Technologies of Memory in the Arts

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Feng Chia University - PalgraveConnect - 2011-05-13

Technologies of Memory in the Arts

10.1057/9780230239562 - Technologies of Memory in the Arts, Edited by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

Also by Anneke Smelik:


And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory (1998)


Edited by

Liedeke Plate Assistant Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

and

Anneke Smelik Professor of Visual Culture, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands




Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik 2009 Individual chapters © contributors 2009

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–57567–7 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–57567–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

viii

Notes on Contributors

x

Technologies of Memory in the Arts: An Introduction Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

1

Part I Mediating Memories Introduction: Mediating Memories Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

15

1 Tourists of History: Souvenirs, Architecture and the Kitschification of Memory Marita Sturken

18

2 Minimalism, Memory and the Reflection of Absence Wouter Weijers

36

3 The Virtuality of Time: Memory in Science Fiction Films Anneke Smelik

52

Part II Memory/Counter-memory Introduction: Memory/Counter-memory Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik 4 The Astonishing Return of Blake and Mortimer: Francophone Fantasies of Britain as Imperial Power and Retrospective Rewritings Ann Miller 5 Writing Back Together: The Hidden Memories of Rochester and Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea Nagihan Haliloglu 6 Liquid Memories: Women’s Rewriting in the Present Liedeke Plate

71

74

86 100

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Contents

vi

Contents

Part III Recalling the Past 117

7 The Matter and Meaning of Childhood through Objects Elizabeth Wood

120

8 The Force of Recalling: Pain in Visual Arts Marta Zarzycka

132

9 Photographs that Forget: Contemporary Recyclings of the Hitler-Hoffmann Rednerposen Frances Guerin

150

Part IV Unsettling History Introduction: Unsettling History Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

169

10 Facing Forward with Found Footage: Displacing Colonial Footage in Mother Dao and the Work of Fiona Tan Julia Noordegraaf

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11 Documentaries and Mediated Popular Histories: Shaping Memories and Images of Slovenia’s past Maruša Pušnik

188

12 Impossible Histories: Violence, Identity, and Memory in Colombian Visual Arts Marta Cabrera

203

Bibliography

216

Index

232



Introduction: Recalling the Past Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

Cover The Library for the Birds of Antwerp 1993 by Mark Dion, photographed by Nic Tenwiggenhorn, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2008 1.1 World Trade Center memorial snow globe Marita Sturken 1.2 Fire Department of New York teddy bear Marita Sturken 2.1 Reflecting Absence, Michael Arad, Peter Walker (January 2004) 2.2 Reflecting Absence, Memorial Room, Michael Arad, Peter Walker (January 2004) 2.3 North, Michael Heizer (1967/2002, Dia:Beacon, NY) 8.1 Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam, 2008 8.2 Alina’s Funeral, Alina Szapocznikow (1970) 10.1 Three smoking toddlers on the island of Bali, Indonesia, recorded by I.A. Ochse in 1926. Still from Mother Dao: The Turtlelike (Vincent Monnikendam, 1995) 10.2 Still from the installation Smoke Screen, Fiona Tan (1997)

19 20 37 38 40 137 142

173 174

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List of Illustrations

The editors and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: VG Bild-Kunst, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and Sammlung Grässlin for The Library for the Birds of Antwerp 1993 by Mark Dion, photographed by Nic Tenwiggenhorn, 1993, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2008. Corbis and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation for Reflecting Absence (Winning Design for the World Trade Center Site Memorial), January 2004, by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, view of Memorial Plaza. Corbis and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation for Reflecting Absence (Winning Design for the World Trade Center Site Memorial), January 2004, Michael Arad and Peter Walker, view of the memorial room. Dia: Beacon, Beacon, New York for North (detail from North, East, South, West) by Michael Heizer 1967/2002. Excerpts from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles by Jeanette Winterson, first published in Great Britain by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE. c 2007 by Jeanette Winterson, Excerpts from The Stone Gods, copyright reprinted by permission of Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books (2008), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, Random House of Canada Limited. Caroline Michel, PFD Agencies London, for the excerpt from the September 2007 Jeanette Winterson column on www.jeanettewinter son.com. National Museum in Kraków for Alina’s Funeral by Alina Szapocznikow (1970). Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2008. The Nederlands Filmmuseum for the still ‘Three smoking toddlers on the island of Bali’ recorded by I. A. Ochse in 1926 and taken from viii



Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments ix

the documentary Mother Dao: The Turtlelike by Vincent Monnikendam, 1995.

Every effort has been made to trace rights holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. The editors are thankful to David C. Felts for his help in editing the text and to Maarten Michielse for his dedicated preparation of the manuscript.



Fiona Tan and Frith Street Gallery London for a still from Fiona Tan’s film installation Smoke Screen, 1997.

Marta Cabrera defended her PhD in Communication and Cultural Studies, University of Wollongong, Australia and teaches ‘Political Sociology and War, Memory and Violence’ courses at Universidad Externado de Colombia. Her research interests include topics of violence, trauma and representation in the visual field. Frances Guerin is Lecturer in the School of Drama, Film and Visual Arts at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and the co-editor of The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Her numerous articles have appeared in international journals, including Cinema Journal, Screening the Past, Film and History, and Cinema e Cie. Her book, Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany, is forthcoming. Nagihan Haliloglu was born in Istanbul and holds an MSt in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford and an MA in English from Middlebury College. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Heidelberg, and her thesis title is ‘Narrating Selves: Female and Colonial Subjectivities in Jean Rhys’s Novels’. Ann Miller is currently Director of Studies for French at the University of Leicester, where she teaches French Language, Cinema, Literature and bande dessinée. It is on this latter area that her research is concentrated, and her book Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip was published by Intellect in 2007. Julia Noordegraaf is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Programme Director of the international Master’s programme Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image. She is the author of Strategies of Display: Museum Presentation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Visual Culture (NAi Publishers, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2004). Her current research focuses on the access to and use of audiovisual collections. Liedeke Plate is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and the Institute for Gender Studies at Radboud University x





xi

Maruša Pušnik is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies. Her research interests include media, popular culture, cultural history of media, memory and nationalism. She is currently co-editing a book Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia. Anneke Smelik is Professor of Visual Culture, holding the Katrien van Munster chair at Radboud University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). She is author of And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory (1998) and several books in Dutch on issues of visual culture. She recently coedited Bits of Life: Feminist Studies of Media, Biocultures, and Technoscience (2008). Her research interests include digital art and culture, the performance of authenticity in fashion, and multimedia literacy. Marita Sturken is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and Co-Director of the Visual Culture Program at New York University. She is the author of several books, including Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (University of California Press, 1997), Thelma & Louise (British Film Institute, 2000), and Practices of Looking: an Introduction to Visual Culture (with Lisa Cartwright, Oxford University Press, 2001, 2nd ed. 2008.) Her most recent book is Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism in American Culture (Duke University Press, 2007). Wouter Weijers teaches Modern and Contemporary Art at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He has published (in Dutch) Ars Longa, Vita Brevis? (Nijmegen University Press, 2003). His articles focus on history and memory in the art of Joseph Beuys, Jasper Johns, Kara Walker and Jeff Wall, and on the way the attacks of 11 September 2001 were remembered in public and private, lasting and short-lived, memorials. Elizabeth Wood is Assistant Professor of Museum Studies and Teacher Education at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, and holds a joint appointment as public scholar of museums,



Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She has published extensively on the subject of women’s rewritings and cultural memory, most recently in Signs 33.2 (Winter 2008). Together with Anneke Smelik, she edited a Dutch book on the cultural memory of ‘9/11’: Stof en as: 11 september in kunst en populaire cultuur (Dust and Ashes: Nine-eleven in Art and Popular Culture, Amsterdam: van Gennep, 2006).

xii Notes on Contributors

Marta Zarzycka graduated in Art History at the University of Lodz, Poland. She teaches in the Women’s Studies Department, Utrecht University, where she recently defended her PhD. Her research centres on the politics of representations of bodies in crisis and visualizations of pain in visual arts.



families and learning at the world-renowned Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Her research focuses on role of objects and artefacts in everyday life and learning, and learning in museums.

Technologies of Memory in the Arts: An Introduction

The tyranny of memory will have endured for only a moment – but it was our moment. (Nora, 1996, p. 637) ‘Remember me,’ the ghost famously says to Hamlet in Shakespeare’s tragedy, and like so many contemporary Hamlets, we obey the spectral past’s call to remembrance. The seemingly simple imperative to remember, however, obscures the fact that remembering can be a tricky business. Sometimes we remember in order to honour the past, even as we remember selectively and distort the past. At other times, we disremember, failing to remember what seems of little importance, or forgetting altogether. We may remember because we refuse to forget. Or we may forget what we wish to remember. By remembering, we form an idea of our self and shape a sense of our identity; thus, we end up embodying the memory that inhabits us. Yet, memory is a dynamic phenomenon for any individual, but also for a culture as a whole. Memory is affected by politics, ideology, technology, or art and popular culture. By changing over time, memory may unsettle received ideas of the past, and consequently also of the present and even the future. In Technologies of Memory in the Arts, we focus on cultural memory, that is, on the cultural dimension of memory, taken as both the what and the how that a culture remembers. Cultural memory can thus be defined as the things and the ways in which a culture remembers. Located at the intersection between individual and collective memory and connecting, as it were, self and society, it includes the institutionalised discourses about memory and practices of remembrance. Cultural memory has a material as well as an immaterial dimension. It is not cast and settled forever in a certain form but, on the contrary, continually subject to 1



Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik


negotiation and renegotiation, at the crossing point between the personal and the collective, and between the past and the future. Because our concept of cultural memory points to a memory that is emergent and perpetually as if ‘in the making’, art, media and popular culture evidently play a pivotal role in it. As the essays in this book demonstrate, forms of artistic or popular recollection work to inscribe as well as to give meaning to and thus to affect the past. In fact, how we remember the past affects not only the present but also the future it helps to bring into being. Whether we recall it deliberately or involuntarily, the past conjured up serves the interests of the present. Remembering happens at the level of the individual recalling the personal past or at the level of the nation recollecting its collective history. This recalling and recollecting is always memory for something – a remembering in the interests of a particular group of people, a particular ideology, or a particular notion of the individual or collective self. Memories are not only shaped by the social context in which they are produced, but also by the material and technological means available to produce and reproduce, store, archive and retrieve them. The book Technologies of Memory in the Arts focuses on art and artistic practices as technologies of cultural memory: paintings, souvenirs, photographs, science fiction films, memorials, novels, documentaries, comic strips and toys. Exploring the varied ways in which art and popular culture process and construct the past in the present, this volume examines how those artistic and popular practices have a particular stake in the complex procedures of remembering and forgetting, of recollecting and disremembering, of amnesia and anamnesis that make up cultural memory. As such, Technologies of Memory in the Arts engages with issues that are crucial for our times. Exploring technologies of memory from a wide range of perspectives by authors from the Americas and Europe, including Eastern Europe, the book at once addresses the globalising tendencies of cultural memory today and provides a powerful corrective to it. We do so by contextualising historically and situating geographically the various media, technologies, and artistic and performative practices that we explore in this volume. In addition, students of cultural memory on both sides of the Atlantic and scholars engaged in cultural memory studies worldwide will find the book’s focus on the materiality of the medium of memory illuminating. Indeed, the combination of an analysis of art and technology offers particular insight into the workings of cultural memory in the western hemisphere. We thus hope to provide a unique perspective on cultural memory as a shared yet contested



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Technologies of Memory in the Arts: An Introduction 3

Technologies of memory In Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925), French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs explores the social construction of memory, arguing that individual memory functions within a social context and is, therefore, framed by it. There is, in other words, no other memory but social memory; all individual and personal memories take place within society and are shaped by their social context. Following Halbwachs, Jan Assmann (1992) postulates two uses of the past: first, the collective memory of the recent past that finds objectification in all kinds of sign systems, such as ritual, dance, myth, clothing, tattoos, roads, painting and landscapes. Second, the cultural memory of fixed points in history that is focused on myth rather than on facts or, more precisely, that changes historical fact into myth. In Assmann’s definition, cultural memory may contain an aspect of the sacred, as for example in ceremonies or festive events. Also, collective memory and cultural memory have normative and formative powers, since they serve to actively construct the identity of a social group or of an individual. Aleida Assmann (2004) further refines the terminology. Identifying ‘four formats of memory’, she distinguishes individual, social, political and cultural memory. In her analysis, political memory differs from the other formats of memory in being more homogeneous and monolithic, less volatile and transient, and ‘emplotted in a narrative that is emotionally charged and conveys a clear and invigorating message’ (p. 26). In this book, we take the position that personal and social memory are already political, traversed and informed by ideology and politics, and that ‘cultural memory is always about the distribution of and contested claims to power’ (Hirsch and Smith, 2002, p. 6). In fact, just as memories are formed and informed by their social, generational and cultural context, so are they formed by their medial and technological frameworks (Rigney, 2005). Here we want to refer to the notion of technology that Foucault introduces in his first volume of The History of Sexuality, in which he analyses ‘the presence of a veritable “technology” of sex’ in bourgeois society (1998 [1976], p. 90). By ‘technology of sex’, Foucault means that modern sexuality is not regulated by law, but by discourses of power. Thus, he understands sexuality



practice that stands at the heart of current cultural identity debates, national (re)formations, and the construction of Europe as a cultural as well as a political and economic project.


as the effect or product of a ‘complex political technology’ (p. 127), for example through institutionalised discourses and cultural practices. In the same way, we can understand memory as an effect of a variety of institutionalized discourses and cultural practices. That is what Marita Sturken suggests in Tangled Memories (1997), when she launches the term ‘technologies of memory’: objects, images, and representations ‘are technologies of memory . . . through which memories are shared, produced, and given meaning’ (p. 9). Sturken explains that we should not obliterate the process that is involved in creating memories. Rather than repeat and confirm the self-evident nature of memory, she argues that the illusory transparency of individual memory is in fact the outcome of complex technologies that produce cultural memory, through objects such as monuments, texts, icons and images. Her focus of analysis is therefore on the material objects that convey cultural memory or memorial practices. Following Foucault, she argues that those technologies of memory are implicated in power dynamics, involving people in an active process in relation to institutionalized discourses and cultural practices (1997, p. 10). The aim of our book is to analyse memory as a technology, in order to grasp the historical production of cultural memory in its many forms and expressions. Technologies of Memory in the Arts therefore focuses on the varied technologies of memory as they find expression in art and popular culture, addressing a wide array of artistic and cultural practices. The technologies for remembering, the social and cultural institutions, and the media to which we have recourse for storing, recording and otherwise keeping our memories all equally affect how we remember no less than what is remembered. Thus, the rise of national museums in the nineteenth century served to construct and preserve the nation’s cultural memory through rituals of canonization (Duncan, 1995), while more recently, the advent of home videos has transformed the way in which people shape their personal memories (van Dijck, 2007). In that sense, we take the position that memory is always already mediated, following debates by Terdiman (1993), Huyssen (1995) and Radstone and Hodgkin (2006). The authors in this book address the cultural dimension of memory. At the cultural level, art and artistic practices most explicitly engage memory as representation. Memory is always re-presentation, making experiences, as it were, present again in the form of images, sensations or affects. At the level of cultural memory, therefore, we are inevitably dealing with representations, performances and re-enactments of memory. Foregrounding the work of memory, such as the processes of



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remembering and of forgetting and of selective amnesia, artworks and artistic performances form a particularly interesting site for the study of cultural memory as a social practice of self-representation and self-understanding. As a technology of memory that links the present to the past and to the future, art has strong ethical and political aspects. This is particularly evident in the case of memory of traumatic experiences – architectural design memorializing 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing come to mind as recent American examples, as Marita Sturken and Wouter Weijers discuss in Chapters 1 and 2 respectively. Documentaries of post-socialist Slovenia (see Maruša Pušnik, Chapter 11) or reproductions of photographs of Hitler (in Frances Guerin, Chapter 9) equally and forcefully demonstrate the political and ideological implications of art as a technology of memory. Technologies of Memory in the Arts therefore addresses the mediation of memory not only as a technological issue, but also as a political one. For instance, Julia Noordegraaf (Chapter 10) looks at the recycling of found colonial footage in contemporary art as a political gesture in the context of a revision of colonial history, and Marta Cabrera (Chapter 12) explores some of the rare artworks that commemorate the violence of the civil war in Colombia. Ultimately, the book is about cultural memory as continuous movement, unsettling and unsettled, producing new memories, cultural representations and social effects. Art and popular culture are governed by specific rules and conventions of shared social practices. As such, they are engaged in non-linear processes of remembering and forgetting, characterized by repetition, rearrangement, revision and rejection. This can be seen in the literary practice of rewriting canonical novels, for example Jane Eyre, as is explored by Nagihan Haliloglu (Chapter 5), or the retelling of Robinson Crusoe as a fallacious myth of progress, as discussed by Liedeke Plate (Chapter 6). It can also be found in the artistic practice of recycling graphic styles in comic strips, as Ann Miller shows in her essay (Chapter 4) on the resurrection of the comic strip with the heroes Blake and Mortimer. Wouter Weijers argues that the complex practice of cultural memory-in-the-making is reflected in the recycling of Minimalism to commemorate the dead in Germany or at Ground Zero, while Marta Zarzycka (Chapter 8) explores how female artists such as Frida Kahlo and Alina Szapocznikow use art to process physical pain and trauma. Throughout these cases, new memories are constantly constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed by narrative strategies, visual and aural styles, intertextual references and intermedial relations, re-enactments





and ritual performances. Artistic representations re-present the past, that is, make it present again. As Mieke Bal puts it, ‘cultural memorization [is] an activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future’ (1999, p. vii). In doing so, art inevitably selects to include certain aspects while excluding others. Cultural codes and conventions, no less than material support and technological means and tools, equally determine what can be re-collected and re-presented. As new technologies make new memories possible, they also demand that older representations be re-visited and re-presented again, thus engaging art and popular culture in a dynamic process of re-vision and re-production. Not surprisingly, the contemporary fascination of art with history and memory is accompanied by developments in media technology that have simultaneously a petrifying and a virtualizing effect, as Sobchack (1996) and Radstone (2000) have observed. The fossilizing effect of the media lies in the fact that both individual and cultural memory are more and more mediated by technology. This means that memories are not only collected and saved by media, but are also reproduced and represented by them (Huyssen, 2000; Hirsch and Smith, 2002). As Julia Noordegraaf discusses in this volume, artists such as Fiona Tan recycle found colonial footage in video art. The virtualizing effect lies in what Baudrillard (1983) has termed a society of simulacra and Žižek (2002) has called the derealization effect of the media: anything that is filmed with a camera becomes more show and less reality. This effect of visual technologies reinforces ‘memory’s mediatedness’ (Radstone and Hodgkin, 2006, p. 11). In her essay on recent science fiction films, Anneke Smelik (Chapter 3) illustrates how the fascination with the virtualization of digitalised memory seems to reflect a crisis in narrative cinema as well as ontological uncertainty. Thus, modern technologies increasingly mediate both individual and cultural memory as media not only record and recollect memories, but actually shape and produce them (van Dijck, 2007). Digital media in particular allow for new ways of storing, retrieving and archiving personal and collective memories and cultural artefacts that have far-reaching consequences for the ways we remember the past.

Cultural memory Cultural memory is far from homogeneous and coherent. Although shared, it is also contested, formed and re-formed time after time, in an incessant interaction of artistic and social processes. In our book,



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we follow scholars of such varied plumage as German Egyptologist Jan Assmann and literary scholar Aleida Assmann, American media theorist Marita Sturken, as well as Dutch cultural analyst Mieke Bal and French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, among many others. A number of factors are important to consider here. To begin with, the notion that cultural memory is a shared knowledge of the past that is not part of official history. As Sturken has put it, such memory ‘is shared outside of formal historical discourse, yet is imbued with cultural meaning’ (1999, p. 178). It is the French historian Pierre Nora who first formulated cultural memory as distinct from history. Arguing that modern, ‘cultural’ memory emerges from the split of history and memory resulting from the historical shift from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban culture on the one hand, and historiographical self-reflexivity on the other hand, Nora proposes the lieu de mémoire (site of memory) as the object of study for ‘another history’ (Nora, 1989). Nora’s analysis of the factors that contributed to the emergence of memory and its crystallization around these lieux means that cultural memory has its own – often unwritten – history. Richard Terdiman observes that ‘memory has a history’ (1993, p. 3). In fact, the tendency to view history and memory as opposites itself belongs to our historical moment. It is in the wake of feminism, postcolonialism and postmodernism that history came to be viewed as one of the grand narratives denounced as totalizing and negatively associated with public and presumed objectivity, while ‘memory has become positively associated with the embedded, with the local, the personal and the subjective’ (Radstone and Hodgkin, 2006, p. 10). Following Fredric Jameson’s famous imperative to ‘always historicize!’ (1981, p. 9), then, this book insists on the importance of historicizing cultural memory. The preoccupation with memory that feeds contemporary interest in and research on cultural memory is the product of a particular historical configuration. In his seminal book on cultural memory, Jan Assmann locates the ‘virulence of the theme of memory’ (1992, p. 11) in a historical period that not only sees the global growth of electronic media, but also witnesses the end of ‘old Europe’ as we knew it, while people who lived through the horrors of the Second World War are dying out. Identifying, like Andreas Huyssen (2003), the crucial roles of media, politics and the Holocaust in making memory a central contemporary concern, Assmann argues these factors together produce a need for reflection and reminiscence. Nora’s research into this new form of memory resulted in the monumental seven volumes of Les lieux de mémoire (1984–92), investigating a





vast array of sites that range from monuments (such as the Panthéon), to traditions, customs and practices (including le café, meaning both coffee and the coffeehouse). In the wake of Nora’s project of national memorymaking and historiographical recovery, other European countries have followed suit and engaged in similar projects. For instance, a fourvolume Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (German Sites of Memory) was published in Germany in 2001, another four-volume Plaatsen van herinnering (Sites of Memory) appeared in The Netherlands between 2005 and 2007, while a volume collecting Belgian sites of memory appeared in 2008 under the title België, een parcours van herinnering (Belgium, a circuit of memory). To understand the different rhythms of these research projects as technologies of cultural memory, we would need to explore each country’s specific investment in the various versions of their national past, in relation to recent wars, political regimes, former colonies, and the formation of Europe as a political, economic and cultural project. By mapping some of those trajectories, this book reflects on those trends from a more cosmopolitan perspective. This means that whereas we believe technologies of cultural memory need to be analysed in their local and national contexts, we are convinced they should also be thought about and reinterpreted within the imaginary connection for which Kwame Anthony Appiah retrieved the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ (2006). ‘Cosmopolitan’, however, does not mean ‘global’ by some other word, substituting one totalizing grand narrative by another. Indeed, as we map the material, social, cultural, political, ideological and artistic/aesthetic dimensions of cultural memory, it soon appears we should not only ‘always historicize’, as Jameson had it, but that we should equally ‘always spatialize’, as Susan Stanford Friedman puts it (1998, p. 130). Memory has not only a history; it also has a geography. Everywhere in Europe we find a fascination with places that one can visit, from walking tours ‘in the footsteps of’ famous historical or fictional figures such as the Don Quixote trails in Spain, Hemingway’s Paris or Virginia Woolf’s London (see Plate, 2006) to guided tours of their homes, such as, for instance, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Included in the brochures of travel agencies and increasingly part of the cities’ marketing strategies, these sites then become tourist destinations in the current economy of cultural consumerism. In Destination Culture (1998), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has shown how museums compete with tourism in the production of ‘heritage’, marketing themselves as tourist attractions and turning locations into destinations. This ‘tourism of history’, as Marita Sturken has labelled the phenomenon in her study of consumer practices at sites of national trauma in the United



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States (2007), certainly has globalizing tendencies, affecting tourist practices in places as distant and different as Auschwitz, Oklahoma City, Hanoi and Budapest. As Antze and Lambek so poignantly put it, ‘we all become the alienated tourists of our pasts’ (1996, p. xiii). On the one hand, then, we see that places are put on tourist trails. On the other hand, we also see that this fascination and the commercial exploitation of this fascination assume different forms across the globe. Take, for instance, the Shoah, whose sites of memory are inscribed very differently within the cultural geographies of different countries. Packaged tours to Prague and Krakow often include, or offer the possibility of including, a day’s visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In contrast, there are no tours to Babi Yar near Kiev, where an estimated 100,000 people were killed during the massacres of 1941 and the following years. In fact, the site is surprisingly difficult to reach for visitors of the capital city of Ukraine. These examples of geographically specific inscriptions of cultural memory, moreover, should not make us forget that many histories have no sites for memory at all. In this volume, this forgetting is illustrated by Marta Cabrera’s analysis of the painful absence of memorials and commemorations of violence in Colombia. The inscription of cultural memory in space requires attention to be paid to the materiality of cultural memory and to the medium of this materiality. As Aleida Assmann argues in her book Erinnerungsräume (Spaces of Memory) (1999), individuals and cultures build their cultural memory interactively through communication in language, images, objects and rituals. In other words, they need external media and cultural practices to organize and express their memories (p. 19). These media and practices are the subject of Marita Sturken’s discussion in this book of kitsch souvenirs and Elizabeth Wood’s exploration of childhood objects (Chapters 1 and 7 respectively). It is one of the reasons why we focus on technologies of cultural memory. Yet the spatial dimension of cultural memory does not only translate as a key issue for media studies and cultural geographies of memory, it also points to a fundamental feature of cultural memory today. As the essays in this book illustrate, the contemporary interest in the past and in cultural memory, desirous of making the past present, takes on a distinct spatial dimension. Obviously, the materiality of memory has a spatial dimension: it literally takes place. Objects, but also performances, thus emphasize the spatialization of memory that is such a crucial feature of contemporary memory culture. Indeed, it is in this spatial dimension that ‘the presentification of the past’ manifests itself, as Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht has termed it (2004, p. 123 and passim).




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Practices of cultural memory involve a conjuring up of the past that makes it present again; times of yore become tangible, material and capable of ‘touching’ us.

The recent boom in memory that has come to pervade Western culture since the 1970s has been accompanied by the conviction that this is only a moment in history. Reflecting on the destiny of the lieux de mémoire, Nora concludes that soon, ‘the need to exhume these landmarks and explore these lieux will have disappeared. The era of commemoration will be over for good. The tyranny of memory will have endured for only a moment – but it was our moment’ (1996, p. 637). For years now, scholars have searched for signs of ‘memory fatigue’ (Huyssen, 2003, p. 3), convinced that the current fascination with memory would soon reach a point of saturation. In the context of our contemporary culture of instant obsolescence, of the ever-increasing acceleration of history and faster cycles of innovation and novelty, it is indeed to be expected that the newness of the old and the novelty of the past as fashionable interests would soon wear out. Surprisingly, however, this is not the case, as new pasts keep being retrieved, unearthed and manufactured. One reason for this may be that, contrary to appearances, the point of saturation is nowhere near to being reached. Another may be found in an intrinsic relation between the production of memory and consumer culture. Looking back on the fate of the lieux de mémoire, Nora wonders ‘why this co-optation has taken place’ (1996, p. 609). Indeed, ‘The work was intended . . . to be a counter-commemorative type of history’, but it was overtaken by commemoration – an irresistible and all-consuming ‘commemorative bulimia’ (p. 609). The idea that the academic, historical project was co-opted suggests it preceded its cultural and commercial co-optation; that it existed prior to and outside the sphere of consumer culture and was overtaken by it. This is akin to the notion that there once was an autonomous culture of art and intellect that has now been enlisted by the all-engulfing capitalist machine which knows how to make ready money out of anything faster that any academic can think, which ‘is utterly promiscuous, and will happily tag along with the highest bidder’ (Eagleton, 2003, p. 17). But what if, rather than imagining a pure and uncontaminated culture of memory beyond the sphere of commercialism, we were to think of memory and the memory boom as inextricably linked with it? We would then need to rethink its cultural



A new historical culture

construction in art and artistic practices as inevitably informed by its economic no less than its political, social and aesthetic interests. In this volume, we propose precisely such an unsettling of the past, reconceiving it as manufactured, that is, as produced by a culture in the interest of particular people in that culture and therefore solidly ideological and economic. As Pierre Nora phrases it: ‘Today, the historian is far from alone in manufacturing the past; it is a role he shares with the judge, the witness, the media and the legislator’ (2002). As discussed in this volume, there are evident commercial interests involved in the memorialization of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 or of the 9/11 attacks. Yet, as Liedeke Plate suggests in her essay on what she terms (after Bauman) ‘liquid memories’ (Chapter 6), the same is true for those modes of cultural production we generally think of as belonging to the more rarefied domain of art. In fact, the production of literary and artistic memories is not only a political and ideological affair but is framed by vested interests. This is corroborated by Maruša Pušnik in Chapter 11 on the struggle over meanings of the imagined past in documentaries from post-socialist Slovenia. In Technologies of Memory in the Arts, we thus conceive of the memory boom and contemporary memory cultures as a constituent part of economic globalization, one of the ways in which art and culture were reconceived as cultural products to be packaged and sold on the increasingly significant market of the culture industry. This is why we gather essays dealing with popular culture and commodified objects, together with essays dealing within artworks marked by the halo of an authentic signature by the artist, viewing them as a continuum relating to the same consumer culture. This is not to say they are the same. But it is to stress that the past sells better than the future, from the paintings of Frida Kahlo to the remembering and forgetting of colonial history. From our introduction, it follows that Technologies of Memory in the Arts specifically addresses the material construction of cultural memory. Some essays explore procedures of memory in both traditional and new media. Other essays investigate the role of digitalization of art and culture in relation to memory. Generally, the focus of the book is on the materiality of representation and on the relation between the medium and the construction of cultural memory. Technologies of Memory in the Arts is divided into four thematic parts. Each of these parts consists of a short introduction to the theme and new essays specifically written for this volume, which are then more fully introduced in the thematic introductions. Part I, Mediating Memories, looks at the ways in which memories are mediated, exploring the





materiality of cultural memory in such diverse artefacts as tourist souvenirs, memorials and the representation of memory in recent science fiction films. Part II, Memory/Counter-memory, focuses on intertextuality and rewriting as literary technologies of cultural memory. It explores how rewriting works counter-memorially, in the revival of the so-called ligne claire (clear line) in comic strips, Jean Rhys’s rewriting of Charlotte Brontë’s nineteenth-century classic, Jane Eyre, and Jeanette Winterson’s retelling of myth in The Stone Gods. In Part III, Recalling the Past, the focus shifts to the many ways in which the past is invoked in contemporary cultural practices, such as the role that toys play in childhood memories, contemporary recyclings of Hitler’s so-called Rednerposen (oratory poses) photographs, and the possibilities of painting the traces of pain and trauma in the art of Frida Kahlo and Alina Szapocznikow. The final section, Part IV, Unsettling History, engages with representations of cultural memory that disturb and upset the known and official historical accounts. The essays here show the wilful construction or the fundamental instability of cultural memory in visual representations that change the authorized views of history, focusing on colonial footage in documentary film and installation art, the redefinition of Slovenian history in recent right-wing documentaries, and Colombian art that helps to shape a cultural commemoration of a violent past in a culture of disavowal and denial. Technologies of Memory in the Arts unravels the complexity of practices and discourses of cultural memory from many different perspectives. By its focus on artistic and popular practices as technologies of memory, this volume seeks to provide a pertinent analysis of how art and popular culture work to settle and unsettle the past in the present. Its international scope serves to underscore how the many and varied practices have particular stakes in the complex processes of remembering and forgetting, of recollecting and disremembering, that make up cultural memory.



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Part I


Mediating Memories




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Introduction: Mediating Memories

When Pierre Nora (1989) situated the break between history and memory in modernism, as we mentioned in the Introduction, he also characterized memory as the realm of immediacy and presence. Memory is thus understood as being ‘independent of the materiality of the sign’ and ‘unstructured by social technologies of learning or recall’, as John Frow explains (1997, p. 223). In Nora’s view, the lieux de mémoire that come into existence in modernity indicate a lost world of a historical time of traditions without rupture or conflict. Museums, archives, monuments and the like have transformed memory by a long passage through history. These memory sites have in a way ‘degraded’ immediate, unmediated, memory. The notion of memory as unmediated experience has haunted cultural studies of memory. According to Susannah Radstone (2000), the memory crisis in the nineteenth century was the ‘felt break with tradition’ (p. 7), while the crisis in the late twentieth century is rather informed by the development of new media and electronic technologies that seek an experience of ‘immediacy, instantaneity and simultaneity’ (p. 7). It is as if the media have taken over the promise of immediacy and authenticity from memory. Ever since McLuhan (2002) argued in 1964 that media are an extension of the human senses, and also an extension of consciousness, it is impossible within contemporary multimedia culture to maintain a view of memory as unmediated. The focus of media and cultural studies on media and information technologies guarantees a foregrounding of the materiality of representation. As Vivian Sobchack explains, audiovisual technologies of the twentieth century collapse the temporal distance between present, past and future. There is no longer a history that happened ‘before’ and a re-presentation that came ‘after’ the event, but we are moving towards 15





simultaneity (1996, p. 5). Sobchack refers to the O. J. Simpson case, but ‘9/11’ is of course another example of history happening right here and now; it ‘is transmitted, reflected upon, shown play-by-play, taken up as the stuff of multiple stories and significance, given all sorts of “coverage” in the temporal dimension of the present as we live it’ (p. 5). For Huyssen (1995), this collapse of the boundaries between past and present in contemporary fast-speed media pertains to the very crisis of memory. Radstone claims that in the contemporary remembrance boom, memory is aligned with issues of subjectivity and representation, privileging invention and fabrication over authenticity and lived experience (2000, p. 9). Scholarly research in the last decade testifies to an understanding of memory as mediated by technology. For example, John Frow (1997) calls for an exploration of memory as ‘tekhnè, as mediation, as writing’ (p. 224), as structured by technological and institutional conditions (p. 230). While it is an advancement to understand memory as ‘always already’ mediated, we can push the argument even further. Memory is not only shaped by media, but media are also shaped by memory. Thus José van Dijck argues that ‘media and memory transform each other’ (2007, p. 21). Media technologies structure our process of remembering, just as remembrance affects the way in which we make use of media devices. Mediated memory thus results in concrete objects, products or performances, which people employ for negotiating the relationship between self and society, between personal and cultural memory (p. 21). If we understand the medium as a process, and not as a thing, we can also argue that it not only re-mediates, but that the medium itself also remembers. That is why media usually mediate each other, as McLuhan already indicated in his seminal Understanding Media: ‘the “content” of any medium is always another medium’, he famously stated (2002, p. 8). Or, to put it differently, if the past is always already mediated, then media have by necessity to re-mediate. Mediated memory products can so be understood as having a double mnemonic layer – that is, as being both the cultural and the medial remembrance of something. This may also hint at an explanation of why cultural memory seems to be shrouded in clichés and stereotypes. The essays that follow carefully examine the materiality of mediation, by paying attention to the layeredness of concrete objects and acts of mediated memories. In the opening chapter, Marita Sturken observes how cultural artefacts such as tourist souvenirs and kitsch objects operate as technologies of memory in American culture. Her primary focus is on the intersection of cultural memory, tourism, architecture and consumerism in the



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United States in relation to the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the debate over the memorialization of 9/11 at Ground Zero in New York City. She is particularly concerned with the way that American culture encourages a ‘tourist’ relationship to history, one that reveals the deep investment in the concept of innocence in American culture. In Chapter 2, Wouter Weijers reflects on the minimalist aesthetic that seems to have become the dominant style for public monuments, probably because its ‘timeless’ and ‘apolitical’ forms allow for the private contemplation of loss. He situates the contradictory responses to the design Reflecting Absence by architect Michael Arad for the official 9/11 memorial in New York City within the context of Modernist abstraction. While minimalist designs can on the one hand be understood as the creation of transcendent meanings, Weijers explains how minimalist memorials can on the other hand be read as part and parcel of today’s culture of the spectacle. In Chapter 3, Anneke Smelik explores digital technologies in recent cinema on memory, such as Minority Report, Final Cut, 2046 and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Either in spectacular images or in multiple and fragmented narratives, the films raise questions of subjective memory. Drawing on Deleuze’s thought, Smelik argues that the affect of memories provokes a non-linear, dynamic vision of time, undoing the authority of the past that so often ties subjects obsessively to their recollections. The affective level also allows the spectator to establish an experiential relation to the film, embracing memory as a loop that connects present, past and future.



Introduction: Mediating Memories 17

Tourists of History: Souvenirs, Architecture and the Kitschification of Memory Marita Sturken

Technologies of memory take many forms, from photographs to architectural designs, from docudramas to memorials, from talismans to souvenirs, from diaries to the body itself. The aesthetic styles and designs of these memory technologies can span a broad range of taste categories and stylistic intents, from the sentimental object of loss and mourning to the angry political statement of an AIDS quilt panel. Such distinctions of taste are, of course, deeply tied to class-based notions of what constitutes appropriate taste in relation to memory and loss. They are also crucial to understanding the relationship of memory and politics. It is the case that the aesthetics and forms of cultural memory both enable and limit the memories that circulate through them. The aesthetics of technologies of memory are thus deeply political. In this essay, I examine a trend in the kitschification of memory that has emerged in American culture over the past twenty years, and what it indicates about particular narratives of innocence and a consumer culture of comfort in the United States. I am interested in the political implications of kitsch forms of remembering and how an aesthetic of reenactment, which is a key factor of kitsch remembering, enables certain kinds of memory narratives and limits others. Is a particular kind of kitsch aesthetics of memory emerging at this moment in history – a historical time framed by the events of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, and the war in Iraq? I would like to look specifically at the way that the memory of 9/11 is being encoded into a particular set of aesthetics of kitsch and re-enactment at Ground Zero in New York City. Such a set of aesthetics emerged in the context of a particularly troubling and extreme moment in American political history, when the stakes in reproducing notions of innocence were very high in the United States. 18



1

Souvenirs, Architecture and the Kitschification of Memory 19

My story begins with two souvenirs. The first is a plastic snow globe pencil holder that contains a miniature of the twin towers of the World Trade Center standing next to an oversized St. Paul’s Chapel with a police car and a fire truck sitting before it (Figure 1.1). When the globe is shaken, bright moons and stars float around the towers. It is labelled, ‘World Trade Center 1973–2001’. I purchased it from an illegal street vendor selling wares at a temporary table next to Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. My second souvenir is a teddy bear that wears a FDNY firefighter’s uniform, which is sold as part of a broad (legal) consumer network related to the New York City Fire Department (Figure 1.2). The WTC snow globe is not only an object of tourism but is also an object of memory that depicts the insulated world of the US nation in the small bubble-like worlds of its globe. We look into the small world of a snow globe as if from a god-like position. The effect of the miniature

Figure 1.1

World Trade Center memorial snow globe Marita Sturken



9/11 souvenirs


is to offer a sense of containment and, in this case, to narrate particular stories about the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. The snow globe’s miniature world is not simply small, but animated. When shaken, it comes alive with the movement of moons and stars, offering a kind of celebratory flurry that then settles back again. This snow globe also has a very particular relationship to time. It notes the dates of the ‘life span’ of a building, the World Trade Center, and captures it in a mystical temporal moment – the towers remain

Figure 1.2

Fire Department of New York teddy bear Marita Sturken



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standing although the emergency vehicles that signal the towers’ demise are already present. Time-wise, a snow globe is itself an object of time that one is encouraged to ‘visit’ on a regular basis, absentmindedly giving it a shake in a moment of distraction. Yet, a snow globe also offers a sense of time as a return – one shakes the globe, but it always returns back to the landscape before the snow flurry. I see this snow globe not simply as an object of kitsch, but as an object that embodies the way that kitsch can produce a sense of innocence and comfort. The comfort of the snow globe derives in part from this expectation that it returns each time to its original state. The FDNY teddy bear is an example of the broader role that teddy bears have played in the kitschification of memory and the predominance of a culture of comfort in the United States. The ubiquity of teddy bears in New York City after 9/11 brought the national trend of giving teddy bears to the grieving and the sick to unusual proportions. Ever since the early years of the AIDS crisis, when people began to give teddy bears to people who were ill with AIDS, the teddy bear has been increasingly deployed as a commodity of grief. This recent consumerism of comfort teddy bears is aimed at adult consumers, not children, and carries with it the inevitable effect of infantilization – teddy bears have proliferated in the comfort culture of breast cancer advocacy and at sites like the Oklahoma City National Memorial. This FDNY teddy bear is an object of memory – it is a reminder that several hundred New York City firefighters lost their lives on 9/11, and that they left behind bereaved families and colleagues. It is also an object that can aid in screening out many other stories of 9/11 that have been overshadowed by the sanctification of the New York City firefighters – or the brutal truth that it was lack of preparation that fated them, rather than sheer heroism. A teddy bear is a primary object of comfort culture. It is a tactile object – one is supposed to hold it in order for it to convey its fully resonant meaning. In the aftermath of 9/11, the power awarded the teddy bear to provide comfort was extraordinary – as early as the next day, the Salvation Army handed out teddy bears to people returning to the city. Importantly, the teddy bear promises comfort, not necessarily the comfort that things will be better, but the comfort that one will feel better.

Tourists of history The snow globe and the teddy bear are emblematic of the ways that American culture processes and engages with loss, and of the economic networks that support the consumerism of American kitsch. They are





both mass-produced and labelled ‘Made in China’. They are thus produced out of the elaborate global economic networks that manufacture the objects of American patriotism (including the vast majority of small American flags, which are made in Korea and China). Their production of American innocence is the product of low-level, lowly paid, outsourced labour. The snow globe and the teddy bear are both objects that participate in what I call the tourism of history; they form part of the broad array of cultural practices that reveal the deep investment in the concept of innocence in American culture. The tourist is a figure who embodies a detached and innocent pose. In using the term ‘tourists of history’, I am defining a particular mode through which the American public is encouraged to experience history through media images, souvenirs, popular culture, and museum and architectural re-enactments, a form of tourism that has as its goal a cathartic ‘experience’ of history. I am concerned with the subjectivity of the tourist of history, for whom history is an experience once or twice removed, a mediated and re-enacted experience, yet an experience nevertheless. Tourists visit sites where they do not live, they are outsiders to the daily practices of life in tourist destinations, they are largely unaware of the effects of how tourist economies have structured the daily lives of the people who live and work in tourist locales. Tourists typically remain distant in the sites they visit, where they are often defined as innocent outsiders, mere observers whose actions are believed to have no effect on what they see. It is the case that there now exist many forms of tourism, such as ecotourism, that attempt to produce different kinds of tourist subjectivities, but my intent here is to deploy the very modernist notion of the tourist as a metaphor – I want to consider how this subjectivity of the tourist can serve as a metaphor for the ways in which American citizens are encouraged to situate themselves as innocent outsiders in relationship to history and in particular to world history. The investment in reaffirming American innocence that underlies the tourism of history functions not only to mask US imperialist ventures but also to obscure the degree to which violent conflict is a fundamental aspect to American society. For instance, the narrative describing the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as comparable to Pearl Harbour as the country’s ‘loss of innocence’ about being attacked on home soil helped to affirm an isolationist shock – the jolting response that suddenly the rest of the world had come into view to the American public, the anger of that world suddenly in focus. Yet, the narrative of innocence enabled the US response to avoid any discussion of what long histories of its foreign



22


Kitsch The tourism of history that I see in American culture is intimately tied to the production of American kitsch. Kitsch has historically been considered to be an aspect of mass culture (McDonald, 1952). The word itself is derived from the German verkitschen, meaning ‘to cheapen’ (Broch, 1968, p. 49). Thus, kitsch is often associated with cheapness both in terms of cost and production, as well as with the idea that such cheap things are without any cultural refinement or taste. Mass production is a key component in this definition of kitsch, since these qualities of cheapness are related to the mass production of objects with no relationship to craftsmanship. Yet, a kitsch aesthetic is hardly restricted to cheap, mass-produced objects, though these may constitute the origin of the term. Matei Calinescu notes that many objects that constitute kitsch, while they may be inexpensive, are intended to suggest richness in the form of imitation gold and silver, and that luxury goods can often be seen as kitsch in style (1987, p. 243). Similarly, as I will discuss further, high-end design can often engage in a kitsch form of sentimentality. Kitsch was thus initially associated with a set of social factors that accompanied modernity, with the rise of mass culture, the sense of alienation that accompanied the shift to industrialization and urbanization, and the widespread commodification of daily life. Calinescu writes that kitsch ‘has a lot to do with the modern illusion that beauty can be bought and sold’ and that ‘the desire to escape from adverse or simply dull reality is perhaps the main reason for the wide appeal of kitsch’ (1987, pp. 229, 237). This sense of easy formulas and predictable emotional registers which form a kind of escapism is essential to most definitions of kitsch. In his well-known essay, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Clement Greenberg wrote: ‘Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and fake sensations. [ . . . ] Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time’ (1986, p. 12). While I am not interested in retrieving Greenberg’s



policies had done to help foster a terrorist movement specifically aimed at the United States and its allies. The cultural memory of events such as 9/11 is intimately tied up with this culture of innocence. Narratives of innocence need constant maintenance in order to be sustained, and this maintenance is manifested in many places including popular culture, tourism and memorials.


dismissal of kitsch, I am interested in revisiting his analysis of the problematic mechanics of kitsch. Critiques of kitsch such as these have been largely understood within the framework of critiques of mass culture, and within that, the critique that mass-produced objects of prepackaged sentiment offer a cheapened way to engage with interpersonal emotions, tragic sites of loss, and political complexity. Yet, it is worth noting that kitsch objects are often quite spontaneously mixed with objects that are understood to be less prepackaged and more personalized and individual. In the United States, spontaneously created shrines at sites such as Shanksville, Pennsylvania or along the fence that surrounded the destruction of the federal building in Oklahoma City, are as likely to have mass-produced objects such as teddy bears and Hallmark cards as they are to have objects that are less likely to be seen as kitsch. Of course, these categories can be immensely problematic, since a handwritten note, understood in many contexts as more authentic than a mass-produced souvenir, can deploy kitsch sentiment as well. In addition, there are many ways in which individuals make meaning with kitsch objects and do non-kitsch things with mass-produced souvenirs. It is not useful to understanding kitsch, particularly in the context of postmodern culture, to simply dismiss tourist practices and the purchasing of kitsch souvenirs as activities that are superficial and meaningless; certain kinds of tourist practices, broadly defined, enable people to respond to loss and make sense of their grief. Yet, I also do not feel that the model of cultural analysis that sees such cultural practices as people ‘making do’ with the symbols at hand in order to make sense of loss tells us very much about what happens politically at such places. It may be that the purchasing and display of a FDNY teddy bear allows someone to feel a connection to and sadness about those who lost their lives on 9/11. But in offering simple comfort, such a teddy bear also disables certain kinds of responses. It is not a versatile object that can be employed for a range of responses; it is a circumscribed one, precisely because of the message of sentimentality and reassurance it offers. When someone leaves a teddy bear at the memorial, it is to signal an empathetic and caring response, to offer comfort to the dead. When people purchase FDNY teddy bears in New York City, they are fulfilling a particular set of needs to feel connected to particular traumatic events, a connection that the teddy bear enables in a narrative of simple comfort. However overstated this may sound, such a teddy bear is ultimately not an innocent object.



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While modern critics of mass culture have historically defined kitsch as an aesthetic of the masses (and thus as an aesthetic of lower-class culture), contemporary kitsch cultures defy simple hierarchies of high and low culture or class-distinct cultures. In the context of postmodern culture, understanding kitsch thus means moving beyond these simple definitions of high and low, precisely because of the way that kitsch objects can move in and out of concepts of authenticity in contemporary culture. Kitsch objects from history can also be imbued with a kind of playful engagement with history, a kind of humorous pastiche. For instance, there are many levels of ironic engagement at work in the proliferation of kitsch artefacts of the former Soviet Union and East Germany. The proliferation of Cold War kitsch in places such as Berlin, where, for instance, the former Checkpoint Charlie site has been transformed into a tourist site where one can purchase Checkpoint Charlie coffee mugs and chocolate bars, demonstrates the role that kitschification can play in simultaneously processing and erasing history. What does the souvenir replication of the Checkpoint Charlie sign that once marked a site of oppression, a place where people were shot for attempting to cross a border, do to notions of history? What kind of cultural memory does it produce? In China, objects from the Cultural Revolution now decorate the walls of ironic cafes in Beijing, and Chairman Mao dinner plates are sold as pricey collectibles at Sotheby’s. In many ways, this can be seen as an aesthetic of kitsch as irony, the reduction of historical objects into humorous souvenirs which reduce historical events to something containable, laughable, and hence less powerful. Yet, at the same time, we cannot deny that this process of kitschification also takes the edginess and tensions of history and makes them more palatable and less present. Kitsch as irony is a particular kind of kitsch aesthetics. Thus, when an object of the past is labelled kitsch, it can indicate a doubled reading – that is, an object is defined as kitsch when it is seen to have an original aesthetic status that is reread as being tasteless, a lava lamp for instance, but then recoded as valuable. Daniel Harris refers to the distancing associated with this second stage of kitsch as a ‘twice-removed aesthetic’ that shifts toward irony (Harris, 1995, n.p.). Yet, the second, ironic and transcoding stage of kitsch takes time. It is difficult, for instance, to think about purchasing 9/11 souvenirs in order put them on ironic display next to nuclear-inspired household appliances from the 1950s that have



Kitsch as irony


gained value because they display the naïve and crass tastes of previous eras of popular culture, or even beside the Checkpoint Charlie souvenirs. Kitsch’s relationship to ironic distancing and playful pastiche shows how many of the modern mass-culture critiques of kitsch fall short in the context of postmodern culture. The challenge to understanding how kitsch operates today is to see the range of responses that it produces, to consider how it can encourage: 1) a prepackaged and unreflective sentimental response; (2) a playful irony; and (3) a serious engagement with history, simultaneously both innocence and irony. The tourism of history of American culture is fuelled in many ways by the first category of kitsch, kitsch as a prepackaged and sentimental response, which directly relates to its political meaning. This kind of kitsch is meant to produce predetermined and conscribed emotional responses, to encourage pathos and sympathy, not anger and outrage (though there is plenty of kitsch in many of the 9/11 artefacts that promise to get revenge). Even when a kitsch object might be used by someone in a non-kitsch way, as a means to recognize loss, it can rarely be an incitement to historical reflection or political engagement. Kitsch does not emerge in a political vacuum, rather it is more often than not a style that responds to particular kinds of historical events and that indicates particular kinds of political acquiescence. The well-known German critiques of kitsch saw it as an element of the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany, and kitsch has often been associated with a totalitarian or fascist aesthetic. Greenberg wrote: ‘the encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects. [ . . . ] Kitsch keeps a dictator in close contact with the “soul” of the people’ (1986, p. 20). During the Cold War, kitsch was the dominant style of totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union, and dissident writer Milan Kundera famously wrote that it was the function of kitsch to curtain off the abject: ‘Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence’ (1991, p. 248). Kundera argued that totalitarian regimes use kitsch to sell the idea of a ‘brotherhood of man’. In a well-known passage he states: Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch (p. 251).



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It is this relationship of sentiment to the idea of universal emotions shared by all of mankind, Kundera’s ‘second tear’, that gives kitsch a broader political meaning. And, when teddy bears are circulated as ‘universal’ symbols that can ‘make us feel better’, they provide a means to participate in Kundera’s image of the universal second tear of emotion. The FDNY teddy bear says that Americans are innocent, unknowing and, by extension, that the United States as a nation is innocent too. A kitsch teddy bear can thus be seen not only as embodying a particular kind of prepackaged sentiment, but as conveying the message that this sentiment is one that is nationally if not universally shared, that it is appropriate and, importantly, that it is enough. When this takes place in the context of politically charged sites of violence, the effect is inevitably one that reduces political complexity to simplified notions of tragedy. To go back to my initial declaration, kitsch images and objects are not innocent, they sell the idea of innocence, and at this particular moment in US history, that belief in innocence is particularly troubling.

