Liedeke Plate, Anneke Smelik Technologies of Memory in the Arts 2009

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Technologies of Memory in the Arts

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

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Also by Anneke Smelik:

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


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Technologies of Memory inthe ArtsEdited by

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

and

Anneke SmelikProfessor of Visual Culture, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands


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

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

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmittedsave with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licencepermitting 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 publicationmay be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identifiedas the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2009 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments viii

Notes on Contributors x

Technologies of Memory in the Arts: An Introduction 1Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

Part I Mediating Memories

Introduction: Mediating Memories 15Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

1 Tourists of History: Souvenirs, Architecture and theKitschification of Memory 18Marita Sturken

2 Minimalism, Memory and the Reflection of Absence 36Wouter Weijers

3 The Virtuality of Time: Memory in Science Fiction Films 52Anneke Smelik

Part II Memory/Counter-memory

Introduction: Memory/Counter-memory 71Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

4 The Astonishing Return of Blake and Mortimer:Francophone Fantasies of Britain as Imperial Power andRetrospective Rewritings 74Ann Miller

5 Writing Back Together: The Hidden Memories of Rochesterand Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea 86Nagihan Haliloglu

6 Liquid Memories: Women’s Rewriting in the Present 100Liedeke Plate

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vi Contents

Part III Recalling the Past

Introduction: Recalling the Past 117Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

7 The Matter and Meaning of Childhood through Objects 120Elizabeth Wood

8 The Force of Recalling: Pain in Visual Arts 132Marta Zarzycka

9 Photographs that Forget: Contemporary Recyclings of theHitler-Hoffmann Rednerposen 150Frances Guerin

Part IV Unsettling History

Introduction: Unsettling History 169Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

10 Facing Forward with Found Footage: Displacing ColonialFootage in Mother Dao and the Work of Fiona Tan 172Julia Noordegraaf

11 Documentaries and Mediated Popular Histories: ShapingMemories and Images of Slovenia’s past 188Maruša Pušnik

12 Impossible Histories: Violence, Identity, and Memory inColombian Visual Arts 203Marta Cabrera

Bibliography 216

Index 232


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List of Illustrations

Cover The Library for the Birds of Antwerp 1993 by Mark Dion,photographed by Nic Tenwiggenhorn, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam2008

1.1 World Trade Center memorial snow globe Marita Sturken 191.2 Fire Department of New York teddy bear Marita Sturken 202.1 Reflecting Absence, Michael Arad, Peter Walker (January

2004) 372.2 Reflecting Absence, Memorial Room, Michael Arad, Peter

Walker (January 2004) 382.3 North, Michael Heizer (1967/2002, Dia:Beacon, NY) 408.1 Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939, c/o Pictoright

Amsterdam, 2008 1378.2 Alina’s Funeral, Alina Szapocznikow (1970) 142

10.1 Three smoking toddlers on the island of Bali, Indonesia,recorded by I.A. Ochse in 1926. Still from Mother Dao: TheTurtlelike (Vincent Monnikendam, 1995) 173

10.2 Still from the installation Smoke Screen, Fiona Tan (1997) 174

vii


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Acknowledgments

The editors and publishers wish to thank the following for permissionto reproduce copyright material:

VG Bild-Kunst, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and SammlungGrasslin for The Library for the Birds of Antwerp 1993 by Mark Dion,photographed by Nic Tenwiggenhorn, 1993, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam2008.

Corbis and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation forReflecting Absence (Winning Design for the World Trade Center SiteMemorial), January 2004, by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, view ofMemorial Plaza.

Corbis and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation forReflecting Absence (Winning Design for the World Trade Center SiteMemorial), January 2004, Michael Arad and Peter Walker, view of thememorial 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 JeanetteWinterson, first published in Great Britain by Canongate Books Ltd, 14High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE.

Excerpts from The Stone Gods, copyright c© 2007 by Jeanette Winterson,reprinted by permission of Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books (2008),Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, Random House ofCanada Limited.

Caroline Michel, PFD Agencies London, for the excerpt from theSeptember 2007 Jeanette Winterson column on www.jeanettewinterson.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 onthe island of Bali’ recorded by I. A. Ochse in 1926 and taken from

viii


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Acknowledgments ix

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

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

Every effort has been made to trace rights holders, but if any have beeninadvertently overlooked the publishers would be pleased to make thenecessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

The editors are thankful to David C. Felts for his help in editing thetext and to Maarten Michielse for his dedicated preparation of themanuscript.


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Notes on Contributors

Marta Cabrera defended her PhD in Communication and Cultural Stud-ies, University of Wollongong, Australia and teaches ‘Political Sociologyand War, Memory and Violence’ courses at Universidad Externado deColombia. Her research interests include topics of violence, trauma andrepresentation in the visual field.

Frances Guerin is Lecturer in the School of Drama, Film and Visual Artsat the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of A Culture of Light:Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota 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, includ-ing 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 OrientalStudies from the University of Oxford and an MA in English from Mid-dlebury College. She is currently a doctoral student at the University ofHeidelberg, and her thesis title is ‘Narrating Selves: Female and ColonialSubjectivities in Jean Rhys’s Novels’.

Ann Miller is currently Director of Studies for French at the Universityof Leicester, where she teaches French Language, Cinema, Literatureand bande dessinée. It is on this latter area that her research is con-centrated, and her book Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches toFrench-Language Comic Strip was published by Intellect in 2007.

Julia Noordegraaf is Assistant Professor in the Department of MediaStudies at the University of Amsterdam and Programme Director of theinternational Master’s programme Preservation and Presentation of theMoving Image. She is the author of Strategies of Display: Museum Presen-tation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Visual Culture (NAi Publishers,Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2004). Her current research focuseson the access to and use of audiovisual collections.

