherited from their forebears and which they must pass on to their successors. Fundamentally, Ruskin argued, we have ‘no right whatever to touch them.’ Eggert develops this idea, arguing that the identity of a building is accreted over time and that the building itself thus becomes a witness to history. Returning to conservation practice, however, he astutely points out that Ruskin’s argument is no basis for decisive action. We are reminded how time seems to stand still in historic house museums and other properties maintained by heritage organizations. Such buildings are ‘frozen’ in their perceived original state. However, Eggert lucidly states that the moment of origin has no more validity than any other stage in the building’s history, since buildings undergo continuous change. Indeed, without this process of reuse and renewal, few buildings would have survived long enough to challenge conservationists.

Consequently, works - whether buildings, paintings or literary texts - are diachronic, since they exist in a state of perpetual change. This is easiest to demonstrate with regard to buildings, which are continually revised by inhabitants and restorers, but Eggert reveals that literary works are similarly constituted. He argues that works must therefore be viewed diachronically. Quoting Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn (1994), Eggert encourages a shift from ‘image architecture’ to ‘process architecture’, a conception that encompasses the ‘skein of relationships over time.’ He paraphrases Brand’s belief that architectural history is a derivative of art history and that it remains focused on style. Many architectural historians would take exception to this. In the last decade there has been a growing awareness of the need for greater theoretical rigour and reflexivity. Dana Arnold’s Reading Architectural History (absent from Eggert’s bibliography) identified problems inherent in the discipline as it has traditionally been practiced, and highlighted the need for a radical rethinking. In 2006 a conference was held at the Yale Center for British Art, entitled Histories of British Architecture: Where Next? This investigated the theoretical and methodological problems facing practitioners of the discipline. Recent work has begun to ask additional questions of architecture, concerning its economic basis, its political functions and its role in structuring the identities of consumers – patrons, users and critics. Buildings are typically viewed as indices of the dynamic social and cultural networks that gave rise to them and which they in turn defined and shaped. Addressing epistemological issues, writers have also begun to question the role of architectural history in mediating one’s experience of architecture. In short, the discipline has advanced considerably since David Watkin wrote that the aims of architectural history are practical (‘to establish what was built, when it was built, and the names of the patron and designer’), historical (‘why the building was built’), and aesthetic (‘to describe and perhaps account for the visual or stylistic differences between one building and another’). Reading as an architectural historian, the chapters on building conservation are in fact the least enlightening. There is a sense that Eggert is introducing himself to the main debates, which is of course understandable, but he could have done more to acknowledge that practitioners within the discipline of architectural history have responded to these methodological and philosophical concerns in recent years.

The chief attraction of the book is that it draws together the different arts of conservation to explore their underlying connections, whether methodological or philosophical. What this often amounts to is the application of literary terminology to art and architecture. Paintings and buildings thus become texts with multiple authors, and so on. This is less an integrated analysis of the three major fields of conservation than a study of each one in turn, with metaphor and analogy making the connections. Another means of maintaining coherence across the volume is the persistent use of cross-referencing. This becomes mildly irritating when Eggert unnecessarily tells the reader what has been said in previous chapters and rehearses what will follow in subsequent chapters. This results in a disrupted narrative and robs the text of momentum.

Despite these minor shortcomings, Securing the Past is a rigorous analysis of the methodologies employed in the conservation of art, architecture and literature, and the discussion sheds much light on their linked philosophical justifications.