The myth of innocence In the aftermath of 9/11, the proliferation of kitsch consumerism was quite stunning. As Salon writer Heather Havrilesky wrote on the firstyear anniversary, ‘sifting through the consumer fallout from 9/11 can incite the kind of cultural vertigo heretofore only achieved by spending several hours in a Graceland gift shop’ (2002, n.p.). Daniel Harris writes: Does an event as catastrophic as this one require the rhetoric of kitsch to make it less horrendous? Do we need the overkill of ribbons and commemorative quilts, haloed seraphim perched on top of the burning towers and teddy bears in firefighter helmets waving flags, in order to forget the final minutes of bond traders, restaurant workers and secretaries screaming in elevators filling with smoke, standing in the frames of broken windows on the 90th floor waiting for help and staggering down the stairwells covered in third degree burns? . . . Through kitsch we avert our eyes from tragedy . . . (2002, n.p.) The souvenirs at Ground Zero, the snow globes and FDNY teddy bears, as technologies of memory, inevitably collapse history into simple narratives. The focus of such images and objects is invariably not the why of such events or the complexities of history so much as it is about producing narratives of redemption and comfort. Thus, many of the objects that circulate at Ground Zero offer a kitsch embrace of redemption,





exemplified by images of angel figures surrounding the Twin Towers. This emphasis on redemption is a key element in the deployment of such events for political gain. The snow globes, the teddy bears and the images of the Twin Towers with the angels and seraphim actively produce innocent subjects. They affirm the broader American myth of innocence, a well-entrenched and heavily maintenanced belief that the United States is a country of pure intentions to which terrible things can happen, but which itself never provokes or initiates attack. This narrative of innocence and comfort functions to screen over the imperial projects of American history and its aspirations to empire, both historical and contemporary. Hal Foster notes that in the post-Cold War context, the proliferation of national kitsch evokes many of the forms of Cold War totalitarian kitsch, which was itself a highly constructed façade of innocence. He writes: . . . we are surrounded by ‘beautifying lies’ of the sort noted by Kundera – a ‘spread of democracy’ that often bolsters its opposite, a ‘march of freedom’ that often liberates people to death, a ‘war on terror’ that is often terroristic, and a trumpeting of ‘moral values’ often at the cost of civil rights. [ . . . ] the blackmail that produces our ‘categorical agreement’ operates through its tokens. For instance, in support of the ‘war on terror’ are the decals of the World Trade Center towers draped with Stars and Stripes, the little flags that fly on truck antennas and . . . business-suit labels and the shirts, caps and statuettes dedicated to New York City firemen and police (2005, p. 29). The dominance of a kitsch aesthetic as the style of the nation invokes a notion of the people. Thus, in the United States today, kitsch thrives in a context in which the nation is deeply wedded to an abstract notion of populism which is distinct from the people. This is a highly constructed sense of populism, through which the ‘American people’ are constantly marshalled to affirm policies that are actually quite destructive to the well-being of most of the American public. This is a sense of populism that is so constructed and kitsch that it was easily inhabited by a President who is a member of the elite. Thus, the kitschification of traumatic and highly political events in the United States, such as the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11, allows for, if not facilitates, the means through which these events can both be depoliticized into prepackaged sentiment and exploited for particular political agendas. These forms of consumer culture enable a political acquiescence, one in



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which consumers signal their ‘categorical agreement’, as Foster notes, through the purchase of tokens.

Kitsch and re-enactment are closely allied. Whereas the kitsch object smooths over conflict and complexity in terms of circumscribing sentiment, in cultural re-enactments the repetition of memory can often serve to reinscribe those narratives into containable frameworks. Sigmund Freud believed, for instance, that the compulsion to repeat was a mode through which most people would act out, rather than remember, their childhood dynamics and traumatic experiences. For Freud, a patient needs to work through their resistances to seeing the distinction between the present and the past in order to move beyond compulsive repetition (Freud, 1958). The work of confronting traumatic memories is thus understood to give them representational and narrative form and to integrate them into one’s life-story. Traditionally, psychoanalysis has contrasted compulsive repetition with this working through of trauma, yet this binary is highly problematic. One could argue that it is often the compulsive repetition of a narrative that allows for the subjects to feel some form of agency over the story of their own trauma, and the idea of a ‘working through’ of trauma implies too simply the emergence of a new state of being in which the effects of trauma are properly managed (Brison, 2002). Here, I am interested in looking at the aesthetic of compulsive re-enactment in architectural design that has emerged in the aftermath of 9/11, in particular in New York City, and how it enables a kind of kitschification of history. Post-9/11 American culture proliferated with forms of cultural reenactment, not the least of which were the many renderings that circulated of the now lost Twin Towers. For instance, in July 2002, when the New Yorker magazine asked a group of artists to reimagine the space, the artists produced a series of ironic, oddly humorous, ambivalent, and whimsical proposals that almost all replicated the towers in some form (Tomkins, 2002). Despite its intention to use humour and cynicism to intervene in the hypersentimentalisation of the site, this project became an exercise in reimagining twin structures, two buildings, figures of two. Artist Nancy Rubins inverted the towers with a proposal for two 110-storey underground structures, and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman proposed 110 one-storey buildings. Artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, who are well known for their avant-garde work on issues of aesthetics and taste, produced a comical proposal for



Cultural re-enactment


a farm on Lower Manhattan, with the Cortlandt Street subway station surrounded by cows and fields. Yet, the two silos of the farm are unmistakable references to the two towers, hovering over the bucolic rendition like a shadow of the past. Video artist Tony Oursler created two scaffoldings in the shape of the two towers that would hold video screens onto which video coverage of 9/11 would be replayed in a continuous loop. He suggested that the footage be run for a period of time and then buried, so that it would ‘consume itself’. Re-enactment, much of it bordering on or fully immersed in a kitsch aesthetic, has also been a key factor in a large number of the architectural designs that were put forward for the rebuilding of Ground Zero in the years after 9/11. British architect Norman Foster (since commissioned to produce a new office tower at Ground Zero) initially designed two ‘kissing towers’ that he described as ‘two towers that kiss and touch and become one’ (Goldberger, 2004, p. 10; Stephens, 2004, pp. 78–81). Foster’s plan, which consists of two towers angling towards each other, held observation decks and ‘sky parks’. The design was oddly reminiscent of the numerous children’s drawings that had proliferated throughout the city, in which the towers had been imagined as brothers embracing each other. Other designs, such as the one by Richard Meier and Associates, proposed to incorporate shadows of the Twin Towers, by extending two long piers into the Hudson River the size and shape of the former towers, as if to install their shadow permanently (Stephens, 2004, pp. 82–5). The THINK project design, which came second in the design competition, offered two lattice structures of steel in the shape and outline of the two towers, into which would be inserted several cultural and conference centres. Toward the top of the structures, an elongated shape connected the two buildings, a shape that looked uncannily like the image of an aircraft hitting the towers. This design, a re-enactment not only of the Twin Towers but also of the catastrophic events of 9/11, exemplifies the degree to which the architectural imagination of Ground Zero has had a tortured relationship to memory. The design that re-enacts the events of 9/11 the most dramatically, some would say insensitively and compulsively, is Peter Eisenman’s office complex, which was originally published in the New York Times in September 2002. Eisenman, now best known as the designer of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, designed a set of buildings with crumpled facades designed to look as if they are in a state of perpetual collapse. The buildings appear from an overview perspective to be an exploded structure; from the street, their facades seem to be collapsing downward in rapid motion. The design is thus a reenactment of the towers



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falling, precisely one of the most traumatic moments of that day. As the New York Times puts it, in all seriousness: ‘the buildings would echo the devastation wrought on 9/11 and offer a striking memorial to the fallen towers; at the same time they would provide three million square feet of new office space’ (Muschamp, 2002, p. 53). This design is so strangely inappropriate, and so insensitive to the grief and pain that surrounds Ground Zero (one can hardly imagine survivors of 9/11 wanting to work in a building that reenacts the towers’ collapse), that I think it can only be read as itself an indicator of grief, unprocessed, inchoate, in a continual state of re-enactment. It is tempting to interpret the constant re-imagining and re-enactment of the Twin Towers as a form of disavowal. Norman Foster explained his proposal’s re-enactment of the towers as a kind of unconscious response: ‘it wasn’t a conscious decision to emulate the Twin Towers; at first we designed something completely different . . .’ (Pearman, 2003, n.p.). To think of these designs as a form of compulsive repetition is, of course, to indicate that they constituted a kind of overwhelming grief, one that must be couched in terms of architectural criteria rather than acknowledged. One could speculate that the grief evident in the constant desire to reimagine Ground Zero not as renewed but as a site of memory is also, for the architectural community, about a disavowal of the role of the buildings themselves in the tragedy of 9/11. While no one believes that buildings can be built to withstand the effects of being hit by jetliners filled with fuel, it is nevertheless the case that the Twin Towers, like most other skyscrapers, were inherently unsafe for the people who worked within them. Thus, to reimagine the Twin Towers is to disavow so much – to deny the fact that it was as much the buildings that killed people as the planes that destroyed them (many more people died from the buildings’ collapse than from the impact of the planes), that they were symbols of architectural achievement at the expense of those who worked inside them. It is to disavow the most harrowing images of that day, that of people falling/jumping to their deaths because they were trapped by the buildings themselves. These architectural designs thus constitute technologies of memory that also effectively screen out these images. Reenactment of what took place on 9/11 is also a key element in the master plan by architect Daniel Libeskind, which was approved in early 2003. As the rebuilding process has become increasingly fraught and divisive, Libeskind’s master plan has been rendered increasingly irrelevant, yet it is worth re-examining his original plan, since its aesthetic demonstrates the way that re-enactment and memory have dictated





visions of the site. Libeskind can be said to have won the design competition precisely because of his ability to negotiate this terrain fraught with aesthetics and mourning. Libeskind presented his proposal, Memory Foundations, not as a reconstruction of Lower Manhattan so much as a memorialization of the site, and initially kept part of the slurry wall of the pit of Ground Zero exposed in his design, to pay tribute not only to the ‘bathtub structure’ of the foundation of the Trade Center but to the experience of Ground Zero itself. Fully cognizant of the demand for symbolism, he imagined a set of buildings that ascended along a spiral, culminating in a tall and slender skyscraper, later dubbed the Freedom Tower, that would be 1,776 feet tall and would echo the Statue of Liberty across New York harbour. Libeskind presented his architectural design by portraying himself as an intensely patriotic New Yorker: ‘I arrived by ship to New York as a teenager, an immigrant, and like millions of others before me, my first sight was the Statue of Liberty and the amazing skyline of Manhattan. I have never forgotten that sight or what it stands for’ (Goldberger, 2004, p. 8). Libeskind evokes a set of historical meanings as a culture figure – a Jewish refugee, a patriot immigrant, and one of the primary interpreters of Jewish history and cultural memory. Libeskind’s presence in the process of rebuilding Lower Manhattan in New York City was thus coded as a redemptive one. Libeskind’s plan for Ground Zero is not the first time that he has used memory as a guiding means for design. As he states: ‘I have been trying [in my work] to redefine the relationship between architecture and memory’ (Goldberger, 2004, p. 120). And, indeed, this is precisely the same strategy that Libeskind deployed in designing his now-famous building for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. As Noah Isenberg has written, Libeskind often described the Jewish Museum (as he did his design for New York City) as a building about his own biography, and the museum, which is a compelling edifice, has often been seen to be more of a memorial than a museum (2002, p. 171). In his philosophy of architecture and memory, Libeskind deploys a kind of ‘narrative architecture’ that is intended to tell stories, what Martin Filler calls a kind of updated architecture parlante of ‘buildings whose forms “speak” of their function’ (2001, p. 28). Thus, Memory Foundations narrates a memory of the day of 9/11. It initially included ‘The Park of Heroes’, demarcating the space where firefighters entered the buildings, and a ‘Wedge of Light’, a triangular plaza where the sun was supposed to reach from 8:46 to 10:28am each year on 11 September, each an explicit restaging of the day of 9/11. In designating the footprints of the towers



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to be voids in the space, an element that is reiterated in Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s design for the memorial at Ground Zero, Reflecting Absence, Libeskind used an aesthetic of absence to reiterate the presence of the two towers. This concept of the void has been a central element of Libeskind’s architectural style and has been seen by some critics as ‘nearly necrophiliac’ (Franklin, 2005, p. 29). Libeskind’s propensity for re-enactment is also tied up in the elements of his work that critics have seen as kitsch. So, in Memory Foundations, the re-enactment of the events of 9/11 is essential to the patriotic elements of the design, elements that were seen by many as Libeskind wrapping himself in the flag. From its tower to its rhetoric of freedom and equation with the Constitution, Libeskind’s original master plan used narrative to inscribe the space of Ground Zero within a discourse of American exceptionalism. New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp wrote a now-famous critique of it, accusing it of being ‘astonishingly tasteless’ and ‘an emotionally manipulative exercise in visual codes’. Muschamp went further to state: ‘A concrete pit is equated with the Constitution. A skyscraper tops off at 1,776 feet . . . A promenade of heroes confers quasi-military status on uniformed personnel. Even in peacetime that design would appear demagogic’ (2003, p. E1). As Muschamp wrote: . . . had the competition been intended to capture the fractured state of shock felt soon after 9/11, this plan would probably deserve first place. But why, after all, should a large piece of Manhattan be permanently dedicated to an artistic representation of enemy assault? It is an astonishingly tasteless idea. It has produced a predictably kitsch result (ibid.). Here, re-enactment converges with kitsch to produce a narrative of patriotic embrace. Had it been built as intended, Libeskind’s memorial plan would thus have operated as a counterpart to what is often described as the ‘Spielberg style’ of history, in which simplistic symbols are deployed to evoke empathetic responses in viewers. As Hal Foster has written: ‘The real pessimists glimpse a Trauma Theme Park in the making, with Libeskind a contemporary cross between Claude Lanzmann and Walt Disney, the perfect maestro for an age when historical tragedy can become urban spectacle’ (2003, p. 17). While its Minimalist aesthetic makes it less kitschy, the memorial design by Michael Arad that is planned for Ground Zero, Reflecting Absence, also participates in an aesthetic of re-enactment, using the two





‘voids’ of the towers’ footprints to evoke absence in a way that replays, of course, their presence. As the fraught political process at Ground Zero has succeeded in eviscerating the Arad design to the point of unrecognizability, its designation of the two voids looks increasingly like a terrible loss of public space that reinscribes a large area of the city into a kind of memory replay. In many ways, the re-enactment of Libeskind’s design and of Reflecting Absence share a sense of suspended time with the snow globe souvenir from Ground Zero. In the souvenir, the Twin Towers are still standing, together, whole and untouched. Yet they are surrounded by police cars and fire trucks, and the sense of emergency is present. This reenactment, like Memory Foundations, reproduces again and again that sense of emergency. It hardly needs to be said, of course, that that sense of emergency has been exploited politically, and in the context of Ground Zero, it has helped to enable a particular set of discourses of New York City exceptionalism, 9/11 exceptionalism, and American exceptionalism.

Re-enactment and irony What, then, would be an aesthetic of re-enactment that would not deploy kitsch sentiment that might engage irony rather than an easy comfort culture? Ironically, one of the architects of the most appalling designs for Ground Zero, Peter Eisenman, has created in Berlin (initially in collaboration with Richard Serra, whose lasting influence on the design would seem to be present) a memorial that produces an experience of memory that re-enacts, but which does so in an open-ended, unsentimental way. The location of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the middle of Berlin, next to the former site of the Berlin Wall, situates it in the middle of a city that has used architecture in stunning and highly varied ways to integrate memory into the present: with buildings that are hybrids of old and new (Norman Foster’s Reichstag building), buildings that place the skin of modern materials over a palimpsest of the brick and mortar of the past (the Akademie der Künste) and buildings that declare a break from the past in their futuristic aesthetics (the Potsdamer Platz). One can certainly have sympathy with the critical arguments that the memorial is too big, too central, too overdetermined. Yet, its achievement is in precisely the way in which it does not demand of visitors a particular, prescribed emotional (one might say kitsch) response. Eisenman has stated that he did not want the memorial to allow for sentimentalization, ‘I did not want people to weep and



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then walk away with a clear conscience’ (Ouroussoff, 2005, p. B6). Walking between the pillars of the memorial, one can have an experience of the tenuousness of history, the inescapability of different paths. As one gets deeper into the chasms and loses the city behind, one catches glimpses of others moving through, fleeting and then gone, never to be seen again. In walking through the memorial, one experiences the arbitrariness of life, its ungraspability. Is it possible that architectural design that allows for this kind of openended response could be built in New York City, or in the United States, at this moment in history? Of course, the Berlin memorial was the product of intense debate over several decades, and is a memorial to those who died in a tragedy that occurred more than sixty years ago. Nevertheless, I would argue that the tourism of history has been a mode of American public discourse for some time. Americans are still caught, in many ways, in the repetition of snow globes, in the moment of emergency and in the contained comfort zone of souvenirs and kitsch. Perhaps what Americans need in order to fully engage with the historical implications of 9/11 and the sense of loss it produced in New York City and in the United States is time and irony.1

Note 1. This essay is derived in part from my book, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2007).




2 Wouter Weijers

Within days, even hours after the collapse of the New York World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, people felt an urgent need to create a presence of some kind to mark its disappearance. This rush to remember is all the more striking since the metamorphosis of a historical place into a site of memory has always taken time: decades, even generations. This was, however, not the case with the site soon to be called Ground Zero. As Richard Stamelman explains, using terms derived from the French historian Pierre Nora, a milieu de mémoire (the moment of the event itself in the historical here and now) was rapidly transformed into a lieu de mémoire (a memory site) in order to turn the ‘nothing’ of Ground Zero into ‘something’ (2003, p. 15). Many ad hoc proposals for memorials were made at the time, but to date we are still waiting for an official memorial to become a lasting place of remembrance for the victims’ relatives and friends, and for the city, the nation and the world. In April 2003, the ‘World Trade Center Memorial Site Competition’ was announced, and on 13 January 2004, the jury published a statement proclaiming the winning design of the eight finalists.1 The proposal called Reflecting Absence, designed by the young architect Michael Arad, was praised because it most eloquently fulfilled the demands of the memorial: ‘In its powerful, yet simple articulation of the footprints of the Twin Towers, Reflecting Absence has made the voids left by the destruction the primary symbols of our loss’, the jury’s statement reads (World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition, 2007). In time, and much to Arad’s chagrin, the design changed rather drastically due to all kinds of political interventions (Hagan, 2006, n.p.). I will discuss the impact of these changes later on in this essay, but first I wish to concentrate on the original design as it was chosen and praised in January 2004, 36



Minimalism, Memory and the Reflection of Absence

Figure 2.1

Reflecting Absence, Michael Arad, Peter Walker (January 2004)

since it was this proposal that articulated the events of 9/11 in an artistic engagement with a notion of the past. Let me first describe Arad’s winning design as it was originally planned. The design (Figure 2.1) features two huge negative spaces, each occupying a footprint of the obliterated Twin Towers, with screens of water cascading into gigantic pools, and then falling down even further into smaller square pools. Ramps lead from street level down to underground walkways bordering the pools. Below, visitors find themselves behind the curtains of water flowing down into the pool before them. A stone ledge with the names of the deceased chiselled in it surrounds both pools. More underground passageways enable visitors to



Minimalism, Memory and the Reflection of Absence 37

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reach smaller chambers meant for contemplation and a huge underground museum containing various ruined artefacts of the towers, a ruined fire engine, and personal effects of the people who worked in the buildings. In the footprint of the North Tower, a hole is planned in the middle of the lowest recess. Below this opening, another space is created, open to the sky (Figure 2.2). This space touches bedrock, roughly

Figure 2.2 Reflecting Absence, Memorial Room, Michael Arad, Peter Walker (January 2004)


68 feet (21m) below street level, and houses a big, dark, stone box of approximately 30 square feet and 9 feet high (9m x 9m x 3m). This box, which Arad considers to be ‘a touchstone and a centre’ of the memorial, is meant to contain the unidentified remains of victims (Dunlap, 2006, p. 3). Some people objected to its underground location. ‘We ask that the memorial see the light of day and not be hidden in the shadows,’ the president of the patrolmen’s association complained (Collins, 2006, p. 3). Others, however, desired that the monument touch bedrock, which they considered to be the graveyard of their loved ones. In fact, highly divergent opinions about the memorial continue to be voiced among, and even within, the various groups connected with the site. In addition, economical and political, and often plainly ideological issues interfere with every stage of the memory process of 9/11. By the spring of 2006, Arad’s design was amended and changed almost beyond recognition. Arad’s design is a technology of memory; that is, writes Marita Sturken, ‘not a vessel of memory in which memory passively resides so much as [a design] through which memories are shared, produced and given meaning’ (Sturken, 1997, p. 9). However, rather than sharing memories, Arad’s memorial mediates them in a rather aloof way. This essay focuses on how the original design for the proposed monument negotiates between experiences of distance and proximity, by referring to a particular artistic language – the language of ‘Minimalism’.

Minimalism and the monument Many reviewers have described Reflecting Absence as Minimalist and argued that with its Minimalist language of geometric, ‘timeless’ forms, it could rise above cultural, economic or sociopolitical differences and transcend conflict. Thus, it would allow for a private contemplation of loss by mourners and others who could project their innermost thoughts upon the blank spaces. However, quite a few of the victims’ friends and relatives felt estranged by its ‘Modernist abstraction’ and saw it as somehow inappropriate for the ‘hallowed ground’ the site had become. Although simple, geometric, austere designs have been considered an appropriate form for monuments and memorials throughout the ages – in particular for sepulchral sculpture and architecture – recently many people have come to oppose the presumed dominance of Minimalist aesthetics in public memorials. Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe (Berlin, 2005) is just one prominent





example. As New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman writes, ‘[l]ately (see Ground Zero) Minimalism has become the default mode for our memorial culture, the proverbial blank slate onto which we inscribe what we want the future to remember about us. Austerity and authority, Minimalist tropes, implying puritan spirituality, are serving the role that angels did on sculptural monuments in the past’ (2004, p. 31). Although Arad’s Reflecting Absence is not a work of Minimal art, it seems to imitate Minimalist sculpture to a high degree. Among its most striking features are the empty spaces receding downwards, resembling reversed ziggurat-like voids. They bring to mind the installation North, East, South, West, which artist Michael Heizer realised at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, NY. In particular, the ‘double negative’ space of North looks like a prototype for the overall design of the pools in the New York City memorial (Figure 2.3). A critic tellingly described Heizer’s installation at Dia:Beacon as ‘reviving the . . . connection between sublimity and terror, its elements darkly awesome, like some bad-dream neo-classical fantasy: [a] visionary cenotaph inverted’ (Princenthal, 2003, p. 67). With regard to Arad’s huge dark box, I cannot help being reminded of the blackish proto-Minimalist steel cube by Tony Smith from 1962,

Figure 2.3

North, Michael Heizer (1967/2002, Dia:Beacon, NY)



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not just because of its formal analogies, which are in fact rather superficial, but also because of its title Die, with its allusion to death and its reference to chance – one of a pair of dice, an agent of randomness. In 1966, in a short text for the catalogue of an exhibition of his sculpture, Smith wrote about Die that it was ‘a complicated piece’ with ‘too many references to be coped with coherently’. In a few sentences, Smith makes oblique references to a religious edifice and even to a mausoleum and ends with a pun on Die’s measures: ‘Six foot box. Six foot under’ (Wagstaff, 1966b, n.p.). Another of Smith’s sculptures from the same year, Black Box (1962), resembled a child’s tombstone so much that one of his daughters was prompted to ask ‘who was buried there?’ (Storr, 1998, p. 28).2 Apparently, Minimalist works of art evoke extra-formal references like these, and perhaps this is also the reason why they are thought to provide a proper aesthetic for memorials. Nothing, however, could be further from the theoretical considerations of the artists who developed the so-called Minimal art in the early 1960s. The Minimalists attacked widely recognised artistic goals such as the creation of transcendent beauty, the expression of complex inner feelings, or the unique interpretation of the world by the artist. Looking back on his years as a sculptor in the early 1960s, Robert Morris, one of the most prominent and outspoken artists and theorists of Minimal art, wrote: I was out to rip out the metaphors, especially those that had to do with “up”, as well as every other whiff of transcendence [. . .] no to transcendence and spiritual values, heroic scale, anguished decisions, historicising narrative, valuable artefact, intelligent structure, interesting visual experience (Morris, 1989, p. 144). How could such an apparently radical negation of anything usually connected with memorialization be turned into a preferred ‘style’ to symbolize and reflect upon destruction and loss? What is the relationship, if any, between the theories and practices of Minimalism as it was developed in the 1960s and its ‘fate’ as ‘the default mode for our memorial culture’ today? For a possible answer, I will return to three texts from the 1960s, texts that have by now reached an almost canonical status within postwar art history. I will, however, not just focus on these primary sources but alternate reference to them with more recent reflections of art historians and critics on Minimalism. Thus, my story will not develop in a straight chronological order, but will jump back and forth between texts that now may be considered historical and later




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The work of art as a specific object In his essay ‘Specific Objects’, the artist and critic Donald Judd described the distinctive features of the best new art, which he characterized as neither sculpture nor painting (1975, p. 181). In Judd’s opinion, the possibilities of painting and sculpture had become exhausted. He wanted to get rid of any hierarchical organization among the elements of a work of art and was against compositional ‘part to part’ relationships within a painting or a sculpture. Since these were important features of much ‘European’ Modernism, Minimal art positioned itself, contrary to widely held notions, against Modernist abstraction, even though in certain respects it can be seen as Modernism’s radicalization (Foster, 1996, pp. 44–6). ‘Abstract painting before 1946,’ Judd writes, ‘and most subsequent painting kept the representational subordination of the whole to its parts. In the new work shape, image, color and surface are single and not partial and scattered. [. . .] The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting’ (1975, p. 187). Judd also opposed the opinion of Modernism’s most important advocate, Clement Greenberg, who wrote that the ‘heightened sensitivity of the picture plane . . . does and must permit optical illusion’ (1982, p. 8). Judd condemns the way such optical effects appeal to eyesight alone and favours art works that are objects when he states, ‘[t]hree dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism. [. . .] Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface’ (1975, p. 184). What is at stake between a Modernist and a Minimalist view of art is, as Briony Fer later remarked, ‘a shift of emphasis onto another way of attending to the object, of looking with a different set of interests in mind’ (1997, p. 132). Judd reduced the elements of his work to such a degree that all would connect self-evidently to unitary shapes (his ‘specific objects’). The industrially manufactured rectangular boxes, made of standardized materials such as steel, wood and aluminium, are placed directly on the floor, or are cantilevered off the wall. ‘The closest parallel is architectonic,’ Alex Potts commented in 2000, ‘between say a sarcophagus set some way up a wall and one resting in the middle of the floor, [. . .] without the mediation of mouldings or brackets or a plinth’ (2000, pp. 291–2). Though Judd’s works are seldom entirely closed and usually have a directional axis – often straight rows of identical boxes,



arguments. All these texts share a concern for the relationship between the work of art and its beholder. Together they might help to understand the appropriation of Minimalist aesthetics in Reflecting Absence, as well as its pitfalls.

‘one thing after another’ – which distinguishes them from the simple and closed cube of Tony Smith’s Die, the box-like shapes have no privileged front (Judd, 1975, p. 184). What is seen as front or side depends on the viewing position of the observer. The rather neutral overall shapes allow artist and viewer to focus on other aspects of the work’s appearance: its materials and colour, the sense of scale and occupancy of space. To many art critics and art historians, writing in the 1960s as well as more recently, the interaction between object and viewer is the quintessence of Minimal art, but in ‘Specific Objects’, Judd is hardly concerned with the position of the spectator. Even though Judd did not elaborate on this subject, Alex Potts considers the creation of a sense of place to be crucial to Judd’s art. According to Potts, ‘Judd takes the box or cuboid shape as a basis for creating three-dimensional objects that elicit from a viewer an intensified awareness of his or her immediate perceptual engagement with the things and spaces he or she is looking at’ (2000, pp. 289–90). Potts adds that such a phenomenological insistence on art concerned with the relation between self and physical world had for Judd a latent social dimension, since his art, though it did not articulate existential truths, functioned by being embedded in the network of relations between self and world and self and others that constitute our being alive. As such, his sense of place is also a sense of time and space. Judd’s three-dimensional work of art is not an autonomous self-absorbed thing, but has the conditional autonomy of something intervening in and activating the relatively neutral space around it (p. 297). This might explain, at least in part, the tendency of memorial designs to use Minimalist forms. Ground Zero, however, is hardly a neutral place, and Arad’s box, with its single, closed form, its dominating size, and its contextual metaphoric connotations, is completely different from Judd’s objects. Yet, in its articulation of a specific space, it shares an important aspect with Judd’s work. To quote Potts’s comments on Judd once more: The mode of viewing that a work by Judd invites might be described phenomenologically as one in which the human subject immerses her or himself in the objective world, setting up a symbiosis that can no longer be assimilated to the standard model in which a viewer looks out at an object located apart from her or him. [. . .] With work such as Judd’s, a presence emerges that is not locatable in the viewed object itself but in some indeterminate region embracing the viewer’s interiorised awareness and the object with which he or she is engaging (2000, pp. 305–6).




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Donald Judd’s fellow artist and theorist Robert Morris elaborated on the implications of the bodily encounter of the spectator and the Minimalist art work. In his ‘Notes on Sculpture’, published in two parts in Artforum in 1966, Morris explicitly deals with viewer participation. Like Judd, he opposes sculpture consisting of clearly divisible parts that set up relationships and he wonders whether a work could possibly exist that has ‘only one property’ (Morris, 1968, p. 225). Though he admits that no such thing could exist, his remark alludes to a kind of form that consists of parts held together in such a way that it offers a maximum resistance to perceptual separation. He calls such forms ‘Gestalt sensations’, like cubes or pyramids in which ‘one need not move around the object for the sense of the whole, the Gestalt, to occur. One sees and immediately “believes” that the pattern within one’s mind corresponds to the existential fact of the object’ (1968, p. 226). Since one already knows the Gestalt, all the information about the object itself is already established and exhausted. However, simplicity of shape does not necessarily equate with simplicity of experience. To Morris, ‘the object is but one of the terms in the newer aesthetic’; it has not become less important, but ‘less self-important’, since ‘the better new work takes relationships out of the work, and makes them a function of space, light and the viewer’s field of vision’ (1968, p. 232). Minimalism’s fundamental reorientation from the expressive work of art to the kind of work that engages the beholder in a spatial and temporal context has been described, in an allusion to Roland Barthes’s 1966 essay on ‘The Death of the Author’, as ‘the birth of the viewer’ (Foster, 1996, p. 50). Along with this transformation comes another shift from the private object to the public domain. ‘The ambition of Minimalism was,’ as Rosalind Krauss later argued, ‘to relocate the origins of a sculpture’s meaning to the outside, no longer modelling its structure on the privacy of psychological space but on the public, conventional nature of what might be called cultural space’ (1993, p. 270).

Size, scale and a sense of place In his ‘Notes on Sculpture’, Robert Morris also discusses the implications of this shift when he discusses matters of size and scale. Morris begins part two of his ‘Notes’ by quoting a few sentences from an interview with Tony Smith about the latter’s sculpture Die. Its height is just above



Sculpture and viewer participation

eye level, and when Smith was asked why he did not make it larger, so that it would loom over the observer, he replied: ‘I was not making a monument’. In fact, Smith defined Die’s size in relation to the scale of the human body, and its dimensions reflect the proportions of Leonardo’s famous drawing of the ‘Vitruvian man’, whose outstretched arms are as wide as his body is tall. Smith wanted to increase the viewers’ awareness of their own scale in relation to Die, and their own as well as the work’s positioning within the exhibition space. Following Smith, Morris writes that in the perception of relative size, the human body establishes itself as a constant, resulting in the fact that things smaller than ourselves are seen differently than things larger. To Morris, smaller things are more intimate and ‘essentially closed, spaceless, compressed, and exclusive. [. . .] The smaller the object, the closer one approaches it and therefore it has less of a spatial field in which to exist for the viewer’ (1968, p. 231). An intimate relation pulls the work out of the space in which it exists. It is the greater distance, however, that structures the non-personal or public mode. Due to this distance between object and subject, physical participation becomes necessary. The experience of the work exists in time and leads to a strong awareness of oneself existing in the same space as the work. Morris adds, however, that Minimalist sculpture does not belong to a class of monuments. Even if the new sculpture makes a positive value of large size, it does not follow that the larger the object, the better it will establish a more public mode. For Morris, a sculpture should be neither too small nor too large. Enormous objects elicit a specific response to size as such, and beyond a certain size, the object can overwhelm, and the gigantic scale becomes the prevalent aspect. ‘Only one aspect of the work should be immediate: the apprehension of the gestalt,’ he writes; in order to reach this goal, the artist has to deal not so much with size as such as with the carefully scaled interrelationships of space and place (1968, p. 234). This way of establishing direct relations, in which beholders become less aware of the sculpture and more aware of their own presence and experiences in space and time, explains why Minimalist Gestalts are considered by artists and juries as forms appropriate for memorial tasks – perhaps even more so than their supposed evocation of transcendental meanings. But, even if Minimalism’s concern with the spectator is fundamentally tied to the public domain, the advanced art criticism connected with it is directed towards an elite audience, which makes it hard to associate Minimalism with collective social experiences. In fact, the ‘hard-core’ Minimalism of the 1960s, in its demand for a





specific kind of concentration, is a form of art particularly appropriate to carefully balanced spaces and museum-like circumstances. This, however, has not prevented Minimalist aesthetics from entering the general public’s domain. With Morris’s ideas in mind, we can now understand the memorial’s dark box at bedrock as not just a monolithic abstract form, but also a device enabling visitors to wander through space and time with both body and mind while maintaining a sense of place. In some respects, however, Arad’s box differs completely from Minimalist concerns. Judd hoped to avoid any sense of an idea or an intention lying inside the object – both literally and conceptually. Although we know the box of Reflecting Absence is hollow like all Minimal sculptures, unlike Judd’s objects this container does not so much refer to space as to its emotionally meaningful content. Invisible and indiscriminate as it may be, the box’s emotionally charged core is its raison d’être. The box is big indeed and, as regards scale, even overwhelming. So are the vast, monumental spaces of the monument. Although the box relates to its architectural environment in the North Tower footprint – its formal and emotional centrepiece – that environment also frames an infinite distance. The framed view of heavenly spaces – the only feature in the memorial that may promise some kind of redemption – allows not only for the changing conditions of light, but also for sensations of the sublime. These spaces are sometimes full of sunshine and wandering white clouds, while at other times they are filled with thunder and lightning and allow hard rains to fall down upon the sarcophagus, unprotected from the elements. So much for Morris’s ‘no’ to metaphors, then, especially those metaphors that ‘have to do with “up”’, transcendence, and heroic scale’ (Morris, 1968, p. 144). Indeed, it seems as if in Reflecting Absence, Minimal art’s basic assumptions have been turned upside down. Moreover, since the contemplation room is only part of the wider memorial with its twin voids and tall screens of falling water and its underground passageways, chambers and museum, the aesthetics of size have supplanted a Minimalist concept of scale. Soon after writing his ‘Notes on Sculpture’, Morris changed his ideas considerably. He turned away from Minimalism’s public dimension and the way the physical encounter between viewer and object was mediated and played out in a public context. He feared that such a staging of art would lead to a corrupting commodification of art in the modern world.



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Another contemporary writer severely criticized Minimalism at an early stage, mostly because he considered the implications of Minimalism’s encounter between viewer and object problematic. In his essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1968), the Modernist art critic Michael Fried analysed, and condemned, the particular relationship between object and subject that Minimalism in his eyes played off against the Modernist claim of immediate visual experience. Fried’s arguments may explain why Minimalist aesthetics have influenced the design of present-day monuments and memorials, since he saw the Minimalist approach as fundamentally theatrical. Contrary to Modernist painting, according to Fried, Minimalism aspires to discover and emphasize its own ‘objecthood’. As such, according to Fried, it does not represent, signify or allude to anything at all. Shape and object are one and the same. Since Minimalism positioned itself against the relational character and the pictorial illusion of almost all painting, and since Minimalist shapes are experienced merely as objects, Fried calls Minimal art literalist art. To Fried, the literalist sensibility is theatrical, because it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters the work. ‘The experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation – one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder,’ he writes. At the same time, however, the non-personal, public mode of the Minimalist object ‘distances the beholder – not just physically but psychically’ (1968, pp. 125–6). The object encroaches on the viewing subject’s space, which is also the result of a certain largeness of scale, while maintaining a critical distance. From his analysis of Morris’s ‘Notes on Sculpture’, Fried concludes that even though the object must remain the centre of focus, the situation itself belongs to the beholder. ‘Someone has merely to enter the room in which a literalist work has been placed to become that beholder – almost as though the work in question has been waiting for him. And inasmuch as literalist work depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him, it has been waiting for him’ (p. 140). To Fried, the presence of literalist art is basically a kind of stage presence. With reference to Tony Smith’s proto-Minimalist sculpture Die, Fried writes that the beholder has to take the presence into account, has simply to be aware of it as if he or she has to be aware of another, surrogate person (‘a kind of statue’), to which he or she stands in an indeterminate, open-ended relation, subject to the impassive object on



The staging of art


the floor. Fried even uses Tony Smith’s account of a night-time ride on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike in the early 1950s to illustrate his point (pp. 131–2; Wagstaff, 1966a, p. 19). Smith recalled a revealing experience he had when he drove through the vast landscape of the turnpike while it was still under construction. That artificial environment could not be called a work of art, he said, but it did something to him that art had never done, because ‘there is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it’. Since it is apparently the experience alone that matters, Fried diagnoses the impact that the empty, abandoned site had on Smith as characteristic of literalist art, even if the art itself was absent. What Smith’s remarks seem to suggest is that the more effective – meaning effective as theatre – the setting is made, the more superfluous the works themselves have become. [. . .] Smith’s account . . . discloses, precisely in the absence of an object and in what takes its place what might be called the theatricality of objecthood (p. 135). In discussing another condition of literalist art, Fried once again refers to Die. ‘Smith’s cube is always of further interest; one never feels that one has come to the end of it; it is inexhaustible’ (p. 143). Fried considers such a ‘duration of the experience’ as paradigmatically theatrical: as though theatre confronts the beholder, and thereby isolates him, with the endlessness not just of objecthood but of time, [. . .] time both passing and to come, simultaneously approaching and receding, as if apprehended in an infinite perspective (p. 145).

Space, time and the beholder If we now reconsider Michael Arad’s contemplation room with Fried’s analysis in mind, it strikes us as a strangely appropriate environment, mirroring desperate feelings of loss. The inescapable presence of the black box confronts people with the harsh reality of surviving the sudden, arbitrary death of loved ones. What Fried strongly condemned in Minimalist literalism – the passive wholeness of a mere object depending completely on a theatrical effect in a ‘situation’ – may constitute its power as a memorial. Since theatricality is a result of the insistence of the Minimalist object on engaging its surroundings (space, time and the beholder), it is difficult to draw a line between sculpture and viewer.



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What most aroused the extreme disquiet expressed in Fried’s response to Minimalist work was that the uncompromisingly simple forms and stark staging seemed to dissolve the framing of aesthetic experience to which he was accustomed. The work did not just impinge uncomfortably on his visual and spatial awareness but got on his psyche too. His unease combined an acute sense of alienation from the work with a disquieting sense of being engulfed by it, as if the meditations normally framing interactions with the world of objects were momentarily suspended. [ . . . ] A Minimalist work could serve as a dumping ground for free-floating . . . anxieties . . . because it staged such a direct physical encounter between the viewing subject and the obdurate otherness of the object, and seemed to lack internal articulations that might keep at one remove the irrational, highly charged responses such encounter could provoke (2000, p. 193). One could further add Fried’s observation that literalism brings into play a kind of intersubjective drama in which the work becomes a quasihuman presence. Equally relevant is his remark that the experience is potentially endless because there is no clear-cut climactic moment, which leads to ‘some form of repetitive looping’, with its rhythm of passing through repeated circuits, ‘making one acutely aware that time moves on and that one never comes back again to exactly where one was before’ (Potts, 2000, pp. 196–7). Such experiences of the endless presence of absence come close to a process of mourning. This may explain the use of Minimalist aesthetics in today’s memorial culture, as well as in the absence of a possible heroic identification or some final moment of illumination, for the opposition to this aesthetic. One of the most important aspects of Fried’s elucidating essay is the way he draws attention to the affective dynamics of the interaction between viewer and artwork in Minimalism. While other writers were treating this interaction in formal terms as the articulation of space, placement and scale, his attention to the performativity of Minimalism enabled him to point to its surrender to theatricality.



At the same time, as Alex Potts observes, the object’s presence arouses unease, since the object, while encroaching on the viewer’s space, maintains a physically and psychically critical distance. In his review of Fried’s aversion to Minimalism, Potts almost seems to describe the disturbing feelings of the victims’ survivors standing at bedrock in front of the black sarcophagus:


Years later, the art historian James Meyer observed how artistic attention has gradually shifted from work to room to spatial context: ‘In today’s museums we are accustomed to installations that are keyed not to the individual body and its perceptual grasp, but to an increasingly grandiloquent architecture’ (2004, p. 223). These installations depend on the experience of size, and seem to have transformed the critical goals of an earlier period, even though some of these later practices are also dealing with acts of perception and are still connected to the body of the viewer. One now can walk through the sculptures, which overwhelm and engulf the viewer: ‘Such works rephrase the perceptual encounter as drama, as spectacle’ (p. 226).

Theatrical memory The original proposal Arad submitted for the memorial competition was relatively simple, with its two voids descending in two stages from the plaza to bedrock thirty feet below grade (Stephens, 2004, p. 40). The underground museum was not part of Arad’s initial design, but along with the passageways leading to it and other features that were incorporated in the memorial, it became an integral part of the memorial after it was relocated to its underground destination. Things went from bad to worse when in the spring of 2006, the costs of the memorial had escalated to almost a billion dollars and politicians demanded that Arad’s design be reconsidered. The twin pools in the footprints were kept, as were the waterfalls. The names of the dead would now be inscribed above ground. Almost all the underground galleries were eliminated, including the contemplation room with the sarcophagus, which had by then been changed into a cenotaph anyway.3 It was announced that decisions still had to be made as to the new location of the remains and a family room, a delay that showed that these were no longer considered to be the touchstone of the memorial. Now the museum became the centre of a vast underground complex that will de facto serve as the memorial. The focus of the underground spaces is no longer on the people who died, but on the audience. In placing the emphasis on the museum, the memorial’s silent evocation of loss was traded for the more literal experience of World Trade Center relics (Ouroussoff, 2006, p. 5). Such a context almost seems to be the fulfilment of Fried’s fear of abandoned situations ‘without the art’, situations that cannot be framed and only exist to be experienced. In 1993, Rosalind Krauss had already pointed critically at some implications for museums of Minimalist art. In her essay ‘The Cultural Logic



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of the Late Capitalist Museum’, Krauss notices that the contemporary museum has done everything to create the experience of articulated spatial presence specific to Minimalism. She observes how not the art but the museum itself – as a building – has somehow become the object. In such a situation, the spaces themselves increasingly emerge as the focus of experience. The contemporary, market-driven museum has much in common with other industrialized and highly commodified areas of leisure, which bring us simulacrum experiences rather than aesthetic immediacy: ‘So, with minimalism, the potential was always there that not only would the object be caught up in logic of commodity production, but that the subject projected by minimalism also would be reprogrammed . . . into the utterly fragmented Post-modern subject of contemporary mass culture’ (1993, p. 12). The dispersed subject awash in a maze of signs and simulacra has thus replaced the ‘Minimalist’ subject of lived bodily immediacy. The 9/11 memorial shows the legacy of Minimalism and the pitfalls of its transfer to the public domain. One may well consider the original Minimalist voids of Arad’s design, and especially the contemplation room with the black sarcophagus, as well suited for the task of mourning. But one also has to acknowledge that the design, and even more the changes it had to endure, focuses on the intensity of staged experiences for a mass audience, which will not be confronted with the temporalhistorical implications of death and destruction, but will be absorbed in an overwhelming, spatial configuration. Such a fate will locate the memorial in today’s culture of the spectacle, as a theme park of grief, where one can experience a modern-day version of the sublime in its huge voids and framed heavens and in the relics that show the devastating power of the attacks. Even if, for better or worse, Minimalism laid the foundations for Reflecting Absence, its spectacular result is a far cry from the critical intentions and practices of Minimal art in the 1960s. Yet it is also Minimalism’s outcome.

Notes 1. For the guidelines of the competition and the Jury Statement, see www. wtcsitememorial.org. For the final eight designs, see Stephens (2004, pp. 40–7). 2. Following his daughter’s remark, Smith placed a plywood base under Black Box to diminish the grave-like effect. 3. It was decided that the remains were to be kept in a separate climate-controlled room, from which they would be more easily removable for further examination in the future, when DNA identification techniques will have improved (Dunlap, 2006, p. 3).




3 Anneke Smelik

To say that memory has a privileged place in contemporary cinema requires little demonstration; it is as ubiquitous as it is banal. In contemporary science fiction films, however, memory – both as a theme and as a structural element – has become the site of a full-scale interrogation and re-evaluation of traditional accounts of human subjectivity. The cult film Blade Runner (1982) initiated this trend by making digital memory a prominent feature of the Sci-Fi genre. Recent Sci-Fi films such as Minority Report (2002), Final Cut (2004), The Butterfly Effect (2004 and its sequel in 2006), the manga film The Ghost in the Shell (1995), and the British television series Life on Mars (2006–7), represent fantasies about the possibilities and impossibilities of digital technology to register and delete individual memories. Films on memory that skirt the borders of the science fiction genre include The Bourne Trilogy (2002, 2004, 2007), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and the Chinese film 2046 (2004). In this essay, I will investigate the role of digitalization in cinema as a technology that literalizes memory, by exploring the way in which science fiction films feature what one could call a materiality of representation. ‘Representation’, however, no longer seems the appropriate term in an era where digital aesthetics take contemporary films beyond the boundaries of classic structures of visual and narrative pleasure (Rodowick, 2001; Flaxman, 2000). I therefore prefer to use the term mediation (Hirsch, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Taylor, 2005), for the science fiction film mediates memory from the inner ‘medium’ of the subjective mind to the outer medium of digital images.1 My argument is based on the premise that films mediate visual and narrative forms, thereby forging a new aesthetics, which can be described in terms of the sensation of spectacle and affect arousal. 52



The Virtuality of Time: Memory in Science Fiction Films

The science fiction films that I will discuss mediate the individual memories of characters. Memory in these films is persistently individual, functioning as an index for subjectivity, but bereft of any historical or social moorings. Sci-Fi movies convey the futuristic fantasy that private memory can be captive of technology in such a way that it becomes transparent and visible, for example, by projecting it as images on a screen. Individual memory can digitally be retrieved, represented, remediated, transformed or deleted. The films suggest that private memory is a prison that keeps the subject chained to the past. Technology offers the character liberation from his or her memories, and thus from the past, opening up new vistas for the future. The science fiction dream of exercising total control over memory fits perfectly with what Radstone calls the ‘memory boom’ of our time (2000, p. 5).2 The persistent fantasy of uploading or downloading, registering or manipulating personal memories stands in stark contrast, however, to the ways in which the human mind actually works. Personal memory is highly subjective and frequently unreliable; in real life, remembering and forgetting are often beyond our control, or are subject to a control that is all too human (as in selective remembering or forgetting). As contemporary culture puts emphasis on history, heritage and remembrance (Huyssen, 1995), science fiction films focus on retaining every bit of personal memory through digital technology in a desire for ‘total recall’ – as the title of one of the Sci-Fi films has it. It would seem that remembering is ‘the radiant hero in the limelight’ and forgetting ‘the shady villain . . . lurking behind the scenes’ (Brockmeier, 2002, p. 15). Such films thus offer the fantasy of mastery over that which so often escapes our grasp: our private memories. In this way, the Sci-Fi fantasy seems to respond to cultural anxieties around digital technologies as pervading contemporary culture and transforming our relation to personal and archival memory. The technological digitalization of memory in contemporary science fiction films results in two different trajectories: 1) the material visualization of memories; and 2) a fragmented narrative in which past, present and future become confused. In either case, individual memory of the characters is highly infused with affect. If we accept the assumption that what one remembers is always important (the rest one simply forgets), then one could say that memory is overdetermined by complex desires and emotions. I am using affect in its Deleuzean sense as a moment of intensive quality (Deleuze, 1986), or as a bloc of sensations waiting to be activated by a spectator (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994). Affect is an experience for the spectator that comes prior to meaning. It is, according to



The Virtuality of Time: Memory in Science Fiction Films 53

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Memory and morality Digital technology has provoked some significant transformations in science fiction cinema. Firstly, the image of the cyborg changes, from the hardware cyborg of the 1980s to the software and wetware cyborgs of the 1990s.3 The hardware cyborg combines a human body with technology in the form of implantations or prostheses: for example, the metallic figures of the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and RoboCop (Peter Weller). In contrast, the software cyborg is a human who can hook up to a computer. For example, Johnny Mnemonic (Keanu Reeves) in the eponymous film can upload data into his brain by plugging in, while the mercurial T-1000 (Robert Patrick) in Terminator 2 (1991) can take on any form whatsoever because he consists of a computer program, and thus his substance is malleable. Finally, the wetware cyborg is a mixture of digital technology and a ‘wet’ humanoid inside, like Cash (Wynona Ryder) in Alien Resurrection (1997).4 Secondly, the technologies of memory shift to other grounds. Early cyborg movies, such as Blade Runner (Silverman, 1991), RoboCop, Total Recall and the Terminator films (Penley, 1991), tell stories about prosthetic memory and the concomitant crisis of identity. Prosthetic memory is typical of the cyborg movies of the 1980s and 1990s, where implantations complicate the relation between memory, experience and identity (Landsberg, 2004). The films focus on anxieties aroused by the paradoxical experience of remembering events that the character has not lived through (Radstone, 2000, p. 8). Landsberg (2004) has shown that the identity crisis of the cyborg is often visualized by surrounding the characters with reflective surfaces such as a video monitor or computer screen. The mirroring surface allows for a moment of uncanny (because implanted) self-recognition and even self-reflection, in a scene that is reminiscent of the Lacanian mirror phase (Landsberg, 1995). In science fiction films of the twenty-first century, the story centres more on the relation between the superior memory of the computer and the failing memory of the human being. Science fiction writer William Gibson has claimed that for him, computers are no more than a metaphor for human memory (Cavallaro, 2000). Digital media have



Colebrook, ‘a sensible or sensibility not organised into meaning’ (2002, p. 34). Drawing on Deleuze’s notion of cinematic time, I will argue that these Sci-Fi films are not only concerned with the characters’ affects, but also have an affective impact on the spectator. In this manner, I will suggest a shift from mediated to affective memories.

created new ways of saving, retrieving and archiving personal and collective memories (van Dijck, 2007), grafting onto the original memory system developed by Vannevar Bush, the Memex machine, and its later application, Xanadu, by Ted Nelson, technologies that can be characterized by their perfect storage capacity (Locke, 2000). In contemporary science fiction, the fantasy has undoubtedly become one of control. Therefore, with digital technology the concern is no longer with the implantation of false memories, since the characters remember lived experiences. Rather, the utopian fantasy now centres on total recall that is enabled by the continuous enhancement of computer memory, while the dystopian fantasy focuses on digitalized memories that can be manipulated. One of the first films in this genre is Johnny Mnemonic (1995), based on a few short stories by Gibson. The hero uploads certified data into his brain in order to bring them to people on the other side of the world. To make space for the data, Johnny (Keanu Reeves) has to temporarily download (and thus be deprived of) his personal memories of his deceased mother (as in Blade Runner, the mother functions as the Oedipal sign of human identity and memory [see Silverman, 1991]). If he is unable to download the computer data within 24 hours, he will die of ‘information overload’. Only when he can discharge the data is he able to reload the personal memories. Of course, Johnny is saved just in time to retrieve his early memories of his mother. The contemporary fascination with memory in Western society is accompanied by developments in media technology that have a simultaneously fossilizing and virtualizing effect (Sobchack, 1996; Radstone, 2000). The fossilizing effect of the media lies in the fact that both individual and cultural memory are more and more mediated by technology. This means that memories are not only collected and saved by media, but are also reproduced and represented by them (Huyssen, 2000; Hirsch and Smith, 2002). While this particular power of media has been deplored as atrophying or debasing memory, Radstone and Hodgkin call attention to the fast-growing debate on the ways in which particular media may actually sustain and protect memory (2006, p. 12). Obviously, science fiction films promote the fantasy that media technology is not only helpful but also indispensable in the struggle for control over the human mind. The virtualizing effect lies in what Baudrillard (1983) has termed a society of simulacra and Žižek (2002) has called the derealization effect of the media: anything that is filmed with a camera becomes more show and less reality. Something that you can watch again at





any time by endless replay eventually becomes unreal, as if it were set apart from reality. This derealization effect also occurs with respect to images from one’s own life, in repeatedly poring over old photos, Photoshopping them, or in replaying or remixing home movies. Science fiction films show images from personal memory as if they were indeed home movies that can be endlessly remixed and re-viewed. Media technologies thus play an important role in the derealization of personal memory. While contemporary science fiction films may not be concerned with the kind of effects of media technology that worry cultural studies scholars, they nonetheless do raise ethical questions about the use of technology. How are saved memories to be used? Do they tie people to their past, imprisoning them, as it were? How are we to deal with traumatic memories? Is the manipulation of memories legitimate? Strange Days (1995) is one of the first films to raise such issues. In this story, life experiences can be recorded on a so-called ‘squid’. Anyone can plug into such a squid and undergo the experiences as ‘real’. Characters can thus relive their own experiences and so keep their personal memory alive. Alternatively, they can plug into the experiences of someone else. Perhaps unsurprisingly, squids with experiences of violence, sex and drugs form a lively black market. The main character, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), is addicted to squids, reliving a happy relationship with a girlfriend who left him years ago. His friends reproach him for being a hostage to his past and refusing to live in the here and now. Strange Days suggests that squids have a drugging effect and keep people imprisoned in a fossilized past. By questioning the negative effects of the mediating role of technology in memory, the film addresses the loss of real and authentic experiences. Minority Report raises a similar moral issue: unable to process the trauma of loss, a father relives repeatedly the memories of his dead little son (projected on a screen), thus keeping himself tied to a lost past. Since he is also addicted to certain drugs, there is a suggestion that addiction to mediated memories or to drugs is not really that different.5 Both Strange Days and Minority Report show examples of male characters who are unable to come to terms with the loss of a girlfriend or a son, and hence fall back on melancholy memories (Freud, 2001). In Final Cut, the ethical question revolves around which registered memories should be kept after somebody’s death. Should everything be saved, including bad experiences, or should the negative parts be cut, so that the bereaved can be comforted or cured by a smooth and seamless collection of pleasurable images?



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The consequences of manipulating memory also play a central role in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but here it concerns the living and not the dead. The film poses the moral question of whether people should have bad memories removed from their brain, with the implication that they would no longer be able to learn from their mistakes and experiences. The film suggests that, if their memory is deleted, people will repeat the same mistakes, like falling in love all over again with the wrong person. In general, science fiction films tend to warn about the inappropriate or potentially catastrophic uses of science and technology – a moral ending typical of Hollywood. Some of the films I have mentioned express an anxiety about the fossilizing and even addictive effects of technologies of memory, imprisoning people in a past to which they remain forever bound by the endless replay of digital images. In contrast, others focus rather on the derealizing effect of these technologies, where the remixing or deleting of negative aspects of someone’s life results in a cleaned-up version of the mind, untainted by unwanted memories.

The frenzy of the spectacle Science fiction cinema is, of course, a genre known for its spectacular special effects. This is also the case with the visualization of memories. For a long time now, cinema has used flashbacks to visualize memories; this cinematic term has even entered our daily language. Postmodern films on memory upset conventional linear narrative structures by making abundant use of flashbacks, as in 21 Grams (2003), Memento (2000) or Kill Bill (2003 and 2004).6 In the science fiction movies Minority Report and Final Cut, however, memories are not presented as flashbacks, but as digital films that the character can put into a computer to project onto a screen or wall. In both cases, the diskettes are made of transparent glass, turning the material medium of the memories into a transparent and reflective surface. When John Anderton (Tom Cruise), in Minority Report, calls forth his personal memories and projects them onto the wall, there is both a spectacular display of futurist technology and a literal mediation of his memories. The memories are registered in an audiovisual medium, as if the personal experiences had been recorded with a camera. Certain visual elements indicate that it is a memory of the past: colours are more saturated; the edges of the frame are frayed, and the image radiates light from the middle. These almost mystical rays of light suggest that we are looking at the past, but they also enhance the derealization effect. The images have a strongly emotional value for





John, because they are his personal memories of his deceased little son. His endless replaying of the scene also turns the cinematic scene into a psychoanalytic scene of repetitive melancholy. This kind of literal visualization of memories can also be found in the film The Butterfly Effect or the television series Life on Mars. In both cases, the memories are saturated with colour and are more vivid than the drudgery of daily life. In The Butterfly Effect, moreover, the memories of the past are introduced by a waving, digitally manipulated image moving up and down, and finally disappearing into a vortex that sucks the character into the past (it is a time-travel story). Elsewhere, I have argued that in contemporary visual culture, and particularly in science fiction films, different kinds of space collapse (Smelik, 2008). Real space, virtual space, inner and outer space overflow into one another, confusing the storyline and, more often than not, confusing the characters. As memories belong to the inner space of the mind, they are by nature virtual. It is important to realize that the films externalize and materialize memories by mediating them through technology. They show, indeed, a fantasy of registering and projecting the internal, personal memory of a character outwards, thus collapsing inside and outside, internal and external space. In addition, the films introduce a fundamental time loop in which past and present collapse. In Minority Report, Anderton can communicate with the images projected on the wall: he talks to his dead son who in turn reacts to him. In The Butterfly Effect, the traumatized main character, Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher), discovers that he has the special ability to time travel, which allows him to remake his unhappy past (an endeavour that does not succeed because something goes dramatically wrong each time). We thus see how mediated memories introduce uncertain parameters and produce a fundamental ambiguity about space and time. Visual technologies help to sustain the fantasy of reliving the past – of making the past present. In Radstone’s words, the memory boom of the late twentieth century is informed ‘by the experiences of immediacy, instantaneity and simultaneity’ (2000, p. 7). Science fiction films insist on the presentness of past experiences: memories are always there for us to view at any given moment. The effects of electronic technologies have been noted before: Sobchack (1996) pointed to the collapse of the distance between event and representation, while Huyssen (1995) indicated the collapse of the boundaries between past and present. Contemporary science fiction movies testify to those developments while pushing them further in the direction of fusion. Whereas in video



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culture, images can be endlessly replayed, in DVD and Internet culture, it is possible to remix and redesign them as well. Representation gives way to mediation. These films thus proceed in the direction of the manipulation of memories. Yet they also struggle with technological restraints. A closer look at Final Cut will illustrate this. A selected group of people receives at birth a brain implant that registers all their experiences and thus functions as a repertoire for their memory. When one such person dies, a ‘cutter’ (the cinematic term for the person who does the editing of a film) can edit all the memories into one short film, the so-called ‘memorial film’. Alan Hakman (Robin Williams), the best cutter in town, presents the memories of the deceased as a linear story. The short film, of about one minute in duration, simulates the narrative line of a documentary or nature film by imposing on it the traditional linear structure of birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, career, decay and death. Since all the seconds and minutes of somebody’s life are registered, the computer program has first to process vast amounts of information. This is represented as uncontrollable information overload. In a speedy montage, we see images flash by the year, month, day and hour as shown at the bottom of the shots. This information overload is visualized as a split screen. At first it is a simple double screen, but it quickly explodes into twelve, twenty-four, and finally to sixty-four images on the screen. The unrepresentibility of a lifetime collapses the time onto the space of the screen. The registration and documentation of memories is literally unmanageable, unless it is severely edited and reduced to the definitive one-minute version – the ‘final cut’ of the title of the film. This exercise also reduces the emotions of a full life into an easily digestible piece, with a clear beginning, middle and end. In addition to the information overload, there is yet another technological problem in Final Cut. The implantation device in the brain registers the experiences as if a camera were filming everything through the eyes of that person. The spectator of the memorial film thus sees the images of the deceased’s life from a sustained subjective point of view; both the characters in the film and the spectators in the movie theatre literally look through the eyes of the character. They can thus never see the character himself. Such images pose a problem for the memorial film, made for the benefit of the surviving relatives: they never get to see the deceased person on screen, but are instead watching themselves through the eyes of their beloved. This problem is sometimes solved by having the character look into the mirror: for example, in a montage shot of a man in pyjamas brushing his teeth in front of a





mirror, in ten-year intervals, thereby showing the relentless process of ageing. The point-of-view camera perspective is thus necessarily narrow and exclusive, as well as downright incomplete. The fantasy of total control over memory by a technology that can register, retrieve and project recollections inevitably leads to questions about the truth-value of images. The images are supposed to be the registration of somebody’s personal and highly subjective memories. In both Minority Report and Final Cut, the visual recollections function as the source of truth about somebody’s life. Where personal memories ‘in real life’ are characterized by subjectivity, and especially by what is forgotten, repressed, or distorted, the films show an allegedly ‘factual’ version of the past, because it is documented by an objective camera. Science fiction films thus create a binary opposition between the subjective, failing memory of the individual and the objective and reliable memory of technology. Whereas the personal memory is immaterial, technology transforms it into a medium that materializes memories. The memories become tangible and, in the logic of science fiction, real and true, doing away with any possible ambiguity or complexity. Paradoxically, the genre of science fiction reveals a naïve and old-fashioned idea of media technology as objective, factual and truthful. It reinforces an idea of the immediacy and transparency of media that became obsolete with the advent of digital technology. No contemporary user of the Internet, of digital cameras, or player of computer games still adheres to that outdated view. Yet there are some exceptions to this science fiction perspective. The BBC television series Life on Mars, for example, dares to retain the ambiguity until the very end of the series. The main character, Sam Tyler (John Simm), continually wonders whether he is mad, in a coma, suffers from amnesia, or has travelled in time and landed in the 1970s. Until the very end of the sixteenth and final episode, the series keeps all options open and leaves the spectator in uncertainty.7 In this context, it is interesting to note that many science fiction films feature an element of ambiguity: the spectator does not really know whether the main character is paranoid or schizophrenic, or whether to give credence to plot elements involving time travel or manipulated memories.8 These films often play on this ambiguity by having the character visit a psychiatrist. At the end of the second series of Life on Mars, it is suggested that Sam Tyler’s psychological problems were due to his amnesia (which was caused by a car accident while on police duty). His recurring pain, fear and insecurity stretching over the entire television series are quite moving, and when he finally overcomes his problems



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and chooses ‘reality’, it registers as redemption for both him and the viewer. Most Hollywood films, however, are keen to substantiate the science fiction part of the story. In the last minute, the image of the hero has to be saved. Since it is impossible to present the hero as mad, his sanity is proved by showing that he was a victim of an unreliable State or of evil people abusing technology. Such closure is, however, not only less moving; it is also less convincing. The spectators cannot be completely persuaded by the happy conclusion because they may see it as contrived. For instance, in The Butterfly Effect, the viewer has watched so many versions of the past where something repeatedly goes horribly wrong that the rather sudden happy ending seems plainly incredible. In contemporary visual culture, to see something implies its existence. This is, in the words of Linda Williams (1989), a ‘frenzy of the visible’, a Foucauldian will to knowledge: to see is to believe and also to know. Radstone and Hodgkin argue that the process of remembrance (the will to know the past) is driven by the fantasy of omnipotence (2006, p. 133). Indeed, many science fiction films portray a fantasy of omnipotence. They make something visible that in real life remains completely outside the perception of others or beyond a reality check: memory. By visualizing virtual and ephemeral memories, the films make them real and concrete. The first trajectory of the digital technologies of memory that I trace in this article is thus the ruthlessly material visualization of memories, which I call the ‘frenzy of the spectacle’. Science fiction cinema petrifies memory through visual representation, thus immobilizing memories and stripping them of their essentially elusive quality. Where digital culture as a whole is characterized by virtuality (Rodowick, 2001), science fiction films, on the contrary, explore digital technology as a means of rendering the most virtual and fleeting aspects of the human mind as material, solid and unambiguous. The films fit in with a material culture that allows not so much for an unmediated but rather a mediated relation to the past, memory and lived experience. They present memory as something that can be known, retrieved and changed. With a little help from technology, nothing of the mind gets lost. Yet, something disappears in the frenzy of the spectacle. What gets lost in the visual materialization is the acknowledgement of the fundamental instability of memory; that is to say, the notion that memory is by nature fleeting, ephemeral, virtual. In the second part of this essay,




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Confusing narratives The second trajectory that science fiction films pursue in the digitalization of memory is a fragmented narrative line in which past, present and future become thoroughly confused. The films in fact undo the linearity of the narrative structure. This narrative fragmentation allows for the affect of the past to be processed. As was observed above, the ambiguous affect of memories is considered problematic in Hollywood science fiction movies unless they are smoothed by narrative closure. Independent films such as 2046 and Eternal Sunshine allow for the ambiguity of affect by foregrounding the ambiguity of memory, which results in a non-linear, fragmented narrative structure. To understand affect, it is helpful to turn to Deleuze’s ideas on cinema (1986; 1989). Deleuze calls for a productive analysis of film in terms of affect rather than in terms of representation. This implies an attempt to get beyond the critique of representation as it has been dominant in film studies until recently. There have been several attempts to understand the experiential relation to cinema, for example, the notion of ‘haptic visuality’ introduced by Laura Marks (2000; 2002) or of affective experience by Simon O’Sullivan (2006).9 For Deleuze, cinema, like any art, is never just representation but instigates always a process of affect and transformation – which is another reason for preferring the term mediation to representation. Deleuze prompts us to view cinema (or art) as a creative production of both affect and thought (Bennett, 2006, p. 32). As Colebrook puts it: ‘Art may well have meanings or messages but what makes it art is not its content but its affect’ (2002, p. 24; emphasis in original). In the films that I am discussing, the affects are directly related to memories. In her discussion of the writings of the cognitive psychologist Silvan Tomkins on affect, Armstrong writes that memory and affect are contingent on one another because of their relation to time: as memory looks forwards and backwards, ‘the original affect becomes remembered affect and remembered affect can evoke new affect’ (2000, p. 135). Bennett (2006) uses the term ‘affective memories’ (p. 28) as an aesthetic category in art that produces an experience that is no longer framed by representation (p. 27).



I turn to the independent films 2046 and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which, like Life on Mars, are more radical in exploring the transitory or capricious nature of memory.

I argue that the affective memories of the main characters in both 2046 and Eternal Sunshine are enacted in a fragmented narrative, thus intensifying an affective experience for the spectator. It is not always easy to keep the narrative layers straight in those two films, because present, past and future are continually confounded. As the films are ‘the kind of text which is disengaged from the linear sequence of memory’ (Braidotti, 2002, p. 126), they could be seen as part of a minoritarian cinema that unhinges the role of memory in subjectivity. The title 2046 refers both to the future, the year 2046, and to a specific location, a hotel room with that number. The characters move in and out of the hotel room, which functions as a time portal. Without a conventional narrative structure, time and space collapse, bringing the vicissitudes of desires, memories and affects to the fore. Eternal Sunshine tells the story of a failed love relationship, after which the former lovers proceed to delete one another from their memory. The film focuses on the moment when the male character seeks to erase his memories. In the process of deleting them, Joel Barisch (Jim Carrey) finds himself transported back to the time of his memories. Realizing that he is quite attached to those memories, he struggles to stop the process of erasure, but to no avail. The middle part of the film becomes a complicated mental journey in which past, present and future get thoroughly confused, confusing not only the characters but also the spectators. As in 2046, the dense narrative structure gets quite intricate because of the reorganization of linear time. This is digitally visualized as follows: while Joel and his girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), run through the sets of their own past, the setting around them is literally deleted; it disappears. As in the other science fiction films, we see a literal materialization of inner space. However, unlike those Sci-Fi movies, Eternal Sunshine does not foreground narrative pleasure or visual spectacle, but rather the disconcerting affect of a past that is being undone while one is still in it. In both films, the science fiction element is represented somewhat awkwardly. In 2046, surrealist colours suggest the future, and in Eternal Sunshine Joel is fitted with some kind of strainer on his head to erase the memories of Clementine from his mind. Obviously, these films are not concerned with producing a convincing futuristic image. Rather, as mentioned above, the films are concerned with the portrayal of emotions of loss and longing. Affect is what matters in these films – an affective register that is directly related to remembering. In both films, memory is a source of suffering; the loss of a loved one is still poignantly experienced in the present. In 2046, the main character,





Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung), revolves endlessly in a perplexing carousel of present, past and future, thus never escaping from the emotions that he passively and passionately endures. In Eternal Sunshine, the characters hope to be delivered from their emotional pain by deleting the agonizing memories, but that also blocks any possibility of learning from failures and of preventing them in the future. Upon reflection, Joel prefers not to lose his memories of Clementine because he recognizes that the memories are part of what he has become. But he is too late, and he can no longer stop the erasure of his memories of the doomed love affair. In the cultural and social sciences, memory is generally considered to be the core of identity. Both 2046 and Eternal Sunshine suggest that memory is what makes the subject: lived experience and its preservation in memory are the source of one’s personality and inform one’s subjectivity. Some critics, however, think that memory can be separated from who we are. As Cardullo puts it in his analysis of Eternal Sunshine, the film suggests that ‘our memories, even if (or precisely because) they are malleable or erasable, may somehow exist apart from our deeper impulses, urges, instincts, or desires – which cannot be purged’ (2007, n.p.). Such an essentialist view divides our memories from our subjectivity and forecloses on any notion of the unconscious as a reservoir of affects, impulses and desires that include memories. Radstone and Hodgkin are afraid that contemporary conceptions of memory tend to neglect the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious, where so many of our memories are stored. They believe that our understanding of memory should still be informed by the psychoanalytic insight that: ‘the subject is radically other to itself, driven by fantasies and desires of which it has only the most limited awareness’ (2006, p. 19). Thus, we should not turn our ‘backs on unruliness, on desire, on an otherness within’ (p. 95), with regard to our understanding of memory. In my view, the layered complexity of memory in the fragmented narratives of both Eternal Sunshine and 2046 presents a heterogeneous enactment of memory, which is highly affective and intensive. Remembering and forgetting are two sides of the same coin. The films show that the science fiction fantasy of total control over memory is unrealistic and ought to give way to an insight into the ungraspable virtuality of memory. In the words of Rosi Braidotti this view takes into account that memory is stored ‘throughout the physical and experiential density of the embodied self and not only in the “black box” of the psyche’ (2006, p. 165). In focusing on the affective register, both films show the intricacies of memory and the impossibility of disentangling reminiscence



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from desire and affect, even though technology can erase memories (in Eternal Sunshine) or project them into the future (in 2046).

We have seen that Minority Report, Final Cut, The Butterfly Effect, Life on Mars, Eternal Sunshine and 2046 all touch on the affective register of memory. However, whereas Eternal Sunshine, Life on Mars, and 2046 produce an elemental confusion within the story, Minority Report and Final Cut exorcize the uncontrollable emotions by conveying them in a unidirectional storyline. In all cases, time, memory and affect are inextricably linked. When narrative coherence is restored, the impact of affect is contained, as in Minority Report and Final Cut, but when the temporal organization implodes in the confusion between present, past and future, affect is intensified, as in Eternal Sunshine and 2046. I argued above that contemporary forms of cinematic and digital aesthetics have taken films beyond the confines of classic structures of representation and narrative, whether it is the frenzy of the spectacle in Hollywood movies, or the non-linear and complex narratives in independent films. Eternal Sunshine and 2046 are examples of the second trajectory where the notion of time does not imply a simple linear development from one point to the next. Instead, time is represented as a virtual process with the potential of being actualized. Because cinema is a time-based medium, Deleuze devotes one of his two volumes on cinema to time.10 Inspired by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Deleuze argues that the film image is connected to memory, for example in the flashback. Here we may bring together the notions of memory, time and affect. Colebrook explains that the experience of time is split in two: ‘There is the past or impersonal memory which is virtual and the actual lines of lived time. The world or life we live is an actualisation of this pure or impersonal memory, but memory or time in its pure and whole state can also interrupt our world’ (2002, p. 33). The disruptive power of memory is quite clear in both 2046 and Eternal Sunshine, where daily life is upset by an event from the past. In 2046, Chow Mo Wan relives an unhappy love affair with every other woman that he meets and whom he tries (but fails) to love, because each new relation reawakens the memories of the lost woman. As Colebrook points out, the memory can disrupt the actual present, because it is real and exists virtually alongside the present (p. 33). The fact that in the film the women all look alike enhances the confusion of actual and virtual time.



The virtual time of memory


Such an interference of actual and virtual time, of past and present, also takes place in Eternal Sunshine when, during the erasing procedure, part of Joel’s memories of his former girlfriend reactivate the recollection of his early childhood and Oedipal love for his mother. Memories get mixed up to the extent that they produce an altogether new present and even future. This makes it quite a bewildering film to watch despite the attempt at narrative closure (near the end of the film Joel and Clementine meet and have to decide whether to start their relationship all over again – without their memories to guide them). Like in 2046, the confusion of time is not resolved. Eternal Sunshine and 2046 both foreground the complexity of time, collapsing the actual and the virtual experience of time. While time turns inside out and outside in, the same happens to space. As I have argued above, different kinds of space are entangled in many science fiction films (but it is also the case for such diverse genres as medical documentaries, video clips and games): real and virtual space can no longer be distinguished, nor can inner and outer space. Eternal Sunshine and 2046 push the representation of time to extremes. I want to argue that these two films show that the disruptive power of memory is related to its affective qualities. The complicated scenes where the present enters the past activate an affective force. As memory has a temporal element that is irreducible, it seems to lead naturally to the disruption of time. The films mediate the disruptive power of time and memory by cutting up the narrative. In turn, the fragmented narrative produces affect in the spectator, for example, confusion, sadness or compassion. The mediation of memory in the fragmentation of the narrative, but also in the scenes of spectacular visualization discussed earlier, creates moments of pure affect for the spectator. It is important to realize that in a Deleuzean framework, affect is a material experience of sensation that is corporeal in nature. We can understand such viewing experiences as moments of intensive quality (Deleuze, 1986). As such, affect helps us to move beyond the subjective confines of the ego or the psyche. The affective power of art lies in the fact that it is an event, generating a new experience in the spectator (O’Sullivan, 2006). The role of the spectator is crucial here, because as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) argue, affect needs to be activated by the viewer. Just as memory is an act of transforming the past, so is affect an act of active becoming. We can thus understand the science fiction films on memory as displaying the very image of time, that is, as its process of becoming. Here we may encounter the transformative power of cinematic affect, as it challenges spectatorial subjectivities.11 Cinematic affect may help us to rethink the spectator position in terms of understanding and affinity. Such a



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Conclusion In this essay, I have discussed the theme of mediated memory in the genre of science fiction cinema. The digital technology of memory has, on the one hand, resulted in a frenzy of the spectacle, as in Minority Report, The Butterfly Effect and Final Cut and, on the other hand, in fragmentary narratives in which past, present and future are intertwined, as in Eternal Sunshine and 2046. In all these cases, time and space, inside and outside, the actual and the virtual, collapse. Memory affects the experience of time, which in turn opens up to spectatorial affect. In my view, we need to take into account the ways in which memories are bound up with affect if we are to understand the ways in which Sci-Fi films mediate and remediate memory. To conclude, let me briefly draw out the implications of an analytic focus on affect. Firstly, as a moment of intensive quality, affect provokes a non-linear, dynamic vision of time. As we have seen, affect creates a time continuum that envelops past, present and future, undoing the authority of the past that so often ties subjects obsessively to their recollections. Secondly, the notion of affect as an impersonal intensity enables the establishment of a relation to the outside world, that is, beyond the merely subjective or personal. This leads, on the one hand, to an understanding of the dissolving boundaries between the human and the technological. For Deleuze, cinematic technology frees the human body, for example, in the camera and montage that establishes an impersonal observer: ‘this is not a human eye – even an improved one’ (Deleuze, 1986, p. 81). One could say that the affective experience of the image of time enhances this impersonal, perhaps post-human, view. On the other hand, the affective level requires the spectator to establish an experiential relation to the film. The regime of affect creates a different mode of creative spectatorship, pointing to its transformative power. Affect is therefore closely related to the Deleuzean notion of affirmation as a positive and joyful experience of cinema, even though the actual story may be sad or painful. A recognition or reactivation of affect may lead to the transformative, and perhaps even affirmative, moment in cinema. This is the moment of resistance, of change, of escape from the memory that keeps the character imprisoned. For the spectator, it is the moment when he or she can



position is always located or situated rather than detached or voyeuristic. The spectator engages with the film affectively through empathy or identification, which in turn demands a reflexive recognition of memory as a precarious formation of subjectivity.

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establish a different, that is, an affective relation to time. Some films may indeed offer the viewer the rare experience of an affective memory, embracing present, past and future as inextricably connected.12

1. See for an insightful discussion on mediation, the conversation of Hirsch with Kirstenblatt-Gimblett and Taylor (2005). Bolter and Grusin (1999) use the term ‘re-mediation’ but that presupposes a shift from one medium to another, which is not the case here, and also a rather dichotomous view of original and copy. 2. This fantasy is in itself not new or unique to science fiction; as Douwe Draaisma argues in his book Metaphors of Memory (2000), human memory has been described throughout the ages in terms of an artificial memory and as influenced by technological developments. 3. See for the introduction of the term ‘cyborg’ into cultural studies, Haraway (1985). See for cyborg cinema, Kuhn (1990; 1999), Bukatman (1993), Dery (1996), and for cyborg theory, Gray (1995; 2002). 4. The change in the image of the cyborg also requires a different kind of actor: bodybuilders such as Schwarzenegger or Van Damme make room for the more androgynous Keanu Reeves or Jude Law, or for women such as Wynona Ryder and Angelina Jolie (as Lara Croft). 5. The term ‘mediated memories’ was introduced by Radstone and Hodgkin in Memory Cultures (2006). 6. Contemporary Hollywood films thus both continue and revise the avantgarde preoccupation with memory and narrative of high modernist cinema of the 1960s, as exemplified by Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) or L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961). 7. The BBC broadcast a sequel to Life on Mars in 2008: Ashes to Ashes, featuring a female detective from the twenty-first century, Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes), who wakes up in 1981 after being shot in 2008. As she is fully familiar with the case of Sam Tyler, Drake is convinced that she is hallucinating rather than experiencing memories of the 1980s. 8. It deserves a separate article to discuss the boom in traumatized, schizophrenic or paranoid men in recent films, from Fight Club (1999), Memento (2000), Vanilla Sky (2001) and Donnie Darko (2001) to the science fiction films I discuss here. It is interesting to note that this form of psychological suffering concerns only male characters. 9. See also Kennedy (2000) and Hemmings (2005). 10. For a clear introduction to Deleuze’s rather difficult cinema books, see Bogue (2003). 11. I elaborate on the ethics of spectatorship and the affective powers of witnessing in an essay on 9/11: ‘A Theme Park of Disaster: The Ethics of Post-9/11 Spectatorship’, forthcoming in Arcadia, 2009. 12. I would like to thank Liedeke Plate and Robert Doran for their comments and suggestions on this essay.



Notes

Part II


Memory/Counter-memory





Introduction: Memory/Counter-memory

Memories do not simply add up to constitute cultural memory. Instead, they compete and clash, vying for a place in collective remembrance. The many and competing, contested and contradictory memories have the effect of making modern memory markedly counter-memorial. As we explain in the Introduction, the democratization of History into histories has splintered the grand narratives of empire and progress into the many and divergent (counter)-memories of the men and women that felt left out. The positive valuation of memory, Radstone and Hodgkin write, is the result of its being ‘utilised in order to retrieve that which runs against, disrupts or disturbs dominant ways of understanding the past’ (2006, p. 10). By this account, memory is counter-memory. Unsanctioned, subversive, from below or from the margins, it attempts to overthrow or deconstruct the memory-as-history and to dislodge it from its position of authority. Memory resists amnesia. It refuses the political and ideological ‘forgetting’ of people and events and counteracting the ‘selective traditions’ (Williams, 1961) that overlook or silence the experience of those who are not included in it. It is thus a movement against repressive memorialization emerging from all the nooks and cracks of the present culture of memory. The view of memory as ‘always already’ a counter-memory can be traced back to Foucault. In his essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, he identifies the historical sense as giving rise to ‘a view of history that severs its connection to memory, its metaphysical and anthropological model, and constructs a counter-memory – a transformation of history into a totally different form of time’ (1977, p. 160). Opposing the idea of ‘history as knowledge’, as ‘reminiscence or recognition’, and as ‘continuity or representative of a tradition’ (p. 160), Foucault’s conception of history as counter-memory implies it is actually a use of the past that 71





is no more organically related to identity and truth than any other narrative use of the past. In fact, it can be understood as ‘just one more technology of memory’, as Carolyn Steedman says (2001, p. 66). Neither memory nor counter-memory nor history constitutes the destiny of a person or a people. Instead, they are uses of the past that try to mask their own constructiveness as well as the non-neutrality of the subject of knowledge – of the historian, but also of s/he who re-members. The movement towards seeing history as always already countermemorial is evidently crucial to artistic projects that remember by way of rewriting. Thus, feminist ‘re-vision’ (Adrienne Rich’s term) attempts to intervene in the production of cultural memory by telling ‘the other side of the story’. Similarly, postcolonial intertextuality conceived as a ‘writing back to the centre,’ as Salman Rushdie memorably phrased it, contributed to the characterization of postcolonial literatures as counter-narratives. The essays in this section focus on rewriting as a technology of cultural memory whose meanings, rather than being stable, are seen to change as culture itself, in its relationship to the past and in its understanding of that past, also changes. Intertextuality, which basically means that texts are made of texts, reinscribes those texts and thus remembers them. ‘Intertextual mnemonics’ certainly is one of the ‘strategies employed to implant and keep literature in cultural and collective memory’ (Grabes, 2005, p. xi). (The other strategies are genre, the canon and literary history.) As the citation of texts that are ‘anonymous, irrecoverable, and yet already read’ (Barthes, 1986, p. 60), intertextuality itself is also a mnemonics and can thus be understood as a technology of memory. As Bakhtin explains in ‘Discourse in the Novel’, words remember the contexts in which they have been; they carry the ‘taste’ of these contexts, are shot through with the intentions and accents of others. Novelists employ the words’ heteroglossia to achieve their purpose, carefully orchestrating the echoes of the words’ previous contexts to resonate through the novel, using intertextuality as a technology of memory to invoke these other worlds. Nagihan Haliloglu’s reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in Chapter 5 evokes this understanding of intertextuality as reinscription and polyphony in her notion of ‘writing back together’, while Ann Miller, in Chapter 4, shows how the recent Blake and Mortimer comic-strip albums retrospectively re-contour Jacobs’s 1950s moral and political universe, stripping it of colonial overtones unpalatable to a twenty-first century readership. In Miller’s analysis the ligne claire (clear line) serves as a technology of memory that can summon up ‘the lost world of certitudes mapped out in the original albums’ only after adjustments



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to Jacobs’s referential system. Similarly, Plate argues that as re-visions proliferate, ‘telling the other side of the story’ becomes a kind of shopping for alternative versions. In this (commercial) context, mythical retelling can continue to work as a technology of memory that brings women’s stories into cultural memory and thus ‘alters or expands the options for the future’ (Belsey, 2005, p. 16). Together, the essays in this section demonstrate how rewriting as a technology of memory works to resist the supposed homogeneity and hegemony of ‘official’ or dominant memory yet is itself subject to change as the meaning of the past itself changes. Rewriting, indeed, enacts ‘one of the crucial features of cultural memory’, Catherine Belsey writes: ‘We remember the past not simply as it was, but . . . as it will turn out to have been, in consequence of our remembering it’ (p. 4). In Chapter 4, Ann Miller turns to a bestselling series of comic-strip albums, which have resurrected Blake and Mortimer, heroes created by the Belgian artist E. P. Jacobs in 1946. She addresses the question of technologies of memory by considering the ligne claire, the characteristic drawing style used by Jacobs as well as by Hergé, which was subverted by other artists for satirical purposes or postmodern irony. However, when Blake and Mortimer were resurrected in 1996, irony and pastiche were eschewed in favour of a convincing evocation of Jacobs’s vision of the 1950s. This was achieved by means of ‘a detour and mythological reworking,’ Miller argues. In Chapter 5, Nagihan Haliloglu offers an intertextual reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which relates memories that have been hidden in the discursive space of Jane Eyre. She proposes ‘writing back’ as a technology of memory, an orchestration on the part of the writer that gives expression to memories of certain subjects. She argues that remembering in the form of self-narration and in the narrative space of a single novel reveals the similarities between the experiences of the two different colonial subjects of Antoinette (Bertha in Jane Eyre) and Rochester. In Chapter 6, Liedeke Plate discusses women’s rewriting as a powerful political and ideological tool in the shaping of cultural memory. She highlights the success of feminist re-vision as a technology of memory aimed at affecting how we remember culturally central texts, yet submits that the role of rewriting has altered in the context of the present ‘liquid’ culture of memory. Taking her cue from Jeanette Winterson’s retelling of myth in The Stone Gods, she proposes mythical retelling as a mode of rewriting that is particularly suited to the contemporary condition.



Introduction: Memory/Counter-memory 73

The Astonishing Return of Blake and Mortimer: Francophone Fantasies of Britain as Imperial Power and Retrospective Rewritings Ann Miller On 21 September 1996, the headline ‘Blake and Mortimer have been found!’ dominated page one of the French newspaper Libération.1 The next three pages were devoted to the same sensational event: the resurrection of Belgian artist Edgar P. Jacobs’s comic-strip heroes, nine years after their creator’s death. The phlegmatic, Eton-educated Captain Francis Blake, never known to betray his emotions beyond the occasional ‘By Jove!’, the more volatile but intrepid physics professor Philip Mortimer, and the suave but unscrupulous Olrik, their implacable enemy, were to meet again, thanks to a decision by the publisher Dargaud to pay 10 million francs to buy out the Éditions Blake et Mortimer and the Studio Jacobs, which held the back catalogue and the copyright on the characters. Dargaud then invested a further 8 million francs in a massive publicity operation, which included the handing out of 100,000 free copies of classic Jacobs albums from the 1940s and 1950s to firstclass TGV passengers, a strategy that suggests that the readership being targeted for the first of the Blake and Mortimer remakes was largely an adult one (Lindon, 1996, p. 2). Dargaud’s financially motivated bid to evoke the childhood memories of a generation amounted to the commodification of nostalgia, something to which the Jacobs albums were peculiarly well suited. A book about Jacobs by Gérard Lenne describes his own Blake and Mortimer collection as ‘the object of a fetishist cult’, and as having acquired ‘the exquisite taste of a madeleine’ (1996, p. 9), a reference which recurs in Jean-Paul Dubois’s book on Jacobs: ‘Jacobs often has the effect of a Proustian madeleine’ (Dubois, 1989, p. 18). The new album, L’Affaire Francis Blake [The Francis Blake Affair], was scripted by the Belgian Jean Van Hamme, a successful screenwriter as well as author of bande dessinée series including the prodigiously 74



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bestselling XIII. It was drawn by the French artist Ted Benoît, best known for his sophisticated Ray Banana albums. The new Blake and Mortimer album sold no fewer than 700,000 copies in its first year, and topped the bestseller list not just for bande dessinée albums but for all books (de Saint-Vincent, 1998, p. 66). At the same time, sales of the back catalogue, consisting of eleven albums by Jacobs written between 1946 and 1971, which had been running at 130,000 a year, went up to 400,000 (Lefebvre, 2000, p. 30).2 Four more Blake and Mortimer albums have since appeared: another one by Van Hamme and Benoît in 2001, and three more in 2000, 2003 and 2004 by a second team: the Belgian writer Yves Sente and the French artist André Juillard. All of these albums have enjoyed considerable commercial success: the 2003 album sold 600,000 copies, making it the bestselling album of the year (Ratier, 2004, p. 3). This essay will examine first of all the fascination of Jacobs’s own albums, which put forward a mythologized version of Britain, ‘a sort of magnified version of what Belgium would have been like if it hadn’t had to undergo the humiliations of defeat and occupation’, in the words of Daniel Riche (1990, p. 23). Like Hergé, Jacobs uses the ligne claire, or ‘clear line’, characterized by clear outlines and documentary precision: Bruno Lecigne has suggested that the ligne claire implies that the world itself is legible, and can be unproblematically encoded (1983, p. 40). The diagrammatic effect of the ligne claire makes it appear purely denotative: the dense ideological content of Jacobs’s work is presented as self-evident by the referentialism of the graphic line. In the Blake and Mortimer remakes of the 1990s and the twenty-first century, it is the ligne claire which acts as a technology of memory, through its power to summon up the lost world of certitudes mapped out in the original albums. The second part of this essay will argue, though, that that world is subtly and retrospectively recontoured in the new albums. Adaptations are made to Jacobs’s moral and political universe, most notably in relation to the presentation of colonialism, given that the nostalgic fix offered to contemporary readers is intended to assuage a rather different set of cultural anxieties.

Imperial assurance and Cold War anxiety Jacobs’s Blake and Mortimer albums represent Britain as a major world power in which liberal democratic values are upheld by a ‘natural aristocracy’, in Dominique Petitfaux’s term, made up of intellectuals, government officials and army officers, whose lightly worn superiority is unquestioned by a deferential working class (1980, p. 4). As Luc



The Astonishing Return of Blake and Mortimer 75


Routeau has argued, the social world which Blake and Mortimer inhabit seems to belong to the nineteenth century in terms of its value system (1976, p. 59). Capitalism and consumer culture are nowhere in evidence: wealth is discreetly owned (Blake and Mortimer have a flat in Park Lane), and only the occasional American characters, like Olrik’s henchmen Jack and Sharkey, are vulgar and mercenary. In Le Mystère de la Grande Pyramide [The Mystery of the Great Pyramid], for example, Sharkey menaces the highly spiritual Egyptian priest Abdul Razek with a bullwhip, and then tries to bribe him (Jacobs, 1955, p. 10). The devotion of Blake and Mortimer’s Indian servant, Nasir, who had served under Blake in the Indian army, demonstrates the loyalty felt towards the British Empire by its colonial and ex-colonial subjects. In La Marque Jaune [The Yellow Chalkmark], for example, he hurls himself down the stairs to defend Mortimer from a mysterious intruder, only to be struck down by an electric charge that the intruder projects (1956, p. 29). The beginning of La Marque Jaune gives a sense of the way in which Britain’s identity as an imperial power is presented as eternal, part of a national narrative that seems to be set in the stone of its historic monuments. A narrative voiceover accompanies an image of the London skyline at night: Big Ben has just struck one in the morning. London, the gigantic capital of the British Empire, stretches out, as vast as an entire province, under the rain that has been falling for two days. The solid medieval silhouette of the Tower of London, the heart of the City, is outlined against the glowering sky (1956, p. 5). Fredric Jameson has suggested that mass culture may be conceived not as mere manipulation but rather as ‘a transformational work on social and political anxieties which must have some effective presence in the mass cultural text in order subsequently to be “managed” or repressed’ (1992, p. 25). Surprisingly, the anxieties which dominate the series do not seem to include the loss of empire, even though India had gained its independence in 1947, a year after the first Blake and Mortimer album was published, and independence struggles were going on in Africa and elsewhere for much of the period during which Jacobs was writing. The threat to Western civilization, as upheld by Blake and Mortimer, that is most present in the albums, is not the potential hostility of the colonized other, but the possibility of brainwashing and indoctrination. Concerns about the misuse of science to this end are mobilized by the use of fantastique and science fiction elements drawn from Jacobs’s



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reading of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. In La Marque Jaune, the plot is set in motion by the theft of the imperial crown, but this symbolic assault on the British Empire emanates not from the colonies but from the mad scientist Septimus, seeking revenge for a professional slight, and the terror at the heart of the text is that of the control of behaviour. Septimus uses a robotically guided Olrik to carry out his attacks, and succeeds in turning pillars of the establishment, such as a high court judge and the editor of the Daily Mail, into brainwashed zombies. Unease at the prospect of the annihilation of individuality may relate as much to the fear of standardization and mass production coming from America as to the menace of communism from the East: we have noted Jacobs’s tendency to associate American characters with crass materialism. A number of the albums do, though, have an explicitly Cold War scenario. In the 1959 S. O. S. Météores [S. O. S. Meteors], the scientist, Professor Miloch Georgevitch, is working for a foreign power that aims to use the meteorological disruptions that he has created in order to invade Western Europe.

The unconscious of the text It is, then, the forces of totalitarianism, not anticolonialism, that Blake and Mortimer must defeat, and in this endeavour, they can actually count on the support of the colonies, with the exception of the occasional traitor, like the Bezendjas, who turns up in the Le Secret de l’Espadon [The Secret of the Espadon], written in 1946, in the Makran area of what would become Pakistan in 1947. Even this character is portrayed not as an independence fighter, but as having sold out to the dictator of the evil empire of the ‘Yellows’ (Jacobs, 1950, p. 51). The spectre of anticolonial insurrection is, admittedly, evoked in the 1957 L’Énigme de l’Atlantide [The Mystery of Atlantis], but in highly displaced form. Blake and Mortimer, on holiday in the Azores, find themselves in Atlantis, which has survived underground, after being hit by a comet, as an empire run according to principles of ‘knowledge and wisdom’. The empire had colonized a savage people on its borders, but some of their descendants had become aggressive and had to be driven back over the frontiers. They are now being encouraged to invade and overthrow the benevolent imperial rulers by a renegade member of the imperial guard, helped by Olrik. The invasion is foiled thanks to Blake and Mortimer, but Olrik accidentally breaches a floodgate, and Atlantis is swept away by floodwaters. Its inhabitants escape in spaceships to





another planet, while the barbarians drown. Resolution is achieved, then, by the expulsion of the inassimilable other. Luc Routeau has argued that the unconscious of the text is effectively repressed at the end of every Jacobs’s album. Not only is the enemy comprehensively defeated, but the irrational and fantastique elements which had threatened the social order are evacuated from the narrative, whether, as in this case, by submersion or, elsewhere, by violent explosion. A more unusual variant occurs at the end of Le Mystère de la Grande Pyramide, when the priest Abdul Razek induces amnesia in the two heroes (Routeau, 1976, p. 59). The reader’s confidence that order will be restored is undoubtedly strengthened by Jacobs’s frequent use of symmetry in the design of his pages. The unruliness of the monsters, machines, savage hordes or nature itself is contained by the aestheticised regularity of the page layout. Control is further asserted by the monologic assurance of the narrating position, as images, dialogues and narrative voiceovers work in harmony. In fact, at the end of the albums, the narrating voice frequently fuses with that of either Blake or Mortimer. After the imperial crown has been recovered at the end of La Marque Jaune, for example, it is Blake’s words that occupy the voiceover box and draw out the moral of the story: that true science works in the service of humanity, not to serve the vanity or tyranny of an individual, and Olrik’s fate will serve as a reminder of this (Jacobs, 1956, p. 70). The reader’s pleasure may, though, not be quite such a simple one. Some of the most memorable images in Jacobs’s work offer a meaning that exceeds the constraint of the narrative voiceover. There are two recurring visual motifs which seem to figure the return of certain elements of the unconscious of the text that cannot be resolved or banished. The fact that women are almost entirely absent from the albums simply reflects the context in which Jacobs was working, which demanded a suppression of the heroes’ sexuality. There is, though, an abundance of disturbing episodes in which the heroes are trapped in caverns which threaten to suffocate or engulf them with water, a rather obvious metaphor for a fear of the female element (Jacobs, 1956, p. 49). This undermining of the untroubled masculinity of the heroes recurs in another motif, that of the eye within a circle which appears in a number of the albums, usually when one of the heroes is temporarily imprisoned and perceives that he is being watched through a spy-hole. These sudden and terrifying instances of a gaze from the place of the Other work to unsettle the easy authority with which the heroes inhabit the socio-symbolic order. Furthermore, there is the occasional possibility for the reader of a still more illicit pleasure. In La Marque Jaune, for



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example, in one startling panel, we are offered a visual identification not with the representatives of the law but with Olrik, who has now left the scene, and whose space we are invited to occupy.3 As his pursuers burst in through a door into the office of the editor of the Daily Mail, whom Olrik has just kidnapped, the optical point of view is from the editor’s desk, where Olrik has left a piece of paper displaying the symbol of the marque jaune (1956, p. 15).

The Blake and Mortimer remakes: renewing the reference systems When Blake and Mortimer were resurrected in 1996, it would have been possible to re-envision the series in a number of ways: perhaps the reader could be offered the perspective of Olrik, or the treacherous Bezendjas or even that of Nasir, the faithful Indian servant. However, the publishers had correctly surmised that what would make the public buy the new albums in large quantities was the belief that they were being offered a Proustian madeleine, and this would preclude any radical departure from Jacobs’s ideological universe. It would also be imperative to avoid postmodern pastiche. The technological conduit for the reawakening of childhood memories was to be the faithful reproduction of the ligne claire, but this undertaking was not entirely straightforward, given that the distinctive graphic style had itself acquired a new set of meanings. Its capacity for conjuring up the worldview of Hergé and Jacobs had been exploited in the 1970s by the Internationale Situationniste for purposes of political satire, and it had subsequently been appropriated in the 1980s by artists such as Joost Swarte, Floc’h, Yves Chaland, and by Ted Benoît himself in what Lecigne calls an ‘aesthetic of quotation’ (1984, p. 87), which replicates its referentialism only in order to contest the realist illusion through highly self-conscious intertextuality. Benoît and others had also used the ligne claire in their illustrative and advertising work, so that by 1996 it had taken on a certain modish irony. If the legibility of the ligne claire was to be renewed, there would have to be some adjustment of Jacobs’s referential system in order to make the albums credible, and the madeleine palatable, for a late twentieth and twenty-first century readership. The ideological consensus taken for granted by Jacobs could not simply be reactivated in the postcolonial and post-Cold War world into which the new albums emerged, in which counter-narratives had challenged the monologic authority that the original albums could so effortlessly display. Moreover, a cultural





accretion had overlaid Jacobs’s perception of 1950s Britain with a set of visual references taken from cinema rather than from the fantastique literature on which he had drawn. The much-heralded retour of Blake and Mortimer would require a detour and a mythological reworking. In the Van Hamme and Benoît albums, the detour is away from Jacobs’s nineteenth-century literary sources and towards cinematic sources. In order to create the reality effect craved by readers, they use the ligne claire to reproduce a vision of 1950s Britain that would be familiar from films. The 1996 L’Affaire Francis Blake is largely based on Hitchcock’s film The 39 Steps, with an espionage plot in which Blake pretends to have sold out to the enemy in order to unmask the real, highly placed traitor. The Scottish locations of the film are carefully evoked, and there are several knowing references to the original: the spymaster Deloraine has six fingers on his left hand, for example. Hitchcock’s film was made in 1935, but by drawing on it, the authors are still able to offer a representation of Britain less ideologically marked for 1990s readers than Jacobs’s own: the spymaster is a businessman, the Indian servant Nasir has disappeared, and the key role played by a female character who wins Mortimer’s admiration allows for the discreet heterosexualization of the heroes, thereby avoiding any suggestion of a camp send-up. The second Van Hamme/Benoît collaboration, L’Étrange rendez-vous [The Strange Meeting] (2001), moves still further away from Jacobs’s universe. The album is set almost wholly in America, home of the mass culture that was so distasteful to Jacobs, but which is lovingly recreated by Benoît’s drawings of suburban interiors, gas stations and cinemas. Both décors and plot are reminiscent of 1950s Sci-Fi films, the cult status of which is perhaps a filmic equivalent to the fetishism that surrounds Jacobs’s albums (Van Hamme and Benoît, 2001, p. 10). An adjustment in the relative status of Britain and America is made as Blake ruefully notes how much better equipped the American armed forces are than the British. The Sente/Juillard albums are more striking still for their reconfiguration of Jacobs’s universe. The first offers a realignment of Jacobs’s Cold War scenario. La Machination Voronov [The Voronov Plot] (2000) is a spy saga set in 1957. The evil Soviet scientist trying to control the world turns out to be a Stalinist dissident, and the Soviet government acts in concert with MI5, represented by Blake, to defeat him. Moreover, Voronov’s machination has considerable resonance for contemporary readers: he tries to spread a virus which attacks the immune system of its victims.



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It is the second Sente/Juillard collaboration, Les Sarcophages du 6ème continent [The Sarcophaguses of the Sixth Continent] (2003–4), a double album, that will concern us here. Homi Bhabha discusses the notion of the ‘supplement’ in relation to narratives of nation, and it may be argued that this album is not merely added on to the existing series, but comes as a supplement. Bhabha cites Rodolphe Gasché’s claim that ‘supplements . . . are pluses that compensate for a minus in the original’ (Gasché, 1986, p. 211; quoted in Bhabha, 1990, p. 305), and then argues that the force of the supplementary ‘lies . . . in the renegotiation of those terms, times and traditions through which we turn our uncertain, passing contemporaneity into the signs of history’ (Bhabha, 1990, p. 306). The ‘minus’ in the original is, as we have argued above, any acknowledgement that the colonial subjects were other than loyal and grateful beneficiaries of the British imperial enterprise. In the new double album, characters representing an explicitly anticolonial position are included. This does not, however, mean that the albums are going to be opened up to a plurality of narrating voices in quite the way that Bhabha goes on to envisage. The albums have a double timeframe which includes episodes set in India in the twilight of the British Raj and, in this respect, may be likened to the ‘elegiac narratives about the closing of the imperial period’ which, as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have suggested, had come to prominence in Britain in the 1980s, exemplified by the films A Passage to India (David Lean, 1984) and Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982), the former ‘ton[ing] down the cautious anti-colonialism’ of E. M. Forster’s original novel and the latter ‘subtly prettifying the British role’ (Shohat and Stam, 1994, p. 123). Shohat and Stam quote Salman Rushdie’s denunciation of what he sees as a Thatcherite attempt to refurbish the image of empire, ‘the artistic counterpart of the rise of conservative ideologies’ (Rushdie 1992; quoted in Shohat and Stam, 1994, p. 123). Writing twenty years later, in a context in which the antagonisms underlying the imperial imaginary had resurfaced in alarming ways, Sente and Juillard imbue the conventions of the ‘Raj nostalgia genre’, in Shohat and Stam’s term, with a mood of anxiety and a highly Jacobsian sense of the irrational. Equally Jacobsian is the reassertion of Western rationality and, implicitly, imperialist ideology, at the end. We learn in the first volume of Les Sarcophages that Mortimer’s identity as a Western male unified subject occludes a trauma from his past.



Rewriting the colonial narrative


The album is set in 1958, at the Universal Exhibition in Brussels, with which Blake and Mortimer are both involved, but it contains a flashback to Mortimer’s teenage years, presumably about twenty years previously. This flashback doubles as an extraordinary retelling of the narrative of colonization and decolonization. When visiting his parents in India, where his father was an army doctor, Mortimer had fallen in love with an Indian princess, Gita. This love, clearly powerfully sensual even if not consummated, was reciprocated (Sente and Juillard, 2003/2004, p. 22). However, Mortimer was tricked into missing a rendezvous with the princess by his boyhood Indian friend, Sushil, who then stabbed her. Mortimer was forced to leave India both by his own father, furious at the scandal, and by Gita’s father, who told him that she had committed suicide on his account. Unknown to Mortimer, the princess recovered, but was led to believe that it was Mortimer who had tried to kill her, embarrassed by his relationship with an Indian woman and engaged all the while to an English woman. This trauma of loss and guilt returns for the adult Mortimer in the form of nightmares, but also in the form of the strange figure of the reincarnated emperor Açoka, the princess’s father, who, in 1958, is behind a plot to sabotage the Brussels Exhibition by using a cyber-guided Olrik. At the end of the album, it is revealed that this figure is not in fact Gita’s father but the princess herself in disguise, now middle-aged and bent on vengeance against the man whom she believes to have abandoned her. This is an interesting reversal of the rape myths that are often used as allegories for colonization: here is an Englishman who, far from raping an Indian woman, failed to consummate his love for her, and it is because he scorned her (or so she thinks) that she hates him. We understand that a union between the two sweethearts and, on a symbolic level, their countries, would have been possible, had they not both been betrayed by the independence fighter Sushil. It may be noted that early in the flashback, when the young Mortimer first arrives back in India from his school in England, Sushil sends him a note saying, ‘Quit India now, Philip Mortimer. This is not your home any more’ (Sente and Juillard, 2003/2004, p. 12). This is presumably intended to evoke the ‘Quit India’ campaign led by Gandhi, even if anachronistically, since that did not start until 1942. So the independence movement having destroyed the love affair between Britain and India, the ex-colony has turned into a terrifying woman. Mortimer, moreover, will be obliged to kill her, because she is holding a knife against the throat of Nasir, the faithful Indian servant, who has made a reappearance in this album. (We learn that he had left Blake and Mortimer’s service, but is coincidentally



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in Brussels.) The figure of Gita is thus a condensation of the colonial Other and the female Other, both of which had been repressed all through the original Blake and Mortimer series, and both of which now emerge in disconcerting ways that correspond to cultural anxieties of the twenty-first century. Colonial guilt is projected back onto the colonized, and the male anxiety that had been present only in the form of certain obsessive visual images in the original Jacobs albums, now comes to the surface and is embodied as the monstrous castrating woman. Resolution is achieved when Mortimer has no option but to eliminate her.

From Britain to Belgium The Brussels setting of this double album is also noteworthy. In all of Jacobs’s work, only a fraction of one page was ever set in Belgium. When Blake is on a stopover from London to Greece during Le Mystère de la grande pyramide, one panel shows Brussels Midi station and one shows the Metropole hotel, before the hero leaves on the airport bus (Jacobs, 1954, p. 45). The almost complete absence of Belgium from the original series and its return in the new series are both logical. If a seemingly unassailable imperial Britain might well serve as the repository of fantasies of Belgian and French readers in the 1950s, for whom the experience of defeat and occupation was a recent memory, it is perhaps harder to identify with the imminence of post-imperial decline which must be read back into the Britain of Blake and Mortimer from the standpoint of the twenty-first century. Conversely, from that same standpoint, 1950s Belgium can be portrayed as a country on the threshold of modernity. The belated, indeed posthumous, entry of Belgium into the Jacobsian imaginary enables it not to be encumbered by its own colonial history. This is disposed of in a subplot: Belgian involvement in the Congo appears to be limited to the medical programmes directed by Mortimer’s friend Dr Claes, and for the Congolese Mukeba, the supporter of independence, the enemy is the thuggish and racist frontiersman Van den Brand, whose role in trafficking uranium is uncovered by Blake and Mortimer with Mukeba’s help. The independence movement seems, then, to be an affair between indépendantistes and the white settler population. It is not Belgium as imperial power that is mythologized by Les Sarcophages du 6éme continent, but the accession of the country to modernity in 1958. The reality effect is assured through the careful replication of photographic documents from the period, showing the king and his brother at the opening





ceremony of the Universal Exhibition, and the Atomium is promoted to the iconic status afforded by Jacobs to monuments in London and Paris. The cover of Les Sarcophages, showing the Atomium under attack, is, moreover, interesting for its evocation of an anxiety which is particularly insistent for contemporary readers. This dramatic scene cannot fail to recall the panels in Jacobs’s Le Secret de L’Espadon, in which the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben are destroyed by the totalitarian ‘Jaunes’, provoking frissons of terror in their readers. Lenne remembers his own response: ‘Ah, that Eiffel Tower smashed in two!’ (1996, p. 164). In a post 9/11 climate, however, such images are still more powerful. The threat to the Atomium will be averted, of course, and intimations of what Slavoj Žižek has called ‘the frailty of the symbolic edifice’ (1991, p. 36) will be banished, thanks to Blake and Mortimer.

Conclusion In this essay, I have aimed to show that the extraordinary success of the new Blake and Mortimer albums has depended on their careful evocation of the universe created by Edgar P. Jacobs. The technology of memory here takes the form of the replication of Jacobs’s characteristic graphic line, the ligne claire, redeployed by contemporary artists to depict a vision of the 1950s that would be pleasurable for readers, both through the recycling of images of Britain and America familiar from films and, in the case of Les Sarcophages, the recycling of documentation that is part of the national iconography of Belgium as a country defined by its modernity. The credibility of the new albums for readers in the 1990s and the twenty-first century has depended on an ideological disinvestment in relation to the Cold War, and a working through and resolution of anxieties about the colonial Other and about women that were absent or heavily repressed in the original Jacobs albums. I have furthermore suggested that contemporary readers may find echoes, through plotlines and through scenes depicted, of social and political concerns that have arisen only in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Blake and Mortimer have, then, continued to restore order, but have done so in the context of an evolution of the collective imaginary, haunted by a new set of demons.

Notes 1. All translations from the French, including dialogue extracts from the albums, are the author’s.



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2. There was a twelfth album, the second part of Les Trois formules du Professeur Sato [The Three Formulas of Professor Sato] which was completed by Bob de Moor in 1990, after Jacobs’s death in 1987. 3. Interestingly, the cover of Lenne’s book, drawn by Ted Benoît, contains a metarepresentative portrayal of the artist at work. Only Jacobs’s hand can be seen as he sits at his desk surrounded by drawing implements, but a reflection can be seen in the mirror. The idealised self-image of the artist which is reflected back is not that of either of the heroes but that of Olrik.




Writing Back Together: The Hidden Memories of Rochester and Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea Nagihan Haliloglu I lived with that woman upstairs four years, and before that time she has tried me indeed: her character ripened and developed with frightful rapidity; her vices sprang up fast and rank [ . . . ] Bertha Mason, the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bond to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste (Brontë, [1847] 1994, pp. 303–4). Edward Rochester’s forced statement, in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, reads not so much like the incriminating evidence about his marriage upon which Jane Eyre will leave him, but as an expression of relief. After four years, he has at last voiced what was on his mind and hovering, as it were, above his head. Rochester is a wealthy Englishman who hires Jane Eyre to look after his protégée child at Thornfield Hall. He falls in love with her, but their marriage is prevented when Jane discovers that Rochester is already married to Bertha Mason. Rochester, who has been hiding the fact of his marriage, and hiding his mad wife upstairs, is forced to reveal the truth about the ‘madwoman’ from the West Indies to Jane when, on what was to be their wedding day, a cousin of Bertha’s appears and reveals him to be already married. After Jane’s departure, Bertha escapes from the attic and sets fire to the house, causing her own death, and Rochester’s loss of sight. Eventually, Jane returns to Rochester. By letting Bertha set fire to Thornfield Hall, Charlotte Brontë throws open the doors of the attic and yet only lets us glimpse at what it has been hiding. As Aleida Assmann explains, the attic is a metaphorical figure for ‘latent memory’ – a sort of repository which is there and can, by will or violence, be brought to reveal what it stores (1999). 86



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Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) can be considered a prequel to Jane Eyre that not only writes back to it by way of giving voice to the ‘true daughter of an infamous mother’, but also lets Rochester elaborate on his unfinished disclosure, as yet another subject partially silenced and forced to forget by the dominant discourses of the time. In this essay, I propose ‘writing back’ as a technology of memory and a ‘ritual of remembering’ by way of a narrative project. This narrative project is an orchestration on the part of the author whereby memories of certain subjects, especially politically repressed ones, are given expression. I argue that Wide Sargasso Sea is such a ritual of remembrance, where Rhys stages the self-narrations of Rochester and Antoinette (Rhys’s name for Brontë’s Bertha), with a view to providing these characters a space to remember their past together – a past which, in Jane Eyre, is relegated to passages like the above. In Wide Sargasso Sea, self-narration functions as an act of memory, the mechanism through which the ritual of remembering is staged. Remembering in the form of self-narration and in the narrative space of a single novel, I argue, reveals the similarities between the experiences of these two different colonial subjects. In The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin elaborate on Salman Rushdie’s phrase ‘write back’, and say that apart from nationalist aspirations of writers from the ex-colonies, novels redressing the image of the colonies as portrayed by colonial powers also set out to ‘question the bases of European and British metaphysics, challenging the world-view that can polarize centre and periphery in the first place’ (1989, p. 37). Wide Sargasso Sea certainly also questions relations between centre and periphery, and treats what seems to be peripheral in a Victorian text as the central theme. If technologies of memory are the ways in which cultural memory is constructed and deconstructed, then deconstructing the hierarchies between established categories through inventing or discovering hidden memories can be conceptualized as a technology of memory as well. In my reading, it is Jane Eyre that qualifies the memories revealed in Wide Sargasso Sea as ‘hidden’. Accordingly, I will first examine the sort of discursive space Wide Sargasso Sea provides in contrast to Jane Eyre that facilitates the expression of certain memories. I will then investigate the various subjectivities the colonial system brings about, in order to locate Rochester and Antoinette in this set of power relations. In this framework, the particular instances where the character of Rochester ‘remembers’, or narrates events from the Caribbean past, will reveal to what extent his exclusion from the ‘English family’ brings his



Writing Back Together: Rochester and Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea


predicament close to that of Antoinette. A subsequent investigation of the way that intersubjectivity is staged in Rhys’s novel will expose the intimacies occasioned by the resemblance of the experiences and memories of the two subjects. The intimacies of these subjectivities will then be tested out on the way both subjects regard remembering and forgetting, to see how Antoinette arrogates agency in using technologies of memory.

Self-narration and memory Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette, a white Creole in the West Indies, who marries an Englishman and is, after a short and disastrous period of married life, shipped off to England in pretty much an incapacitated state. Although Rhys has renamed Bertha as Antoinette and falls short of naming the husband Rochester, all the other names are consistent and the characters are recognizable from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The figures of Bertha and Rochester, in their embodiments in Jane Eyre, have come to stand for certain archetypes, and their stories, I argue, have become part and parcel of cultural memory when it comes to the colonial past. In their seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have read Antoinette/Bertha as representing the suppressed psyche and sexuality of Jane Eyre: Thornfield’s attic soon becomes a complex focal point where Jane’s own rationality (what she has learned from Miss Temple) and her irrationality (her ‘hunger, rebellion and rage’) intersect. She never, for instance, articulates her rational desire for liberty so well as when she stands on the battlements of Thornfield, looking out over the world (1979, p. 348). As Gilbert and Gubar point out, once the walls of the attic have been torn down to reveal what was inside, the leading female character is entrusted with even more self-confidence, pointing indeed to the epistemological importance of the attic and how it can be used for further self-definition. Thus, the ‘madwoman in the attic’ has, in time and through interventions such as Rhys’s, become proverbial, reigning over a wider semantic field. The self-narrations of Antoinette and Rochester remind us once more that different contexts bring about different practices of self-narrative. In Wide Sargasso Sea, these narrations collaborate to paint a picture of the ‘past’ different to the one that has passed into cultural memory. According to Jan Assmann, a society uses technologies of memory in



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Because memory is made up of socially constituted forms, narratives and relations, but is also amenable to individual acts of intervention in it, memory is always open to social revision and manipulation. This makes it an instance of fiction rather than imprint, often social forgetting rather than remembering. Cultural memory can be located in literary texts because the latter are continuous with the communal fictionalizing, idealizing, monumentalizing impulses thriving in a conflicted culture (1999, p. xiii). If indeed some fictions work towards social forgetting – like the apparent forgetting in Jane Eyre – then others work towards remembering, especially that which has been forgotten in previous acts of memory.1 The latter is what Wide Sargasso Sea does. Rhys’s attempt to introduce the hidden memories of Rochester and Antoinette functions as a rethinking or revising of a specific part of cultural memory, by introducing new self-narratives. Although there is no explicit reference to the act of narration in Wide Sargasso Sea, when we follow the novel to the end, we see that both characters are remembering from across the water, from England. It is crucial to acknowledge this location of remembrance: certain modes of remembering are available only to those who have left the colonies behind. Moreover, as Gillian Whitlock points out, ‘vision of myth making about colonial spaces represents them as sites of longing and ambivalence, held in utopic/dystopic tension’ (2000, p. 179). Rhys’s novel embodies this tension, albeit not in the formulaic sense of allocating the dystopic for the narration of the settler and the utopic for the white Creole. Instead, Wide Sargasso Sea achieves a narrating space where both these characters touched by the imperial project have this tension singly in themselves, manifested in their narrations. Indeed, this mixture of the utopic and dystopic, this unresolved longing for the Caribbean space even when one is there, is what makes these narrations akin to each other. Part of the hidden history I refer to in my title are therefore the memories that Rochester recovers through an utopic mode of remembering filled with longing bordering on nostalgia, a remembering which he categorically despises in Jane Eyre.



order to preserve collective knowledge and experiences and to pass these on to the next generation (1992, p. 80). I read both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea as such technologies of memory, the latter revising the dictates of the former. For as Mieke Bal has argued, individual interventions can and do influence cultural memory:


That Rochester’s account of his time in the Caribbean in Jane Eyre sounded too negative was a concern of Rhys’s, which, she admits in a letter to her editor, is one of the reasons she wanted to write Wide Sargasso Sea (Angier, 1985, p. 26). The secret history that she wants to reveal has to do as much with Rochester’s position as with the perceived madness of Antoinette. Rhys has the following to say about the white Creole stereotype that Jane Eyre has generated: ‘I was vexed at Brontë’s portrait of the “paper lunatic”, the all wrong Creole scenes and above all the cruelty of Mr Rochester’ (Angier, 1985, p. 44). If we give credence to Rhys’s dictum that ‘there is always another side’ (p. 27), then this is also true for the telling of personal history, and no Caribbean history of Antoinette would be complete without Rochester’s account. In Wide Sargasso Sea, this is an account that is more detailed and one in which he is allowed to speak in terms exceeding the confines of the Victorian fictional world of Jane Eyre, where any propensity towards sensuousness must be quelled and denied.2 Indeed, when we consider the various subjectivities staged in the novel, it becomes difficult to brand it as solely the story of the madwoman told from her own side. It is a novel where different voices are staged in an orchestrated way. The first overall narrative strategy that we encounter in Wide Sargasso Sea is the division of the book into three parts of unequal length. The first part is Antoinette’s fragmented narration of her childhood. The second part, of almost equal length, is the story of the short-lived shared life of Rochester and Antoinette. This part begins with Rochester’s narration, switches back and forth between him and Antoinette twice and then ends again with Rochester. The third part, much shorter than the first two, starts with Leah the cook’s narration, but where, in fact, all of the talking is done by Grace Poole, Antoinette’s keeper – ending again with Antoinette’s narration. These changes in narrative voice provide spaces in the novel where the dynamics of the ritual of remembering can be observed. The passage from one voice to another, sometimes staged as a transformation of one subjectivity into another, seems to suggest that repressed memories can only be truly recalled through the narrative force of more than one narrator. It has to be staged, as it were, as a collective act of remembrance. Thus, Wide Sargasso Sea is a writing back, not only on the part of Antoinette but, along with other characters, of Rochester, who is a very particular male subject in the colonial order of things.3 In order to understand the importance of revealing the hidden memories of Antoinette and Rochester in the same narrative space, we firstly need to tease out the power relations between these two characters, to



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spell out the characteristics of the two colonial types that these two characters represent. The term ‘colonial’ denotes all those subjects who are implicated in the imperial system – this use of a generic term, though it can be tricky at times in its inability to express differentiated identities within the colonial system, calls our attention to the fact that the categories such as settler, colonial and post-colonial have come about through historical and narrative transformations. Howells identifies Rhys’s two novels that introduce a prominently West Indian character, Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark, ‘as illustrating the shift from colonial to postcolonial’ (1991, p. 23). This shift, I believe, is particularly pertinent to Rhys’s writing in her attempts to make these various positions and their transformations, or even transmutations, manifest to the reader. Thus, a ‘colonial’ subject can mean any one of the subjectivities in the continuum of settler, colonial and postcolonial. Different identities and subjectivities develop along with historical events, conquests and emancipatory acts. In this string of historical and narrative transformations, I am interested, within the space of Wide Sargasso Sea, in the interaction between the categories of the settler and the colonial.

Performing colonial identities from the Settler to the Creole Settlers are the representatives of colonial power, acting as colonial seeing agents who want to make an inventory of the land in order to rule it effectively. Generally, the term is reserved for the first generation of settlers who are still very much strangers to the colony (Renk, 1999, p. 19). The term ‘colonial’, however, is more liberally used in critical discussions. It can mean the indigenous people, the indentured labour, and the descendants of the settler people, who, after a while, are distanced from the English family, chiefly because, as Kathleen Renk explains, they cannot practise the English language as an institution any more. In the Caribbean, due to the effects of Middle Passage – that is, the transportation of slaves from Africa to plantations in the Caribbean – both the colonizers and most of the colonized are at the same remove from the landscape, but it is now the English language through which it has to be interpreted. Though this may at first seem to favour English both as a social and lingual practice, the practice of an English way of life and sticking to a purely English vocabulary soon proved to be problematic and hindered the settlers’ interaction with their surroundings. The difficulty of acquiring an identifying relationship between self and place,




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After all, why should the free settler, formally unconstrained, and theoretically free to continue in the possession and practice of ‘Englishness’, also show clear signs of alienation even within the first generation of settlement, and manifest a tendency to seek an alternative, differentiated identity? (1989, p. 12). While Rochester can be categorized as the ‘settler’, Antoinette has moved on to this differentiated identity. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn argues that this is the ‘Creole’, which she conceptualizes as transitional (1998, p. 178). This transitional identity, resulting from the distance felt towards both the English language and the landscape at the same time, lets us read one subject’s predicament in the other and is therefore pertinent to my discussion of the collaborative remembering in which Antoinette and Rochester are engaged. Indeed, just as Antoinette performs her identity in this transitional space, so does Rochester. The transformative space of the Caribbean, simulated in the eclectic narrative space of Wide Sargasso Sea, enables the reader to see the changes in these characters. The novel seems to suggest that only through holding a conversation together can the two identities, but especially that of Rochester, subvert the expectations inscribed into their subjectivities by previous narrations. While in Antoinette the settler has transformed into the Creole, in Rochester the colonial seeing agent will transform into something else: if not into the Creole, then into a white subjectivity that understands its limits and admits its awe in the face of something it cannot quite dominate. Robert Kendrick puts the stress on Rochester’s particularity as a white male in the settler role and considers the novel as a space where Rochester reframes and revises his position in the patriarchal and colonial discourses: Though the changes that occur in the characters of Antoinette and Jane have been much noted and discussed, the efforts of feminist readings to chart Antoinette’s and Jane’s rearticulations of their relations to the patriarchal discourses embodied by Rochester have not explored fully the possibility that Edward himself rearticulates and redefines his position as a masculine subject, as he re-examines the ethical implications of the masculine prerogatives that he has enjoyed and abused (1994, p. 36).4



as observed both in Rochester and Antoinette, has been pointed to by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin:

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Indeed, it is through his remembering and narrating in Wide Sargasso Sea that Rochester reconsiders his position as a white male subject. He remembers the unsettling experiences of the settler in the Caribbean wistfully, a remembering which he has tried to relegate to his wife in the attic in the fictional world of Jane Eyre. For Rochester, rearticulating and redefining his position as a settler is possible only by reframing his discourse concerning his marriage – that is to say, through a retelling and fuller narration of the events that took place in the Caribbean. In Wide Sargasso Sea, he gives the lie to his own statements in Jane Eyre concerning his marriage as having been a catalogue of ‘hideous and degrading agonies’ as he recollects the night when Antoinette drugged him with an obeah potion she has procured from Christophine, her now emancipated slave: I had never seen her look so gay or so beautiful. She poured wine into two glasses but I swear it was long before I drank that I longed to bury my face in her hair as I used to do. I said, ‘We are letting ghosts trouble us. Why shouldn’t we be happy?’ She said, ‘Christophine knows about ghosts too, but that is not what she calls them’. She need not have done what she did to me. I will always swear that, she need not have done it (Rhys, 2000, p. 87). We can read the above passage in the register of what Kendrick calls the ‘intriguing representations of how Victorian subjects lived at odds with the dominant cultural narratives of class and gender’ (1994, p. 36). Rochester’s self-confessed complicity in the sensual world of Antoinette can thus be seen as a resistance to the cultural narrative of the prude and civilized white male reining in the wild Creole. This, it seems, is one of the ways in which Rhys re-evaluates the ‘cruelty’ of Rochester, through a recuperative re-articulation of his relationship to Antoinette. What works even more towards an understanding of Rochester’s predicament is the representation of his relationship to his family, and through it, the rules of Victorian British society, especially that of patrilineal primogeniture, according to which the second son is ignored in inheritance. After being informed about Antoinette’s mother’s madness, Rochester writes an imaginary letter to his father, who had sent him to the Caribbean to find himself a rich bride: ‘I know now that you planned this because you wanted to be rid of me. You had no love at all for me. Nor had my brother. Your plan succeeded because I was young, conceited, foolish, trusting. Above all because I was young you were able to do this to me’ (Rhys, 2000, p. 84). But the following is





what he actually writes: ‘Dear Father, Unforeseen circumstances, at least unforeseen by me, have forced me to take this decision and I am certain you will believe that the less you talk to anyone about my affairs, especially my marriage, the better. This is in your interest as well as mine’ (ibid.). Here we see the fate-determining role of the English family and how one’s agency is determined vis-à-vis one’s distance to it, not only in the colonies but also in the ‘mother country’. This is, as Kendrick points out, a re-examination of masculine prerogatives, which includes the passage of wealth to the first-born son. The set of Victorian values that dispossesses Rochester has already dispossessed Christophine, Antoinette’s liberated slave, and through marriage has dispossessed Antoinette too. The remembering in Wide Sargasso Sea, then, brings out experiences that are similar for each of them and that have to be kept silent in Jane Eyre in order to conform to Victorian social discourses. Remembering reveals the intimacies that have taken place between the fortunes of the two characters. Their mutually mirroring predicament is in turn reflected in the novel’s way of representing their subjectivities. Rather than confine the two narrations to different parts, Rhys accommodates them within one, drawing attention to the interaction between the two subjectivities and how they remember. The way we attach meaning to this interaction depends on the way we perceive the political dynamics – as warring or collaborative – of this ritual of remembering. At the start of Wide Sargasso Sea, the agency appears to be all Antoinette’s. The appearance of Rochester’s voice then seems to intervene in Antoinette’s voice. However, I would like to read the proliferation of narrators as more collaborative than warring. The staging of intersubjectivity, Gillian Whitlock argues, is a decolonizing activity, and I suggest that like all decolonizing activities, it is also de-essentializing: If binaries, thinking in terms of origins and authenticity, centre and periphery, and the separation into consistent and homogenous identities are fundamental to colonizing discourses, then the work of decolonization is to return ambivalence and duplicity, and to look to intersubjectivity in cultural formations and texts. All this is implied in ‘intimacies’ (Whitlock, 2000, p. 6). In Wide Sargasso Sea, the intimacies that Whitlock calls our attention to, I would argue, can be best observed at points where the narrator changes. However, these intimacies happen not only through Rhys’s



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narrative strategy of allowing one character to cut in on the narration of the other, but also through letting their discourses, as Trin Minh-Ha puts it, ‘leak into each other’ (1989, p. 94). The adoption of certain aspects of the discourse of the other, for instance, the way they express their feelings for the island, also works towards that end. In both the remembrance of Antoinette and Rochester, the Caribbean remains alien to a great degree. Whereas Rochester claims that he is the stranger to the island, Antoinette speaks explicitly about the similarity of their positions vis-à-vis the island, an understanding that their narratives have already been working towards: ‘I feel very much a stranger here,’ I said. ‘I feel that this place is my enemy and on your side.’ ‘You are quite mistaken,’ she said. ‘It is not for you and not for me. It has nothing to do with either of us. That is why you are afraid of it, because it is something else. I found that out long ago, when I was child. I loved it because I had nothing else to love, but it is as indifferent as this God you call on so often’ (Rhys, 2000, p. 82). Thus, Rhys seems to be warning her readers through Antoinette’s statement that they should not be surprised to find Rochester’s and Antoinette’s voices resembling each other’s. As Minh-Ha suggests, ‘Whether I accept it or not, the natures of I, i, you, s/he, We, we, they, wo/man constantly overlap. They all display a necessary ambivalence . . . Despite our desperate eternal attempt to contain and mend, categories always leak’ (1989, p. 94). Perhaps the best example of this leakage in Wide Sargasso Sea is when Antoinette first cuts in on Rochester’s narration in the second part of the novel. It happens, as it were, unbeknownst to Rochester, while we read a chapter in a book entitled ‘Obeah’ with him. The text trails off with three dots, after which a first-person narration resumes: I did not look up though I saw him at the window but rode on without thinking till I came to the rocks. People here call them Mounes Mors (the Dead Ones). Preston shied at them, they say horses always do. Then he stumbled badly, so I dismounted and walked along with the bridle over my arm. It was getting hot and I was tired when I reached the path to Christophine’s two-roomed house, the roof shingled, not thatched. She was sitting on a box under her mango tree,




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Christophine perceives Antoinette here almost like a changeling, and the reader is startled just as much. The fact that Antoinette is riding the horse and that she distances herself from the landscape, transferring the knowledge of the stones to the locals by saying ‘people here call them’, accommodate a perception of this narration as still being Rochester’s. This effect of one voice transforming into the other, this dexterous staging of intersubjectivity, is what Rhys’s technology of memory achieves in the text of Wide Sargasso Sea. Another intimacy that takes place between the two subjectivities is their approach to and relative agency in engaging acts of memory, pointing to collaboration in their efforts to re-paint their past together. When Christophine suggests that Rochester and Antoinette separate and that Rochester leaves, the following exchange takes place between them: ‘ “She marry with someone else. She forgets about you and lives happy.” A pang of rage and jealousy shot through me then. Oh no, she won’t forget. I laughed’ (p. 102). Rochester’s ‘She won’t forget’ is replete with meaning. His wording suggests that he will not let her forget to whom she ‘belongs’. But it is a double-edged weapon with which Rochester invests Antoinette. For if he lets the memories of the Caribbean live on, latent in Antoinette’s mind, there will always be the danger of them being exposed to the public through unexpected means. Rochester, however, believes that he can assign the remembering to Antoinette and that once he locks her up, there will be no more need to deal with the past: Very soon she’ll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter . . . But others are waiting to take their places, it’s a long, long line. She’s one of them. I too can wait – for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie (p. 112). In this passage, Rochester suggests that it is the white male, however disempowered by the centre, who can use technologies of memory to write or delete histories. But memory is not the exclusive property of Rochester: other subjects can use it to their own ends and the novel



smoking a clay pipe and she called out, ‘It’s you Antoinette? Why you come up here so early?’ (Rhys, 2000, p. 67).

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closes with Antoinette’s narration. She is now recognizably in the attic, and under the care of Grace Poole. She believes that her brother has not recognized her because she has not put on her red dress: ‘I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now’ (pp. 121–2). This ‘something she must do’ is, of course, to ‘remember’. Her ‘I will remember’, then, turns ironic, for whereas Rochester would have her remember whose wife she is, and under whose rule she must live, she will remember instead the injustice and meet Rochester’s violence with her own violence. Thus, remembering does not always work towards making the subaltern remember the hierarchies and the feared violence that has helped put them in place: it can also work in a recuperative way to lend the oppressed agency.

Revising cultural memory Wide Sargasso Sea can thus be seen as a project to revise cultural memory through self-narration – one that requires a certain degree of violence on the part of Rhys, of intruding upon previous plots. This intrusion results in the emancipation not only of the oppressed, but of other subjects who had previously been deemed as sovereign, as in the case of Rochester. With its revised context of power relations, Wide Sargasso Sea provides a different narrative space than Jane Eyre. In the dynamics of this ritual of remembering, the utopic and dystopic are dealt out equally to Rochester and Antoinette: Rochester is allowed to remember scenes of unity as well as of discord in collaboration with Antoinette. Although in the novel Rochester suggests that he will not let Antoinette forget, his self-narrative in Wide Sargasso Sea reveals that he has not managed to forget either. Just as Rochester locks Bertha/Antoinette up in the attic and transfers upon her the business of remembering, so Rhys, in turn, unleashes the hidden memories of Rochester. Thus, Wide Sargasso Sea functions as a ritual of remembering where Antoinette moves, even if partially, from hysteria to historia and Rochester from the stiff-upper-lipped Englishman to someone who has not just suffered but also partaken in passion. In this respect, Wide Sargasso Sea is a transformative space that suggests that if we are to consider the novel as a writing back, then Rochester’s narrative is also crucial to this ritual.





Through the transformative narrative spaces that Rhys provides in the novel, the two subjectivities meet and adapt to each other’s idiom. Their experiences in the Caribbean inform their subjectivity, which we see approach one another throughout the novel. These intimacies are staged, not just to salvage some authority for Antoinette from Rochester, who is conventionally thought to represent the consistent homogeneous identity of the white male, but to give him a more plausible and perhaps redeemable history. The articulation of Rochester’s hidden memories show that one can be victimized by the patriarchal and colonial systems in a variety of ways. The agencies of both Antoinette and Rochester is defined through their distance to ‘the English family’, and this in turn is reflected in how they use self-narration as a technology of memory. As we have seen, in both Antoinette’s and Rochester’s narration, writing or speaking back to perceptions about oneself is made possible by recalling and narrating one’s life story once again. In this re-narration, which is a mode of writing back, the dynamics between the centre and periphery are deconstructed. This is accomplished by questioning the privileges attendant upon certain colonial practices – primarily of ownership and inheritance that revolve around a particular understanding of ‘the English family’. While this institution is an instrument that serves to keep the centre and periphery apart, in the story, representatives from both sides engage in conversation, and the novel, by staging their self-narrations, allows for a space where the discourses of both can be investigated for their variances and their convergences. The fact that the past is reconsidered not just by one but two archetypal characters lends more authority to the text as an intervention in cultural memory. Thus, I argue, writing back in a (post) colonial context offers itself as a technology of memory that is recuperative and restitutive through revealing the hidden memories of not just the disenfranchised, but the colonizer as well.

Notes 1. Jane Eyre can, at the same time, be read as both revealing and concealing Rochester’s past and Antoinette’s history. Critics have shown that both readings are possible; for the literary detective, there are enough passages in Jane Eyre that help an unbiased reader reconstruct a more rounded version of Bertha Antoinetta Mason (as her full name runs in her brother’s letter to Rochester), rather than the paper doll Rochester would have Jane believe her to be. 2. In Jane Eyre, Rochester explains his marriage to Bertha thus: ‘She flattered me, and lavishly displayed for my pleasure her charms and accomplishments . . . I



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was dazzled, stimulated: my senses were excited; and being ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved her . . . Her relatives encouraged me: competitors piqued me: she allured me: a marriage was achieved almost before I knew where I was’ (Brontë, 1994, pp. 302–3). 3. Indeed, the narrations of Grace Poole and Leah the cook also need to be taken into account when considering the novel as a remembering of neglected histories. This essay, however, focuses on the way the two subjectivities of Antoinette and Rochester interact. 4. Kendrick goes on to argue that ‘[t]his question must be addressed if the depth and potential of Brontë’s ethical revision of gendered subjectivity in her “original” work, and the reaffirmation of this re-vision in Rhys’s “supplement” are to be recognized, for the novels of Brontë and Rhys offer intriguing representations of how Victorian subjects lived at odds with the dominant cultural narratives of class and gender’ (1994, p. 36).




6 Liedeke Plate

The best work is a cup that holds the liquid that you are. (Winterson, 2007)

In a celebrated autobiographical essay, the American writer, poet and literary critic Adrienne Rich famously wrote: ‘Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival’ (1972, p. 18). Rich’s words have had a major impact on the feminist imagination ever since they were first written. Frequently cited, they define a key critical concept of feminist practice, lending their force to what would be called the ‘revisionary imperative’: the sense, by the 1980s generally acknowledged among feminists of all plumage, that ‘we must redo our history, . . . review, reimagine, rethink, rewrite, revise, and reinterpret the events and documents that constitute it’ (Gilbert, 1980). Re-vision is a technology of cultural memory. The rereading and rewriting of texts is one of the central ways in which culture builds its literary heritage. Feminist re-vision, rereading and rewriting wellknown texts from a new critical perspective, literally intervenes in the production of cultural memory: it affects the way we read and understand these texts and transforms the way we remember them. For instance, Jean Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre, also discussed by Haliloglu in Chapter 5 of this volume, has so effectively transformed the way we now remember Charlotte Brontë’s nineteenth-century novel of development that most recent adaptations of the novel, whether for television, stage or the big screen, and ranging from novels to films to plays 100



Liquid Memories: Women’s Rewriting in the Present

and operas, all refer to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as part of Brontë’s novel’s subtext (see Rubik and Mettinger-Schartmann, 2007). Producing both the texts that constitute cultural memory and the sentiments and ideologies that accompany it, feminist re-vision has been particularly successful in opening it up to negotiation over which stories are to be included in it, who is entitled to define it, and which meanings it holds. Indeed, putting the old stories together differently, constituting them anew, it successfully demonstrated what Marita Sturken sees as memories’ most valuable insight, which is ‘the stakes held by individuals and institutions in attributing meaning to the past’ (1997, p. 9). In this essay, I propose to look at feminist re-vision as a technology of memory whose impact on the cultural imagination has altered. Drawing on the notion of a memory culture we are in the midst of today, which first emerged in the 1970s and has been developing since to reach its apogee in the 1990s and beyond (see Nora, 1996; Huyssen, 2003; Radstone and Hodgkin, 2006), I argue that in a culture as obsessed with the past and as saturated with memories as ours, the very means of cultural memory production is itself affected by this memory surplus. This essay, then, is based on the premise that Western culture’s relation to the past has changed. It submits that if, as Richard Terdiman writes, ‘memory has a history’ (1993, p. 3), so do its technologies. How memories are produced, shared, passed on and given meaning is not stable but changes over time, as both the social frameworks and the media of memory change too. In particular, I suggest, women’s rewriting as the remembering differently of a culture’s so-called classics in order to project a feminist future does not work in the same way and to the same effect as it did thirty-five years ago, when Rich first articulated the concept of re-vision. I therefore start by delineating re-vision as a feminist technology of memory: a tool designed to re-member the past differently and thus to affect and transform cultural memory, working to demythologize its central texts so that out of the revised past new futures can emerge. Suggesting that in ‘liquid times’, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman refers to our present, such tools are implemented to different effect, the second part of the essay turns to Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods to explore mythical retelling as a technology of memory closely related to re-vision yet better adapted to the contemporary liquid condition. Liquid memories, then, is the name I give to those fluid retellings that, far from settling or being settled, bring the past into the present in a movement that remains open to a future in becoming.



Liquid Memories: Women’s Rewriting in the Present 101

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When Adrienne Rich coined the term ‘re-vision’, she formulated a feminist practice of reading and writing that is also a technology of memory that looks back (in anger) in order to look forward.1 Soon to become ‘the emblem of the Women’s Studies enterprise’ (Lourie, Stanton and Vicinus, 1987, p. 3), it is a rereading of the ‘old texts’ that is to open the past to alternative stories, which in their turn would open new possibilities in the future. Firmly wedged between past and future, ‘re-vision’ belongs to historical time conceived as a progressive sequence of events. It predicates social transformation on a notion of progress – of the present as a moment marked by change resulting from the unfolding of time, out of the past and into the future. And it trusts in the value of historical knowledge: the belief that one can learn from the past and put such knowledge to productive use, ‘to imagine a future that serves women better’, as Catharine Stimpson puts it in ‘The Future of Memory’ (1987, p. 263). For as Rich writes: ‘Until we can understand the assumptions in which we have been drenched we cannot know ourselves. [. . .] We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us’ (1972, pp. 18–19). Supplementing history by revisiting and revising its central texts, revision is a tactic of memory, a strategy to redress and reform wrongful representations by remembering differently. Writing is a medium of remembrance and re-vision, a re-writing that inscribes obscured lives into cultural memory, allowing them equal share in the cultural imagination. In this sense, re-vision is a re-presentation that has everything to do with who and what we remember. In particular, it is invested in whose version of the story we remember. Not surprisingly, therefore, a great many re-visions are rewritings of the classics as told from the perspective of one of the ‘marginal’, usually female, characters from the rewritten text. These retrospective first-person narrations include those of many wives – Bluebeard’s latest bride in Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (1979), Job’s wife in Andrée Chedid’s La femme de Job (1993), or Mrs Gulliver in Alison Fell’s The Mistress of Lilliput (1999).2 They also feature many a mythical character – Christa Wolf (1984) has Cassandra tell her story and Margaret Atwood (2005) gives a voice to Penelope – as well as ‘minor’ or secondary characters from well-known, mostly nineteenth-century novels, for instance: Jane Fairfax, the ‘second heroine’ from Jane Austen’s Emma (Aiken, 1990), Mary Reilly, Jekyll



Feminist re-vision

and Hyde’s maid in Stevenson’s novella (Martin, 1990), and Adèle, Jane Eyre’s tutee in Brontë’s novel (Tennant, 2002). Obviously, then, Rich’s ‘re-vision’ has proved a powerful political and ideological tool in the reshaping of cultural memory. Histories have been retold and canonical texts rewritten; counter-narratives and counter-memories have proliferated. Today, indeed, it sometimes seems there is hardly a story left that has not been turned over and told from another perspective, and from The Journal of Mrs Pepys (George, 1998) to novels about Captain Ahab’s wife (Naslund, 1999), Scarlett O’Hara’s mulatto half-sister (Randall, 2001), or Proust’s beloved fugitive, Albertine (Rose, 2001), feminist rewritings have enriched our repertoire of stories with accounts of untold ‘lives of the obscure’.3 These re-visionary narratives have affected and transformed our understanding of the texts they rewrite, unsettling the cultural meanings attached to them. Telling what Molly Hite terms ‘the other side of the story’ (1989), they have also changed how we remember our classics and canonical texts to great effect. For as Rich observes in a subsequent introduction to her famous essay, as a result, ‘[w]hat is changing is the availability of knowledge, of vital texts, the visible effects on women’s lives of seeing, hearing our wordless or negated experience affirmed and pursued further in language’ (1979, p. 34). Multiplying the perspectives on literary history and our so-called cultural heritage,4 feminist re-vision can be seen to rejoin the goals of women’s history as defined by Joan Kelly: ‘to restore women to history and to restore our history to women’ (1976, p. 809). Feminist art, literature, and scholarship have been defined as ‘a means of redressing the official “forgetting” of women’s histories’ (Hirsch and Smith, 2002, p. 4). Their methods, like those of feminist re-vision, have been described as a ‘re-membering’ of women’s histories (Lourie et al., 1987, p. 3), while their purpose has been identified as the undoing of the hegemonic and authoritative version of History (and his story). Characterized as a form of ‘counter-memory’, women’s studies has in fact always more or less directly engaged issues of cultural memory (cf. Lourie et al., 1987; Hirsch and Smith, 2002, p. 3). Contributing to the shift of attention from questions of history to questions of memory, feminism’s critical and artistic practices establish it as one of the social movements that, in the 1970s, worked towards the democratization of history: the opening up of history to ‘all those forms of memory bound up with minority groups for whom rehabilitating their past is part and parcel of reaffirming their identity’ (Nora, 2002, p. 5).5





There is, however, yet another sense in which re-vision contributed to challenging the historian’s monopoly. It follows from what Susan Suleiman describes as ‘the contemporary – and contemporary feminist – insight that the stories we tell about reality construe the real, rather than merely reflect it. Whence the possibility, or the hope, that through the rewriting of old stories and the invention of new forms of language for doing so, it is the world as well as words that will be transformed’ (1990, p. 143). Shifting the attention away from re-vision as the supplementing of past narratives with untold obscured lives, the issue now is no longer simply one of representation (and re-presentation), but about the conditions and possibility of willing new futures into being. Emphasizing the selectivity of all narration – the notion that ‘stories inevitably both obscure and encode other stories’ (Hite, 1989, p. 4) – and the constructiveness of all memories – the notion that memories are ‘reconstructions . . . [formed] from elements scattered throughout various areas of our brains’ (Dubuc, 2002) – re-vision becomes emblematic of the human activity of (cultural) remembrance. Rather than a matter of mending or correcting history, re-vision is as much about memory as about the structures, social, psychological and political, of remembering and forgetting – in short, about the technologies of memory. A productive feminist concept that has affected the lives of many women and men in their relations to stories told and untold, to narrative knowledge and to historical time, ‘re-vision’ can thus be said to have changed not only the ways in which stories, histories and her-stories are told, but also how the past is conceived. Enabling the production of the past as so many small and local narratives, it has contributed to the transformation of our relationship to the historical and cultural past. In the years that saw the development of Rich’s term into a feminist imperative, cultural critics and philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard observed the atomization of History into histories, of grand narratives into petits récits (Lyotard, 1979). Re-vision, I submit, played a vital role in this process. Indeed, the imperative to re-vision served as a catalyst for many re-visionary narratives, from many different perspectives, and in a broad range of domains – not just literary studies and history, but also book publishing and the heritage industry, to name two of the domains of knowledge and cultural production most visibly affected by the so-called re-visionary imperative. Yet, if it has helped ushering in new uses of the past, has it not also contributed to the loss of a sense of the future? Elsewhere, I have argued that feminist re-vision has helped to make the past one of our prime commodities, sold on the cultural market for consumption and profit (Plate, 2008). The question this article



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addresses is: given these multiple senses of the past existing today, what is ‘re-vision’ still to do, as the contours of a return to grand narratives seem to draw themselves on the cultural and political horizon?

As a medium of remembrance that re-plots the past so as to better fit our ideas of ourselves and of our present, ‘re-vision’ has been instrumental in the transformation from a view of history as destiny to a view of the past as a storehouse of alternative possibilities serving to enrich the present but holding no real purchase on the future. Paradoxically yet crucially, retellings, rewritings and other cover stories contributed to extending the logic of consumer culture to the past. As the so-called ‘democratization of history’ turns into what the French historian Pierre Nora terms ‘a new, unpredictable, and capricious use of the past’, the dynamics of present and past are turned around. Today, indeed, and as Nora aptly remarks, ‘What matters is not what the past imposes on us but what we bring to it’ (1996, p. 618). This radical change in the dynamics of present and past can be seen to rely on the notion, so fundamental to feminist re-vision, that any narrative rests on the suppression of other ways of telling the story and that social change will result from telling ‘the other side’. This, of course, implies that no single narrative can do justice and bring desirable changes to all. To begin with, and as Hélène Cixous phrases it, ‘all narratives tell one story in place of another story’ (1997, p. 178). The logic of narrative, however, does not only imply selection and therefore the ‘forgetting’ of alternative versions. It also obfuscates that, in the words of Jeanette Winterson, ‘inside the story told is the story that cannot be told’ (2007, p. 127). Whereas there is always another side to any told story, depending on the time, location and individual situation, versions will be preferred, selected and chosen to match the mood of the day. With the past increasingly being a matter of selection, of picking and choosing, it soon turns ‘ripe for consumption and profit’ (Nora, 1996, p. 625). And so, in a culture in which, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has it, ‘whatever we do . . . is a kind of shopping, an activity shaped in the likeness of shopping’ or ‘is derived from the pragmatics of shopping’ (2000, pp. 73–4), the opening up of history to a plurality of histories and memories in effect becomes a kind of shopping for alternative versions. Let me unpack this a little. As Nora explains it, the social phenomenon of the democratization of history is a historical development concurrent with the temporal one of the so-called ‘acceleration of



Consuming memories


history’, which ‘essentially means that the most continuous or permanent feature of the modern world is no longer continuity or permanence but change. An increasingly rapid change, an accelerated precipitation of all things into an ever more swiftly retreating past’ (Nora, 2002, p. 4). This condition is one which Bauman has labelled ‘liquid’. In a series of books with the titles Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Life (2005), Liquid Fear (2006) and Liquid Times (2007), Bauman describes our present condition as characterized by fluidity. Life is liquid, our jobs impermanent, and our relations volatile. In this context, with everything a matter of choice, shopping around becomes our prime activity: scanning, surveying, comparing and remaining ever on the alert for new possibilities, other opportunities, better offers. What I am arguing is that just as the world becomes full of myriad possibilities, so does the past. Increasingly conjured up for its own sake, ‘the past’ becomes a matter of choice, retrieved and recovered not for its exemplary value, but for what Gilles Lipovetsky terms ‘the emotionalmemorial value associated with feelings of nostalgia’ (2005, p. 60).6 This extension of the logic of shopping to our relationship to the past implies that ‘the past’ gets caught in the cycle of newness, subjected to marketing and consumption, evidently no longer capable of structuring life.7 In the context of this temporal and sociological transformation of life in ‘liquid times’, re-vision increasingly appears unable to serve to revisit the past in order to project new futures. In a world characterized by commercialism and permanent flux, the retelling of well-known stories from alternative points of view becomes part of the shopping, of selecting ever new versions. As such, it leaves the future for all practical purposes ‘inaccessible’, outside the reach of our collective imagination (Gumbrecht, 2004, pp. 120–1). The profound change that has taken place in our relation to the past, then, also has far-reaching consequences for the way we envision the future. As Nora explains, in the past, ‘it was the way in which a society, nation, group or family envisaged its future that traditionally determined what it needed to remember of the past to prepare that future; and this in turn gave meaning to the present, which was merely a link between the two’ (2002, p. 4). Today, however, we stockpile all manner of pasts out of the inability to anticipate the future. The accumulation of different pasts in the present makes that the ‘liquid’ present assumes ‘the structure of a broad present’ (Gumbrecht, 2004, p. 121) that swells to incorporate both the past and the future, which become as it were present in the present. This picture of a present time that absorbs ever more pasts into a broadening synchronous space poses some serious questions for



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women’s writing as re-vision. Indeed, if re-vision becomes a kind of shopping for alternative versions, how is one to project a better future out of it? And if one no longer learns from history – if the model according to which ‘one learned from history . . . no longer works’ (Huyssen, 2003, pp. 1–2) – how does one avoid history repeating itself? Winterson’s novel The Stone Gods (2007) addresses precisely such questions, thereby presenting itself as an eminently suitable locus for the exploration of women’s rewriting in the present. The Stone Gods, indeed, compellingly poses the question of our responsibility towards the future, showing it to be inscribed in the present rather than to be reached for out of the past. Framing the obligation to remember and to retell in terms of oral traditions of storytelling and mythmaking, it suggests mythical retelling as a technology of memory fitting to the liquid present condition. Having established a short history of women’s rewriting and a context in which it functions (the liquid modernity of consumer memory culture), I therefore now turn to a reading of The Stone Gods in order to illuminate how the novel articulates the moral imperative of cultural remembrance today. Subsequently, I will elaborate on the notion of myth as an open form of retelling more adequate to the present liquid condition, responding at once to the need to remember and the necessity for an engagement in a dialectic of past and future, ideology and utopia. In The Stone Gods, indeed, the future is perpetually on the horizon. First represented in the world of Orbus, a seemingly near-future of rampant consumerism, technological advance, total state control and impending ecological catastrophe, it then returns in the apocalyptic post-atomic world of Wreck City, the surplus world of Tech City that resembles Orbus but takes place 65 million years later. Both Orbus and Wreck City are dystopian worlds satirizing our own. Their resemblances suggest that, as Karl Marx notoriously had it, ‘History repeats itself’.8 They also suggest that history as progress is a myth, caught in the cyclical return of ‘the same old story’. Speaking of the future as one of our own making, these worlds also represent futures resulting from a failure to learn from the past and an inability to imagine the future as other than more of the present. Shown to be the consequence of a cultural lack of appreciation for books, literature, history and the imagination, the repeating worlds of The Stone Gods formulate a scathing critique of our liquid times. They also present a powerful intervention in myth’s relationship to historical time and in the dynamics of the present to the literary past and to imaginable futures, showing history to be, in effect, the future anterior of what the past will have become.




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Winterson’s novel is ostensibly about ecological disaster resulting from consumerism, warfare, our formidable capacity for producing waste, and the lure of technology as an instrument of domination. It is also, and perhaps foremost, about the stories – indeed, the myths – that sustain contemporary society. One of these myths is Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century novel of a shipwrecked mariner who by dint of his labour survives for twenty-eight years on a desert island, the last four years in the company of Friday, the native who becomes his servant. Robinson Crusoe is usually read as a myth of civilization as progress, fuelled by radical individualism, a Protestant work ethic, and the accumulation of capital. In Robinson Crusoe, the potentialities of the individual find their realization in the conquest of the environment and in the subjugation of the native subject. Myth and the retelling of myth play an important role in Winterson’s fiction. Her novels frequently reference and rework culturally central texts. In fact, starting with her self-representation as a little girl ‘just beginning to enjoy a rewrite of Daniel in the lions’ den’ with Fuzzy Felt in her autobiographical first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985, pp. 12–13), Winterson’s narrators regularly show a concern with storytelling that is also and foremost a concern with the retelling of the classics of Western civilization as a way of inscribing oral traditions of storytelling into the writing of literature. Retelling is evidently central to Weight (2005), a recent novel that not only retells the myth of Atlas and Heracles, but also takes retelling as its theme. Its leitmotif, indeed, is the phrase ‘I want to tell the story again’, and this ‘recurring language motif’, as Winterson calls it (p. xiv), speaks of narrative desire as desire for re-narration, for repetition and myth’s return. An inaugural rewriting in Canongate’s series The Myths, Weight explicitly reflects on myth’s relationship to history and the individual life, countering the view of myth as destiny with myth as multiple telling and choice. In this context, retelling becomes the means to the end and an end onto itself. ‘That’s why I write fiction,’ Winterson explains towards the end of Weight, ‘ – so that I can keep telling the story. [ . . . ] Always a new beginning, a different end’ (p. 137). In The Stone Gods, Winterson echoes, rewrites and recreates the very male and masculinist myth of Robinson Crusoe, a novel that, Ian Watt pointed out half a century ago, ‘seems to fall . . . naturally into place with . . . the great myths of our civilization’ (1951, p. 95). Allowing the myth to interact with the narratives of history, The Stone Gods



Futures past

both repeats the myth and remythologizes it. The distinction between demythologizing and remythologizing, which I derive from Laurence Coupe (1997), serves to distinguish mythical retelling from feminist revision. The difference can be explained as follows: feminist re-vision, operating in the mode of typology, works towards closure; appropriating the story it rewrites for alternative ends, it aims to demythologize it, explaining it away and substituting another story for the one we used to know.9 In contrast, mythical retelling taps into myth’s radical potential for open-endedness. Traditionally, myth is a particular kind of story: an oral story that presupposes retelling, needing to be told and retold to achieve the status of myth (Kirk, 1974). Myth works according to the principle of repetition with a difference, implying ever further retellings. It can thus be seen to have some kind of built-in reproduction mechanism that makes retelling and rewriting an inherent part of it. This inbuilt narrative dynamic ensures that myth is never fixed but is in permanent flux, changeable and changing with every telling, which makes it particularly suited to the spirit of the present, ‘liquid’ age, adapted to its fluid character yet retaining a sense of futurity. Mythical retelling is the fluid encounter of the individually lived life with the told story, the liquid memory inscribing the individual with the collective – or, alternatively, allowing the collective and cultural memory to be impacted by the individual. How, then, does Winterson’s The Stone Gods exemplify women’s rewriting as remythologizing? As I have already pointed out, The Stone Gods revolves around repetition: the repetition of the same mistakes – or, as one of the characters puts it, ‘A repeating world – same old story’ (Winterson, 2007, p. 49). A fictional world made of possible worlds, the novel is, in fact, itself a repeating world. It is divided in four parts, each situated in a different time and place, yet each leading to ecological disasters, all of them caused by a culturally sanctioned masculine drive to domination, colonization and conquest. These parts are linked through repetition, citation and recurrence, and by centring on a protagonist of the same name (though not always of the same gender). In the first part, entitled ‘Planet Blue’, Billie Crusoe is a recalcitrant female citizen of Orbus, interested in history, the past and the natural life, living on a farm, and refusing to subject herself to the high-tech life of Orbus with its ‘womb-free’ births and ‘genetically Fixed’, forever younglooking people. To get rid of Billie, she is put on the starship that is sent off to explore the newly discovered Planet Blue that is to present humanity with a second chance and the possibility of beginning again. On this ship, called Resolution in remembrance of the one commanded





by the British explorer James Cook, Billie falls in love with an artificially intelligent and stunningly beautiful robot named Spike. Their story comes to an end as Planet Blue is prematurely destroyed by the miscalculations of the crew’s captain, who meant to kill the dinosaurs living there but instead ruined the entire planet. This, we eventually learn, was 65 million years ago. In the second part, entitled ‘Easter Island’, Billy Crusoe, now male, is shipwrecked on Easter Island in 1774, left behind during Captain Cook’s second voyage of discovery in search of the mythical Terra Australis. On Easter Island, ecological disaster results from trying to appease and worship the island’s Stone Gods. As the last of the trees is felled, leading to the total destruction of the island and its inhabitants, Billy falls in love, this time with a marooned Dutchman named Spikkers. The third part takes place ‘Post 3War’ – post-Third World War. In the imagined near-future of an apocalyptic post-atomic world that follows ‘the brutal, stupid, money-soaked, drunken binge of the twenty-first century world’ (p. 164), Billie is now an employee of MORE-Futures (MORE is the name of the global company that rules post-Third World War) working on the Robot Spike (now only a head). Walking out of the gardens of MORE-Futures, Billie, with Spike in a sling, gets lost in Wreck City, a Blade Runner-like final frontier on the edge of Tech City. There they are taken in by Friday, a former economist with the World Bank, who offers them shelter in his book-lined shack. Eventually, on the disused Lovell telescope, they pick up a signal from the past that turns out to be the chronicle of the first Billie Crusoe’s arrival on Planet Blue, a planet described as ‘strikingly similar to our own planet, sixty-five million years ago, with the exception of the dinosaurs, of which we have no record on Orbus’ (p. 202). Crucial for Winterson’s treatment of the Robinson Crusoe theme is that she evokes the myth and the worldview it sustains but does not actually go back to the myth itself to set it correct. Neither looking back nor entering the old text from a new critical direction, Winterson does not simply demythologize Robinson Crusoe to show it to be about colonialism, capitalism and conquest. This is probably because this is received knowledge: we all know that already. Instead, she challenges its place in contemporary culture – its ways of sustaining the contemporary worldview, its function as dominant ideology – a challenge to our way of treating the world she frames as a repetition of the hubris of Robinson Crusoe and his like. It is, then, on this point that The Stone Gods differs significantly from the feminist re-visions I evoked earlier, for rather than working in terms of closure or as the fulfilment of a (feminist) promise,



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it addresses re-narration as possibility. Formulating a feminist critique of contemporary culture, the repeating worlds of The Stone Gods also show history as teleology and as progress to be itself a myth, caught in a cycle of repetition and return. Instead of buying into the myth of history as leading to more (and ‘MORE’), the novel seems to suggest, we need to ‘trust . . . in the very power of myth to change and, in the process, to change us,’ as Coupe puts it, ‘to maintain the interaction of myth and history’ (1997, p. 189), starting with the interaction of myth with our personal histories.

Myth and memory Myth, then, is not only about its ‘eternal return’, as Mircea Eliade had it, its coming back, again and again, whether in the same or in a different form. Nor are its literary uses confined to what T. S. Eliot once called ‘the mythical method’, which he defined as ‘simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (1923, p. 483). In contrast to such a use of myth as ‘manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ and thus attributing an archetypal, unchangeable quality to the (fictional) world it literally inscribes, myth here is taken to be defined by its capacity for change, for adaptation and transformation. Already in Weight, Winterson explored the possibilities of mythical retelling by weaving her personal story into the fabric of the myth. This, of course, is how myths are lived; in many oral traditions of storytelling, myths are told in the first person (Young, 1983). As used in The Stone Gods, myth is not about its meaning for the individual, but for collective, cultural identity. Nor is it, as a technology of cultural memory, about repeating worlds and repeated stories. Instead, it is about its being set back in cultural orbit, its being put back in circulation. And in this re-circling and recycling, what matters is its encounter with the individual subject’s life-story. This movement of myth’s return as rewriting is explicitly stated in what we might call ‘the book within the book’ episode in Winterson’s novel. The episode is based on an actual event.10 On the London Tube, a reader finds the manuscript of The Stone Gods and starts to read it. The anecdote, which Winterson works into her subsequent version of her novel, connects the individual lived life to the return of myth. For as she weaves the story of her own adoption into this line of The Stone Gods, Winterson also brings in the reader as rewriter and reteller. Theorists of reading have been telling us that picking up the text and reading it is





the act in which the fictional world is actualized (Ingarden, 1973; Iser, 1980; Calinescu, 1993), potentially to be inscribed with one’s own story, for as Billie points out, ‘The pages are loose – it can be written again’ (p. 203). As the interfacing of the personal story and the returning myth, reading, retelling and rewriting constitute the encounter or intervention that is to prevent the world repeating itself. The writer, however, can only try and create the conditions for this encounter to happen. As Billie explains, it was she who left the manuscript there, ‘A message in a bottle. A signal. But then I saw it was still there . . . round and round on the Circle Line. A repeating world’ (p. 203). The metaphor of the myth on the Circle Line, orbiting London’s metropolitan life and waiting to be picked up and actualized in reading, retelling and rewriting, suggests myth is a story that holds the possibility of change. Retelling myth temporarily opens up the narrative to a new future as potentiality while linking up to the past as already there. Thus, mythical retelling enables us to think of change outside of historical teleological time. This is evidently not the same as to say that every new retelling becomes assimilated to some mythical origin or merely repeats it. Instead, what I here propose is not to conceive of myth as oriented towards a past it (re)actualizes, but rather to see it as a particular kind of story and storytelling that, by its very nature and definition, implies change and transformation in and through retelling. As Coupe points out, ‘All myths presuppose a previous narrative, and in turn form the model for future narratives. Strictly speaking, the pattern of promise and fulfilment need never end; no sooner has one narrative promise been fulfilled than the fulfilment becomes in turn the promise of further myth-making’ (1997, p. 108). Myth as ‘permanent possibility’, to use Coupe’s expression (1997, p. 100), is in fact repeatedly underscored by Winterson. Her novel Weight, for instance, develops the metaphor of ‘the book of the world’, speaking of ‘all the stories [being] here, silt-packed and fossil-stored’ (2005, p. 6). This thought is echoed in the last sentence of The Stone Gods, a self-quotation that reads: ‘Everything is imprinted for ever with what once was’ (2007, p. 207). There is a difference of emphasis, to be sure, between the notion, central to Weight, that the stories are there, ‘waiting to be written. Re-written’ (2005, p. xiv) and the notion, central to The Stone Gods, that ‘the universe is an imprint’ (2007, p. 87). Indeed, in The Stone Gods, this imprint, this already written – and written on the body of the universe – is conceived in terms of memory and forgetting – of forgetting the lessons of history, yet of remembering that there once was a pristine place. As Billie muses: ‘Perhaps the universe is a memory



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of our mistakes’ (2007, p. 87). And there is a change of scale, moving from myth-making as world-making to the retelling of myth as constituting a universe, that is, as constituting an entire system of worlds. It is, then, in this shift of emphasis and this change of scale, in the selfreflective movement of mythical retelling as the remembering of myth and the forgetting of history that The Stone Gods most powerfully intervenes in the discussion about what retelling can do in liquid times. The repeating worlds inside the novel evidently prove myth to be a narrative mode particularly appropriate to the fluid and ever-shifting mixture of history, memory, and fiction that presently make up our various versions of the past and of the future. At the same time, the universe totalling all these repeating worlds represents a conceptual system that seems the fictional equivalent of that contemporary liquid modernity capable only of assimilating more pasts into its ever broadening present.

Conclusion In this essay, I have argued that as we witness the collapse of past, present and future under the temporal regimes of modernity, memory changes, and with it, the technologies of memory. With the loss of historical time as the linear unfolding of time, out of the past and into the future, more cyclical or circular modes of understanding time are called for. To this end, I proposed an exploration of myth as a viable and productive successor to women’s rewriting as re-vision. As I suggest, mythical retelling as a re-narration that brings the past into the present while remaining open to future retellings is better adapted to the liquid modern condition than rewritings that work to demystify and demythologize. Also, it does more justice to the counter-memorial impulse of women’s rewriting as a feminist technology of cultural memory: its open character implies the possibility for retelling, not to substitute one story for another, but to hold in potentiality many and varied meanings and modalities of telling. As Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Stone Gods illustrates, women’s rewriting as mythical retelling projects the possibility of new futures that are not just the repetition of the same old story, but serves to inscribe futurity as perpetually present in potentiality.

Notes 1. In her introduction to the issue of College English on ‘Women, Writing and Teaching’ featuring the papers presented at the MLA Forum on ‘The Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century’ and including Rich’s ‘Writing as Re-Vision’,




2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

Technologies of Memory in the Arts Elaine Hedges notes ‘the anger – healthy, constructive anger – that the writers . . . express’ (Hedges, 1972, p. 2). In her collection of poems The World’s Wife, Carol Ann Duffy gives a voice to many wives from history and myth (Duffy, 1999). ‘The Lives of the Obscure’ (1938) is the title of an essay by Virginia Woolf. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf already breaks a lance for rewriting, saying, ‘It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about the shelves for books that were not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that they should rewrite history, though I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why should they not add a supplement to history, calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impropriety? For one often catches a glimpse of them in the lives of the great, whisking away into the background, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear’ (1993, pp. 41–2). For a critical discussion of the term ‘heritage’, see Stuart Hall’s ‘Whose Heritage? Un-settling “The Heritage”’ (1999/2000). Nora, in fact, speaks of a shift of meaning that he deems dangerous, observing that ‘what we today call “memory” – a form of memory that is itself a reconstruction – is simply what was called “history” in the past’ (2002, pp. 4–5). This ‘emotional-memorial value’ is, of course, central to the so-called experience economy – an economy that, as its theorists Pine and Gilmore (1999) have argued, is geared towards producing not goods and services, but memorable experiences. ‘The more we summon up historical memory and dramatize it, the less it structures the elements of ordinary life,’ Lipovetsky writes (2005, p. 61). Marx’s famous aphorism is in fact a misquotation. The opening sentences of ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ actually reads: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’ (1978, p. 594). In typology, the rewriting announces itself as the fulfilment of the rewritten, as for instance in the New Testament’s rewriting of the Old (see Auerbach, 1984; and Coupe, 1997, pp. 106–8). The event was reported in a BBC News story on 8 March 2007: http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6430775.stm.



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Part III


Recalling the Past





Introduction: Recalling the Past

Contemporary cultural practices invoke the past in a more or less conscious attempt to make the past present. The essays in this part of the book look at objects and performances of cultural recall. As we mentioned in the main Introduction, artistic representations re-present the past, making it present again. In this part, then, we focus on ‘the presentification of the past’ (Gumbrecht, 2004, p. 123) as it manifests itself in, for example, childhood toys, photography or art. The point here is that objects and performances of cultural memory recall and adopt the past as part of the present, or as Antze and Lambek put it: ‘Memory acts in the present to represent the past’ (1996, p. xxiv). According to Mieke Bal, these acts of memory raise the question of agency, ‘of the active involvement of subjects . . . who “do” the remembering’ (1999, p. xv). The essays in this part trace the dynamic involvement of subjects in the process of making the past present again in the cultural domain. Acts of memory have a function in the construction of identity, whether it is a personal or a more public form of identity. As Frances Guerin argues in Chapter 9, photographs of a dictator such as Hitler can function as propaganda in the making, by representing a conscious construction of the public image as a weapon in the struggle for political dominance. On the other end of the spectrum, childhood toys may help to retrieve forgotten, often happy, personal memories of individuals and thus assist in the refashioning of their personal autobiographies, as Elizabeth Wood describes in Chapter 7. The old toy evokes a past time and makes it tangible; it is as if we could touch, feel, and smell it once again. Likewise, in Chapter 8 Marta Zarzycka demonstrates that the memories of artists such as Frida Kahlo and Alina Szapocznikow become public acts ‘of commemoration, of testimony, of confession, of accusation’ 117





(Antze and Lambek, 1996, p. xxv). In creating a dialectical relationship between painful experiences and the representation of those experiences in paintings or sculptures, the artists are capable of producing continuity over discontinuity. The cultural shaping of memory into narrative, visual or theatrical forms thus takes on a performative meaning, which both underlines and displaces the fragility of memory. Whether the acts of memory are personally or collectively motivated, the tangible objects or performances make the past present. The weathered toy, the painted scar in a painting, or the photograph of Adolf Hitler all create an image of time that carries a certain experience. Memory is thus shown to be made of lived time. Perhaps the acts, objects, and performances of cultural memory can be understood as a defence against the cruel progress of time. Recalling the past is then a conscious act to ward off the fragility of recollections. In tracing the technologies of memory in different forms of cultural practices, the following essays testify to the power of memorial agency. The articles in this section show how memory constructs different aspects of identity, moving from the more personal to the more public level. In Chapter 7, Elizabeth Wood explores the notion that objects and material culture serve as a medium to access a shared understanding and cultural memory of childhood. The analysis examines the implication that toys have in creating the collective memory of childhood in twentieth-century American culture and the effects of cultural norms in constructing and reconstructing narrative experiences of childhood by children and adults. The cultural memory of childhood is linked to the presence of objects from childhood, whether in personal collections, or in those in the general public. In Chapter 8, Marta Zarzycka explores art as ‘memory work’ by delving into the question of how visual art can recall and narrate pain. Pain, seen as the intersection of lived experience and the memory of it, is the tool for retrieving the memory of flesh. She analyses how artworks can effectively account for traces of remembering pain or trauma, and at the same time mediate the appropriation of pain for the viewer. Zarzycka shows how art functions as a technology of memory of pain and trauma in the work of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow. In the final chapter in this section, Frances Guerin focuses on the contemporary recycling of photographs of Hitler in his ‘oratory poses’, the so-called Rednerposen. She claims that recontextualizations of these rare photographs reveal little about the photographs in their original



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context and everything about our own anxiety over how to remember the traumas of the past. The recycling of the photos in magazines, exhibitions and films creates new memories for the historical present, but forgets or erases the past through decontextualization. Guerin argues for the importance of retaining at least the traces of the original images through complicating the relationship between past and present, the photographs and their representation, in a new time for a new audience.



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7 Elizabeth Wood

Introduction The National Toy Hall of Fame at the Strong Museum in Rochester, New York boasts 38 toys that have achieved national significance and longevity and are part of a collective American memory of childhood. The hall of fame includes some of the most well-known toys of the twentieth century: Barbie and GI Joe, crayons and Play-Doh, games such as checkers and Scrabble, Lego, teddy bears, and many more. Toys such as these, selected for their iconic nature, illustrate the dominant cultural values, definitions and expectations of childhood in the United States, particularly in the late twentieth century. These objects are a technology of memory, serving as a medium to symbolize and express the concept of childhood for many adults. The meaning of these artefacts is reinforced in the wider culture through the constant construction of childhood through individual and collective attitudes, behaviours and memory. Toys may be the most obvious symbols of childhood, but these are not the only artefacts that mark the meaning or experience of youth. Everyday objects from childhood can serve as a technology of personal memory. A recent example is that of Christian Boltanski’s Favorite Objects (2000), an exhibition that includes images of 264 beloved possessions of schoolchildren at the Lycée Français in Chicago. Though no one category constitutes more than a quarter of the objects displayed, at least 35 of these are surprising to the adult eye. These objects include: a lava lamp, licence plate, calculator, ceremonial sword, decorative plate and a globe. In my own research on adults and the objects of their childhoods, I found a similar mix of the expected – baby blanket, teddy bear, book, and doll – along with a surprising array of household and other objects including an ice-cream scoop and a tablecloth. Clearly these objects can 120



The Matter and Meaning of Childhood through Objects

help better define the role of objects as a technology of memory and a meaning of childhood. In countless exhibitions, books and in the media, favourite objects from childhood stimulate discussion ranging from the political to the philosophical. When viewed through the lenses of anthropology, sociology, history and, of course, material culture, the meaning and context of these objects – whether toys or other mementoes – express both a personal and collective memory of childhood. I begin this essay with an exploration of this technology of memory by examining childhood objects using examples from my research. Next, I present a broad definition of collective memory. Then, I suggest ways in which toys link the two ideas in American culture and end with some reflections on the ways in which the artefacts of childhood reconnect adults through memory. Through all of this, the persistence of these objects and artefacts of childhood help people reinforce their sense of identity and personhood, and break through the commonly held detachment of childhood.

Biographical objects, identity and personal memory As Gaston Bachelard notes, objects are a ‘material testament to who we are, where we have been, and perhaps even where we are heading’ (1968, p. 4). Over time, everyday objects can become familiar things that create emotional and physical responses which invoke past experiences (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000, p. 110). These objects become a mediator of memories; they act like a mirror reflecting who we were and who we are. Proust was well aware of this phenomenon. He writes: ‘Objects retain something of the eyes which have looked at them . . . a thing which we have looked at in the past brings back to us, if we see it again, not only the eyes with which we looked at it but all the images with which at the time those eyes filled’ (1927, p. 284). Accordingly, a person can see and remember their childhood through an artefact – a technology of memory. Artefacts from childhood serve as contributors to the collective memory, but many are also part of a personal narrative. These objects anchor the storylines of personal narratives and function as representations of a particular time and space of childhood. The discourse on the social construction of identity and age relationships emphasizes the constitution of the self in context of experience and the social construction of childhood. In this sense, identities are influenced by how people tell their stories and how they interpret their experience through particular



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objects or artefacts. Hoskins calls these ‘biographical objects’: these are metaphors imbued with self-definition, markers of history, experience and relationships (Hoskins, 1998, p. 7). Biographical objects focus on our relationships to time, delimit the concrete space that defines an individual, and demonstrate the user’s everyday experience. Articulating the personal meaning of objects in the biographical sense shapes an understanding of the deep connections between artefact and subject rather than the broad collective meaning and memories of childhood. To understand the value of this technology of memory, there must be recognition of the biographical objects as contextual and specific to certain people, places and experiences. The things people keep have as much to do with who they are, as does the influence of any book, toy or person they might encounter in their childhoods (Fleming, 1996, p. 7). The stories and the objects of childhood represent an account of life’s experience. Such objects stand in for important messages and interactions and can keep the memory of strong and powerful experiences. As material objects, they represent the intangible concepts and ideas that cannot be explained except through language and experience. For this reason, the objects help keep those experiences alive in the mind. In research documenting the meaning of objects, the theme of identity consistently appears (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981; Whitmore, 2001; Wood, 2005). The object becomes a mediator, as well as a tangible metaphor, of experience and of memory (HooperGreenhill, 2000, p. 115). In particular, toys and other objects of childhood become elements of socialization and, in part, create a sense of self, or a sense of destiny (Sutton-Smith, 1986, p. 214). Sutton-Smith defines these idiosyncratic artefacts as toys of agency. A personal memory, more than a collective memory, develops in relationship to and through identification with these objects (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981, p. 53). Working within an aesthetic framework, along the lines of Dewey (1934, pp. 83–5) and Jackson (1998, pp. 28–32), and taking into account the extrinsic and intrinsic qualities of the artefacts, I believe there is another meaning of the object that illuminates the connection between the object and the subject’s sense of being in the world. This meaning of the object is made through the interaction of context, experience and the relationships between the object and the subject (Wood, 2005, p. 36). The following brief examples help to illustrate the personal meaning applied to the object that is unique and situational and one that evokes a deep sense of identity. These abstract references are what provide us with access to the meaning and memory of childhood. The



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objects mediate the temporal, spatial and ritualized experiences of childhood and demonstrate some of the ways in which objects function as a technology of memory. Each person’s story is a rich and complex definition of identity and life’s experiences. These examples describe each subject’s recognition of the object in preserving or containing some part of their identity.1 Anne’s tablecloth contains the signatures of family members from four generations. Each member has signed the tablecloth during the holiday meal each year since the 1950s, and later it would be embroidered by one of the women in the family. To Anne, the tablecloth serves as a metaphor for making her place in the world, both literally and figuratively, by being present at the holiday table and by signing her name on the cloth. The memory of the holiday table and the act of signing the cloth brings Anne into the real, solid world. The permanence of her embroidered signatures evokes her presence in time, for all time. She says: One of the biggest senses of loss of not being home at Christmas was knowing that I wouldn’t be able to sign the cloth. That it wouldn’t be just that moment that I wouldn’t be there, but forever I wouldn’t have been there. Mariam shared with me a novelty chewing-gum holder given to her by her father. It is a gilded catcher’s mitt mounted on a piece of ceramic, and says ‘Mariam’s Gum’. Though it appears small and insignificant, to Mariam it is extremely important to her sense of self. She says: It’s priceless, it’s a treasure, it’s just a part of me that, that you know, if it broke and I had to throw it out, you know it’s just a thing, but still, it’s very meaningful and I would hope that I’d pass it down . . . This is really representative of who we were and who I am now. Sarah came to me with a painting that she made at the age of four. The framed, tempera-paint self-portrait hung in her mother’s house for many years. She recognizes that this particular painting helps her connect her life together. As she told me: I think almost everything that I keep is about memory and continuity, it’s not letting go of your past. Or not wanting to. Whether it’s part of your memory, it’s saved there and you can see it, it fills in those gaps.




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I brought that book with me because it also represents a lot of who I am, and who I have become . . . as an adult I think that this thing should matter, because it would be nice to say that this [book] had a history to it, but it doesn’t have a history, the only history is me. David recalled a set of books and dice used in role-playing games. He continues to play these games with a group of men he has known for over twenty-five years: I have more concrete memories about times that I spent with my friends doing role-playing games than I do of much of the rest of my childhood . . . This game has endowed me with unique traits that I enjoy, and every time I use this twenty-sided die, it reminds me of that. In each of these examples, the object functions as a mediator of the subject’s identity and memory of childhood. The objects richly describe a sense of self, of personal value, and of documenting life experiences. Particularly important is the object’s continued presence in the subjects’ adult lives. These objects are still part of their daily lives and help them connect to the memory of childhood on a regular basis. A second prevalent theme marking objects as technologies of memory is the connection to time (Whitmore, 2001, p. 59; Wood, 2005, pp. 67–75). Identity can only be created retrospectively, and saved objects represent an aspect of time which links to the subject’s memory (Freeman, 1993, p. 9). Subjects in the research consistently recognized themselves in a timeless relationship between the object, their childhood and their own lifetimes. Equally important is the recognition that they cannot determine when the object came into their lives, rather ‘it has always been there’. They define this as a sense of continuity or consistency of their identity, as well as of their relationship to the objects. Many of my subjects commented on the fluidity of time when reflecting on the object from their childhood. Again, some examples.



Laura Jean presented a number of childhood objects including a tattered old book. As she explained the meaning of the book, there was a clear indication that each item represented some aspect of her personal life rather than of the broader world. Perhaps trying to rationalize its importance, she felt it should have a significant provenance, in her words a ‘history’. As she explained:


When I hold the ice-cream scoop, the house is right here around us. The feel of this ice-cream scoop, the look of it, transports me back pretty much completely into my mother’s kitchen. The counter is right here, the stove is over there. I’m at the table. I’m in it. I’m in the kitchen. I can smell things cooking, and I can see my mother. It’s very immediate. Katy, a young woman in her mid-twenties, talks about a baby blanket made for her by a grandmother. The blanket shows signs of wear and many repairs. Much of the original fabric is faded, but still intact, showing a patchwork of gingham that echoes the farmlands where she grew up. Katy sees the blanket as a map of her life: I really hated it when people would say I had to get rid of [my blanket] because I was getting older. I didn’t understand why getting older meant you had to give up something you loved. [. . .] But I kind of like the idea that you can hold on to something and it might change forms, sort of, but that there’s [sic] still pieces of the original, still there. In all of these instances, it is important to recognize that the relationship between the subject and object is perceived as unchanging. The effects of time in these situations are not clock time, but lived time and a lived relationship to the object. While the world around them changes, the subject’s relationship with the object does not. This helps to maintain a sense of identity. The artefacts of childhood create a technology of memory that links identity and time. As a biographical object, the meaning relates to personal relationships, development of identity, and lived experiences. In short, the object’s context and the experiences with the objects make all the difference. The biographical object clearly demonstrates a personal memory, and, I argue, a meaning deeply connected to individual rather than shared identity. Toys, like other artefacts, as material culture, carry assigned meanings. But these meanings can shift according to personal, social or cultural contexts. Often toys, especially those inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame, represent a broader meaning of childhood rather than a personalized view. The collective memory, then, is one that is drawn out of a social and cultural context of childhood.



Jen has an ice-cream scoop that reminds her of summers with a close friend and making egg crème floats. Her story suggests the visceral connections between subject and object. As she describes:

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Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton suggest that artefacts act as socializers and organizers of people (Csikszentmihalyi and RochbergHalton, 1981, p. 21). In the same way that we use objects biographically, as a culture, we use the object as a technology to transmit and mediate memories of childhood past, present and future. The objects of childhood are entwined in the social fabric, but we cannot as children articulate their meaning or experiences in the language of adults. The objects from childhood help to construct the collective memory and meaning of childhood. Artefacts of childhood – namely toys, but perhaps the numerous everyday objects discussed earlier – become a medium to communally understand and reconstruct the meaning of childhood. At any time, these artefacts can evoke a meaning of childhood even if the object is not among those with a personal connection. These are the type of objects shown in the Toy Hall of Fame. In this manner, the artefacts could be defined as ‘universal’, continually viewed as young, fresh or new (Hoskins, 1998, p. 8). These are the things one would expect to see when talking about childhood objects; these are the artefacts that help most people remember childhood. Beginning in the early twentieth century the concept of play and the use of toys became solely the domain of children (Cross, 1997, p. 14). As a result, the collective understanding of childhood reflects only a certain age range marked by extensive play with toys. The collective memory of childhood in American culture is one that reinforces the ideals of innocence and imagination, and something left behind as a person grows older. In this manner, toys are the domain of childhood; childhood ends once the toys as cast aside (Hall, 1909, ch. 5). Paradoxically, while Americans believe that they cannot return to their childhood or youth, they also fear the idea of growing old (Chudacoff, 1989, p. 6). The collective memory of childhood in American culture is one that reinforces the generalized ideals of innocence and imagination (the ideals which enable an entry into the Toy Hall of Fame), not necessarily the distinct experiences and relationships that help us develop or create our identity. The notion that once a person leaves childhood, he or she can never return was fuelled in the early part of the twentieth century by the emerging definition of adolescence as a distinctly different phase in human growth (see Hall, 1909). This definition included ceasing to use toys and other objects already collectively understood as part of childhood. Added to this were the influences of industry and technology, and



Collective memory of childhood


Childhood’s toyland Wonderful world of joyland Wouldn’t it be fine If we could stay there forever more ... Ooh, toyland, toyland Wonderful girl and boyland Once you leave its borders You can never return again (MacDonagh and Herbert, 1903) This idea of a childhood left behind is reinforced so often in popular culture that the symbolic importance of objects from childhood blends seamlessly into the fabric of our lives. Without a strong biographical connection to the objects, most of the personal memory is lost. The collective memory simply places these artefacts into a variety of broad narratives to the extent that people usually see past any personal connections to childhood. A notable example of this is the movie Citizen Kane, summed up in one word, ‘Rosebud’. The dramatic tension of the film centres on the reporters discovering the meaning of Rosebud. The viewer is in on the secret; they see and experience the meaning of a sled, called Rosebud, a biographical object of Charles Foster Kane. Because the sled, as sled, is part of a collective memory of childhood, it is dismissed from having significant meaning. By the film’s end, the reporters are desperately seeking anything to make sense of Kane’s last words. The closing camera shot includes the following description: [Thompson] picks up his overcoat – it has been resting on a little sled – the little sled young Charles Foster Kane hit Thatcher with at the opening of the picture. Camera doesn’t close in on this. It just registers the sled as the newspaper people, picking up their clothes and equipment, move out of the great hall (Mankiewicz and Welles, 1941). Though right under their noses, the sled, as part of the collective memory of childhood, is dismissed in its entirety. It was not expected that



the roles expected of children during this time (Cross, 1997, p. 14). By the early 1900s, the distance of childhood and related memories were popularized in song. Consider some of the lyrics from the 1903 musical Toyland:


a sled could have such significance to a grown man of Kane’s stature. The collective memory does not always evoke personal meaning, and yet this is a critical component that helps create the collective meaning. There are reasons to attend to these childhood objects as a technology of collective and personal memory. The collective memory of objects seeks a continuity and sameness of our childhoods in a way that will link us to others (James, 1993, p. 141). This affect leads towards varying degrees of nostalgia toward childhood. The culture holds up collective artefacts as a way to mediate and define childhood, perhaps to trigger personal memories. The collective memory often construes these objects as artefacts of historical significance (Fleming, 1996, p. 38). Personal memory generated through biographical objects brings to the foreground representations of particular events through time, as well as personal experience and circumstances and the feelings associated with those events (Bruner, 2004). What remains is an effort to make sense of the connections between the personal and collective memory in relationship to the artefacts of childhood.

Toys as a technology of personal and collective memory The concept of toys as material definitions of the meaning of childhood ultimately led to the social constructions of age in America (Cahan et al., 1993, p. 195). Although toys are not the single most defining objects of American childhood, their social and cultural meanings are completely intermixed with the concept of childhood. This provides a place to begin to understand the relationship between these objects and the collective memory of childhood and how they serve as a technology of memory. The early part of the twentieth century marked a change in societal views of the life of children, their growth and development that translated into new methods of teaching, parenting and indulgences (Chudacoff, 1989, p. 48). This paralleled the mass production and development of toys and parenting guides. Equally important to this shift were the changing perceptions of childrearing in which parents were, and are still, encouraged to provide toys that promote educational and skill development. Furthermore, this cultural construction of both child and toy, later amplified by the use of television to market products, reinforced a concept of children as fundamentally different (Cross, 1997, p. 149). Adults increasingly lost their understanding of the way their children play; toys and other objects designated for a child audience created a fantasy world no longer accessible to adults.



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As described above, adults tend to have specific memories of their own childhood, yet often place them in opposition to the collective idea of childhood. Baxter suggests ‘adults use toys as a means of defining age, gender, and social class as a mechanism for delegating tasks, behaviours, and attitudes’ (2005, p. 42). As adults reinforced the construction of childhood, this built up a mythology of childhood as a fictionalized, and certainly idealized, narrative conception of that period of life. In part, this is because childhood itself is a referential framework seen only as the past. The experiences of adults mixed with the collective objects of childhood in American culture, like those in the Toy Hall of Fame, represent middle-class idealism and the enduring promise of innocent and happy childhood, perhaps another twist on the ‘American Dream’ (Steinberg and Kincheloe, 1997, p. 16). A result of this is that a majority of the broadly defined artefacts of childhood represent a somewhat limited view of the experiences and meaning of the experience of childhood. The definitions of personal memory and collective memory, as discussed above, share a general construction of the relationship of time, space and self. Where the collective memory and related objects of material culture suggest a generalized, mythologized sense of childhood, the biographical memory and its objects, drawn from the same cultural milieu, share an intimate, personal definition of our lives. The element of time, childhood as the past, creates a felt distance between adult and child which further places childhood within this mythology (James, 1993, p. 81). Adults seek to identify themselves in relation to the broader childhood concept, one that in American culture consists of happiness, freedom, imagination and innovation.

Reflecting the meaning of toys and other objects The overarching, collective memory of childhood, manifested primarily through the technology of toys, is created outside of our own experiences. In short, the collective memory is simply a ‘toy’, and in particular, one that is decentralized and fragmented in our identity. It is merely a brushstroke to suggest the memory. Yet, when personalized and interpreted from individual experience, the object becomes more than just a toy. Embedded within the object are distinctive memories and experiences with relationship to others across time. With this notion of toy as a technology of memory, there must be ways to enable the personal memory to exist in concert with the collective definitions of childhood.





The challenge to this phenomenon is that without a personal connection, the memories are never quite right. Through objects of the collective memory, the childhood referenced is in the indefinite, as ‘a childhood’, or in the most delusional sense, ‘The Ideal Childhood’, one rich with imagination, innocence and a variety of toys. When looking at an object in a museum, the viewer should be stimulated to recall their own version of the toy in addition to the broader collective meaning. The viewer should be able to make a distinction that makes the object personal, something from ‘my childhood’. Because the collective meaning of childhood is in the past, it makes it even more difficult to access personal memories and meaning, particularly without objects to mediate the experiences. Winnicott’s (1971) theory of the transitional object is an apt way to conceive of these artefacts as a way of both holding on to childhood while at the same time moving on. At the personal level, these objects can mediate the unknown future and preserve the known past (Gibson, 2004, p. 288). At the collective level, one must consider whether the same type of mediation is possible. Childhood is culturally shaped and defined, and ever-changing. In the twentieth-century United States, a childhood is supposed to be full of happiness, innocence, freedom, creativity and imagination. Yet the themes of individual childhood refer more to identity development, a sense of security, and specific relationships. It is no wonder that the collective memory is in conflict with personal memory. Individuals strive to recall personal memories in the spirit of the collective memory. But it does not always work. Every object from childhood is unique and specific to each person’s life and relationship to others. When made an integral part of a person’s life, the object takes on special meaning and purpose. The objects are irreplaceable; they cannot be substituted.

Conclusion It seems there is no escaping the rule of toys as part of the collective memory of childhood – it is embedded in the cultural definitions of what it means to be a child. Whatever the role of toys in the future, or the past, childhood in twentieth-century American culture is clearly marked by their presence and their message. As a technology of memory, toys and other objects from childhood can help us access meaning and memory. The problem is that the artefacts in the collective memory are de-personalized. The distance that this creates adds to the widening gulf between adult and child, fuelling a mythology and a shared definition



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of childhood. As the artefacts in personal collections cease to become important, they are generally discarded. It is only when reconnecting with the artefacts that people often wish to re-engage in their own personal narrative. The resulting effect is a memory created collectively that provides only a generalized and somewhat idealized conception of childhood. When the artefacts can help make connections to personal narrative, the memory can be truly felt. This means a direct and personal connection to the artefact is necessary. Childhood artefacts in the collective memory are time-bound gateways to another part of adult lives, whereas biographical objects and personal memory provides continual access to experiences and meaning. Collectively, adults use toys as markers of age distinction and to differentiate the roles and relationships of children. The mythology of childhood and of toys in particular leads to the development of an inaccessible time, one filled with expectations of freedom, imagination and innocence. Yet, when looking closely at personal collections of objects from childhood, there is a distinctly different story. A personal memory of childhood is aided by biographical objects that evoke the relationships and experiences that shape identity. This means that a direct and personal connection to the artefact is essential. As a footnote to the opening example, the Toy Hall of Fame had a new entry in 2005. It is, quite wonderfully, an object of both personal and collective memory of childhood. This recent inductee is the cardboard box. Though it seems terribly bland next to Barbie, the cardboard box seems to evoke many more personal memories for me than does Barbie. This is a perfect example of the lingering thread of personal experiences borne out in the simplest of things we can all collectively remember as part of childhood. It is perhaps why these artefacts matter.

Note 1. Of the 28 respondents to the research call, only three were male. This lack of male involvement is not uncommon; Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton suggest that ‘the selves of men and women represent different sets of intentions or habits of consciousness: They pay attention to different things in the same environment and even value the same things for quite different reasons’ (1981, p.106). This suggests that the ways men relate to their objects, or have saved objects from childhood, may be based on different reasons from those of women. It is not unreasonable to conclude that while men do keep things from their childhood, they are not initially preoccupied with the meaning or reflective nature of the objects when given the opportunity to talk about them.




8 Marta Zarzycka

Painful iconographies Pain is overly present in the visual culture at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Bombarded with images of pain, acutely aware of the traumas going on in every corner of the globe as brought to us through the media, we are no longer able to think of pain as something private that emerges from within. Due to the everincreasing medialization of images of war and trauma, pain can no more simply proceed from a body of an individual without ever engaging with another body. The private and the public aspects of pain, together with the processes of narrating and witnessing, have reached hyper-visibility in the forms of paintings, photographs, television and the Internet. In the light of contemporary discussions of recovered memories and the limits of representing catastrophes of humanity, one might face various questions and uncertainties: are we actually able to revoke the pain of others, rather than that of only one person – the self? Shall we, after Susan Sontag, argue that, ‘No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain’ (2003, p. 7)? And, if there is no ‘we’ when confronted with suffering and agony, should we talk about sharing and transmitting the memory of pain at all? Despite those hesitations, critics such as Hal Foster (1996) and Roger Luckhurst (2003) claim that a veritable trauma culture seems to be thriving in the art world, seducing academics just as it seduces the public.1 Popular culture deals with trauma and pain as much as contemporary art does. Singularity and intimacy merge with collective forms of representation and remembrance. Seltzer (1997) argues that the private and public registers collapse in the case of pain and trauma, resulting in a pathological public sphere, that is, prime-time dramas, hospital series, Tarantino-style 132



The Force of Recalling: Pain in Visual Arts

films, and the recent emergence of the gorn genre (horror and porn in one). The ‘traffic in pain’ signifies the economic exploitation of a visual exchange where the weak, the sick and the Third World are objects of scrutiny and scopophilic practices.2 In ‘wound culture’, as Seltzer calls it (1997, p. 3), the very notion of sociality and connectedness, exhibition and witnessing, is operative through the body that is torn open and on display for viewers. The (memory of the) damaged body of an individual becomes a public spectacle, satisfying the audience’s attraction to atrocity.

The memory of pain Although contemporary Western culture allows for representations of pain mostly within a medical context, associating pain with doctors and surgeries, or media coverage of war and natural disasters, art is another privileged discourse where pain can manifest itself. While theorists of trauma and memory have so far paid relatively little attention to visual arts (Bennett, 2005), a substantial critical literature on trauma, memory and representation has nevertheless increasingly involved art theory. Although pain and trauma have been traditionally declared beyond the scope of language and as not conforming to the codes of representation (Bal, 1999; Felman and Laub, 1992; Van Alphen, 1997), art may nevertheless engender ‘new languages of trauma that proceed from lived experience’ (Bennett, 2005, p. 24). The iconography of pain, particularly embellished by heroism, martyrdom, sacrifice and courage, has a long tradition in art history, from the godly revenge on Laocoön to the Crucifixion and the maternal mourning in the Pietà. Visual arts throughout the centuries aimed at transforming pain from a private sensation into a public spectacle. Fleshly experience has been turned into cultural and theological heritage. The visual icons such as devotional imagery were the most effective means of storing and retrieving memories, triggering an affective response among Christians (Bennett, 2005). From etchings of Goya (Los Caprichos, 1799; Disasters of War, 1810–20) to a seventeenth-century devotional sculpture, from videos by Bill Viola (Nantes Triptych, 1992; The Passions, 2000) to the works of Anish Kapoor (Marsyas, 2002), pain has long been penetrating art. Following the Holocaust, artists such as Christian Boltanski, Anselm Kiefer and Eva Hesse have been dealing with both the individual and the collective character of trauma and pain and with the question of how their (un)representationality can be stretched. Also, art engaging with



The Force of Recalling: Pain in Visual Arts 133


postcolonial literature and theory in the 1980s formed a vivid account of past traumas and painful experiences (Bennett and Kennedy, 2003). Art testifies to the fact that pain and memories do not produce a homogenous group of bodies who share that pain (Ahmed, 2004). In presenting two artworks by two different artists, Frida Kahlo and Alina Szapocznikow, I hope to reveal the particularity of painful experience and counter the universalization, and therefore also the commodification, of suffering. The two artworks I engage with, The Two Fridas by Kahlo and Alina’s Funeral by Szapocznikow, can effectively account for traces of remembering pain. Although the two artists come from different backgrounds and different cultures, they both illustrate how remembering pain can be negotiated by the artist herself as well as the viewer. The location, aetiology, and prognosis of each artwork are quite different, but they both constitute a space where the recalling of pain is performed. My aim is to unsettle the memory of trauma conceptualized as a floating, disembodied condition, ready to be appropriated by scholars and the wider public (Bennett, 2005) and argue that the memory system can go ‘deeper’ than cultural remembrance alone. Art presenting painful bodies strongly engages the process of remembering. The original point of pain is transformed through the circulation of images into remembered pain. If memory is a process (Bal, 1999), nothing could be a stronger documentation of that process than an artefact. If memory is about encounters, visual arts are the space of that encounter. Memory is in this case both a finished piece of work and an act of looking. It is my argument that presented art, engaging with both pain and memory – terms that have been stretched out to the point of becoming almost ungraspable – moves our understanding beyond what the fields of medicine, clinical psychology, literary studies and anthropology can offer us. Pain is described as an aspect of clinical conditions, sexual practices, metaphysical rituals, power relations and political acts of repression, but rarely is the reality of the painful body as immediate as in the encounter with an artwork. The concept of pain, with its fluidity and intersectionality, forms an especially useful critical category. Race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, class, disability and other markers of difference do not act independently of one another in the experience of pain. Therefore, the artworks of Kahlo and Szapocznikow should be put in the context of women’s art, where the presence of pain, suffering and trauma is overwhelming. Regardless of the medium or overt context, artworks by women artists have usually been presented as a gendered embodiment



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of the artist in various degrees of exposure, producing meanings for a bodily, gendered experience. Pain and self-violence have been played out differently by many contemporary women artists, including Gina Pane, Marina Abramović, Ana Mendieta and Orlan. Artists such as Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Tracey Emin, Doris Salcedo and Tracey Moffat also engage with the problem of representing painful experiences. Showing the experience of pain fundamentally owned by someone, their art at the same time questions a singular subjective account. While pain is still constructed in popular discourse as overly present but unspeakable (Scarry, 1985), those visualizations may provide usable words and sentences that can work against the silence of pain imposed on the suffering subject. Frida Kahlo (1907–54) has been one of the most widely known artists to convey suffering and pain. Her art shows how the direct experience of the body in pain is always shaped and modified by specific human cultures, religions and myths. She represented the different stages of her painful body throughout her life – pain’s intertwining with medical discourse, its institutionalization, its tendency to turn into a hagiography, its (lack of) sexuality, its loneliness, its violence, and its penetrative force. She demonstrated that the self in pain undergoes many differentiated stages of being and states of transition. At the same time, this self is easily conceptualized as victimized and marginal. In catching and ‘freezing’ her body in different stages of destruction and recovery, Kahlo engaged in recalling and re-assembling her identity through the process of representation. The memory of her body persists throughout her artistic production, forming a testimony of her lifelong suffering, enabling a viewer to remember the artist through different stages of her visual diary. The concept of memory is crucial to the work of Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow (1926–73), a Holocaust survivor who died of cancer while desperately trying to preserve traces of her fading body. Although the presentation of Szapocznikow’s art has often been selective and fragmentary, complying with the cultural silence surrounding cancer in the 1970s, she was the first female artist in postwar Poland to represent her own malfunctioning body. The concept of pain moving between and across bodies, the balancing act between the historicity and collectiveness of trauma, and the intimacy and silencing work of cancer are central to my analysis. I will now trace the constructions of pain in and across internal and external spaces of both the body and the artwork as an object and connect those constructions to the process of self-memorialization and witnessing.




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Most of the two hundred paintings Frida Kahlo produced during her life were self-portraits. Dramatizing the central subject – herself – she carefully chose her settings and directed the stories her pictures told. The constant repetition of her own face might be a way for the artist of memorizing herself. Kahlo began to paint lying in bed, using a mirror to examine her own face and body. Kahlo’s portraits are the record of the physical and mental changes she underwent. They accompany a long series of physical traumas – starting with polio, which Kahlo got at the age of six; a serious accident at the age of eighteen; and finally the amputation of her leg at the age of forty-six and her death shortly afterwards. The accident had a lifelong effect on Kahlo’s body. She was on a bus that collided with a tramcar and was pierced by a metal rod that broke her spine in three places, fractured her pelvis, and dislocated and crushed her leg and foot. No one thought she would live, let alone walk. Her works show a lifelong battle with weakness, pain and disfiguration. For months on end, she was encased in plaster casts to strengthen and correct her spine. The number of operations on her vertebrae and foot – thirty-two in total – is terrifying. Many medical authorities questioned their necessity even during her life (Lindauer, 1999). Those operations marked stages in Kahlo’s biography. They intertwined with good and bad periods in her marriage, provided reasons for travels, and collided with her love affairs. The process of self-representing has served as an effective mode of tracing back the artist’s identity and re-constituting the subject. The Two Fridas (1939, oil on canvas 173. 5 cm × 173 cm, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City) shows two women, both representing Kahlo, sitting next to one another on adjacent chairs and holding hands against stormy skies (Figure 8.1). Facing the viewer, both figures are linked through a system of veins, with their hearts exposed. One of them is dressed in a white Victorian dress, another in a dress typical of the Tehuana region of Mexico.3 The ‘Victorian’ Frida controls the blood flow with surgical clamps; the drops of blood form a decorative pattern on her skirt. ‘Tehuana’ Frida holds a portrait of Diego Rivera, Kahlo’s beloved husband. Painted during Kahlo’s divorce from Rivera, this double self-portrait has been commonly read as the portrait of an unloved Frida (in Victorian dress), and the one Rivera still loves (in Tehuana dress, which he favoured). It has been noted that the face of Frida in Tehuana dress is darker than the other, therefore referring to Kahlo’s dual heritage: a German father and a Mexican mother (Herrera, 1989).



Memorizing the self

Figure 8.1

Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam, 2008

Because the figure in Tehuana dress is not bleeding and her heart is not broken, it was concluded that Kahlo’s Mexican roots were the main source of her strength. However, even Kahlo herself suggested explications of this work that were wider than solely her divorce. The use of the heart, rather than symbolizing unrequited love, has its roots in indigenous iconography. Both faces, in fact, are different shades of dark, representing a social caste once esteemed as the true Mexican. Frida dressed in a European way would be criolla, a Mexican of Spanish descent, whereas the other Frida would be mestiza, of mixed European and Indian heritage (Lindauer, 1999). The Mexican/European split can be thus problematized and therefore cannot serve as the single valid interpretation. The complex problem of the double self-portrait illustrated by The Two Fridas, one of Kahlo’s most famous paintings, implies the construction of





the self in a process of remembering. Eric Cassell, a practising internist who has written widely about the theory of clinical medicine (1991), argues that a subject undergoes a drastic change when falling sick, becoming detached from the image of himself or herself from before the illness. In becoming ill and burdened with pain, the self often finds itself reduced to malfunctioning biological tissue. Kahlo may have performed this repetition and replication of her own body to reinforce the memory of the self in the constant balancing act between illness and recovery. It can also be assumed that the multiplication of her own body serves as an outward projection of herself. In psychoanalysis, projection is understood to be a defence mechanism that allows the subject to come to terms with certain impulses by attributing them to someone else. One might argue that Kahlo captured the process of projecting symptoms, complaints and heartaches onto the body of another, while at the same time keeping them all. Kahlo performs here both the role of the suffering subjects and its witness, the giving and the receiving of painful testimony. Acknowledging the painful body of another (in what might be a reciprocal process) is simultaneously the process of recalling one’s own pain. The witnessing of the self’s own fading creates the place from where such experience can be spoken. It is through these processes that this double self-portrait became a tool to fight against the limitation of silence imposed by pain and disability. Another important factor referring to the concept of memory is Kahlo’s use of space and its connection to the process of recalling. The artist presented how pain made her reorganize not only her relation to the past and its re-enactment, but also her lived spatiality, its location and positioning. Remembrance and commemoration often take the form of a spatial practice, such as medieval practices of pilgrimage, today’s sites of destruction turned into museums and, most recently, cyberspace, where the actions of the player ‘bring to life’ many fragmented stories (Smelik, 2003). Those lieux de mémoire (Nora, 1996) might not only be monuments – they can also be our bodies. We remember ourselves in certain places, just as we remember certain places in ourselves. Elkins (1999) uses the concept of proprioception, the body’s internal sense of itself, one of its fundamental senses, situating the body in a space and a given space within the body. To a certain extent, we can see that sense of a body as a memory. Simultaneously, Elkins points out that proprioception is often disturbed in the presence of acute pain. The structure of the The Two Fridas, where the space in which the body exists is split into two, might illustrate that. Having a heart outside one’s



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body might change the sensation of a heart altogether; feeling with two hearts, one may feel twice as much heartache. Space and time have always been crucial correlates of any context of corporeality. As Grosz explains, space is not simply an empty receptacle, independent of what it contains; ‘rather, the ways in which space is perceived and represented depend on the kinds of objects positioned “within” it, and more particularly, the kinds of relation the subject has to those objects’ (Grosz, 1995, p. 92). Space is transformed according to the subject’s affective and instrumental relations with it. In the normal course of events, a subject is able to open up the space around it continually, changing its location freely. In the experience of pain, the character of lived spatiality changes, just as the senses of sight, smell, taste and touch take on different significance. Space becomes restricted and unpredictable; to reach across it or to move from one point to another costs much more time and effort. The self-mapping of the body changes; the place that hurts often becomes more pronounced than other places on the body. The forces consolidating the self in space and in time crumble (Braidotti, 2006). The space shrinks to a restricted spot; the range of possible actions and developments in space becomes severely constricted. In reading Kahlo’s art, a reinvestigation of the spatio-temporal location of the painful body is necessary. The spatial positioning of the multiplied subject in The Two Fridas is centred on the constant superimposition of the inside and outside of the body. Through the process of externalizing her bleeding and malfunctioning organs, Kahlo stressed pain’s immediacy and the power of its impact. Borrowing motives from Western textbooks of obstetrics, Kahlo literally showed externalized, fragmented, detached organs, tied by a net of veins. She referred to medical procedures, based on ‘processes of removal (incision, cutting, removing and reduction) or addition (inlaying, stitching and injection)’ (Grosz, 1995, p. 34), which altogether alter the body. The relation between the inside and the outside has a long tradition in research on pain; behavioural and clinical studies point to the differences between cutaneous pain, involving skin damage which is easy to locate, and deep pain, which often is diffuse and difficult to locate (Melzack and Wall, 2003). The interchange of bodily notions of inside and outside is equally present in Kahlo’s other paintings. The externalizing mechanism is, for example, visible in Henry Ford Hospital (1932, oil on metal 30.5cm × 38cm, Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico City). The experience of pain here is lifted away from the body into its external attributes, such





as fragments of bone and a foetus. But Kahlo also internalized pain by transferring objects of the external world into the body. In paintings like The Broken Column (1944, oil on canvas 40cm × 30.5cm, Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico City), Kahlo’s body is cut open, revealing objects inside – in this case, an Ionic column – transmitting outwards sensory responses to the dysfunctional backbone of the artist. By internalizing pain, Kahlo presented it as inscribed not only on, but also into the body. This could be read as an attempt at a healing process: the technique of visualizing the source of pain (and then extracting it) is nowadays a common practice among cancer patients and has its sources in shamanism and its rituals of ‘pulling’ the pain out of the body (Stacey, 1997). The memory of oneself is in Kahlo’s case a reconstitution of oneself in space, negotiating between the singularity of the memories of pain and their witnessing. Nigro and Neisser (1983) contrast two ways of remembering personal experiences: to ‘see’ the event from one’s perspective as in normal perception, or to ‘see’ oneself engaged in the event as an observer would. Several factors contribute to the determination of perspective – for example, the memories becoming older and more faded – but Nigro and Neisser also report that many subjects claim they can change to another perspective at will. That phenomenon of ‘snapping out of oneself’ can clearly be seen in Kahlo’s painting. Memory is linked here to the conception of separate selves, where each memory is objectified and bracketed, but nevertheless connected. That split between self and other is how the viewer learns about the painful condition.

Mourning and remembrance Pain is often experienced as absolute and timeless. It does not register as a changing product of specific periods and particular locations (Morris, 1991), but as an abstract, time-unbound entity. Being in pain is a situation that often excludes direct memory of the past and expectations of the future. My point in this section is instead to present pain as a timeoriented biochemical process, the networking of nerve pathways and bodily reflexes, and as a subjective experience formed by specific minds, senses and cultures. In the art of Alina Szapocznikow in particular the notion of time is almost palpable. The temporal structure of pain in the works of Szapocznikow may be interconnected with her biography. Like Kahlo, Alina Szapocznikow had her share of suffering: she grew up in the ghettos of Poland and in



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Nazi concentration camps; as a young adult, she suffered a serious disease, which deprived her of any prospects of maternity; and finally, she became a cancer patient. Szapocznikow was thus confronted with suffering, pain and the degradation of her body at an age usually reserved for blooming and thriving. She had learned the limits of her body already as a young girl, witnessing the destruction of bodies everywhere around her. Later, in the face of terminal cancer, the artist tried to preserve herself in her art in first unchanged and gradually dramatically distorted shape and form. The body in Szapocznikow’s art has the character of an object retrieved, exhumed and memorized. Szapocznikow’s work is about trauma without explicitly declaring itself to be such. Her work seems a prelude to the art of the 1990s, the decade of cultural obsession with trauma, from Jo Spence’s intimate photographs to the self-evident images of Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas. Her art puts her viewers in touch with an incredible volume of pain – her Holocaust experience, tuberculosis and cancer – and makes them reflect on the violence exercised on Szapocznikow’s body by aggressive medical procedures, the Nazis, and her own failing immune system. Treating pain as a force that fundamentally changes one’s organism and identity rather than removing one from the social sphere, her sculptures present an alternative to cultural and testimonial accounts of remembering. Alina’s Funeral (1970, polyester, cotton, photographs, wood, artist’s clothes, 135 cm × 210 cm × 50cm, National Museum, Kraków) was made after the artist had an operation (Figure 8.2). The sources are silent about the specifics of the surgery, but it was most probably a mastectomy. The artwork is made of shapeless, tumour-like sculptures wrapped in bandages soaked in polyester with clothes and photographs melted into it. It has two zones that are placed against a rectangular black base. The upper zone consists of rhythmically connected tumours with photographs of friends, family and the artist’s dog. The lower zone represents three tumours containing jeans, a shirt and a photograph of the artist, forming one big cluster which could symbolize the dead body. There is some confusion in the distinction between mourners and the mourned. Photographs in the upper zone could represent people who came to the funeral, looking down at the dead body, or they could assume a role similar to angels often placed at tombstones, testifying to the loss and absence of the subject. The process of mourning, explicit in this artwork, is always the process of remembering. One person’s trauma is repeated by another person; the grief of the self merges with the grief and lamentation of another. Alina’s Funeral is a self-portrait in the grave, a very rare iconographic




Alina’s Funeral, Alina Szapocznikow (1970)



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Figure 8.2

motive, possibly made to process her own impending death, and to become available to a viewer as a body to be mourned. Ars moriendi, the theatre-like quality of funerals, is characterized by the artwork’s decorative character performing the role of vanitas. The configuration of the tumours situates the spectator in the role of the mourner, in the present. But the gap between the body of the mourner and the mourned is here breached by playing with sets of oppositions. Each opposition is turned inside out in an endless series of reversals and reiterations: soft and hard, translucent and opaque, controlled and uncontrolled, weightless and heavy, dark and light, frozen and fluid, inside and outside. The semi-transparent mass around the objects makes them appear larger or smaller than they really are, reflecting them differently as the viewer moves. Also, as years pass, the polyurethane becomes increasingly opaque, making the faces on photographs less and less visible for the next generations of viewers. The negotiations of space in the body in crisis are different here than in the paintings of Frida Kahlo, demanding from the viewer a different kind of presence and engagement. The volatility of the represented body is experienced viscerally. The spectator’s sense of the weight, depth, spatiality and interior and exterior of the object and of his/her own body is disturbed and troubled. Alina’s Funeral is driven by a desire to create a testimony that moves beyond the two-dimensional surface of a canvas. One could also argue that through the process of dying, increasing passivity and resistance to stimuli, the body in Alina’s Funeral becomes more present in space, more present to the touch. The notion of heaviness, gravity, thickness are reflected by the bold, massive blocks of sculpture that take up space rather than create it. There is no possible outline of the body as such, but rather its depth, its systematicity and its weight. The working of this installation is explicit in the way it is constructed: it wants to remember, to memorialize, to maintain contact with the subject portrayed. The concept of time is intrinsic to Szapocznikow’s work; it requires time for the viewer to move and walk around it. It is the passing quality of the body that ‘makes’ her sculptures. The concept of the temporality of the body is here modified by its illness. Szapocznikow’s body had lost its integrity long before Alina’s Funeral was made, during her experiences in camps and hospitals. The body is preserved and mummified, but at the same time, marked by the organic vitality of tumours. It reminds one of the major role that time plays in cancer: the tempo of growth, the moment of detection, the periodical character of chemical treatment. The temporality of cancer does not manifest itself here in clock





time by hours or days, but rather in vital terms of growth, replication, vitality and flow. This is reflected in the material that is used, because polyurethane combined with air grows and hardens rapidly. The tempo of work therefore had to be fast, grasping the moment before the chance was lost. That repeated form of a tumour in Szapocznikow’s art evokes the process of cancer as a disease of uncontrolled cell growth, but also as the dynamic repetition of genetic reproduction. While form, regularity, logic, control and a unity of design and function are admirable in biological systems, in cancer all of these virtues are lost to randomly repetitive chaos. The artwork embraces those processes. Sensations such as pain tell us a lot about time; they are the very ‘ “flesh” of time’, often a time that exceeds the time of an individual life (Ahmed, 2004, p. 202). As Cassell (1991) has argued, suffering can frequently be relieved by causing the sufferers to ground themselves in the absolute present. Szapocznikow’s sculpture can in this respect be interpreted as freezing a moment of the life of the body and abstracting it from the temporality of a healthy body. According to Stacey (1997), the narrative structure of illness is often presented as a linear, coherent story; complaints, diagnoses, treatments, recovery and prognoses immediately form a line of events. She calls these narratives, pervasive in popular imagery of cancer cultures, teratologies: the tales of monsters and marvels, the heroic fight and hope for victory. In her artwork, Szapocznikow questions that linearity by revealing the disturbances of temporality and self-perception that result from cancer. The body in cancer becomes connected to a kind of not yet, which is opposed to a linear temporality as seen from a historical perspective (Duden, 1997). The fear of the painful future suppresses a rhythmic, coherent narrative. In the absence of this coherent narrative, what is the viewer to make of these images of trauma, pain and loss which do not easily map themselves onto memories? What Kear writes in describing photographs of atrocities applies here as well: ‘The time of viewing the image moves it backwards simultaneously, constructing a narrative exegesis which positions the body [in the fabric of the image] as both agent and referent’ (Kear, 2005, p. 109). The key to understanding our reception might be the concept of sense memory. Charlotte Delbo (1995), poet and Holocaust survivor, differentiates between ordinary memory, which is connected to thinking processes and words, positioned within an intelligible narrative framework, and sense memory, which is connected to the processes of trauma and its affective impact, without a narrative framework, inscribed in the body and realized through sensory recall.



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Sense memory operates through the body to produce a kind of knowledge in the body of the witness. Delbo compares this memory to the skin of a snake that cannot be shed. The connection between memory and skin, registering the physical imprint of the event, is not new: Deleuze (in Bennett and Kennedy, 2003) employed the metaphor of a membrane to describe a memory made up from different levels of the past that can be inhabited in different times and in different spaces by different subjects. Relating memory to trauma, Ahmed calls a ‘good scar’ the scar that allows healing, ‘but the covering always exposes the injury, reminding us of how it shapes the body’ (Ahmed, 2004, pp. 201–2; my italics). In Szapocznikow’s art, issuing from her scarred, painful body, but also from the longer and broader transpersonal experience of war, sense memory is ever-present, existing beyond a personal or individual experience. Alina’s Funeral is perhaps the artwork where a living subject, full of memories, turns into an object for others to memorize. Memory has here the role in making the most fundamental sense of self possible. Without memory, both the artist and the viewer would be perpetually confined to an eternal present. The memories of others are impressed on the painful subject, making it a work in progress, in which embodiment, memories, interconnectedness, communication and constant exchange play a crucial role (Braidotti, 2002). The sculpture is the chronicle of the artist’s disappearing body, producing knowledge about the passing quality of every body, and preserving the fragility of remembrance.

Affective memories Pain has to be felt by somebody. In isolation, pain ‘intends’ nothing; its passivity and lack of relatedness make it “‘suffered” rather than willed or directed’ (Scarry, 1985, p. 164). Pain, although one of the most undomesticated of human experiences, may construct an empathic agency that connects subjects: ‘In the register of the imaginary the pain of the other not only asks for a home in language but also seeks a home in the body’ (Das, 1997, p. 88). The bodies in the artworks I have discussed are bodies in which the experience and remembrance of pain have been domesticated. My choice to trace pain in artistic production and organize it along the axes of temporality and spatiality comes from the ongoing debate about whether the images of suffering in popular media can corrupt the ability to be compassionate (Moeller, 1999). Pain and torment are often represented as a spectacle, demanding from the viewer a position of either a disengaged spectator or a coward, implying that any other





positioning is impossible (Sontag, 2003). Sontag postulated that the only people with the right to look at images of suffering are those who are able to alleviate it or who could learn from it, the rest being simply voyeurs, whether conscious or not. Learning from pain would be not seeing pain as a result of a mistake, an accident or a crime, but reflecting on the complex mapping of suffering, the privileged location of notsuffering and the connections between them. Those connections would go beyond extending sympathy to war victims, for example, but rather induce a reflection on one’s own positioning in the world where war takes place. Viewers of art and consumers of war images in mass media both have to learn to live with this positioning in an ethical way that is not dismissive or romantic. That might result in forgetting. Rather, one should consider the possibility of re-enacting the past and redeeming what has been understated or overstated. The attempt to represent and interpret images of pain demands not only an ethics, but also an aesthetics of looking. Sontag’s view on watching painful images takes on a new meaning today: the pictures of the writer, taken by her long-time partner and photographer Annie Leibovitz in the months before Sontag died and immediately after her death in 2004, caused much controversy when they were published by The Guardian in October 2006 and in the book A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005, an autobiographical compilation of photographs by Leibovitz. Instead of images memorizing Sontag’s courage and academic distancing from her own suffering, one sees Sontag’s perplexing physical transformation, fear, resignation and sadness in the face of cancer. That could be one of the reasons why many have denounced these pictures as too revealing and tasteless. Pictures of Sontag as she was laid out in the mortuary gurney with the bruises from an IV still vivid on her arms raise further questions about the ownership and appropriation of memories. The problem of positioning oneself when facing the pain of others is crucial when looking at art presenting painful bodies. In art, to say ‘I am in pain’ or ‘I was in pain once’ compels a response. Although an intimate experience, pain involves an ethics of acknowledgement and sharing. It is never simply ‘subjective,’ but rather lived and negotiated at an intersection of bodies. Elkins describes how pain signifies the mode of awareness of one’s body in the very first moment of reception of artwork: Most of the time, in looking at visual art I am concerned with simple things like the feeling of a turn of the head, or an eye that moves



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That has great consequences for a viewer of Kahlo’s and Szapocznikow’s art. In order to gain awareness of the pain of others, one need not be in the body of another, but rather to feel the positioning, the distance, the volume and the surface of this body. Although bodies isolate us from each other, making us into separate entities, in the artworks I discussed the female body constitutes an object where pain reveals itself clearly in a localized, pain-infused space and time.

Conclusion The temporality and spatiality of the painful experience make pain into a force that is not only contained, but also contagious and acknowledged rather than denied. Pain is described by Rilke as ‘abusing our senses and their “dictionary”’ (quoted in Elkins, 1999, p. 1). As one tries to emerge from the momentum of the artwork back into one’s life, the contrast is such that the resumption of one’s life appears to be ‘a hopelessly inadequate response to what we have just seen’ (Berger, 1980, p. 38). That ‘abusing’ of senses, which could serve as one of the goals art takes upon itself, creates new chances for the subject in pain and for the subject witnessing pain. All too often disengaged from the materiality of the body, pain becomes confusion; it is always difficult to theorize clearly about confusion, let alone recall it in an effective way. Art can help convey the memory of pain through the embodiment, materiality and structure of an artwork. In this encounter, the spectator’s understanding of the pain that the artist experienced may, and hopefully will, change substantially. The artworks that I have discussed here can serve as an example, but also as an actualization, of the process of memorizing pain and the transmission of that memory. They do not allude to already existing or archived memories, but are highly constitutive elements of artists’ identities. In addressing artistic practice, my methodological assumption was that we can derive a certain form of knowledge about pain from images; knowledge that is not entirely reducible to cognitive traditions. It is rather the concept of affect that allowed me to structure the reception of Alina’s Funeral and The Two Fridas. Affect, a real-time somatic experience (Deleuze, 1989), addresses the spectator’s own bodily memory, and is therefore able ‘to touch the viewer who feels rather



and focuses . . . ‘Pain’ here is the delicate awareness of the thought of bodily motion, and it is enough to engage the body . . . (Elkins, 1999, p. 23).


than simply sees the event, drawn into the image through a process of ‘affect contagion’ (Bennett, 2005, p. 36). Arguing that artworks representing painful bodies can offer a space where affectivity passes from one body to another, my aim was to show how memory manifests itself in the process. Bennett (2005) argues that affect in art does not operate at the level of simply arousing sympathy for predefined characters, but rather comprises a force of impact going beyond an individual’s ideas of oneself and beyond one’s ideas on morality. In visual arts, affect can be seen as a fundamental component of an interaction between artist, artwork and viewer. Moving beyond predictable responses to a particular narrative scenario, the affect goes further in its power to immerse the artist, the art object and the viewer in a circuit of sensations that ruptures the individual modes of remembrance and selfreflexivity. In using the affectivity of pain, the artworks of Kahlo and Szapocznikow perform the act of remembering. Through that act, pain can be transformed from a self-contained and un-relational occurrence into a self-modifying one. An encounter with an artwork may often be the moment where we, as embodied viewers, realize that the cultural artefact we are looking at is a materialized act of memory performed by the body that had at some point experienced pain. But memories, like artworks, require care. They are archives of feelings, dealing with loss, helplessness, fear and pain, functioning to recover or mourn, but also to prevent dying out and becoming obsolete. It is in art’s power to establish a relationship to the gaps and lacerations in the memory of pain, seeing it not as a state to be avoided at all costs, but rather as a changing force.

Notes 1. Luckhurst traces its origin in the advanced capitalist economies of the West of the 1990s, where encounters with extremities such as birth, death and insanity were usually suppressed. The remembering of past traumas and recalling them has been increasingly present in the cultural discourse since the 1990s, ranging from a great number of war victims’ testimonies, through prime-time hospital shows such as E.R., to what Luckhurst calls pathography – a genre of individual memoirs of illness and trauma. Luckhurst mentions Oscar Moore’s column PWA (Person with Aids) in The Guardian and John Diamond’s cancer columns in the The Times of London in 1997. 2. I take this formulation from the title of the exhibition of press photography Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, held at the Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown MA), 28 January–30 April 2006.



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3. The costume of women from Tehuantepec has been surrounded by a legend: Tehuantepec women were beautiful, smart, brave and strong (Herrera, 1989). The costume is one of the few recurring indigenous representations in Kahlo’s work. It became so integral to Kahlo that sometimes she painted it devoid of its owner, without a body inside (see My Dress Hangs There, 1933, oil and collage on hardboard, 46 cm × 50 cm, private collection).


Photographs that Forget: Contemporary Recyclings of the Hitler-Hoffmann Rednerposen Frances Guerin

In 1926 and 1927, Adolf Hitler and his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, took a series of photographs in which Hitler posed before a mirror while listening to recorded versions of his own speeches. The subject and his photographer were engaged in the search for an image of the master orator. Unlike the proliferation of images of Hitler that were propagated in the 1930s and 1940s, the Rednerposen, or orator poses, were not made with publication in mind. These are images of a Führer in the making; they are engaged in a search for an image not yet found. Not only does the photographic aesthetic reveal a stylistic experimentation that at times exposes the image to be in process, but the subject – Adolf Hitler, the dictator of the German people – is also a work in progress. The Rednerposen are a form of propaganda that seeks to articulate Hitler as the modern, socially integrated leader who is also godlike, beyond human accountability. The photographs declare him to be an ordinary man with an affinity with his people and, simultaneously, a symbol of unity, strength and power. In these images, Hitler’s posture and facial expression, and compositional elements such as the chiaroscuro lighting, present Hitler as transcendent. At the same time, his conservative black suit and the nondescript darkened studio, for example, articulate him as an Everyman, no different from the German people to whom he delivers his message. The Rednerposen are among those images that search for what Ian Kershaw, expounding upon a notion conceived by Max Weber, throughout his work refers to as the charismatic leader (Kershaw, 1987, pp. 8–9). And, of course, they are also images that contribute to the manipulation of power in the service of eventual evil. Above all, however, the Rednerposen are fascinating studies of modern propaganda in the making, not yet ready for distribution. They are studies of a leader who is still in search of his own image. 150



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Interpretation of these images could follow a number of other possible routes. For example, I argue elsewhere that they are portraits of a modern dictator that were to have an influence on representations of political leaders in the twentieth century (Guerin, forthcoming). I have also interpreted the kineticism of Hitler’s performance and the chiaroscuro lighting for their connections to the Modernist discourses that surround the photographs and, by extension, the images’ exploration of the parameters of Modernist photography.1 Alternatively, interpretation could focus on the challenge to the photographic authorship of the well-known photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. This line of inquiry would expose the struggle between Hitler and Hoffmann for dominance over the creation of Hitler’s public face. In his interpretation of the Rednerposen photographs, Lutz Koepnick reads the ‘somatic expressiveness’ of Hitler’s body as reflecting the modern emphasis on speed and mobility, a performance strategy for visualizing power and, in turn, mobilizing the nation. Koepnick’s approach via the performance and masquerade of Hitler’s body as a political polemic to undo bourgeois stratifications is, like mine, validated through recourse to historical contextualization. The same incompleteness, the same status as an image in the making, not only enables these and other complementary arguments and approaches to the Rednerposen, but it also opens them to the possibility of appropriations that have met a number of different, often conflicting, critical purposes.2 In this essay, I discuss the recycling of the Rednerposen in ongoing attempts to construct and reconstruct the memory and meaning of the present moment and its own historical traumas. In that sense, the photographs are a particular instance of a technology of memory. I will focus on two exemplary instances of recycling: the six Rednerposen photographs that accompanied an article in The New Yorker magazine on the ‘Hitler explanation industry’ (Rosenbaum, 1995), and the inclusion of a handful of the Rednerposen in Underexposed, a travelling exhibition on censorship inspired by the non-profit organisation Index on Censorship (2001). Underexposed opened at the Proud Galleries in London, and was accompanied by a publication that subsequently had an American and further British editions (Jacobson, 2002). My examination of these two instances of recycling reveals the distance that we, particularly those of us outside of Germany, now maintain from the Nazi past. Thus, the recycled images open onto a situation in which, contrary to conventional formulations of cultural memory, it is not the fatal impingement of the past onto the present that spawns urgent investigation. Rather, danger and destruction arise from a visible ‘forgetting’ of the Nazi past in re-presentations absorbed by an obsession with their own cultural



Photographs that Forget: Recyclings of the Hitler-Hoffmann Oratory Poses

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Recycling The Rednerposen have been freely, even unselfconsciously recycled. Indeed, they were first brought to public attention through their recycling as part of a comprehensive exhibition of all the Hitler-Hoffmann photos at the Munich Stadtmuseum, curated by Rudolf Herz in 1994 (Herz, 1994). They have reappeared in other exhibitions such as Underexposed (2001), magazines such as The New Yorker (1995), Harper’s Magazine (2002), and in the 2004 film The Goebbels Experiment, directed by Lutz Hachmeister. The Rednerposen can also be found on a number of websites, including www.histoire-image.org, www.unitedscripters.com, and www.seedsofdoubt.com. Given their relative obscurity as archival images, it is not surprising that most viewers only know the Rednerposen in their reprinted form. For to access and consider such photographs in their archival context is the privilege of a few specialist researchers. In keeping with artistic and commercial practices of recycled archival images, the Rednerposen are always recontextualized in their new narratives (Bruzzi, 2000). While the rearticulation of meaning is inevitable, when the subject matter is as charged as a portrait of Adolf Hitler, the consequences can be disturbing. There are undeniably profound ethical dilemmas that appear in the recontextualisation, dilemmas that often stem from the papering over of historical and political detail. To be sure, the discrepancies and complexities of the relationship between the image in its archival and recycled contexts are important. However, the more interesting, indeed the more immediate question that I address in this article is this: How, behind the concern for the presence of the past in contemporary cultural memory, do the recontextualizations expose an indifference to the profound horror of Hitler and the historical narratives written under his direction? Ultimately, this indifference leads to a type of ‘forgetting’ that is the defining trait of these technologies of memory. The majority of recycled Rednerposen were produced in the last twenty years. Why is this? Are we now able to integrate the nightmare orchestrated by Hitler into our cultural fabric, when before it was too close for comfort? On occasion, the recyclings weave Hitler’s image into our own



context, their own cultural presence. It is altogether a new kind of fatality. While critics argue for the importance of integrating traumatic historical events into an understanding of the present, here we have the very opposite (Bal, Crewe and Spitzer, 1999). All exchange between the past and present has been dispensed with in the interests of a cultural validation of the present.

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contemporary narratives, not only of the past, but narratives that focus on the political issues on our doorsteps, as opposed to those that were of concern in the late 1920s. Do the contemporary appropriations, as they claim, underline an increased awareness of responsibility for the Holocaust – especially outside Germany, in the English-speaking world? That is, does the very appearance of the images signal our willingness to confront their existence and the history that lies behind them? By extension, is this gesture of confrontation a measure of our ability to distance ourselves from this moment? Or do the recyclings bring us closer to the past? Are they an indication of our continued fascination with historical events and people in which we see, but cannot recognize, our own reflections? What indeed do they tell us about our relationship to the past? Before turning to these larger issues, I will examine how attempts have been made to integrate the images into the present. In this capacity, I am prompted to ask myriad questions: What is the nature of the process of memorializing enabled by the images? Do they ensure the viewer is alert to the historical significance of the image? Does the redeployment teach us new things about German history? Where is evil in these images? Do we confront evil, or is it obscured by the archival image as curiosity? There is an irony to these images – how does this distract us from the history they tell? Does the new context encourage a fascination with Hitler in the twenty-first-century audience? If so, what are the contours of this fascination? And, most urgently, how does this weigh upon our picture of the crimes that lie behind these images, that is, the Nazi Holocaust? In the early 1980s, Saul Friedländer asked these and similar questions of the recycling of history in fiction films and writings that exhibited a so-called fascination with the magic and myth of Hitler and Nazism (Friedländer, 1984). Friedländer’s questions about the aesthetic spectacles are open-ended and intended to spawn ongoing discussion. Even before Friedländer articulated the questions, critics grappled with them in a less focused way in relation to fictional narratives such as Syberberg’s Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (1978). Questions concerning the reappropriation of Nazi iconography and Hitler imagery also began to be asked thirty years ago. The topic became particularly charged in the 1970s with Anselm Kiefer’s provocative and controversial performance of the Sieg Heil salute in paintings and photographs such as the Heroische Sinnbilder (1969–1993). A leading critic and theorist of these re-presentations of German history, Andreas Huyssen, continued the debate when he questioned whether satire and irony – two modes of discourse also found in recyclings of the Rednerposen – are appropriate ways to deal with such a horrendous moment in history (Huyssen, 1989).





Underlying all of these arguments is a tension between the terror of German history and the intense longing to move through it, and ultimately beyond it. Today, historians acknowledge that the memory of the Holocaust is culture-specific, and its presence in the German imagination understandably holds a different place from that in its British or American counterparts (Kansteiner, 2006). Nevertheless, irrespective of the specificities of cultural context, the questions asked by Friedländer maintain their urgency: even if the tension between past and present is forgotten in the overwhelming urge to understand the present, it is alive subterraneously as long as the rare archival images in their recycled documentary form are in existence. To be sure, the two instances of recycling of the Rednerposen discussed here are of a different genre to the fictional re-presentations of Hitler and Nazi iconography in 1970s Germany. Neither in their publication in Underexposed, nor in The New Yorker, are the images redeployed in the name of art, of historical mourning, or memorial. Similarly, they make no claims to a concern with German history or its representation. These are popular representations – albeit highbrow – that display a certain curiosity as to what might in another context be understood as dangerous, manipulative images. Similarly, a distinction between the photographic realism of the Rednerposen photographs and fictional performances of these same images must also be made. Performances such as Kiefer’s or Charlie Chaplin’s representation of Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940) are fictional re-presentations. Thus, they make no claim to historical veracity and articulate their status as interpretations. By contrast, the redeployment of the Rednerposen is premised on their historical truth, and this claim to authenticity contributes to the fatality of their detachment from the historical past. They are offered as unmanipulated re-presentations of the past and yet, in their particularity as technologies of memory, they pay no heed to the violence of this past. Even more disturbingly, they forget the significance these images once carried in the interests of creating memories of their own, memories of the historical present. If Friedländer’s questions and the fictional re-presentation of Nazi imagery motivate my approach to the recycled Rednerposen, the solutions are sought through reflection on a different form of cultural memory: recycled historical texts and images of the Holocaust. The Rednerposen and other photographs fabricated in the Hoffmann studio in Schellingstrasse have only recently resurfaced from the archive. In the wake of their discovery, these and other images have been redeployed, often uncritically, in narratives that are removed from the



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original historical moment. Images such as the Rednerposen are often re-presented with little or no attribution or explanation. While critics have been examining the recycling of archival Holocaust images and its ethical ramifications for some time now, the reuse of other images from Second World War Germany have been less studied.3 Even though images of Hitler engage with a different set of issues and problems from the depictions of Holocaust victims, to understand them within the discursive framework provided by images of victims makes salient an awareness of their potential contribution to our responsibility to images, to history, and to the victims of Hitler’s crimes. In his formative work on the art and literature of memory, James Young discusses fictional and factual representations of the evil and the violence of the Holocaust. He claims that the question is never whether or not these texts and images should be published or republished, but always whether and how we blindly participate in the exploitation and perpetration of power by publishing and looking at them. He maintains that the concern of historians of Holocaust representation is never the accuracy or truth of the representation and its correspondence to events, but what the consequences are of interpretation, the ‘plurality of meanings . . . these texts generate and the actions that issue from these meanings outside of the texts’ (Young, 1988, p. 4). Questions in this vein may have become well rehearsed in the analysis of Holocaust imagery; however, they have not yet been asked of images such as the Rednerposen and, in particular, images taken by and of the Nazi perpetrator. Despite this silence, over the past ten years there has been an increase in the occurrence of representations of Hitler — especially, use of his image to address issues of a contemporary rather than historical order. It is time, I contend, to examine the significance of these representations4 and, particularly, to examine examples that abnegate their responsibility to the past and its tainting of the historical present. For in these creations of cultural memory of the present, we are becoming amnesiac towards the unresolved past and its ever-present threat to puncture the fragile veneer of the present. The consequences of this pave the way for the repetition of past traumatic historical events in the present moment.

Underexposed Based on an idea by Index on Censorship, the Proud Galleries in London and, subsequently, a publication by Vision On both placed the Rednerposen in the context of a ‘hidden history of the 20th century’, a history revealed ‘through photographs that were concealed, banned





or manipulated’ (Jacobson, 2002, p. 22). The photographs in the exhibition and the accompanying publication were, in short, never meant to be seen. At least, in the section to which the Rednerposen belong, the images were, for political reasons, censored prior to circulation. Thus, the Hitler-Hoffmann Rednerposen find their way into the exhibition on the basis of Hitler’s order to have the negatives destroyed. While any of the dozen speech poses could have been included in the exhibition, the curators chose and cropped five of the most reproduced poses: in one, we see Hitler in profile pose with his fists tightly clenched, the right one raised and pushing toward the power of victory, his gaze intently fixed beyond the left-hand side of the frame, his gestures exaggerated by the harsh frontal lighting which is reflected in the full-length mirror behind him. The gestures and features of both Hitler and the photographs are emphasized to differing degrees in the five Rednerposen. Also significant is the context provided by the other images in the exhibition and publication. Hitler’s image keeps company with, for example, the bloody, distorted face of Allan Lee Davis as he is executed by electric chair in Florida in 1999; a gleeful Nicolae Ceau¸sescu entertaining at home carving an oversized animal while his visitors await their feast; an Iraqi soldier burnt to a cinder behind the wheel on the road to Basra in 1991; frenzied mourners ripping the cloth from Ayatollah Khomeini’s corpse at his funeral in Tehran on 4 June 1989; cannibalism in Stalinist Russia; summary executions of supposed instigators of pro-democracy demonstrations in China in 1989; and the remnants of massacres by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Instinctively, what is most disturbing about the inclusion of the Rednerposen in this narrative is the disrespect shown toward the image. Not only is there a decontextualization of Hitler’s image, but perhaps more disconcertingly, the victims of war, genocide and political brutality that are either represented or called to memory through the depiction of devastating historical events and despotic leaders are reduced to journalistic curiosities when juxtaposed with images as apparently unrelated as Hoffmann’s portraits. As propaganda in the making, the Rednerposen represent a conscious construction of the image as a weapon in the struggle for political dominance. Hoffmann’s image is a contrived studio portrait that deliberately fabricates a historical narrative. Thus, the Rednerposen belong to a different genre of image than those that surround them in Underexposed. They do not document the heinous results of a violent massacre or the bloodied remains of an inhumane State slaughter. There is nothing ghastly or gruesome about Hitler practising his speech poses, at least not on the surface of the image. The image represents the



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manufacture of a leader and a hero, while it is surrounded by journalistic images that clandestinely capture traumatic public events. In their new context, the Rednerposen become iconic of one of the many political deceptions, genocides, wars and public traumas of the twentieth century. This narrative disturbs because it makes the unbearable comprehensible, makes it accessible as one among many twentieth-century political traumas. The image becomes easy, categorized as something it is not. It is ersatz for the mass destruction of a Holocaust too intolerable to behold. The opposite could also be true. The ramifications are equally disturbing: perhaps when we look at the Rednerposen image in the context of Underexposed, we see it for what it is: Hitler practising his rhetorical gestures before a mirror. This is fatal if the resultant tendency is to forget the mass public trauma that lies behind the poses in this narrative. In short, the place of the Rednerposen in Underexposed puts the manufacture of Hitler’s image on a continuum with Salvador Allende’s defence of his government against the military coup in Chile, the inhumanity of capital punishment in the United States, the decadence of the Romanian dictatorship, the terror of being a victim of the secrets and lies of the Western Allies in wars in Korea, Europe and the Middle East. This vein of presentation is only a short step away from histories that summon Hitler’s image as an abbreviated articulation of the extremity and corruption of specific events, whether it be the Holocaust or other events geographically and historically closer to home.5 In both cases – the Rednerposen as metonym, the Rednerposen as agent in a narrative trajectory wholly external to its own logic – all historical specificity is lost to the drama created through juxtaposition with the other images, through the narrative of fabrication into which the Rednerposen are placed. The caption accompanying the images in the 2001 Underexposed exhibition and publication tells us that the Rednerposen series was never published, that Hitler ordered Hoffman [sic] to destroy the negatives immediately, on the basis of the fact that they ‘explode the myth of Hitler’s natural hypnotic, demagogic skills’ (Jacobson, 2002, p. 22). This fact, Hitler’s ‘censorship’ of the images, legitimates their inclusion in the exhibition and publication. Due to the absence of bibliographical information, it is unclear where the curators have acquired this information. To be sure, even if the information were correct, the context given the Rednerposen in Underexposed – housed in a narrative of images that were indeed banned – functions to efface their devastating significance for the Nazi past in the interests of exploring contemporary issues for which they are convenient examples. There is substantial evidence





to confirm that the Rednerposen were circulated in postcard and placard form in the 1920s. They were also included in the Illustrierte Beobachter, the illustrated press arm of the Nazi Party, overseen by Hoffmann. The first one appeared on the title page of the issue of the paper of 28 January 1928, and again accompanying the article ‘Die Gewalt der Rede’ [‘The Power of Speech’] in the same issue (Illustrierter Beobachter, 1928a). Later that year, the Rednerposen were used as illustrations for the report, ‘Die erste öffentliche Hitler-Versammlung in Berlin’, [‘Hitler’s first public appearance at a rally in Berlin’] (Illustrierter Beobachter, 1928b). Similarly, Herz’s Munich exhibition included examples of the Rednersposen published with a script along the bottom that were distributed as postcards in 1926–7 (Herz, 1994, pp. 110–11). The script was always taken from the content of Hitler’s speeches. For example, an image of Hitler, his right arm at his side, left posed to punch the air before him, and snarling with resolve towards the left side of the frame, is accompanied by the text: ‘If sixty million people had only one will, to be fanatically national, the weapons would swell out in the fist. On the day that Germany breaks with Marxism, it breaks in truth for eternity its chains’ (p. 110). In addition, Herz includes a 1937 text from the film critic Bernhard Viertel which references the existence of these postcards (p. 109). While the image on its own bears the tentativeness of a work in progress, once the text is added, the intensity of an uncompromising propaganda message is realized. Even if Hitler and Hoffmann were unsure of the effect of these images on the public, there was enough confidence to have them published once the text was added. Herz does confirm that Hitler ordered that the Rednerposen be withdrawn from circulation shortly after their publication. Nevertheless, according to Herz, Hoffmann was as eager to mine the commercial value of photographs of Hitler as he was to photograph his subject at close range. Thus, perhaps in spite of an insistence on Hitler’s part to have them censored, Hoffmann ensured that printed copies did circulate, if only in a limited edition and for the briefest of times. Irrespective of the story behind their publication, there is ample evidence to confirm they were published at the time of their production. Underexposed not only narrativizes the images in a way that denies their potential to memorialize, interrogate and critique Hitler’s representation and, subsequently, his crimes. In its zeal to slot the images into a particular historical narrative, the exhibition and publication also misrepresent the Rednerposen. Most significantly, the images’ historical significance is manipulated to accord with contemporary concerns about censorship. The Rednerposen are thus redeployed in the name of creating cultural memories



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for the present, with all traces of their historical currency conveniently evaded. The story of Hitler’s search for an image, the transformation of political leadership within modernity, and the manipulation of Modernist techniques to sway an entire nation are all forsaken for matters that are closer to home. In exchange for a focus on the strategies that seduced a nation to unite and obliterate itself, in the narrative of Underexposed, the Rednerposen are simply another set of images that tell a truth about twentieth-century history where lies had previously been propagated in the guise of political wisdom. In Underexposed, the Rednerposen are used to represent government suppression of atrocity in the interests of manipulating public opinion. The images are re-located in a narrative engaged in a search for the truth about history and the veracity of the images that see that history. To be sure, while this might have formed one aspect of the intentions behind the Rednerposen in the late 1920s, it is, strictly speaking, a late twentieth-century obsession. In addition to their focus on images that were never published, the exhibition and accompanying publication were also concerned with what the image did not see, what images in the press conceal from public eyes. By inversion, this is, nevertheless, still a search for the truth of images and their relationship to history. Photos such as the one showing Jews being transported from Hamburg to a detention camp in 1947, on a train complete with wire-protected windows and watched over by British soldiers, because they have been denied entry into Palestine, display a discrepancy between what the image shows and what we know of history (Jacobson, 2002, pp. 230–1). The truth lies in what we think we see, the distance from, and the absence and simultaneous revelation of history and historical truth. We think we see German soldiers overseeing the deportation of Jews to concentration camps: this is the image we are accustomed to seeing, and therefore, it might be the mistaken truth of what we see in the image. In the same vein, an image of Hitler practising his speeches before a mirror is at odds with what we know of his reputation as a spontaneous orator. Thus, when we look at the Rednerposen in their new context of Underexposed and, particularly, side by side with images designed to deceive, we begin to wonder whether we are looking at a spontaneous moment of oratorial excitement or in fact a contrived studio portrait. The questions regarding what we are actually looking at begin to abound. These relations between the image and history, issues of truth, documentation, the legitimacy of a memory dependent on an image wont to deceive, are all contemporary concerns, and not those of the 1920s.





According to their presentation in Underexposed, therefore, the Rednerposen discourse on the power of the image to tell the truth and simultaneously to deceive, to expose and hide what really happened. This was only one of a number of concerns for Hoffmann and Hitler. For Underexposed, it does not matter that their primary concern was the creation of a face for a modern leader. Neither is it significant that the images in their archival context emphasize different aspects of history – most prominently, the changing face of leadership and its representation in the early twentieth century. Their status as documents of rich cultural and historical memory gives way to a fiction, a memory created to authenticate a present that lies outside the image (Struk, 2004). It could be argued that the meanings derived from the appropriation and recontextualization of the Rednerposen are inevitable. To be sure, even an interpretation that attempts to locate the works in their archival context imposes continuities of a different kind. Nevertheless, what matters here, what is pointed up by this reappropriation of archival images, and what we have a responsibility to take away from the interpretation given by Underexposed, is that in the search for what really happened, for the truth of history in photographs of the past, our existing knowledge and assumptions will inevitably overwhelm what is actually pictured. By extension, we have a responsibility to develop a self-consciousness of our viewing position. And as critics of culture and memory, we need to remain aware that we are dealing with images that, however curious and apparently benign, must nevertheless be approached with deference to what lies behind them, to the secrets of the historical and archival context. Underexposed reminds us that we live in an era when the media are not to be trusted, when we must, first and foremost, be suspicious if we are to be responsible citizens. This is the thrust of the exhibition and its publication. And we must extrapolate from what we have discovered through this interpretation. Although our suspicion toward the mass media is healthy and to be applauded, we cannot afford to repeat the decontextualization and forget the imperative to look at what is actually in the image, rather than what we want to see. Simultaneously, as we shape the visual memories of the present, we must be more aware of what amounts to our dissociation from the past through its appropriation on the surface of images. If the cultural memories of the present are necessarily built on the forgetting of the past, then it is imperative that this inauthenticity be overtly articulated as such. Only then will we take responsibility for its continuing presence in the cultural and historical imaginary.



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In another example of the many republications and representations of the Hitler-Hoffmann Rednerposen, in 1995 the six images accompanied an article in The New Yorker. The article addresses what the author, Ron Rosenbaum, calls the ‘Hitler explanation industry’ (Rosenbaum, 1995, p. 50). Rosenbaum’s article details some of the numerous theses devoted to explaining the cause of Hitler’s evil, the psychological, theological, philosophical explanations of why he did what he did. Rosenbaum argues that Hitler explanation theories are cultural self-portraits, ‘ways of distancing ourselves from him. And ways of protecting ourselves’ (p. 55). Like the presentation of the images in Underexposed, these explanations of such frightening historical realities as Hitler’s hypnotic power over his audience ‘hold up a dark mirror to our own anxieties’ (p. 55). Thus, for example, Rosenbaum cites the perspective provided by the 1990s cult of the serial killer afflicted by low self-esteem to explain Hitler as another Ted Bundy or Hannibal Lecter. When Hitler is explained as another serial killer who was the victim of a dysfunctional family, it does not so much offer insight into Hitler’s psyche as it reveals the late-twentieth-century fascination for the complex and damaged psychological life of the serial killer. Indeed, Rosenbaum’s claims can be pushed even further: by extension, any critique, explanation, and in the case of the Rednerposen, renarrativization of historical documents necessarily speaks from a platform of the present. This is unavoidable. We may even go so far as to say that Rosenbaum’s article itself does the same. For ‘Explaining Hitler’ entertains the same multiple, often conflicting, interpretations of history and Hitler’s role in it as are made by leading Hitler scholars in Britain, Germany and the United States. This is typical of the postmodernist relativism of the mid-1990s, especially as it is played out in popular highbrow magazines such as The New Yorker. The Rednerposen images appear at the end of the article and share the pages with eminent British historian Alan Bullock’s theory that Hitler’s ‘success was in large part due to the image he manipulated of himself’ (Rosenbaum, 1995, pp. 68–9). Hoffmann’s photographs do not illustrate this idea; they simply sit side by side with it, inciting provocative associations for the reader. The copy line underneath the Rednerposen reads ‘Some theorists have traced the source of Hitler’s transformation — and charisma – to hypnotic suggestion’ (p. 69). Once again, this reappropriation of the Rednerposen is in the service of an argument positing the manipulation of an unsuspecting public. That is, the context of



The New Yorker


The New Yorker ensures that the lies told by the image of political deceit are exposed. Thus, in The New Yorker, the images perpetuate the contemporary suspicion of the image’s ability to tell the truth – the image cannot be trusted, and was used by Hitler to mesmerize and deceive. In addition, the photographs belong to a culturally and historically specific discourse of the 1990s: there is no single causal explanation of this inconceivable evil, but there is nevertheless a necessity to continue looking. This could be seen to be following the same logic as the necessity to continue the search to explain the Holocaust. We must never give up the search as this would be to forget the crimes committed in the name of Hitler and the Nazis. Rosenbaum’s line of argument is borne of a postmodern fin-de-siècle belief in the impossibility of ever finding that single explanation for Hitler’s motivations and the Holocaust he brought about. The Rednerposen are accompanied in the article by other Hitler-Hoffmann images, and they also sit side by side with examples from the contemporary press, a family snap shot of the young Hitler, a 1932 Heartfield montage and an unattributed image of Hitler at the Berghof from 1937 – a rare and unusual image that I would have liked to know more about. All of these images, like the theories Rosenbaum expounds upon, may be no more than representations, but if we continue to scour them for ways of ‘explaining Hitler’, we will inch ever closer to understanding ourselves through the lens of this enigmatic evil. The sustained commitment to looking for an explanation was valued above all else in the 1990s intellectual climate (Bartov, 2003).

Conclusion What, then, is the relationship between then and now, past and present, as it is revealed through the republication of these images? In Underexposed and The New Yorker, the Rednerposen are appropriated for discourses on the photograph as evidence, as a historical document in the narrative of twentieth-century traumas other than those that resulted from Hitler’s crimes, the search for truth via the twists and turns in the life of an image. The historical significance of the Rednerposen in their archival form is obscure and difficult for audiences of today to access; it is removed from our experience of images and the values we place on them, the expectations we have of them. Therefore, we look to the Rednerposen for their representation of something else, something similar or closer to what is on our minds today. We may even look at them with incredulity, as pictures we did not know existed, with surprise, even suspicion. Whatever our response, it is unlikely that we would access, let



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alone replicate, the full response demanded by the images in their historical context. Such are these technologies of memory that they have generated an expression of our historical and cultural remove from the Rednerposen. Ultimately, they will also underline our failure to hold one of the great traumas of the twentieth century in our conscious minds. In turn, this is the defining characteristic of these recycled images as technologies of memory of the present. Returning to the questions I asked at the beginning of this chapter: what do these re-contextualizations tell us about our contemporary relationship to Hitler and Nazi history? It is obvious through my reading that the new narratives of Underexposed and The New Yorker divorce their viewers from the images’ archival value and historical context. However, what is striking here is that we are not distanced by the re-presentation because the history and the crimes behind the Rednerposen are too heinous, too unbearable to represent. Underexposed, for example, is replete with gruesome images – massacres, physical torture, cadaverous remains, murders in process. Thus, there are plenty of images from which we recoil, but the Rednerposen are not among them. Neither do the publications ask their viewers and readers to identify with, or to become implicated in and thus responsible to, the history to which the Rednerposen belongs. The photographs’ black and white status, even their crudity, their hastily shot experimental nature relieve us of this burden. They are more like curiosities than historically insightful documents. The aesthetic is suitably distant from the slick, colour compositions of charred, battered, and bloodied bodies in close-up. It pales beside images whose captions remind us of the geographical and temporal proximity of many of the world’s crimes. Similarly, Hitler’s excessive performative gestures give an irony that encourages a more critical perspective towards the images. For these, and the reasons outlined above, re-presentation consciously eschews historical and emotional identification. Perhaps most disturbingly, the distance we experience derives from the need to make the Rednerposen more relevant to the history of the twentieth century as we understand it today. Sixty years after the Holocaust, these events appear to be losing their grasp on the cultural imaginary as singular, irrefutable, incomparable and inconceivable. This is not only because the historical events are increasingly distant in time, and because we have lived through other genocides, but also because the images that document the Nazi Holocaust and those who perpetrated it engage with a set of issues that are different from those taken up by images today. Above all, in the 1920s and throughout the 1930s,





there was an unshakeable belief in the veracity of the image and a zeal to mine the power of its persuasion. In the two cases of recycling, history is brought into the present through a familiar narrative: in the case of Underexposed, twentieth-century political violence, and in The New Yorker, the perpetual search for causal explanations of enigmatic personalities. And while these respective narratives contribute to the experience of the present and its memory, they do so at the expense of remembering the past as embodied, vital and indispensable to this cultural present. Today, the Rednerposen are technologies of memory reappropriated in the interests of reinforcing a familiar narrative about the image, particularly the politically charged image. Images are not trusted to tell their own truths; we cannot access them unless we are given elaborate contexts and juxtapositions. In the case of Underexposed, the new context is first and foremost a narrative on the power of the image to deceive, and in the second place, on the importance of the truth of the image for our understanding of events as historical, for the creation of cultural memories of these same events in the present. This, certainly, was not the only, or the primary, intention of the Rednerposen in their archival form. Thus, republication of these rare archival images of Hitler has returned us to the same dilemma that Friedländer posed all those years ago: that whenever we represent transgressive images, if we dare to cross the line and look through the lens of the perpetrator, we risk the possibility of revoking all meaning. In addition, when we put them in a new context or narrative, we automatically bring them into our own cultural and intellectual milieu. As a consequence, the continuing reproduction of these images becomes simultaneously an expression of our most profound fears and our otherwise mute yearnings. In the case of the use of the Rednerposen in Underexposed and The New Yorker, these fears and desires are about images. The evil perpetrated by their subject matter has become incidental. I would argue that the dilemmas posed by Friedländer have returned, only in a different guise. The resurfacing of archival images has thus reopened the wound, a wound in which the image and its status in the visual and cultural memories of the present have become more important than the devastating history that lies behind them. Lastly, it is undoubtedly more productive to interrogate the political and ethical status of the images in their recycled form than it is to police the boundaries of recycling practices. Similarly, my argument for a historical contextualization for understanding them as propaganda that searches to define the image of Hitler-as-Führer could well be met with the criticism of itself remystifying, and thus obscuring, the political



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import of the Rednerposen. Nevertheless, to interpret them within the larger discourses of the photograph, of constructions of power and subjectivity, nationhood and identity in 1920s and 1930s Germany, satisfies two productive ends. First, it enables us to see that at the time of their production, these images were complexly conceived propaganda. Indeed, they drew on and contributed to discourses on visual, cultural and political representation in the contemporary culture. Thus, at the time, they would not necessarily have been seen as naïve or particularly dangerous. This gives insight into the way Nazism functioned for all involved. Second, the historical approach enables the building in of a critical consciousness in which the historical, cultural and political distance between then and now is foregrounded. This consciousness, in turn, creates the space to imagine how images such as the Rednerposen might more effectively be put into contemporary discourses of the photograph as a technology of remembering as opposed to one of forgetting.

Notes 1. The elements that can be identified as Modernist mark the portraits as radically different from those of previous German leaders, particularly, Bismarck and Wilhelm II. See Herz (1994) for a discussion of the photographic representation of these leaders. 2. Another valuable reading of the Rednerposen is offered by Claudia Schmölders (2000) in her discussion of the aesthetic presentation of Hitler’s face. 3. There are a number of excellent books on this subject (Liss, 1998; Hirsch, 2003; Struk, 2004). There are also a number of recent films which address the images taken by the perpetrators. See The Portraitist, directed by Ireneusz Dobrowolski (2005) and Amateur Photographer, directed by Irina Gedrovich (2004). 4. This is not to deny the important work that has been done in the field of representations of Hitler imagery and Hitler’s image. See, for example, Kleeblatt (2002). 5. Even when the similarity of gestures and deeds is striking, the comparison of George W. Bush, for example, to Adolf Hitler is dangerous as it collapses the historical and real nature of Hitler’s and Bush’s actions. On websites such as http://seedsofdoubt.com/zendaba/bush-not-hitler1.html and http://semiskimmed.net/bushhitler.html, the Rednerposen are juxtaposed with images of George W. Bush in oratorical mode.







Part IV


Unsettling History





Introduction: Unsettling History

In the main Introduction, we write that ‘cultural memory is a shared knowledge of the past that is not part of official history’. Shared yet contested, outside formal historical discourse but productive of the material and immaterial culture that can form its ‘sources’ and produced by some of the same technologies, cultural memory clearly has a complex relationship to history. In Tangled Memories, Marita Sturken first writes that ‘[c]ultural memory can be distinct from history yet . . . is essential to its construction’ but soon afterwards acknowledges there is so much border traffic between them that the distinction is hard to maintain (1997, pp. 4–5). More recently, Andreas Huyssen observes ‘a fundamental disturbance . . . between history as objective and scientific, and memory as subjective and personal’ (2003, p. 2). The recent debates about memory versus history underscore that the relationship of history to memory is not only complex, but is also changing, from the unification of memory and history demanded by the rise of the nations throughout the nineteenth century, to their irremediable severance in modern times. Today, indeed, history and memory are generally seen as fundamentally at odds, with memory serving sometimes to bolster and other times to unsettle history. In the wake of historiographical self-reflection and under the pressures of various memory-groups, history had to relinquish its status as the record of the people’s past, becoming instead the selfconscious study and narrative account of the past. Traditionally focused on political, social and economic events, history inevitably excludes the experiences and memories of many individuals. Therefore, it is by laying claim to memory and by foregrounding the memories of individuals and of social groups, that history came to be unsettled. The essays in this part, then, focus on this movement of unsettling history – that is, of shaking it up, showing its foundations to be unstable and constructed 169





in the interests of particular, usually dominant, groups – colonial settlers, dictatorships and other repressive political regimes. Showing those versions of history to effectively silence, erase or forget memories of the past that do not fit their version of history, these essays also address their continued haunting presence in cultural memory as well as the anxieties over remembering and forgetting to which their presence attests. In this part of the book, cultural memory is viewed as instrumental in the process of unsettling history. ‘Cultural memory,’ Sturken writes, ‘is a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history’ (1997, p. 1). Technologies of memory, in this context, are the means by which this negotiation takes place: the object, images and representations, but also the artistic practices and narrative and audiovisual techniques used to produce and give meaning to cultural memory. To be sure, there is a sense in which individual memories and the collective, social memory laid down in history are always in tension. As Carolyn Steedman puts it in Landscape for a Good Woman, ‘[p]ersonal interpretations of past times – the stories that people tell themselves in order to explain how they got to the places they currently inhabit – are often in deep and ambiguous conflict with the official interpretative devices of a culture’ (Steedman, 1986, p. 6). As the place where individual and collective memory meet and intersect, cultural memory is one of the central sites for reworking past events, for rethinking, re-viewing, and reimagining the past; indeed, for not letting the past settle into history. The essays in this part therefore explore cultural memory as the locus for the transformation of history – its re-production in the present, but also its deconstruction by various means. Focusing on specific technologies of memory that work to disturb or upset the known and official historical accounts, these chapters show the wilful construction or the fundamental instability of cultural memory in visual representations that change the authorized views of history. In Chapter 10, Julia Noordegraaf looks as the re-use of colonial footage from the Dutch East Indies in the compilation film Mother Dao: The Turtlelike (1995) by documentary filmmaker Vincent Monnikendam and in the works Smoke Screen (1997) and Facing Forward (1999) by visual artist Fiona Tan. The representation of audiovisual material is a way of bringing documents of the past into the present. Noordegraaf illuminates how the confrontation with these works encourages contemporary viewers to reflect upon their relationship to (Dutch) colonial history. The way in which the archival material is presented and deconstructed allows for a more critical perspective on this historical period.



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In Chapter 11, Maruša Pušnik offers a critical analysis of the creation in documentaries of collective memory in post-socialist Slovenia. She shows how narrative and visual strategies redefine specific historical events and periods of the nation. Such popular representations of history set a new agenda for public debates on history. Functioning as technologies of memory, the documentaries produce different meanings of the past that are concordant with a new regime of right-wing politics. The films reproduce and sustain a collective memory that is based on the elimination of the Yugoslav period and communism, and on the invention and glorification of Slovenia’s ancient and recent past. In the last chapter, Marta Cabrera draws attention to the state of amnesia concerning the violent past of Colombia. While the mass media and the absence of adequate monuments and commemorations seem to contribute to the perpetuation of this amnesiac state, the visual arts have addressed issues of memory, identity and violence. Cabrera critically assesses visual artworks from the last decade by sculptor Doris Salcedo, video artist José Alejandro Restrepo, and photographer and video artist Juan Manuel Echavarría. She argues that their work contributes to the construction of cultural memory amidst what has been termed as a ‘low-intensity conflict’.



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Facing Forward with Found Footage: Displacing Colonial Footage in Mother Dao and the Work of Fiona Tan Julia Noordegraaf We shall never reach the past unless we frankly place ourselves within it. Essentially virtual, it cannot be known as something past unless we follow and adopt the movement by which it expands into a present image, thus emerging from obscurity into the light of day (Bergson, 2005, p. 135). In 1926, the Dutch cameraman Iep Ochse recorded a fascinating scene on the island of Bali, Indonesia: three toddlers cheerfully smoking a cigarette. The brief shot – it lasts eleven seconds – shows three naked children that fill the frame; they are seated facing the camera, the youngest sitting on the eldest boy’s lap. The latter vigorously inhales and exhales, creating a cloud of smoke that fills the screen. He then passes on the cigarette to the boy on his right and lovingly grooms the lock of hair of the youngest child (Figure 10.1). When this shot was used in a film for the Dutch newsreel production company Polygoon in 1940, the scene was accompanied by a spoken commentary, saying ‘These babies take advantage of the fact that mother went shopping’ (Tropisch Nederland, 1940). The scene is thus being explained as an example of innocent, naughty behaviour that occurs when mothers leave their children alone. In her film installation Smoke Screen of 1997, visual artist Fiona Tan (born Indonesia, 1966) deconstructs this reading of the scene. Tan edited the shot in a short compilation film that is supposed to be played in a continuous loop. In the beginning, her film uses the traditional documentary format: we see the shot, followed by a title card that explains the place and estimated date of the recording. The second title card repeats the 1940s reading of the shot: babies taking advantage of the fact that mother went shopping. After that, however, the film becomes 172



10

Figure 10.1 Three smoking toddlers on the island of Bali, Indonesia, recorded by I.A. Ochse in 1926. Still from Mother Dao: The Turtlelike (Vincent Monnikendam, 1995)

more ambiguous. Again we see the toddlers, now followed by the enigmatic title card ‘Boys will be men’. How are we supposed to interpret this text? Is smoking part of a ritual marking the transition from childhood to manhood? Are we to reflect on the fact that these children have since grown up to be men? The uncertainty about the meaning of the images increases further with the next title card ‘With my own eyes’. Whose eyes have actually witnessed this scene? From the first title card we know that the shot is archival footage – ‘Indonesia, maybe 1930’ – so the scene cannot have been witnessed by the artist herself. But then who saw and recorded it? Or does the text perhaps refer to the viewer, who is confronted with the filmic documentation of the scene and thus sees it ‘with her own eyes’? Finally, the film shows the artist herself, with a toy camera held before her right eye (Figure 10.2). Now the confusion is complete: is it a game? Does she re-enact the recording of the original situation with a toy camera? Are we now watching the artist watching somebody else who looked at these three Indonesian children?



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Figure 10.2

Still from the installation Smoke Screen, Fiona Tan (1997)

Then the film starts over again, and by now the viewer knows the texts and images are highly ambiguous. By constantly repeating the images of the toddlers and alternating them with different texts and the shot of the artist herself, the meaning of what we see becomes increasingly blurred. The contrast between the old, archival footage and the new, self-reflexive texts and images invites the viewer to adopt a more distant standpoint. From this standpoint, the relation between the camera, the people filmed, the artist, and the viewer is being questioned. Who are these children? Where does the footage come from? To what extent was it staged? What has become of the kids? But also: Why are we looking at it now? How do we relate to these images from colonial Indonesia?

Displacing colonial footage In this essay, I investigate the relation between archival footage, its displacements and the effects of these displacements on the interpretation of these images and their link to the past. Central to this investigation are three case studies: the film and video installations Smoke Screen (16mm film installation, 1997, loop) and Facing Forward (video projection, 1999, 11 minutes) by the Indonesian-Australian artist Fiona Tan and the feature-length documentary film Mother Dao: the Turtlelike (Netherlands, 1995, 90 minutes) by the Dutch documentary



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filmmaker Vincent Monnikendam. Both Tan and Monnikendam work with colonial footage from the Dutch East Indies produced between the 1910s and 1930s and kept in various audiovisual archives in the Netherlands, such as the Royal Institute for the Tropics and the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. They both use this archival material to create so-called compilation films: films that are entirely based on existing footage. The discussion of the films is primarily focused on their effect on the contemporary viewer’s engagement with the colonial past of the Dutch in Indonesia. The central questions are: How do Tan’s installations and Monnikendam’s documentary film construct our present-day memory of the colonial past? How can contemporary artworks like these address specific cultural and historical problems, such as the legacy of colonialism in our present time? The compilation film can be seen as a specific technology of memory, one that uses montage, or editing, as a tool to intervene in the way we remember the past. Both Monnikendam and Tan employ montage as a tool in the deconstruction and reconstruction of cultural memory, in particular the memory of the colonial presence of the Dutch in Indonesia. Montage here operates on two levels: first, on the level of the compilation film itself, and second, on that of the exhibition context. In order to analyse how the exhibition context influences the way in which compilation films function as technologies of memory, I compare a feature-length film that was shown in cinemas and on television to two works that were conceived as museum installations – a short, silent film installation (Smoke Screen) and a longer video installation with sound (Facing Forward). Although one can argue that each individual presentation changes the way these works are seen and interpreted, I here focus on the cinema and the gallery space as settings that are characterized by two distinct types of spectatorship. Of course, the displacement of colonial footage already commences at the archive, which attributes meaning to the material by means of selection, classification, description of and access to colonial footage (Stoler, 2002). In this article, however, I specifically focus on the reuse of colonial footage in the works of Monnikendam and Tan. Before analysing these cases in more detail, I first discuss the compilation film as a specific technology of memory. Subsequently, in order to understand how the displacement and montage of archival elements can serve as an alternative way of connecting past issues to present concerns, I discuss the Mnemosyne project of the German art historian Aby Warburg. This discussion provides the theoretical backdrop for




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understanding the construction of colonial memory discussed in the cases below.

Contrary to the traditional historical documentary, compilation films use archival footage not as illustration of real events, but as images that draw attention to the constructed nature of media productions. Because of their self-referential nature, these films, which are also known as ‘found-footage films’ or ‘archival films’, have the potential to critique, challenge and possibly also subvert the power of cinematographic representation (Wees, 1992, p. 39).1 The main technique employed in these films is montage: the filmmaker takes shots from different films and reassembles them in a new order. The new order of the shots creates unexpected connections between them – connections that are often underlined by the use of titles, spoken texts or music. For example, in Bruce Connor’s A Movie (1958), images of an officer staring into a submarine periscope are alternated with images of a scarcely dressed model reclining in a provocative pose – a sequence that is concluded with images of a torpedo speeding through water, followed by a nuclear explosion and walls of water engulfing a battleship and a surfer. In a mocking way, this sequence creates visual links between sexual desire and military aggression, while it simultaneously focuses attention on the conventional editing strategies that link individual shots through implied cause and effect relationships (Wees, 1992, pp. 43, 45). Compilation films literally displace the footage they use: images are removed from their original context and represented in a new one. This displacement entails a shift in meaning: in the new context, the same images can mean differently. As Fiona Tan puts it: ‘The recycling of film fragments or photos breathes new life into the images; they are liberated from the harness of their original context. Recycling makes it possible to see images in a new way. Recycling creates new images. Editing as a window cleaner’ (2000, p. 127).2 As such, the displacement and re-editing of archival material in compilation films can be a tool for remembering the past differently.

Remembering art history: Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne project This technique has a precedent in the way in which the nineteenthcentury German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) used



Compilation films: ‘Editing as a window cleaner’

photographic reproductions of artworks to analyse the relationships between them. Warburg is best known as the originator of the discipline of iconology: a method for deciphering and interpreting symbolic references in artworks. But where followers such as Erwin Panofsky developed iconology as a method with positivist or neo-Kantian ambitions, Warburg’s iconology was critical, in that it stressed the creative act of interpretation. As art historian Philippe-Alain Michaud observes, ‘Warburg replaced the principle of detachment governing the understanding of works with a principle of invention. Research did not simply reflect a theoretical attitude; it had to be imagined as a practice aiming to reactivate its object and experiencing its attraction in turn’ (2004, p. 32). In his vast library, which was moved from Hamburg to London in 1933 and is now part of the Warburg Institute, Warburg collected thousands of books. The organization of these books was not a static arrangement; Warburg constantly regrouped them in order to reflect new ideas about the interrelation of facts. He thus used the physical arrangement of the books as an objectification of his thought, a method that helped him to fathom the psychology of artistic creation (Michaud, 2004, p. 235). Warburg also collected thousands of black and white photographs of sculptures, paintings, prints, tapestries and other forms of imagery. For his Mnemosyne (Memory) project, which aimed to create an atlas in images (an ‘art history without a text’, as he himself described it), Warburg arranged these photographic reproductions on black panels in order to find new and unanticipated interpretations of the relationships between works from different times and places (Michaud, 2004, p. 240). In this way, he used the technique of montage ‘to activate dynamic properties [of individual artworks] that would be latent if considered individually’ (p. 253). The result is similar to the effect of cinematographic montage: ‘The Mnemosyne panels function as screens on which the phenomena produced in succession by the cinema are reproduced simultaneously’ (p. 260). According to art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, what was characteristic of Warburg’s photographic panels was their exchangeability: the photographs could always be taken off the panels and endlessly be recombined with other images, thus keeping their meaning open and avoiding a final point of interpretation (2002, pp. 459–60). The method Warburg used in his Mnemosyne project resembles the way our memory works: images of past objects and events (in his case, photographic reproductions) are combined and recombined in constantly changing constellations. As a consequence, our interpretation





of the objects and events from the past is constantly changing too; each time we approach them from a different perspective. Writing history thus becomes a subjective and creative process, where ‘the researcher gives meaning to something that has no meaning – not in understanding but in reproducing the world in the closed universe of representations’ (Michaud, 2004, p. 236). From this perspective, there is little difference between Warburg’s method of reproducing the historical development of art and the way contemporary artists use the archive as a site for developing alternative memories or reconstructing forgotten pasts. In his discussion of Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean and Sam Durant as exemplars of artists working from what he calls ‘an archival impulse’, art critic Hal Foster indicates that these artists present their archival materials ‘as active, even unstable – open to eruptive returns and entropic collapses, stylistic repackagings and critical revisions’ (2004, p. 17). The aim of these works is to ‘fashion distracted viewers into engaged discussants’ (p. 4). Artists do so by elaborating on the found image, object and text and presenting them in a new form. A closer look at the works of Monnikendam and Tan will now demonstrate how compilations of archival footage can become technologies for reconstructing our memory of the colonial past.

Reconstructing colonial memories in Mother Dao The film Mother Dao: The Turtlelike opens with a creation myth of the island Nias, just off the coast of Sumatra, where ‘Mother Dao’ is seen as the creator of Earth and all life. Her nickname, ‘the turtlelike’, refers to the slightly rounded shape of the horizon that resembles the shape of a turtle. The creation of the earth is represented by recordings of volcano eruptions and explosions – strong images that symbolize the birth of new and unspoilt land. Those images are followed by shots of various Indonesian peoples, from Sumatra to Papua New Guinea. The film seems to suggest that these were the first inhabitants of the new land. Subsequently, we see the arrival of the colonial Europeans. First, there is only one man, on horseback – presumably a missionary, who explores a coastal path on the isle of Nias. Soon, however, he is followed by many more men in white tropical suits who start felling trees in order to be able to exploit the land. A shot of a colonial officer dressed in white, addressing the male population of Nias from a platform, introduces the central theme of the film: the unequal power relations that are the result of the European intervention in Indonesia.



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The opening sequence is more or less representative for the rest of the film. Images of Indonesian landscapes, peoples and rituals are alternated with images of the colonial presence in Indonesia – shots of plantations, factories, trains and other signs of modernization that seem to penetrate the land – and shots of the lifestyle of the European colonials that strongly contrast with the shots of the living and working conditions of the indigenous peoples. Although there is no clearly defined narrative in the film, the alternation of those different types of images results in a film that is highly critical of the colonial presence in Indonesia. Monnikendam makes clever use of the propagandistic nature of the original footage. As in other compilation films, Mother Dao uses propagandistic imagery and turns it against itself: images originally celebrating the production processes in the tobacco factory now mainly show the dirty and dangerous circumstances in which the local workers have to do their work.3 We cannot help but notice the proud and smug faces of the supervisors, dressed in pristine white suits and hats that contrast sharply with the half-dressed and often dirty workers. The film achieves this effect through montage: the unexpected and sometimes crude contrasts between the images of working conditions in factories and the luxurious and cheerful life of the colonials makes us aware of the contradictions and unequal power relations in colonial Indonesia. For example, the film contains a scene of the winnowing of kapok – images that are beautiful but that also demonstrate the dirty and unhealthy working conditions in this industry. These images are followed by a shot of the easygoing life of a colonial family, suggesting that these families sleep on the mattresses for which the locals produce the kapok. In this way, the film forms a critical note in a culture of memory that has been dominated by romantic constructions of colonial history (van Vree, 2005). The specific memory that Monnikendam attempts to deconstruct is exemplified by the newsreel Tropisch Nederland (Tropical Netherlands) of 1940, a remake of the presumably lost 1926 newsreel Naar Tropisch Nederland (Hogenkamp, 1988, p. 32) that contains a lot of the material Monnikendam reused for Mother Dao. This filmic report of a ocean journey from the Netherlands to Batavia (present-day Jakarta), via various Indonesian islands, was made to raise the interest of the Dutch population in a life in the colonies. Combining images of modernization brought by the colonials with images of traditional, local customs, the film expresses a romantic view of colonial Indonesia as a place where locals and colonials coexist in a peaceful harmony. In Mother





Dao, Monnikendam deconstructs the discourse of Tropisch Nederland by presenting the same footage in different juxtapositions. For example, where in Tropisch Nederland shots of a missionary hospital are used to stress the modernization of health care implemented by the Dutch (the commentary track indicates that ‘here, magnificent work is done for the benefit of the indigenous population’), in Mother Dao the same images introduce the dramatic climax of the film: close-up images of people with a skin disease and of dying babies, followed by shots of a local funeral ritual. The film thus constructs a new view of the colonial history of Indonesia: the Dutch invaded an unspoilt country and brought hunger, death and destruction in the name of modernization and progress. This reconstructed memory is supported by the use of sound. Monnikendam left out the explanatory voiceover that is so characteristic of traditional documentaries and replaced it with old and recent poems and songs that are spoken in Bahasa Indonesia and expressing sadness and despair resulting from deceit, exploitation and striving for profit. In addition, there is a soundtrack by the Dutch composer Jan Dries Groenendijk, which combines sounds recorded in Indonesia with new, electronic sounds. The film thus adds an Indonesian soundscape to the Western perspective of the images.4 Montage here functions as a means to deconstruct one memory of colonial Indonesia and substitute it with another. The film premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam on 2 February 1995. Besides a broadcast on Dutch television, the film was subsequently mostly screened in cinemas, in particular at various film festivals in the Netherlands and abroad. To what extent does this exhibition context influence the way in which Mother Dao functions as a technology of memory?5 As film scholar Ann Friedberg explains, cinema spectatorship has traditionally been characterized by the projection of a luminous image in a dark room, viewed by immobilized spectators who have a passive relation to the film they see once and in a linear fashion (1994, pp. 133–4). With the arrival of television and video, the conditions of cinema spectatorship changed: it does no longer rely on the dark room, it allows for a certain level of mobility, and it has become less linear, giving the viewer more control over the when and where of viewing (pp. 136–47).6 In particular, the remote control has turned every viewer into ‘a readymade montagiste, cutting and pasting images from a wide repertoire of sources at the push of a button’ (p. 142).



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Friedberg argues that contemporary cinema and televisual spectatorship is characterized by a ‘mobilized “virtual” gaze’, a gaze that travels ‘through an imaginary elsewhere and an imaginary elsewhen’ (p. 2). In this sense, viewing a film in the cinema or on television is a means towards travelling virtually through time, in particular because of cinema’s ‘ability to be repeated, over time, imparting to each spectator a unique montage-consciousness’ (p. 103). It is exactly this ‘unique montage-consciousness’ that Mother Dao addresses: the spectator is aware that the filmmaker uses footage from another time and presents this in a new order that changes the meaning of the original footage. During the ninety minutes it takes to watch the film, the viewer is invited to reconstruct the filmmaker’s montage and to reflect on the possible earlier meanings of the footage that the filmmaker now deconstructs.7 Thus, watching Mother Dao on TV or in the cinema can be considered montage in time, whereby the spectator’s reconstruction of the filmmaker’s montage results in the formation of a new, critical memory of the colonial presence of Indonesia.

Facing forward in the gallery space Fiona Tan addresses this particular travelling through time in her video installation Facing Forward. For this work she chose ethnographic footage from the collection of the Netherlands Filmmuseum and edited it into a film of eleven minutes. The film opens with a black and white shot of a large group of non-Western (Indonesian?) men who face the camera as if they were having their portrait taken. In the middle, three white men (missionaries?) are seated, flanked by other white men in military garb and leisure wear. This opening shot is followed by other shots of (Indonesian) men and women staring silently in the camera. The flicker and the scratches in the images, as well as the fact that they are in black and white, suggest that we are watching archival footage. The images are accompanied by a soundtrack consisting of a gong and a violin-like, one-tone sound. We then see the title of the film, underscored by a five-tone piano sound that suggests mystery and anticipation. This minimalist soundtrack continues throughout the film. The film then takes us on a car ride to an unidentified Indonesian city where the passers-by look curiously into the camera lens. We hear a voiceover reading a passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1978) – a





text about travelling through time and place. The voice-over cites Marco Polo, who explains to Kublai Khan: ‘that what he sought was always something lying ahead, even if it was a matter of the past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places’ (voiceover commentary in Facing Forward, 1999; after Calvino, 1978, pp. 28–9). In the rest of the film, this scenario is repeated. We see different shots of people from various parts of the world who are apparently made to pose in front of the camera. This impression is reinforced by the inclusion of shots of a white man operating a film camera who is wearing a headband decorated with four feathers. A shot of two African women wearing face masks epitomizes the contrived nature of the footage: women who do not want their faces to be seen are being forced to ‘face forward’. At the end of the film, the images from the opening sequence are repeated, accompanied by the voiceover that resumes the narration from Calvino’s text: ‘By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, Marco is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present’ (voiceover commentary in Facing Forward, 1999; after Calvino, 1978, p. 29). The film ends with a shot of two young girls shyly smiling towards the camera. Like Mother Dao, Facing Forward focuses attention on the constructed nature of cinematographic representation. As in Smoke Screen, the repetition of images, accompanied by texts that complicate the meaning of the shots, encourages viewers to reflect on the meaning of the archival images and the colonial past to which they refer. Contrary to Mother Dao, however, the deconstruction of the colonial discourse in Facing Forward does not lead to the formation of a new, coherent perspective on the Dutch presence in Indonesia. Instead, the work draws attention to the process of creating meaning itself. As Ernst van Alphen states, ‘Tan’s videos and films all reflect on how the medium functions as an agent that creates specific relationships between the viewer and the image’ (2002, p. 59). In doing so, Tan not only stimulates spectators to develop a specific interpretation of the images, but also to reflect on the gaze with which they regard the people portrayed: ‘The cultural other is subjected to observation; but the observing self is also included’ (p. 64).8



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The emphasis on the subjective, open and dynamic process of making sense of the past is supported by the fact that Smoke Screen and Facing Forward were conceived as installations for museum galleries.9 Contrary to cinematic and televisual spectatorship, where viewers are more or less required to sit still and watch the film as it unfolds over time, in the gallery space, both the images and the spectator are mobile. Boris Groys explains that ‘a video or movie installation in a museum neutralizes the ban of motion that determines the viewing of these pictures in a movie system. Pictures and spectators are allowed to move at the same time’ (Groys, 2001, n.p.; see also Groys, 2003). According to Groys, this situation causes a certain tension, putting the viewer ‘in a state of doubt and helplessness’: the time-based nature of film and video installations neither allows the viewer to fully determine his or her own time of viewing nor makes it possible to view all the works in their entirety. It is this fundamental uncertainty that gives the works their aesthetic value: ‘The aesthetic value of the media installation in the museum mainly consists of picking the confusion, the uncertainty, the missing control of the viewer about his time of attention in a museum exhibition – that used to give the illustration of total organization – as a central theme’ (Groys, 2001, n.p.). Consequently, compared to the cinema or television spectator, the viewer of film and video installations in the gallery switches ‘from a passive position to a more interactive one, from an observer separate from the apparatus to a participant’, as Friedberg writes in relation to another context (Friedberg, 1994, p. 144). One can argue that in the space of the gallery, the viewer is invited to continue the editing process that the artist has started. According to film scholar Raymond Bellour, installations guide the viewer towards composing and recomposing the images and words that are being presented (2000, p. 8). Groys explains this active participation of the viewer from the fact that the installation of film or video in the museum focuses attention on the medium itself: ‘It creates an ideal place for an analytic and linguistically based reflection on video and movie pictures.’ This focus on reflection, Groys maintains, ‘causes the viewer to adapt the selective and analytic strategies of the respective artist and to become an active consumer of media himself’ (2006, n.p.). Since the viewer’s physical movement determines the way the images, words and sounds of the installation are recomposed, in the gallery space, the montage in time that characterizes the viewing of compilation films on television or in the cinema theatre is extended to montage into space.10




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As I have argued above, Mother Dao deconstructs the romantic and nostalgic view of the colonial presence in Indonesia and replaces it with a critical discourse, emphasizing the unequal power relations and difficult living and working conditions of the indigenous population. In Facing Forward and Smoke Screen, Fiona Tan uses a different strategy: her installations focus attention on the process of attributing meaning to the archival images itself, inviting her viewers to reflect on their role in making sense of these images. What do these analyses teach us about the way in which compilation films function as technologies of memory? Cinematic montage offers the possibility of deconstructing earlier meanings attached to the images, meanings that remained unconscious in earlier times (as in the case of a propaganda film like Tropisch Nederland) or that have been forgotten. The compilation filmmaker uses editing and sound to draw attention to the production and reception history of these archival images. This is why the compilation film functions as a technology for remembering the past: ‘The “historicity” of found footage, resonant with historical fact, memory, and emotion, emerges from the cultural politics of its production, and most important, its circulation as a symbolic commodity’ (Zryd, 2003, p. 47). The result is a new, self-reflexive discourse on the past. As filmmaker and footage researcher Sharon Sandusky states, compilation filmmakers usually ‘offer enough clues to allow the audience a window into how they think, thereby avoiding a second-generation brainwashing technique’ (1992, p. 12). The viewer is asked to participate in the montage of the filmmaker by reconstructing his or her new configuration of the images. When the compilation film is watched in the cinema theatre or on television, the viewer is bound to the filmmaker’s ordering of the images, and hence, the viewer’s participation consists in reconstructing the filmmaker’s new discourse. I see this as a form of montage in time, both in the sense of the linear montage of the images and in the sense of travelling through time, connecting the present of the viewer to the various pasts embodied in the footage. Yet, while cinema and televisual spectatorship allow for travelling through time, the viewer cannot actively change the order of the images and is thus bound to the filmmaker’s new discourse. In contrast, in the gallery space, the viewer is invited to actively continue the editing process that the filmmaker has started. The physical mobility of the viewer shifts the attention from the montage at the level of the film itself to the way in which the viewer participates in



Conclusion

the construction of the relation between the images, texts and sounds. This can be seen as an extension of montage into space. This double potential of the compilation film, montage in time and space, makes it a technology for remembering history in a dynamic and open way, connecting past issues to the present concerns of contemporary viewers. As Hal Foster indicates, the archival elements reused in contemporary visual artworks serve as ‘found arks of lost moments in which the here-and-now of the work serves as a possible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future’ (2004, p. 15). This connection between past, present and future is achieved through ‘affective association’ (p. 21). This is particularly prominent in Tan’s Smoke Screen and Facing Forward. Her use of close-ups and medium shots of people facing the camera stimulates our affective association with the people and their histories. The texts, sounds, and new images that she uses at the same time support the formation of this affective relation and emphasize the difficulty of relating these histories to our present-day concerns.11 This way of working echoes Aby Warburg’s employment of montage to ‘elaborate a type of thought that espoused the movements of intuition, [. . .] a thought inseparable from the body and the encounters affecting it’ (Michaud, 2004, p. 232). Tan’s installations involve viewers with the archival footage in a way that makes those images productive for understanding ourselves via the unknown other. Paradoxically, we can get closer to the past if we are more aware of the distance that separates us from it. The further Marco Polo travels, the more he is being confronted with his past, the less he understands who he is: ‘Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have’ (voiceover commentary in Facing Forward, 1999; after Calvino, 1978, p. 29). In this sense, Facing Forward invites us to reflect on who we are, where we came from, and where we are going: we have to look back in order to face forward.

Notes 1. Jay Leyda was the first to distinguish archive-based films as ‘compilation films’. See his Films Beget Films (1964). Wees (1992; 1993) was one of the first to try and establish a clear classification for the great variety of films that use existing footage. However, his distinction between ‘compilation’, ‘collage’ and ‘appropriation’ films has not been widely adopted. Note that I do not share Michael Zryd’s distinction between found-footage films – based on non-archived material, literally ‘found’ in private collections, commercial stock-shot agencies, garbage bins, etc. – and archival films – based




2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

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8. 9.

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Technologies of Memory in the Arts on material from archival institutions. I actually doubt whether, as he claims, ‘the archive is an official institution that separates historical record from the outtake’ (2003, p. 41). Sandusky (1992) offers a psychoanalytic account of how the compilation film – which she terms ‘The Archival Art Film’ – can function as a cure for the manipulation of our desires by what she calls ‘The Toxic Film Artefact’. As Michael Zryd states, ‘Ironic recontextualization mines the subversive potential inherent in much archival footage’s source as official discourse, whether located in the sphere of government, corporate sponsorship, or the entertainment/news media industry. The footage speaks anew as evidence – but less as evidence of an event than as evidence of the folly of the official discourses from which the archival footage springs’ (2003, p. 51). Although the soundtrack helps to counter the Eurocentric perspective of the footage, in some cases it results in an embarrassing exoticism. As Delpeut has pointed out, almost all images of the local population and their rituals are accompanied by an ominous sound composition that seems to emphasize the stereotypical image of the elusive and ‘dark’ side of the Indonesian peoples (Delpeut, 1995). It is worth noting that at the screening of Mother Dao at an international film festival in Japan in 1997 the audience definitely saw a different version of the film than audiences elsewhere, since the Japanese customs authorities ordered that a 12-second scene, in which male sex organs are visible, be cut before the film could be shown (Internet Movie Database, 2008). Friedberg discusses the impact of virtual reality devices on cinema and televisual spectatorship. Because she wrote her book before the widespread use of DVD and new media (the Internet, iPods, mobile phones), she does not take into account the radical control over the time, place and order of viewing these media allow. As Mother Dao was broadcast on TV and shown in cinemas only, I think her argument on spectatorship is still pertinent to the analysis of montage at the level of the exhibition context. See Sharon Sandusky’s discussion of Daniel Eisenberg’s compilation film Displaced Person: ‘Displaced Person asks the audience to consider that since the film material isn’t gone, perhaps the meaning behind it also remains. This leaves the audience with the project of confronting the underlying meaning, precisely because earlier generations did not’ (1992, p. 16). This search for earlier meanings in displaced footage is a means to retrieve what Mary-Ann Doane has called ‘subjective residues’ of cinematic texts that remain beyond the initial viewing (quoted in Friedberg, 1994, p. 134). The inclusion of the shot of the artists with a toy camera in Smoke Screen is of course a quite literal reference to the ‘observing self’. It is worth observing that Facing Forward and Smoke Screen have mostly been shown as installations in museums and galleries. Smoke Screen has once been projected on a large screen attached to the front of De Balie, a centre for culture and debate in the heart of Amsterdam. It would be interesting to investigate the implications of this urban screen space setting for the viewing and interpretation of this work, but that falls beyond the scope of this article. Fiona Tan’s video installation Tuareg (1999) is a case in point: a filmic image of a group of children is being projected on a transparent screen that is supposed to divide two separate rooms. In that way, the viewer can literally approach



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the same image from two sides: on the one side you see the image as it is, on the other side of the screen it is reversed. A different soundtrack on both sides underlines the changing perspective on the image evoked by the viewer’s physical displacement in space. 11. Foster speculates that the attempts of artists working from an ‘archival impulse’ to connect things previously disconnected is motivated by a sense of failure in cultural memory, of society’s incapacity to remember the past; in spite of the omnipresent ‘memory industry’, archival art suggests that ‘this industry is amnesiac in its own way’ (2004, pp. 21–2).




Documentaries and Mediated Popular Histories: Shaping Memories and Images of Slovenia’s Past Maruša Pušnik

Popular mediated histories The sociohistorical context of post-socialist Slovenia since 1991 has provided an opportunity for the creation of new national knowledge.1 Since then, Slovenian cultural memory has been extensively created anew through various cultural representations of past events which function as technologies of memory – from historiographical books, museum exhibitions, school textbooks and news programmes to documentary films. These texts set the agenda for public debates and mobilized people’s interests in specific historical events, figures or periods from Slovenia’s past, while at the same time burying and suppressing other viewpoints. This chapter’s main purpose is to explore the role of the media, especially documentary films, in the shaping and reshaping of memory in Slovenian society. I hope to show how the films created a new production of the past and how people – through documentary visualizations of history – are thus educated in understanding and remembering the past in different ways. On the one hand, I focus on the ways memories and histories are shaped through documentary films. On the other hand, I examine the influence of the contemporary sociopolitical context in Slovenia on such a popular, but professionally and academically supported, rewriting of history. The persistent change of the national discursive regime from the early 1990s onwards and the empowering of right-wing politics in recent years play an important role in redefining dominant values, ideas, perceptions and visions of the past. In contemporary media societies, documentaries have become one of the principal means for people to learn about history: ‘Just as television 188



11

has profoundly affected and altered every aspect of contemporary life – from the family to education, government, business and religion,’ Gary R. Edgerton asserts, so ‘the medium’s non-fictional and fictional portrayals have similarly transformed the ways tens of millions of viewers think about historical figures and events’ (2001, p. 1). The technical and stylistic features of documentaries strongly influence historical representations and history itself. The two inherent properties of the documentary medium are intimacy and immediacy, since documentary representations are usually consumed in the privacy of people’s homes and tend to present history as personal dramas or melodramas. Yet, documentary films are broadly perceived as part of the non-fiction genre, legitimate and objective presenters of the past because of their creative treatment of actuality (Winston, 2000, p. 19). When people enter the world of such media representations, and especially when they are confronted with the documentary genre, the images of the past in these documentaries tend to be taken for reality (Hall, 1997; Nichols, 1991). In order to understand the impact of documentary films on people’s perceptions and the acceptance of the new politics of truth about the past, it is necessary to analyse documentaries at the semantic, discursive and ideological level.

Media as technologies of memory: theories and methods Moving from individual to collective constructions and remembrances of the past, I use the concept of cultural memory, understood here as a result of different cultural representations of the past that circulate in society. In this sense, cultural memory could be described – by paraphrasing the founding father of memory studies, Maurice Halbwachs (1980) – as a kind of communication among people when members of a certain community share specific representations of the past. However, since Halbwachs’s term of collective memory today gives rise to numerous misunderstandings, I follow Aleida Assman’s suggestion to replace collective memory with some distinct terms: social (or generational), political and cultural memory which, together with individual memory, make up the four inseparable formats of memory (2004, p. 22). Social memory always interacts with individual memories because the social group provides its members with certain social mnemonic frames. Individual and social memory are directly linked to human beings and are embodied in their interactions, while political and cultural memory as institutionalized and top-down memories ‘are based on the more durable carriers of symbols and material representations’ (p. 25).



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I am particularly interested in how cultural memory is stabilized in a certain society and how it selects only some references to the past, while at the same time pushes others into oblivion. The working of Slovenian cultural memory is based on various archival tactics, documents and traces of the past, or anti-oblivion defence-systems, as Assman defines them (2004, p. 31). The documentary is a material medium that uses various verbal and visual devices for storing information. In this regard, it can also influence the processes of creating cultural memory as well as political, national identification. Pierre Nora’s concept of the lieux de mémoire is useful for understanding cultural representations of the past (textbooks, museums or documentary films, for example) as sites of memory that offer selective images of the past. Although Nora (1989) focuses mostly on material sites of memory, such as monuments, cemeteries or public ceremonies, sites of memory can also be symbolic or textual while their basic functions are identical – to inhibit time, to preserve a sense of continuity and to fix specific knowledge of the past. Despite the common perception of cultural memory as a fixed, unchangeable fact of the past, it is a fluid and contingent category that is subject to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting. Some knowledge can be submerged for years and then suddenly come to the surface and become a dominant memory, occupying a privileged position and marginalizing preceding memories. Such symbolic mnemonic turns caused by intensive politics of memory can have real and material consequences, because cultural memory is always externalized in social action and internalized in individual identification. In this respect, media can be understood as technologies of memory. Many authors agree that in contemporary societies media texts – along with school discourse – are the primary producers of people’s knowledge about history and of their memories (Sturken, 1997; Hardt and Brennen, 1999; Edgerton, 2001; Huyssen, 2003; Evans, 2004; Morris-Suzuki, 2005). Today, the past is visualized to such an extent that visual media have become the main instruments for archiving various past events and helping people remember (Sturken, 1997; Zelizer, 1998; Hardt and Brennen, 1999). People also show great interest in the popular representations of the past in documentaries because of their aesthetics, developed with the help of multimedia technology and computergenerated effects. With their attractive audiovisual stories about the past, which mediate apparently authentic historical scenes, and with their disseminative power, the documentaries provide new means to store, recollect or transform memories and so to (re)organize the past.



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In order to examine how documentaries shape a specific knowledge of the past and promote specific memories, I will use Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge to dig out knowledge of the past and his genealogy to explain the development of this knowledge. This method can help to reveal how knowledge of the past is chosen, how it is narrated, who is the narrator, which discourses guide the narration, and what present interests are behind this version of the past (1982, pp. 183–4). Since Foucault acknowledged that history always tells more about the present than about the past, the analysis of media representations of the past can be used as indicators of the present sociopolitical context and national identity politics (1995, p. 31). Cultural memory should be viewed as a space of discursive struggles because it feeds a battle for the meaning of the past and for the survival of specific knowledge of the past in different groups. To borrow Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, it might be argued that in such hegemonic struggles, only some interpretations of the past can occupy a hegemonic position. Such a position is, however, not granted forever because the hegemonic position in people’s memory is constantly challenged by rival and oppositional interpretations (1971, pp. 351–70). People’s knowledge and their behaviour are subjected to and disciplined by the interpretative limitations cultural memory imposes. Their knowledge about the past and the feeling of all-encompassing consent places individuals within a specific collectivity. Offering a sense of certainty, safety and the continuity of existence, ‘the culture of memory’ (Matsuda in Hutton, 1997, p. 385) thus produced includes a network of power and knowledge that shapes images of the past and of the present.

Documentaries and the struggle for memory In recent years, passionate political conflicts and public debates about the meaning of the past for modern Slovenia started flourishing and dividing the Slovenian public, politically and culturally. Slovenian media have become flooded with history, both recent and ancient. On the one hand, there appears a strong need to invent ancient Slovenian roots. On the other hand, there is a strong need to differentiate Slovenia from Yugoslavia and the Balkans, by rewriting the fifty years of common Yugoslav history and reinterpreting the socialist period. Particularly important is the powerful, politically motivated need to redefine the roles of the antifascist Liberation Front involving the resistant Partisans versus the collaborating Home Guards during the Second World





War.2 A number of cultural representations try to reshape the meaning of the Second World War in Slovenia – now offering a directly opposite, but no less extreme, view of the good and bad sides. During the socialist period in common Yugoslavia, the Liberation Front and the Partisans were one of the most important signifiers of Yugoslav brotherhood and unity, always represented as heroes, while the Home Guards were forever depicted as villains or simply not mentioned at all. In contemporary debates, the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies’ have shifted position. Such one-sided interpretations of history, allowing neither ambiguity nor plurality, bring about radical transformations of people’s memories. As Farrel Corcoran maintains, the unstable conditions and non-consensual interests in divided societies form a perfect laboratory for analysing the relationship between cultural representations and political power in the structuring of memory (2002, p. 63). Specific memories are selected, controlled, instrumentalized, and legitimized within the public consciousness in order to generate a public consensus and build a coherent ideological identity. In the following pages, I will analyse three documentary films produced in Slovenia after 1991 that try to establish a new agenda for remembering and forgetting. Through their treatment of the Slovenian past, these films enable us to observe major shifts in Slovenian cultural memory that are also present in the broader public discourse and political debates. The first film, Ko potrka vojna [When War Knocks at the Door] (Bogdan Mrovlje, 2002), focuses on the ten-day independence war fought in Slovenia against the Yugoslav People’s Army in 1991. The second film, Zamolˇcani – moˇc preživetja [Concealed – the Power of Survival] (Jože Možina, 2004), concentrates on the partisan killings of the Home Guards during the Second World War and the ensuing communist totalitarian regime. The third film, Backup: Slovenska beseda na Koroškem [Backup: The Slovenian Word in Carinthia] (Miha Dolinšek, 1995), goes further back into the past and presents a story of the development of the Slovenian nation from ancient and medieval times onwards. It examines the ancient roots of Slovenia and characterizes Carinthia, which is today part of neighbouring Austria, as the cradle of Slovenianness and the lost Slovenian land.3 The three documentaries operate as technologies of memory. Although the films offer selected images of the past, the documentary as a genre is perceived as factual programming that provides authentic images of the past and not as fiction. Media genre conventions define the documentary film as a text which merely documents reality. Such generic conventions allow audiences to read these texts differently



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from fictional films, such as Hollywood movies, perceiving them as authentic representations of the past rather than wilful constructions of history. The arguments of Susan Sontag (2001) and Roland Barthes (2000) in relation to photography can equally be applied to documentary film; it too addresses viewers with a certain authoritative voice of authenticity and objectivity, and it offers an illusion of reality, as if we were just watching a mirror reflecting the past. The documentary often achieves this aim by using techniques that are characteristic of fictional genres, such as special uses of cameras and editing, computer-based postproduction and even acted-out scenes. The documentary today borrows techniques from TV news production, the fiction film industry and prime-time entertainment dramatic storytelling.

Aesthetics of documentaries: picturing the past In order to get a better insight into the functioning of aesthetics as a way of redefining the past in these documentaries, we can identify specific discursive strategies, narrative techniques and semantic regimes. One of the most important features is the narrative structure. The three documentaries offer apparently very simple and clear stories about the past. When War Knocks at the Door tells a vivid story about the birth of the Slovenian nation state, which emerged in blood through victory in the 1991 independence war. Concealed presents a self-evident story about the Partisans who slaughtered people en masse during the Second World War and about all communists as tyrants and murderers. Backup features an obvious story about the more than one-thousand-year existence of Slovenia as a nation and its millennial oppression by Germans and Austrians. This film especially puts in the picture the foundational myth of the origin of Slovenia in the state of Karantanija – the mythologized eighth-century state-like formation located on the territory of today’s Austrian Carinthia. These simplified accounts of the past constitute not only an entirely new way of interpreting the past, but also embody the current anxieties and priorities of Slovenian society. The present tense is the grammatical imperative in these documentaries, while the lack of a past tense puts emphasis on those past events that are most relevant from the present perspective. This confirms Steve Anderson’s thesis that media representations of the past are mostly used for the purposes of clarifying the present situation (Anderson, 2001). Documentary historical representations link the past with the present. They are usually based on a narrative structure with a clear beginning, middle and end: the opening scene presents the problem, the central





part constructs the culmination, and the solution offers the moral of the story. Concealed, for example, starts with a specific melodramatic dramaturgy in which an older woman searches for the grave of her slain parents in a forest, and closes with a scene in which she finds their grave and breaks down in tears. The film clearly aims to arouse an emotional response from its viewers. This is confirmed by the reaction of the historian who is presented as an authentic and neutral voice in the story, but who also breaks down in tears when the camera zooms in on the ‘evidence’ – the excavated victims’ bones – in his hand. The plot includes a number of personal testimonies of the dead Home Guards’ relatives that fill the space between the opening and closing scenes. Meanwhile there are no testimonies from the Partisans, who are represented very one-sidedly, only to confirm the dominant story of the innocent victims and the guilt of their executioners. The narration of the documentary has a simple and comprehensible structure underscoring the moral of the story: there is a problem and a solution, and between them there is the cause. The film thus provides an implicit justification of who is bad and who is good. When War Knocks at the Door also establishes a particular relationship between the different personal testimonies of the soldiers who fought on the Slovenian side, through a number of shots of military arsenals and newspaper images of ruined houses, bridges and roads from the 1991 war. Personal testimonies are foregrounded and form the essence of the story, just as in Concealed. The emphasis on the personal stories confirms and legitimizes the broader interpretative framework of the documentaries. Viewers of such historical drama documentaries enter the past through a melodramatic structure and individual testimonies, which are narrated from a specific point of view. Since viewers are emotionally touched, they can easily identify with the actors of the represented past. Narrative techniques and discursive strategies grant strong symbolic meanings to these past events, which are narrated only by those who have the privilege to have a voice in these documentaries. All other voices that could constructively contribute to understanding the complex and multidimensional contexts of the past are silenced. We hear voices of Slovenian soldiers but not of Yugoslav soldiers, voices of victims of the Home Guards but none of the Partisans, voices of the historians who support this kind of interpretation of the Second World War, but not of those historians who support other interpretations. It is painfully clear that the three documentaries thus only foster those discourses that promote a new



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order of truth and reflect the new right-wing political regime in current Slovenian society. The documentaries are also based on a linear narrative structure: past worlds are presented in a straightforward manner with clear causes and consequences. In Backup, for example, there is a chronological overview of the collective development of Slovenians since ancient times, through Karantanija in the eighth century to independent Slovenia in the 1990s. Yet, whole eras are left out, including the fifty years of socialist Yugoslavia. The films thus select, emphasize, and incorporate specific events within a coherent story, while excluding other important historical events and episodes. In Concealed, the Partisans and communists are persistently represented as the cause of all the evil that befell the people after the war. Such narrow, not to say bigoted, chronological and linear narratives obscure historical complexities. Although the story at times skips a few decades or centuries, the audience may not notice this because of the compelling linear flow of the narrative structure. Making the gaps unnoticeable and unimportant, the documentaries thus smooth over any inconsistencies. The selection of topics in documentaries likewise shapes people’s perceptions of the past in a specific way. It is particularly disturbing to see how selected topics and past events reproduce and legitimate certain myths about the Slovenian past. Backup puts forward the image of a modest and constantly endangered Slovenian language and culture, threatened first by the Ottomans and later by the Germans and Austrians. The stories of offensive and aggressive Others are played over and over again, but the film fails to mention that in the six hundred years of the Habsburg Empire the sense of an imagined Slovenian community only came to the fore in the final seventy years. Instead, this period is represented as six hundred years of repression of Slovenia. The emphasis on the mythologized democratic inauguration of the Slovenian dukes in Karantanija introduces the dichotomy between an ancient Slovenian democracy versus German and Austrian dictatorship. In Concealed, the Partisan killings of the Home Guards during the war are highlighted and equated to the communist revolutionary movement, while the broader contexts of the Second World War or Nazi crimes are left unmentioned. The documentary exclusively presents the stories of those Home Guards who were killed, and not of those who were persecuted, brought to court or fled to other countries. This is a way of conveniently ignoring the Home Guards’ collaboration with the Germans, because there are no voices to answer unpleasant questions about that collaboration. A similar manipulation is employed in





When War Knocks at the Door, where the ten-day independence war of Slovenia is glorified. The Balkan threats are stressed by referring to ‘Yugonostalgics’, ‘aggressive’ Serbs, and the demonised Chetniks – even though these were, in fact, never involved in combat in Slovenia. Other Yugoslav republics and their complex roles and situations in the war are wholly absent; there is no reference to the shared Yugoslav history. The linguistic level of the story is equally important: how is the narrative verbalized, what register of language is chosen, and how are the events and people described? In Concealed, the slain Home Guards are persistently referred to as ‘civilians’ or ‘victims’. In some cases, it is not clearly indicated that they were organized military groups who collaborated with the German army and worked against the Partisans. The Partisans, on the other hand, are discredited at the verbal level as they are dehumanized and demonized through the repetition of words such as slaughterers, criminals, murderers or communist revolutionaries. Such a choice of language selectively ascribes collective guilt to one group only. The entire Partisan movement is equated to a poorly defined communism, which is effectively criminalized because it is left undiscussed. The historian who narrates the documentary actually likens the Liberation Front and the Communist regime to the Nazi regime and thus presents the Partisans as Nazi-like criminals. At the same time, the Home Guards are presented as true Slovenians who fought against communism. Their collaboration with and their fight for the Nazi regime is conveniently left out of the picture. The documentary uses the historian as an expert voice to legitimize the story and provide professional credibility to this particular view. Such expert voices of authoritative speakers are generally used in media discourse to give credibility to a story, as they are in the genres of news and documentary. John Hartley refers to them as ‘accessed voices’ that are subordinated to the structure of the story, which implies that whatever they say is consistent with the story itself (1989, pp. 109–12). The verbalization in When War Knocks at the Door is based on military and war vocabulary, creating the image of a bloody struggle. Through the repeated use of such rhetoric, Slovenia is presented as a real nation born out of war and struggle. Such language calls on the viewers to identify with the images of their brave fellow Slovenians. The narrator’s phrases such as ‘All Slovenians stood on the same side. Everybody cooperated in that war’, subjects the viewers to easily identifiable collective national positions, even though most Slovenians did not have much



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direct experience of that war and participated in it mostly as distanced viewers, filled with anxiety and fear. In the documentaries, the narrator’s voice is usually male, suggesting a certain authority and determination, while the (rare) female voice reflects sensitivity and innocence. Inserts of female voices are employed to arouse emotions. In Backup, for example, a female voice is applied to the gentle telling of old folktales and poems that are reinvented for national purposes. Concealed uses female voices to read victims’ letters to their families. One of the most important signification systems in documentaries is their visual rhetoric, including editing, lighting, black and white or colour technique, camera angles, camera movements, slow-motion shots, acted scenes, and so on. Acted scenes depicting the past are particularly persuasive ways of telling a story. When there is no authentic footage of the past available, the producer can use actors to portray a specific past event. These acted scenes are built into the story as if they were authentic. Usually they are juxtaposed with shots of archival documents or historical material objects, giving viewers the impression that they are really watching the past, in this case true national heroes of Slovenian history. Backup uses many acted scenes picturing the ancient and medieval past by using both black and white and colour shots. The use of both techniques and the insertion of still photographs into the story is a common way of giving additional credibility to a story. Visual rhetoric pulls viewers into the story and therefore into the past. It produces an effect of reality, since it creates the illusion that the picture is merely a window through which we are looking at the past. Visual images also have the potential to provoke strong feelings – for example, the regular use of close-ups or extreme close-up shots when people present their personal testimonies in visible pain or tears. In Concealed, the relatives of the slain people often cry in front of the camera, and the close-ups of their faces or tearful eyes bring them literally close to the spectator, calling for sympathetic identification. It enables viewers to choose sides, although their compassion concerns the surviving relatives and not necessarily the dead Home Guards. One final technique that I want to discuss is the soundtrack. There is increased pleasure in consuming visual images together with appropriate sounds or music. Sound effects and music create a suitable atmosphere and help people to reveal their emotions as individuals and as audiences (Frith, 1986, pp. 68–9). The pleasure in music, which pre-eminently signals the characters’ emotions and offers viewers a





direct emotional experience, is then simultaneously individualized and shared. Music can construct the cinematic world; it is a source of atmosphere and can thus convey the emotional significance of a specific scene. Sound and music are commonly used to emphasize emotions, to stir up fear, horror, compassion, pity or disgust. The soundtrack also helps to confirm the interpretation that the story offers. In Backup, the audience hears the shattering of glass, the barking of a dog, the sounds of owls and thunder when the film tells about Germans and Austrians or about the unjust setting of the Slovenian-Austrian border after the First World War. The documentary Concealed systematically uses horror and scary music in the background when the victims’ relatives talk about the Partisans’ killing of Home Guards, or about the Partisans and communism in general. In When War Knocks at the Door carefully selected melancholic and slow Slovenian pop-music tunes are repeated throughout the whole film, glorifying the young Slovenian soldiers who fought in the independence war. The many different narrative and audiovisual techniques and discursive strategies that I have discussed effectually structure the viewers’ perceptions of the represented past. In this regard, the cinematic creates strong symbolic meanings of past events. The narrative style of documentaries may be highly poetic, yet the aesthetics do have political effects. As we have seen, the films tell stories about the past that are built on simple oppositions between good and bad, heroes and villains. Slovenian history is interpreted on the basis of such binary oppositions. The main story of Concealed is based on the opposition between the bad communist Partisans and their innocent victims, including the Home Guards. In When War Knocks at the Door, glorifying representations of the defence and resistance of brave Slovenian soldiers are contrasted with representations of an aggressive Yugoslav army. In Backup, modest and humble Slovenians are antagonistically opposed to greedy Germans and Austrians. The actors in the story not only signify but also personify specific past events. In all three documentaries, Slovenian history is presented as a collection of personal dramas between protagonists and antagonists. Above all, the privileging of close-up shots and the use of the present time produce an illusion of ‘being there’. Documentaries inform viewers about the past, but also produce a reality effect making the spectator experience the past as the present. The problematic aspect here is that those three films interpret social, political and cultural matters through personal testimonies, while the broader context is sorely missing.



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The selected documentaries depict a new agenda of historical events and build a new mythical image of Slovenia’s past. They evidence the three main shifts or changes in the reinterpretation of Slovenia’s past that are a part of contemporary media and other cultural discourses in Slovenia. First, since the 1990s, Slovenia favours a strong focus on contemporary history, especially in its glorification of the ten-day war for Slovenia’s independence in 1991. In the documentary When War Knocks at the Door, the war is turned into a myth to be preserved in the cultural memory of the nation. The birth of a nation is usually seen as one involving struggle and blood; when this is not actually the case, it can be invented as such through various cultural texts. When War Knocks at the Door contains all the characteristics of war discourses; it builds on chauvinistic and macho discourses masculinizing the war, the past, and the nation. The bodies of the young Slovenian men who were soldiers in that war are underlined at visual and verbal levels, for example, by showing them as sportsmen undertaking various sporting activities. These activities emphasize the physical power of their male bodies. Their masculinity is also put forward through images of their children and descendants. The message of such storytelling is that the nation is strong enough to survive. Yet, death is also glorified and dramatized as a sacrifice committed in the name of the nation. Although the documentary shows no dead bodies, death is present at the verbal level through the repeated mentioning of the number of casualties in this war. The war is presented as a worthy myth to be remembered by the audience. The second significant – and possibly the most aggressive – ideological turn can be observed in the redefinition of the Second World War. The role reversal between the formerly good but now bad Partisans and National Liberation Front, and the formerly bad but now good Home Guards is particularly disturbing. Also the redefinition of Slovenia’s relations with Yugoslavia, and the erasure of the socialist period, reveals a new, problematic ideology. The Partisans and the Second World War, important signifiers of the brotherhood and unity of all Yugoslav nations during the 1945 to 1990 period, are now facing a redefinition for the new purposes of Slovenia’s ruling right-wing politics. The mythification, dehumanization, and demonization of the Partisans are part of the establishment of a new regime of ‘truth’. The Partisans are represented inequitably as radical and ruthless communist revolutionaries, not as members of the Liberation Front who fought against Nazi occupiers. As a matter of fact, most Partisans were never members of the Communist



Ideologies of documentaries: rewriting the past


Party. This false representation equates the Liberation Front with the crimes of the communist regime, while the Nazi regime is concealed and the collaborating Home Guards are sympathetically characterized as sensitive patriots, acquitted of Nazi collaboration. Such representations push the cultural memory of Slovenian people through significant changes and introduce the historiography of oblivion. The purpose of this kind of historiography is not simply to revise understandings of the past, but to obliterate the memory of certain events from public consciousness (Morris-Suzuki, 2005, p. 7). The documentaries achieve their goal by shifting the public discussion and historical interest away from the bigger picture (the atrocities of the Second World War, the Holocaust) towards a rather narrow view (Partisan crimes, slain Home Guards). The films refuse to set the story within the broader historical context of the Second World War and its aftermath, and subject a small number of selected facts and figures to sustained critical scrutiny. The social amnesia, to borrow Andreas Huyssen’s term (2003, p. 6), that these documentaries produce and foster is too extensive to be ignored. It can have serious consequences for opening or closing public debates. It will also have a formative effect on cultural memory. The documentaries promote a new politics of truth that rearranges past events to justify the current situation and legitimize dubious political actions. The present political and cultural alliances within Slovenian society are produced on the basis of this reinterpretation and reconstruction of cultural memory. The third significant shift in the revisionist Slovenian historiography is the glorification of Slovenia’s ancient history, by focusing on the ancient – imagined – origins of Slovenians and by presupposing a linear development from a tribe to a nation. The documentary Backup reintroduces all these topics. It produces a foundational myth by grossly overrating certain interpretations of Slovenia’s origin. The mythological Karantanija as an ancient Slovenian state is turned into a national myth, which is today stressed much more than it used to be during the period of Yugoslavia. The film reinvents folk traditions and stories about the past, which are to be remembered as originally Slovenian, producing a false sense of an indigenous ‘national species’.

Conclusion As technologies of memory, documentaries reproduce and sustain the dominant discursive order in Slovenia and accordingly try to reconstruct Slovenian cultural memory. This revision of the past in Slovenian



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society is in line with the revisionist political discourses that have come to occupy hegemonic positions in recent years. In Slovenian society, there are still many unresolved issues, which encourage growing partial interests to redefine certain past eras and events. There are strong impulses to rewrite history and to reorganize Slovenian cultural memory. The agents of such mnemonic change are manifold and reveal the interplay of many motives. Concealed designates the aspirations of the Slovenian Roman Catholic Church and the descendants of the Home Guards who after the Second World War emigrated mostly to South America. Both parties attempt to claim property confiscated by the communist regime. By equating communism with Nazism and the Partisans with criminals, both agents are trying to relativize their collaboration with the Nazi regime and justify their claims to the property that in their eyes was confiscated by a criminal regime. In When War Knocks at the Door, the aspirations of both these parties are accompanied by the aspirations of those Slovenians who feel uncomfortable with the socialist Yugoslav past. They emphasize the European character of Slovenia because the transition to capitalism gave them the opportunity to acquire material wealth. The third documentary, Backup, includes the aspirations of the majority of Slovenians who feel a need to have a place in the history of great nations, to be recognized, respected and admired for the ancient democratic principles introduced by their mythological ancestors, and to be included in the European family on equal grounds to any other nation. The conglomerate of all these aspirations provides fuel for the mnemonic change and the urge to build a new national history, one original and magnificent enough for its citizens to be proud of. In this sense, the change of cultural memory confirms Eric Hobsbawm’s idea of history as the raw material for nationalist ideologies (1993, pp. 7, 13). History can be mobilized to support a specific image of a national identity or a particular political regime. For such purposes, new symbols and sites of memory have to be erected. Once such reinterpretations of the past firmly enter the cultural memory, they come to pass for reality and start restructuring present identities. Documentary films have the power to disseminate a particular historical consciousness and to privilege certain memories over others. They have the power to connect people passionately with the past, by bringing them not just interpretations of the past but also drama, entertainment and pleasure.




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1. Historically, the Republic of Slovenia, with approximately two million inhabitants, is closely connected to the broader area of the Balkans. After the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Slovenia joined the coalition of Serbia and Croatia, and in 1918 a new state was formed – The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians. After the Second World War, Slovenia became part of the new socialist state of Yugoslavia. In the late 1980s, Yugoslavia was flooded with ethnic nationalisms. The gap between the different discursive structures in the Yugoslav republics was growing bigger, and the ideology of brotherhood and unity of all Yugoslav nations was no longer enough to prevent the downfall of Yugoslavia and the establishment of an independent Republic of Slovenia in 1991. 2. During the Second World War in Slovenia, counter-revolutionary military, political or intelligence services and organizations appeared, which collaborated with the occupying German and Italian armies. The best organized was Slovensko domobranstvo (Slovenian Home Guards/Slowenische Landeswehr), which was established by the German administration in September 1943 after the Italian surrender. Domobranci were armed, paid, and equipped by Nazi Germans, and their numbers grew over the years. After the Second World War, many members of Home Guards squads fled from Slovenia, but a significant number were captured by foreign liberation armies. Some of these were returned to Slovenia, while others escaped to Latin America or other parts of the world. Those who were returned were persecuted, brought to court or killed by the then Yugoslav communist authorities. 3. The province of Carinthia has been divided since 1920 between three nation states: Slovenia, Austria and Italy. A major part became a federal Austrian province; a smaller southern part became part of Yugoslavia/Slovenia, while a small part was annexed to Italy. A substantial part of the Slovenian-speaking population that lives in Austrian Carinthia is characterized as a Slovenian minority. Accordingly, images of Carinthia as ‘a grief of Slovenia’ and ‘the lost Slovenian land’ have been dominating Slovenian people’s perceptions of Carinthia for decades.



Notes

Impossible Histories: Violence, Identity, and Memory in Colombian Visual Arts Marta Cabrera

Selective memories cannot be avoided, but they can be counteracted. (Davies, 1995, p. 11) With the seemingly over-pessimistic title ‘Impossible Histories’, I refer to a particular condition present in Colombian culture, where the ‘forest’ of narratives of violence cannot be incorporated into a historical narration, one capable of making sense of such violence. As I will argue, this is caused by a complex weaving of memory and oblivion, visibility and invisibility regarding the issue of violence. Violence is central in the production of collective identity, as the past is punctuated by violent events often followed by veils of official oblivion (Pécaut, 2003; Sánchez, 2003). In Colombia, violence is highly visible in a number of spaces: from academia to mass media, from literature and the visual arts to the ambiguous space of rumour. Yet, there is an evident lack of monuments, public rituals and commemorations to remember violence, to the point that the State’s obligation to build a monument in memory of the victims of a 1987 paramilitary massacre is more a matter of punishment than a perceived need to commemorate. Because of this absence of formal remembering of violence, the spaces of art play a key role in the articulation of the multiple narratives of violence. They have, however, ended up constructing a ‘dense forest with deceptively homogeneous contours’ (Coronil and Skurski, 1991, p. 333). Indeed, the Colombian historical imagination appears as circular; the civil wars of the nineteenth century seem to have prolonged themselves into the twentieth, in the bloody bipartisan confrontation known as the War of the Thousand Days (1899–1902), during which the country 203



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suffered enormous losses, including the secession of Panama. As a 1963 study states, this confrontation ‘echoes’ in the subsequent wave of violence, the period simply known as La Violencia [Violence] (1948–60), which claimed more than 200,000 lives (Guzmán et al., 1963, vol. I, p. 24). La Violencia, inaugurated by the assassination of Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, unleashed a violent riot known as El Bogotazo and is well inscribed in collective memory through images and narratives dealing with the massacres, and the horrendous tortures and dismembering of bodies that characterized it. La Violencia ended with the so-called Frente Nacional [National Front], a political strategy based on the alternation of the presidency between the Liberal and Conservative parties every four years, over a period of sixteen years. While order was restored and general amnesties and official pardons were granted, power sharing produced more exclusion, providing the grounds for the creation and strengthening of guerrilla groups. The tradition of pardon and oblivion failed to provide a real closure to the traumatic event, as people were supposed to simply ‘forget’ what happened. As Daniel Pécaut (2001) argues, the difficulty in differentiating rests on the frequency of the episodes, which makes them appear as continuous, thus making the processes of social construction of memory even harder. While the visual arts of the 1950s and 1960s, testimonial in some cases, mostly relied on realism and figuration in their denunciation of the horrors of La Violencia, since the 1990s there appears to have been a turn in representation, evidenced by an interest in moving beyond this realm of unambiguous images as well as in interrogating the role of images and narratives of violence in the construction of Colombian cultural memory. German Egyptologist Jan Assman’s notion of cultural memory is useful in analysing such a turn. As he argues, cultural memory is characterized as compris[ing] that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image. Upon such collective knowledge, for the most part (but not exclusively) of the past, each group bases its awareness of unity and particularity (1995, p. 132). Following Assman, cultural memory is characterized by: first, its power to provide a group with a concrete identity by tracing boundaries of identity; second, by reconstructing traces of the past that are significant in the present; third, by working on a stable formation of collective



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meaning and knowledge; fourth, by organizing common knowledge; and fifth, by creating a hierarchical system of values structuring knowledge and; finally, by its self-reflexivity. The visual arts of the 1990s can be seen to play an important role within the realm of cultural memory by interrogating the archive of violent images and narratives (as much as its omissions and blind spots), the rituals of amnesty and official oblivion, as well as the cultural background of Catholicism and race and class hierarchies and their role in the production of the notion of natural, cyclical violence in Colombia. The attention to issues of suppression and forgetting runs parallel with the rise of a globalized discursive formation dealing with issues of memory, trauma and commemoration (Huyssen, 2000). It is also concomitant with the domestic situation becoming considerably more complex, with drug trafficking and paramilitarism completing the scene of a ‘four-army confrontation’: guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug traffickers and the National Army (Martín-Barbero, 1998). The strategies employed by the visual arts in this period seek to deal with a repository of images and narratives of horror and death as well as with a need to bring traumatic events into the phantom public sphere. Yet because they install violence as natural and constant, they also hinder discussion and analysis, relegating the task of mourning to the private sphere. As a result, it not only leaves society without valuable resources in its construction of shared memory, but also doubles violence ‘in the act of terror and in the repression of bereavement’ (Feldman, 2004, p. 183). The labour of visual representation has an important function in breaking the commonsense understanding of terror present in cultural memory as cyclical, endless, unmotivated, ubiquitous, present in daily life as much as in the memory of the past, as if it were a living force or an explanation for everything (Taussig, 1992, p. 19): ‘violence drew the peasants’, ‘violence came’, ‘violence displaced people’, and so forth (Sánchez, 2003, p. 53). In this respect, Colombia seems to be slowly burning in the furnaces of a low-intensity conflict. In what follows, I explore the ways in which visual arts can function as a technology of memory to open spaces of negotiation between private and public, memorializing and forgetting. To do so, I discuss three instances of the contemporary visual arts in Colombia, all dealing with issues of memory, commemoration and violence, by well-known contemporary Colombian artists exhibiting both domestically and abroad – a choice made on the basis that this symbolic production is key in creating a certain collective image of the Colombian nation at home and abroad.



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My starting point is the work of photographer and video artist Juan Manuel Echavarría, which illustrates some of the difficulties of dealing with issues of violence. I argue that, despite the undeniable power of the some of his images, they are still unable to disengage from the representational dynamics articulating narratives of cyclical, unending violence. Next, video artist José Alejandro Restrepo’s work Musa Paradisiaca is discussed as an exploration of the power of mythical images in legitimizing different forms of violence situated in the same space, although set apart in time. This work in particular seems effective in investigating the contexts of violence and differentiating its forms, breaking away from the notion of violence as an uninterrupted and undifferentiated line that traverses Colombian history. Finally, the works of sculptor Doris Salcedo dealing with the 1985 events at the Palace of Justice in Bogotá attest to the imperative of bringing into public consciousness a tragedy that still lacks closure.

Imagining violence The work of photographer and video artist Juan Manuel Echavarría dealing with contemporary political violence in Colombia is sober and provocative; it is also problematic in its association of image and meaning in a rather restricted fashion. His work Retratos [Portraits] (1996) illustrates this point. Composed of a series of black and white photographs of dilapidated mannequins on the sidewalk, Portraits associates violence and indifference: ‘When I found them – tortured, destroyed and marked by violence . . . and saw how people looked at the clothes without seeing the mannequins, I felt that I lived like this in my country, completely anaesthetized’ (Echavarría, quoted in Herzog, 2004, p. 196). The concealed context of working-class discount stores turns the mannequins into floating signifiers separated from the specificity of their situation. In consequence, the photographs of the dolls are only capable of referring to decadence and mutilation in an abstract way. The images are recodified through a series of statements: the title Portraits refers not only to human beings and the local reference, but also the artist’s comments, and the mannequins as obvious stand-ins for the human body. All this comes to signify the omnipresence of violence exerted over individual bodies as well as on the social body. The use of naturalist, ethnographic photography in the Portraits series, including the use of black and white, close-ups and the avoidance of obvious manipulation, produces metaphors within the linguistic and cultural conventions embedded in Colombian culture, where the notion



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of circular, omnipresent violence persists. The same can be argued for the series of black and white photographs called El Testigo [The Witness] (1997). In one of these pictures, an emaciated white horse stares at the viewer from a solitary landscape. In another, a calf’s eye in close-up confronts the camera lens. Animals here are clearly stand-ins for human beings, and the preferred reading is once again violence incarnated in the ever-present massacre: ‘In order to kill one must reduce the other to an animal’, Echavarría explains. ‘Sometimes the victims of Colombian massacres, such as Mapiripán, have been taken by their aggressors to the public slaughter house. This I mention because the look in the calf’s eye is very perturbing. It is as if it had registered the horror left by a massacre’ (quoted in Herzog, 2004, pp. 197–8). Mapiripán, a coca-growing village in southeastern Colombia, was the background for a horrendous massacre that occurred from 15–20 July 1997. It was committed by the paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), which took over the village for the duration of the massacre and tortured and killed at least thirty people. The case became especially notorious when it became known that the Colombian army was implicated in the killings. Eventually, the Colombian state was condemned for it by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2005. While an analogy between the slaughtering of animals and that of human beings might have been accurate and possibly effective in the case of Mapiripán, Echavarría’s El Testigo limits itself to establishing a connection between the wide-open eye of the calf and an unseen incident of violence – the reference to a real-life event was added a posteriori by the artist in an interview with curator Hans-Michel Herzog. My argument, then, is that the evasion of an engagement with specific incidents of violence is very problematic in the Colombian context because terror is endowed with nearly supernatural qualities. As a result of the numerous incidents of violence that have no apparent resolution and that articulate collective memory into narratives of circular violence, it is everywhere and anywhere as if it were a magical force or a ghostly substance that circulates through objects, persons and animals alike. El Testigo refers to this ominous, constant presence of violence, to hovering, unseen threats. Surely, nothing is more terrifying than an invisible menace. Yet in this understanding of violence and terror, the identity of both victims and perpetrators is dissolved, and further interrogation or even accountability is precluded. Echavarría’s metonymical construction of the hypothetical event of violence in El Testigo as a massacre is quite significant; it points to the importance and visibility of this occurrence in narratives of violence





in Colombia since the time of La Violencia. Massacres are also relevant in their positing of the punished body as site of both violence and memorializing, as Allen Feldman (1991) has noted. According to Feldman, in sacrificial models of memory-formation, the body becomes the site where conflicting political forces publicly display domination and power, but it also becomes a site of remembrance – through its defacement and mutilation. Although Feldman’s example is Northern Ireland, the same dynamics of spectacularity and memorializing can be observed in the Colombian case, as María Victoria Uribe notes: So transformed [after mutilation], the corpses were displayed in highly visible places, so that neighbors and the authorities could find them easily. The bodies of murdered persons became terrifying alterities, pedagogical and exemplifying texts that always achieved their objective: to frighten the local inhabitants away from the area, their houses, and their livestock (2004, p. 89). More recently, Echavarría has shifted strategies, moving away from metaphor and metonymy towards the testimonial, as in the video Bocas de Ceniza [Mouths of Ash] (2000). The title is a reference to the history of colonization, as the Spaniards named the mouth of the Magdalena River thus, having arrived there on Ash Wednesday. Again, a narrative of violence is instated by the artist: ‘You can call it a baptism of death, a permanent mourning’ (Echavarría, quoted in Herzog, 2004, p. 189). The title evokes a historical background that is never fully developed, although it does allude to the conventional, widespread notion that violence began with the conquest. The artist’s views on the violent connotations of the place rely as well on a generalized view of violence: A lot of bodies are thrown into rivers to make them disappear. Thousands of bodies upon which violence has been exercised have been dragged by this country’s rivers during the last fifty years, and in my imagination I always see the corpses floating as far as the mouth of the Magdalena River which is were Colombian water flows into the Caribbean (Echavarría, quoted in Herzog, 2004, p. 189). Bocas de Ceniza, however, does not refer to the topic of the imagination of terror centred on the geographical space of Bocas de Ceniza, nor is it related to the location alluded to in the title, nor the history of the place, making the title of this work a matter of poetic licence. Formally, it comprises a collection of short videos of Afro-Colombians who have



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suffered different acts of violence and who sing self-composed songs in Afro-Colombian traditional fashion about what happened to them, what they saw, or how they survived. The videos are sober, framed by the video screen, with no background information provided (besides the first name of the singer) and limited to close-ups of the singers that focus on the expression of their eyes – ‘I need those eyes,’ Echevarría is quoted to have said (Herzog, 2004, p. 190) – making them a distinctive, key feature of the work.1 This intense gaze seems to demand that the viewer, identified with the position of the camera, become implicated in an emotional drama with the characters onscreen (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996; Walker and Chaplin, 2002). The choice of close-ups conveys proximity, staging an imaginary relation between the viewer and the viewed (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, p. 134). This formal composition, coupled with the subject-matter, has made this a widely celebrated work – moving and compelling. Bocas de Ceniza, however, is problematic in its avoidance of more contextualized narratives. It relies on the testimonies of the victims as a source of reality and legitimacy that acts as if no frames of reference were needed – the same dynamics of representation employed in Colombian television news. Representation and reality are thus equated, naturalizing images as if they had not been subjected to editing decisions. This is indeed naïvely imagined by the artist: ‘I have just been a medium through which others can express themselves’ (Echevarría, quoted in Herzog, 2004, p. 193). The singers, in fact, do not need the medium the artist offers, because their songs are expressly destined for the public sphere, meant to be sung in concerts and festivals or gatherings. What this work actually does is take the singers out of their communal, performative context and place them in the space of the museum for their consecration as ‘art works’, as an ‘authentic’ representation of the reality of Colombian violence. The singers, surrounded by a halo of Otherness and exoticism, all belong to a racial minority, one that has been repeatedly victimized, in the past and in recent years. They sing, with a mixture of performance and pleasure, about their horrendous experiences in a way reminiscent of medieval troubadours, thus offering an authentic social memory, providing the viewer with ‘A Taste of the Pain of the Other’, which was the rather unfortunate title of a group exhibition featuring Mouth of Ash.2 As is the case with other cultural artefacts such as documentaries and autobiographies featuring the act of witnessing, Mouth of Ash gravitates between a universalized understanding of terror and an emphatic,





identificatory response. The universalizing tendency hinders deeper engagement with the particular context, while identification ‘indulge[s] the illusion that we might somehow be able to assimilate [atrocities] fully into our understanding,’ as Ulrich Baer puts it (2002, p. 177). This work, moving and powerful as it is, still sorts victim/viewer into positions of hierarchical observation, compulsory visibility, and nonreciprocal appropriation of the body in pain. It displays simultaneously both distance and proximity; the singers, racialized icons of suffering, inhabit a liminal space – at once part of society but removed from it.

Absence felt An example of the attempt to reinscribe events in memory that have not been articulated (or only partially) in collective memory is Doris Salcedo’s work on the 1985 events at the Palace of Justice. On 6 November 1985, thirty-five members of the M-19 guerrilla group (born from feelings of frustration and exclusion originating in the allegedly fraudulent presidential elections of 19 April 1970) took over the Palace of Justice in downtown Bogotá. Their hostages included the Supreme Court and the people working in the building, as well as those running errands there that day. After twenty-eight hours and a military raid that included artillery shelling which resulted in a raging fire that destroyed the building, all of the rebels and eleven of the twenty-five Supreme Court Justices were dead and at least eleven people disappeared, most of them cafeteria workers. The courthouse was entirely rebuilt four years later, and today, only a plaque with the names of the magistrates who died in the siege reminds passers-by of the events of November 1985 – no other information is provided and no other victims are mentioned in this rather invisible monument. Surprisingly, the events disappeared from public memory, and more than twenty years later, the final fate of some victims is still unknown. No one has ever been punished for the carnage, and no definite responsibility has been fixed either on the government, M-19, or on both parties.3 The siege, however, began to receive renewed attention in 2005 on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, when the Supreme Court created a Truth Commission in order to restart the investigation, in an attempt to provide as much closure as possible to the tragic events. The Commission officially began its work in November 2005 and delivered partial results, to general disappointment, in November 2006. At the time the tragedy was taking place, sculptor Doris Salcedo was returning to Colombia after studying in the United States. Since then,



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Salcedo has produced a number of works and interventions in the public space relating to the events of 1985 with the aim of reinscribing them in the public sphere. Thus, the titles of Salcedo’s installations 6 de Noviembre [6 November] (2001) and Tenebrae Noviembre 7 1985 [Tenebrae 7 November 1985] (1999–2000), seek to transport the viewer to a precise, tragic and nearly forgotten moment in the Colombian past. Her works deal with this event with great economy of means. The work 6 de Noviembre, for instance, consists of thirteen chairs with elongated legs, cast from lead and steel, disseminated across the exhibition space as remnants of a tragedy, creating an area of chaos. It conveys not only the notion of assault, but marks out a space of exclusion where the viewer stands on the threshold between the site of violence and everyday life. Similarly, Tenebrae Noviembre 7 1985 features tipped-over chairs with elongated legs positioned in the exhibition space blocking the access of the public, barricade-like, positioning them as impotent bystanders – almost as witnesses. Salcedo uses furniture as metonymical displacements to convey the absence of those whose presence gave the objects their function. No bodies are revealed in the perceptual space (based on invisibility, representing a lack of power) that is created between the visible world and the absence of those who have died. Loss, grief and mourning are the major issues Salcedo seeks to address. Her work engages ‘with the concept of the monument or memorial, not as commemorative form of an event but as a means of addressing the radical discontinuity between the event and its experiencing, a form that bears witness to that which cannot be accounted for’ (Merewether, 1998, p. 17). The two works do not represent the event, but rather memorialize it, as did the 2002 commemorative action, the ephemeral sculpture Noviembre 6 y 7 [November 6 and 7]. Described by the artist as ‘a piece in permanent movement that took place over time’ (Herzog, 2004, p. 155), it consisted of 280 chairs quietly and gradually appearing suspended from the walls of the rebuilt Palace of Justice over two days, the actual time of the massacre. The first chair descended quietly at 11:35am, marking the time of death of the first victim. The action was interrupted at 10pm on the first day, reminding the viewers that the siege was interrupted for the night because a massive fire hindered the operations. Both the attack and the action were resumed the next day at 6am At 2pm, more chairs were lowered, albeit intermittently until 7pm, marking the last moments of the siege. Like seventeen years earlier on that date, daily life had been disrupted, but this time the disruption took place through an action memorializing not only the incidence of violence, but its actual victims. In this case,





the ephemeral quality of the piece marks the absence of closure of the historical event itself and the need to open a space for remembrance. Salcedo’s works are simultaneously effective and failed technologies of memory, occurring at an intersection between remembering and forgetting. The traumatic event can be remembered, but absence remains. While these works create a space in collective remembrance for those ‘individual cases . . . of little interest to historians and to the Colombian justice system’ (Salcedo, 2003, p. 29), Salcedo is also aware of their limits: ‘This is what my work is about: Impotence, a sum of impotence, not being able to solve anything, or to fix a problem, not knowing, not seeing, not being able to grasp a presence, for me art is a lack of power’ (p. 29). However, what Salcedo does succeed in doing is connecting the private and public spheres in a ritual of shared remembrance, generating a ‘political space not only of commemoration but of an ethics based on collective memory and continuity’ (Franco, 1985, p. 14).

Archaeology of violence In contrast to Salcedo’s evocative pieces in which bodies remain concealed, in Musa Paradisiaca [Heavenly Muse] (1994–97), video artist José Alejandro Restrepo places side by side images from nineteenth-century European travelogues describing the potentialities of the tropics and news bulletins about massacres in Urabá (Colombia’s tropical bananagrowing region). Restrepo employs these images not as repositories of historical truth, but rather as forms of power, a power whose primary source is myth – which entwines with history to the point of becoming inseparable. In other words, Musa Paradisiaca tries to act on memory by denaturalizing images and reflecting on the way mythic images function in history, and how history in turn relies on mythic images. The goal is to trace continuities and discontinuities between forms of violence by means of an intertextual dialogue. The only commonality is the title of the work itself – Musa Paradisiaca (the scientific name for the common banana): I began to weave together Linnaeus, Pliny the Elder, and what the Arians called soma (the sacred spiritual food of the priests), with the exuberance of the plantain, together with Urabá, whose history has a different tone: that of uninterrupted massacres since 1928. I devoted myself to gathering all the chronicles about war and banana plantations, not only in Urabá but also in the battles of the European Union



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Indeed, all of these associations persist beyond the neocolonial nineteenth century: the coastal area is still coded as a place of abundance – natural, sexual – as well as of sloth and lack of civilization. In 1928, for instance, striking United Fruit Company workers were massacred by the Colombian army. The event is well inscribed in collective memory, as Gabriel García Márquez retells it in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). In the 1960s, guerrilla movements infiltrated the banana-workers’ unions. By the 1980s, the region was again the site of violent, collective death as a struggle for power between the guerrillas and paramilitary groups associated with the landowners erupted. Both sides carried out killings of workers until the paramilitary, allied to the army, took control of the area in 1996.4 Restrepo articulated this complex weave formally in an installation that features bunches of bananas, each one with a small television screen attached to its lower end. A round mirror on the floor allows the viewer to see fragments of news bulletins from Urabá, as well as images of a nude couple in a luxuriant natural scene, simultaneously heaven and hell, surrounded by the forbidden fruit: the banana, the heavenly muse. Upon subsequent visits, the viewer witnesses the slow decay of the bananas, which permeates the exhibition space with its smell. This process expresses at once the passing of time, decay and death. It associates the senses of the viewer with history and myth. In this way, Musa Paradisiaca ultimately seeks to reveal different forms of violence coexisting, sedimented, layer upon layer, in a single geographical space – a reading of violence’s continuities and discontinuities that contributes to crushing its apparent uniformity and circularity. The dis/continuity revealed in the use of mixed images, narratives and references reveal scepticism towards linear historical narratives, making Restrepo wonder if video art is capable of creating ‘a countermemory, of liberating the forces of creative chance, the simultaneity and divergence of topics, partial trajectories and labile, new temporal and signifying structures that are closer to myth’ (Restrepo, quoted in Pini, 2001, p. 118). In this sense, Musa Paradisiaca condenses and revisits the multiple, often contradictory, codifications contained in images of a particular geographical space (Urabá). It interrogates the physical and epistemological violence underlying past and present models of progress and productivity designed for the region, as well as the longlasting narratives of natural and sexual abundance of the tropics, as



and the multinationals and the history of GATT (Restrepo, quoted in Herkenhoff, 2001, p. 59).

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much as their opposite: narratives of shortage and hardship, of despair, and of death.

Cultural memory, which is characterized by ‘its distance from the everyday’ (Assman, 1995, p. 129), is the product of representation more than direct experience. In this sense, the notion of violence as articulating the collective can be reworked through the patient interrogation of its texts, images and narratives, making memory a crucial tool in the determination of societal responses to terror. The contemporary visual arts, in their quality of technologies of memory (although not massively produced or circulated), are then capable of becoming a valuable counterpart to a monolithic understanding of terror and violence. It suffices for it to explore the conditions of their production as characteristic of the symbolic order, as a weave of both private and official representations within which a culture models its self-image (Harpham, 2002). Undoubtedly, dealing with the entwining issues of violence, identity and memory is a difficult albeit necessary task where there is no simple solution or clear closure, as I hope to have illustrated with the analysis of three works by Juan Manuel Echavarría. His work, its critical acclaim notwithstanding, still carries within it many representational dynamics relating to the understanding of violence as natural and cyclical. Violence, indeed, continues to be a defining force in Colombian collective memory. Yet appropriate spaces and means of commemoration, public rituals, and coherent historical narratives are still lacking. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that the visual arts can work with memory in the construction of a historical narration that is capable of breaking with the notion of the circularity of violence by showing the continuities and discontinuities of a painful history. Juan Alejandro Restrepo’s Musa Paradisiaca certainly illustrates this. As part of a visual archive with links to cultural memory, art is also capable of exposing the local ways in which memory formation occurs. Art can open up spaces of commemoration for victims and painful events, thus enabling the long-delayed remembrance of violence in the collective consciousness of Colombia. The works of Doris Salcedo seek to do this. The situation in Colombia is increasingly becoming more complex, gradually involving larger parts of the population, and revealing new layers of involvement by different social segments. Strenuous analysis is therefore becoming increasingly urgent. It shows the need to untangle



Visual arts as technologies of memory


the myths and beliefs present in collective memory so as to construct a sense of future. To this task, the visual arts can definitively contribute in a positive way.

1. There is an interesting parallel in Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s work on Rwanda (The Rwanda Project, 1994, p. 98). There, he met Gutete Emerita, who fled with her daughter after witnessing the death of her husband and sons. Jaar’s work, based on this woman’s experience, features only piles of photographs of her eyes, ‘The Eyes of Gutete Emerita’ (1996). 2. This exhibition was curated by Colombian curator José Roca, in Los Angeles, November 2004. 3. Information is being revealed at the time of writing, particularly regarding the fate of the persons who survived the siege and left the building alive only to disappear after. Responsibility, in this case, has been placed on the military. 4. Today, the region produces most of the Colombian banana crop. The production is owned by multinationals such as Chiquita and Dole, as well as by local landowners. Both multinational and domestic banana companies were mentioned in May 2007 by jailed paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso as having paid paramilitary forces in exchange for their ‘security services’.



Notes

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Index

2046 (Wong) 63–5 6 de Noviembre (Salcedo) 211 9/11 souvenirs 19–21, 27 see also September 11, 2001 A Movie (Connor) 175–6 absence, representing 210–12 acted scenes, in documentary films 197 adolescence 126 adults, definitions of childhood 129 ‘aesthetic of quotation’ 79 aesthetic styles, memory technologies 18 affect 53–4, 62–5, 66, 67 affective association 185 affective memories 145–7 Ahmed, Sara 145 Alina’s Funeral (Szapocznikow) 134, 141–5, 142 Alphen, Ernst van 182 American innocence, and tourism of history 22–3 amnesia 171 Anderson, Steve 193 Antze, Paul 9, 117 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 8 Arad, Michael 33–4, 36, 50 archaeology of knowledge 191 architecture Berlin 34 as re-enactment 29–33 9/11 32–40, 48, 50–1 archival films see compilation films archival material, re-use of audiovisual material 174 Armstrong, Isobel 62 art ethical aspects 5 as memory work 118 political aspects 5

representations of pain 133–4 staging of 47–8 works as specific objects 42–3 ‘Art and Objecthood’ (Fried) 47 artists, use of archival material 177 Assmann, Aleida 3, 9, 86, 189 Assmann, Jan 3, 7, 89, 204 association, affective 185 Bachelard, Gaston 121 Backup: the Slovenian Word in Carinthia (Dolinšek) 193, 195, 198, 201 Baer, Ulrich 210 Bakhtin, Mikhail 72 Bal, Mieke 6, 89, 117, 134 Barthes, Roland 193 Baudrillard, Jean 6, 55 Bauman, Zygmunt 101, 105, 106 beholders see also viewers space and time 48–50 Bellour, Raymond 183 Belsey, Catherine 72–3 Bennett, Jill 62, 133, 134 Berlin, use of architecture 34 Bhabha, Homi 81 biographical objects, identity and personal memory 121–5 Black Box (Smith) 41 Blake and Mortimer anxieties 76–7 Belgium, in Blake and Mortimer 83–4 cinematic sources 80 Cold War 77, 80–3 evocation of originals 84 imperialism and colonialism 76–7 Jacobs’s albums 75–9 masculinity, threatened by the feminine 78 nature of reader’s pleasure 78 rape myths 82

232



Italic page numbers indicate illustrations

referential system, adjustment 79–80 remakes 79–84 representation of Britain 75–6 resurrection 74–5 rewriting colonial narrative 81–3 sales 75 satirical appropriation of style 79 Sente and Juillard albums 80 settings 83–4 unconscious of the text 78 Van Hamme and Benoît albums 80 Bocas de Ceniza (Echavarría) see Mouths of Ash body inside and outside 139–40 as lieu de mémoire 138 and national identity 199 as site of violence and memorial 208 space and temporality 143 Boltanski, Christian 120 Braidotti, Rosi 64 Brockmeier, Jens 53 Bullock, Alan 161 Bush, Vannevar 55 Cabrera, Marta 171 Calinescu, Matei 23 Calvino, Italo 182, 185 cancer 143–4 Carter, Angela 102 Cassell, Eric 138, 143–4 childhood in American culture 126–31 collective memory of 118 childhood artefacts 121–2, 125, 126–8 children, changing societal view of 128 cinema, about memory 17 cinema spectatorship, as changing 180 Citizen Kane (Welles) 127–8 Cixous, Hélène 105 class base, of taste 18 close-ups, in documentary films 197 codes 6 Colebrook, Claire 54, 62, 65

collective memory 2, 3 of childhood 118, 126–8 and childhood artefacts 126–8 childhood context 125 documentaries of 171 and toys 128–9 Colombia historical imagination 203–4 Palace of Justice hostage taking 210 violence 203 visual arts and cultural memory 205 colonial film footage, displacing 174–5 colonial, meanings of term 91 colonial memories, reconstructing 178–80, 184 colonialism re-use of audiovisual material 170 represented as love affair 82 subjectivities of 86 in writings of Jean Rhys 91 comfort culture, teddy bears 21 comic strips, recycling 5 see also Blake & Mortimer commemoration, spatial practice 138 commercialism 10 commodification 74, 104 compilation films 174–6, 184–5 computers, as memory 54 Concealed – the Power of Survival (Možina) 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 201 Connor, Bruce 175–6 consumption, of memories 105–7 conventions 6 Corcoran, Farrel 191–2 corporeality, space and time 139 cosmopolitanism 8 counter-memory 71–2 Coupe, Laurence 112 crises of memory 15 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 122, 126



Index 233

Index

cultural memory 3, 6–10 defining 1–2, 189, 204–5 and feminist re-vision 103 globalising 2 and minimalism 40 reconstruction 200–1 relationship to history 169 revising in Wide Sargasso Sea role of visual arts 205 within society 190 cultural re-enactment 29–34 cyborgs 54

use of personal stories use of tenses 193 use of voices 197 visual rhetoric 197

97–8

Dargaud 74 David’s role playing games 124 deconstuction 5 Delbo, Charlotte 144–5 Deleuze, Gilles 53–4, 62, 65, 66, 67, 145 democratization, of history 71, 103, 105–6 demythologizing, and remythologizing 109 derealization effect 6, 55–6 Destination Culture (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett) 8 Dia:Beacon 40 Didi-Huberman, Georges 177 Die (Smith) 40–1, 43, 44–5, 48 digital memory, in science fiction films 52 digital technology 17, 54 digitalization 52, 53 Dijck, José van 4, 6, 16, 55 ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (Bakhtin) 72 discourses, surrounding images 164 distancing, of childhood 127, 130–1 documentary films see also Slovenia aesthetics of 190, 193–8 choice of content 194 genre conventions 192–3 ideologies 199–200 rewriting the past 199–200 role in shaping memory 188–9 selection of topics 195 soundtrack 197–8 and struggle for memory 191–3 use of acted scenes 197 use of language 196

194

Echavarría, Juan Manuel 206–10, 214 Edgerton, Gary R. 189 Eisenmann, Peter 30–1, 34–5, 39 El Bogotazo 204 El Testigo (Echavarría) see The Witness Eliade, Mircea 111–13 Eliot, T. S. 111 elites, as audience 45–6 Elkins, James 138–9 Erinnerungsräume (Spaces of Memory) 9 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry) 57, 63–6 ethics, of images 164 experiencing 48 Facing Forward (Tan) 180–4, 181, 185 fantasies, utopian and dystopian 55 fascism, and kitsch 26 Favorite Objects (Boltanski) 120 Feldman, Allan 208 feminist re-vision 100–1, 102–5 see also re-vision Fer, Briony 42 Filler, Martin 32 Final Cut (Naim) 56–60 Fire Department of New York teddy bear 20, 21–2 flashbacks 57 fluidity 106 focus of experience, shift of 51 forms, of memory technologies 18 fossilizing 6, 55 Foster, Hal 28, 33, 132, 177, 185 Foster, Norman 30, 31 Foucault, Michel 3–4, 71–2, 191 found-footage films see compilation films ‘Four Formats of Memory’ (Assmann) 3 Frente Nacional 204 Freud, Sigmund 29 Fried, Michael 47–8, 49



234

Friedberg, Ann 180, 183 Friedländer, Saul 153 Frow, John 16 furniture, representing absence futures past 108–11 willing new 104

211

galleries, spectators in 183, 184–5 Gasché, Rodolphe 81 geography 8–9 Gestalt 44 Ghosh-Schellhorn, Martina 92 Gibson, William 54 Gilbert, Sandra M. 88, 100 globalization, memory as part 11 globalizing cultural memory 2 historical tourism 8–9 gorn 133 Gramsci, Antonio 191 Greenberg, Clement 23–4, 42 Grosz, Elizabeth 139 Ground Zero architect plans 30–3 changes to project 50 Groys, Boris 183 Guattari, Félix 66 Gubar, Susan 88 Guerin, Frances 118–19 Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich 106 Halbwachs, Maurice 3, 189 Haliloglu, Nagihan 72, 73 Harris, Daniel 25, 26, 27 Havrilesky, Heather 27 Heavenly Muse (Restrepo) 212–14 hegemony 191 Heizer, Michael 40 Henry Ford Hospital (Kahlo) 139–40 heritage 8 Herz, R. 158 Hirsch, Marianne 52, 55, 68n, 103, 165n historical culture, new 10–12 historical documents, renarrativization of 161 historicizing 7

history challenged by images 159 changing view of 105 as counter memory 72 democratization 71, 103, 105–6 effect of kitsch 25 images and understanding 160–3 popular mediated 188–9 and tourism 16–17 tourists of 21–3 unsettling 169–70 uses of 201 women’s 103 Hitler, Adolf representations 154 explanation industry 161 imagery, reappropriation 153–5 Hobsbawm, Eric 201 Hodgkin, Katharine 7, 55, 64, 71 Hoffman, Heinrich 150, 158 Holocaust, as culture specific memory 154 Hoskins, J. 122 Huyssen, Andreas 16, 58, 153, 169, 200 iconographies, painful 132–3 iconology 176 identities colonialism 90 relationship between self and place 91–2 identity biographical objects and memory 121–5 and language 91–2 and memory 64 memory and violence 214 memory in construction 117–18 and remembering 1 retrospective creation 124 social construction 121–2 transitional 92 identity crisis, of cyborgs 54 ideologies, documentary films 199–200



Index 235

Index

images as challenge to history 159 discourses 164 as means of persuasion 164 political and ethical status 164 remixing 59 and understanding of history 160–3 imperialism, narratives of 81 ‘Impossible Histories’ 203 individual memory 2, 3 Indonesia, reconstructing colonial memories 178–80, 184 innocence 22, 27–9 instability 12, 61 interaction, memory building 9, 94–5 intersubjectivity, Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys) 94–5 intertextuality 12, 72 irony 25–7, 34–5, 153 Jacobs, Edgar P. see Blake and Mortimer Jameson, Fredric 76 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 86, 90 Jen’s ice cream scoop 125 Johnny Mnemonic (Longo) 55 Judd, Donald 42–3, 46 Kahlo, Frida 134 depiction of suffering and pain 135, 136–40 use of space 138 Kear, Adrian 144 Kelly, Joan 103 Kendrick, Robert 92, 94 Kershaw, Ian 150 Kiefer, Anselm 153 Kimmelman, Michael 40 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 8 kitsch Checkpoint Charlie 25 Cold War 25 Cultural Revolution 25 definition and understanding of term 23–4, 25 as irony 25–7 and modernity 23

and non-kitsch 24 and politics 26 and postmodernism 25 as prepackaged sentimental responses 26 and re-enactment 29 kitsch remembering 18, 19–21 Ko potrka vojna (Mrovlje) see When War Knocks at the Door Koepnick, Lutz 151 Krauss, Rosalind 44, 50–1 Kundera, Milan 26–7 La Machination Voronov (Juillard/Sente) 80 La Marque Jaune (Jacobs) 76, 77, 78 La Violencia 204 L’Affaire Francis Blake (Van Hamme) 80 Lambek, Michael J. 9, 117 Landsberg, Alison 54 language in documentary films 196–7 and identity 91–2 latent memory 86 Laura Jean’s book 124 Le Mystère de la Grande Pyramide (Jacobs) 76, 78 Le Secret de l’Espadon (Jacobs) 77, 84 Lecigne, Bruno 75 L’Énigme de l’Atlantide (Jacobs) 77–8 Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Halbwachs) 3 Les lieux de mémoire (Nora) 7–8, 10 Les Sarcophages du 6ème continent (Sente) 81–3, 84 L’Étrange rendez-vous (Van Hamme) 80 Libeskind, Daniel 31–3 lieu de mémoire 7, 15, 138 Life on Mars (BBC) 60–1 ligne claire 72–3, 75, 79, 84 ligne de mémoire 190 Lipovetsky, Gilles 106 liquid memories 101 liquidity 106 literalism 47–8, 49 location, and remembering 89



236

Luckhurst, Roger 132 Lyotard, Jean-François 104 Mapiripán massacre 207 mass culture, as transformational 76 materiality 2, 9 of memory 61 McLuhan, Marshall 15, 16 meaning 24, 182, 184 media fossilizing effect 6, 55 as mediated 16 shaped by memory 16 as technologies of memory 190 as untrustworthy 160 virtualizing effect 6, 55 medial frameworks 3 mediation 11–12, 15–17, 52–3 Meier, Richard 30 Memex machine 55 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Eisenmann) 34, 39–40 memories affective 145–7 as competitive 71 consuming 105–7 use of 56 memory in construction of identity 117–18 culture-specific 154 four formats 189 and identity 64 identity and violence 214 materialization 61 and morality 54–7 and myth 111–13 obliteration 200 personal 53 prosthetic memory 54 relationship to history 169 technologies of 3–6 theatrical 50–1 ‘memory boom’ 53 memory fatigue 10, 32 Memory Foundations (Libeskind) 32–3 memory-making, national 7–8 Meyer, James 50 Michaud, Philippe-Alain 176 Miller, Ann 72, 73

Minimal art as appropriate for memorials 45 development 41 and Modernism 42, 47 networks of relationships 43, 45 objecthood 47 in public domain 51 sense of place 43 minimalism, and monuments 17, 39–42 Minority Report (Spielberg) 56, 57, 60 Mnemosyne (Warburg) 176–8 Modernism, and Minimal art 42, 47 modernity 15, 23 montage 174–5, 177, 180, 184, 185 montage consciousness 180 monuments, and minimalism 39–42 morality, and memory 54–7 Morris, Robert 41, 44, 45, 46 Mother Dao: The Turtlelike (Monnikendam, Vincent) 178–80, 184 mourning, and remembrance 140–5 Mouths of Ash (Echavarría) 208–9 Možina, Joze 192 Mrovlje, Bogdan 192 Musa Paradaisiaca (Restrepo) see Heavenly Muse Muschamp, Herbert 33 museums, as focus of experience 51 myth, and memory 111–13 mythical retelling 73 myths as alternative to rewriting 113 capacity for change 111 of innocence 27–9 of rape 82 retelling 107, 108, 109, 112 narrative coherence 65 confusing 62–5 in documentary films 193–4, 195 fragmentation 62–3 narratives of imperialism 81 of pain 144 personal 121–2 repetition of 29, 31



Index 237

Index

narratives – continued retelling 82 supplements to 81 transformative power 98 national pasts, investments in 8 National Toy Hall of Fame 120 Nazi iconography, reappropriation 153 Neisser, Ulrich 140 Nelson, Ted 55 New Yorker, re-imagining Twin Towers 29–30 Nigro, Georgia 140 Noordegraaf, Julia 170 Nora, Pierre 7–8, 11, 15, 36, 103, 105–6, 190 North, East, South, West (Heizer) 40, 40 nostalgia for childhood 128 commodification 74 ‘Notes on Sculpture’ (Morris) 44 Noviembre 6 y 7 (Salcedo) 211 objecthood, Minimal art 47 objects biographical 121–5 connection to time 124 creation of meaning 122–3 favourite 120–1 as mediators of experience and memory 122–4 and memory 118 Ochse, Iep 172 omnipotence 61 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Winterson) 108 pain 118 memory of 133–5 presence of images 132 recycled through art 5 spatio-temporal location 139 temporal structure 140–1 timelessness 140 visualizing 140

past commodification 104 in contemporary cultural practice 12 as manufactured 11 as part of present 113 revision 200–1 value of 106 patriotism, objects of 22 Pécaut, Daniel 204 personal memory 53 biographical objects and identity 121–5 and toys 128–9 persuasion, through images 164 petrification, in science fiction films 61 photography, techniques 206–7 Plate, Liedeke 73 political memory 3 political status, of images 164 populism, US 28 Portraits (Echavarría) 206 postcolonial intertextuality 72 postmodernism, and kitsch 25 Potts, Alex 42, 43, 49 ‘presentification of the past’ 9 projection 138 proprioception 138–9 Prosthetic Memory (Landsberg) 54 Proust, Marcel 121 public domain, Minimal art in 51 public monuments 17 public sphere, pathological 132–3 Pušnik, Maruša 171 Radstone, Susannah 7, 15, 16, 53, 55, 58, 64, 71 ‘Raj nostalgia’ 81 rape myths, as allegories 82 re-enactment architectural 29–33 as close to kitsch 29 cultural 29–34 and irony 34–5 re-presentation 4, 6 re-vision 72 see also feminist re-vision reader, role of 111–12



238

reconstruction 5 recontextualization 118–19 redemption 27–8 Rednerposen circulation and use of images 158 description 156 exhibition and context 155–7 historical contextualization 164–5 integrating into the present 153 in The New Yorker 161–2 possible interpretations 150–1 presentation of Hitler 150 as propaganda 150 re-representation 158–9 reappropriation 161–2 recontextualization 152–3, 155–60 recycling 151–5 in Underexposed 155–60 Reflecting Absence (Arad) 33–4, 46 contemplation room 48–9 memorial room 38 as minimalist 39–40 original design 36–9, 37, 50 responses to 39 sense of loss 48 remembering and identity 1 and location 89 remembrance, spatial practice 138 remythologizing, and demythologizing 109 renarrativization, of historical documents 161 Renk, Kathleen 91 repetition, of narrative 29, 31 representation 52 response to events, kitsch as 26 Restrepo, José Alejandro 212, 214 retelling myths 107, 108, 109, 112 stories 5 in work of Jeanette Winterson 107, 108 as world making 113 Retratos (Echavarría) see Portraits rewriting 12, 73 as remythologizing 109 as technology of cultural memory 100, 107, 103

in documentary films 199–200 from marginal perspective 102–3 novels 5 Rhys, Jean 90 Rich, Adrienne 100, 102, 103 Rigney, Ann 3 Robinson Crusoe (Stevenson) 108, 110–11 Rochberg-Halton, Eugene 122, 126 Rosenbaum, Ron 161 Routeau, Luc 75–6, 78 Rushdie, Salman 81 Salcedo, Doris 210–12, 214 Sandusky, Sharon 184 Sarah’s painting 123 satire 153 scale Reflecting Absence (Arad) 46 size and sense of place 44–5 science fiction films ambiguity 60–1 digital memory in 52 effects of digital technology 54 endings 61 flashbacks 57 mediation of individual memory 53 representation of time 66 sculpture size and response 45 and viewer participation 44 Second World War, redefining 199–200 self, memorizing 136–40 self-narration as act of memory 86, 88–91 and context 88–9 revising cultural memory 97–8 Seltzer, Mark 132–3 sense memory 144–5 sense of place Minimal art 43 size and scale 44–5 September 11, 2001 32, 36 settlers 91–2 Shoah 9



Index 239

Index

Shohat, Ella 81 size, scale and sense of place 44–5 Slovenia see also documentary films creation of new cultural memory 188 cultural memory 190 debates over meaning of the past 191–2 foundational myth 193, 200 presentation of history 198 Smelik, Anneke 6, 52, 58, 138 Smith, Tony 40–1, 44–5, 48 Smoke Screen (Tan) 172–4, 174, 184, 185 Sobchack, Vivian 15–16, 58 social amnesia 200 social forgetting 89 social memory 3 social practices, shared 5 Sontag, Susan 193 S.O.S. Météores (Jacobs) 77 soundtrack, in documentary films 197–8 space in body 143 and corporeality 139 representation of in science fiction 66 time and beholder 48–50 transformative power 92 space and time, collapse 58 spaces, as focus of experience 51 spatial context 50 spatialization 9 ‘Specific Objects’ (Judd) 42–3 spectacle, frenzy of 57–62 spectators 183, 184, 184–5 Stacey, Jackie 144 staging, of art 47–8 Stam, Robert 81 Stamelman, Richard 36 Steedman, Caroline 72, 170 Stimpson, Catharine 102 stories alternative versions 105 as construing the real 104 Strange Days (Bigelow) 56 Sturken, Marita 4, 7, 169, 170

subjectivities of colonialism 86 of tourists 22 Suleiman, Susan 104 supplements, to narratives 81 suppression, of stories 105 Sutton Smith, Brian 122 Szapocznikow, Alina 134 depiction of illness 135 temporal structure of pain 140–1 temporality of body 143 Tan, Fiona 172–4, 176 Tangled Memories (Sturken) 4 taste, class base of 18 technological frameworks 3 technologies of memory 3–6 teddy bears 21, 24, 27 temporal distance, collapsing 15–16 Tenebrae Noviembre 7 1985 (Salcedo) 211 teratologies 144 Terdiman, Richard 7 The 39 Steps (Hitchcock) 80 The Broken Column (Kahlo) 140 The Butterfly Effect (Bress) 58, 61 ‘The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museums’ (Krauss) 51 The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft et al) 86 The History of Sexuality (Foucault) 3–4 The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert and Gubar) 88 The New Yorker, Rednerposen in 161–2 The Stone Gods (Winterson) 107–11 retelling 112 role of reader 111–12 stories 109–10 The Two Fridas (Kahlo) 134, 136–40, 137 The Witness (Echavarría) 207 theatrical memory 50–1 theatricality 48–9 THINK project 30 Three Smoking Toddlers on the Island of Bali 173



240

time and corporeality 139 loss of linearity 113 representation of in science fiction 66 space and beholder 48–50 as split 65 time and space, collapse 58, 67 totalitarianism, and kitsch 26 tourism, of history 8–9, 22–3 tourists, of history 21–3 toys 120, 122, 128–30 cultural values, and toys 120 transformative power, cinematic affect 66–8 transitional objects 130 trauma culture 132 trauma, recycled through art 5 Trinh T. Minh-ha 95 Tropisch Nederland (newsreel), re-use of images 179 trust 160 ‘twice removed aesthetic’ 25 Twin Towers, re-imagining 29–30 Underexposed (exhibition) 154, 155–60, 163 images of political violence 156 Urabà, Colombia, perceptions of 213–14 Uribe, María Victoria 208 viewers see also beholders distancing 47 as participants 44 violence 141 archaeology of 212–14 Colombia 203, 207–8 identity and memory 214 virtual time 65–7 virtualizing 55 visibility, and existence 61 visual arts and cultural memory in Colombia 205 as technologies of memory 214–15 Vitruvian man (Leonardo) 45 voices, in documentary films 197

Warburg, Aby 176–8, 185 Weight (Winterson) 108, 112 Weijers, Wouter 5, 36 When War Knocks at the Door (Mrovlje) 193, 194, 196, 198, 199, 201 Whitlock, Gillian 89, 94 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys) Antoinette as Creole 92 Caribbean as transformative space 92 characters as archetypes 88 Christophine’s perception of Antoinette 96 colonial identities 91–7 control of memory 96–7 effect of 100–1 forgetting and remembering 89 intersubjectivity 94 leakage of discourse 95 narrative strategies 90 as ‘prequel’ to Jane Eyre 86–8 revising cultural memory 97–8 Rochester as settler 92 role of Victorian family 93–4 self-narration and memory 88–91 story 88 Williams, Linda 61 Winterson, Jeanette 105, 107, 110–11 women artists, representations of pain 134–5 women’s history 103 Wood, Elizabeth 118 World Trade Center Memorial Site Competition 36 snow globe 19, 19–22 ‘wound culture’ 133 ‘writing back’ 86 wtinessing 209–10 Xanadu 55 Young, James 155 Zamolˇcani – moˇc Preživeti (Možina) see Concealed – the Power of Survival Zarzycka, Marta 118 Žižek, Slavoj 6, 55



Index 241

Technologies of Memory in the Arts

Bullying in the Arts

Physics in the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Implementation of the Arts

The museum of fine arts in Moscow

Process in the Arts Therapies

Zen in the Martial Arts

The Heart of Memory

The Memory of Love

The Memory of Running

The Memory of Love

The Memory of Love

The Ethics of Memory

The Art of Memory

The Art of Memory

The Renascence of Memory

The Art of Memory

Process in the Arts Therapies

Meaning in the Visual Arts

The Memory Of Stone

The Heart of Memory

The Memory of Stone

The Memory of Love

The Persistence of Memory

Technologies of Memory in the Arts

Bullying in the Arts

Physics in the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Implementation of the Arts

The museum of fine arts in Moscow

Process in the Arts Therapies

Zen in the Martial Arts

The Heart of Memory

The Memory of Love

The Memory of Running

The Memory of Love

The Memory of Love

The Ethics of Memory

The Art of Memory

The Art of Memory

The Renascence of Memory

The Art of Memory

Process in the Arts Therapies

Meaning in the Visual Arts

The Memory Of Stone

The Heart of Memory

The Memory of Stone

The Memory of Love

The Persistence of Memory

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