Liedeke Plate is Assistant Professor in the Department of CulturalStudies and the Institute for Gender Studies at Radboud University

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Notes on Contributors xi

Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She has published extensively on the sub-ject of women’s rewritings and cultural memory, most recently in Signs33.2 (Winter 2008). Together with Anneke Smelik, she edited a Dutchbook on the cultural memory of ‘9/11’: Stof en as: 11 september in kunsten populaire cultuur (Dust and Ashes: Nine-eleven in Art and Popular Culture,Amsterdam: van Gennep, 2006).

Maruša Pušnik is Assistant Professor in the Department of Mediaand Communication Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University ofLjubljana, Slovenia. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies. Herresearch interests include media, popular culture, cultural history ofmedia, memory and nationalism. She is currently co-editing a bookRemembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia.

Anneke Smelik is Professor of Visual Culture, holding the Katrien vanMunster chair at Radboud University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). She isauthor of And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory (1998)and several books in Dutch on issues of visual culture. She recently co-edited Bits of Life: Feminist Studies of Media, Biocultures, and Technoscience(2008). Her research interests include digital art and culture, the perfor-mance of authenticity in fashion, and multimedia literacy.

Marita Sturken is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, andCommunication and Co-Director of the Visual Culture Program at NewYork University. She is the author of several books, including Tan-gled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics ofRemembering (University of California Press, 1997), Thelma & Louise(British Film Institute, 2000), and Practices of Looking: an Introductionto 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 RadboudUniversity Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He has published (in Dutch)Ars Longa, Vita Brevis? (Nijmegen University Press, 2003). His articlesfocus 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 September2001 were remembered in public and private, lasting and short-lived,memorials.

Elizabeth Wood is Assistant Professor of Museum Studies and Tea-cher Education at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indiana-polis, and holds a joint appointment as public scholar of museums,


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xii Notes on Contributors

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

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


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Technologies of Memory in theArts: An IntroductionLiedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

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’stragedy, and like so many contemporary Hamlets, we obey the spec-tral past’s call to remembrance. The seemingly simple imperative toremember, however, obscures the fact that remembering can be a trickybusiness. Sometimes we remember in order to honour the past, evenas we remember selectively and distort the past. At other times, wedisremember, failing to remember what seems of little importance, orforgetting altogether. We may remember because we refuse to forget. Orwe may forget what we wish to remember. By remembering, we forman idea of our self and shape a sense of our identity; thus, we end upembodying the memory that inhabits us. Yet, memory is a dynamic phe-nomenon for any individual, but also for a culture as a whole. Memoryis 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, thatis, on the cultural dimension of memory, taken as both the what and thehow that a culture remembers. Cultural memory can thus be defined asthe things and the ways in which a culture remembers. Located at theintersection between individual and collective memory and connecting,as it were, self and society, it includes the institutionalised discoursesabout memory and practices of remembrance. Cultural memory has amaterial as well as an immaterial dimension. It is not cast and settledforever in a certain form but, on the contrary, continually subject to

1


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2 Technologies of Memory in the Arts

negotiation and renegotiation, at the crossing point between the per-sonal and the collective, and between the past and the future. Becauseour concept of cultural memory points to a memory that is emergentand perpetually as if ‘in the making’, art, media and popular culture evi-dently 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 togive meaning to and thus to affect the past.

In fact, how we remember the past affects not only the present butalso the future it helps to bring into being. Whether we recall it delib-erately or involuntarily, the past conjured up serves the interests of thepresent. Remembering happens at the level of the individual recallingthe personal past or at the level of the nation recollecting its collectivehistory. This recalling and recollecting is always memory for some-thing – a remembering in the interests of a particular group of people,a particular ideology, or a particular notion of the individual or collec-tive self. Memories are not only shaped by the social context in whichthey are produced, but also by the material and technological meansavailable to produce and reproduce, store, archive and retrieve them.

The book Technologies of Memory in the Arts focuses on art and artisticpractices as technologies of cultural memory: paintings, souvenirs, pho-tographs, science fiction films, memorials, novels, documentaries, comicstrips and toys. Exploring the varied ways in which art and popularculture process and construct the past in the present, this volume exam-ines how those artistic and popular practices have a particular stake inthe complex procedures of remembering and forgetting, of recollectingand disremembering, of amnesia and anamnesis that make up culturalmemory.

As such, Technologies of Memory in the Arts engages with issues thatare crucial for our times. Exploring technologies of memory from awide range of perspectives by authors from the Americas and Europe,including Eastern Europe, the book at once addresses the globalising ten-dencies of cultural memory today and provides a powerful corrective toit. We do so by contextualising historically and situating geographicallythe various media, technologies, and artistic and performative practicesthat we explore in this volume. In addition, students of cultural memoryon both sides of the Atlantic and scholars engaged in cultural memorystudies worldwide will find the book’s focus on the materiality of themedium of memory illuminating. Indeed, the combination of an anal-ysis of art and technology offers particular insight into the workingsof cultural memory in the western hemisphere. We thus hope to pro-vide a unique perspective on cultural memory as a shared yet contested


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Technologies of Memory in the Arts: An Introduction 3

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

Technologies of memory

In Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925), French sociologist MauriceHalbwachs explores the social construction of memory, arguing thatindividual memory functions within a social context and is, therefore,framed by it. There is, in other words, no other memory but social mem-ory; all individual and personal memories take place within society andare shaped by their social context. Following Halbwachs, Jan Assmann(1992) postulates two uses of the past: first, the collective memory ofthe recent past that finds objectification in all kinds of sign systems,such as ritual, dance, myth, clothing, tattoos, roads, painting and land-scapes. Second, the cultural memory of fixed points in history that isfocused on myth rather than on facts or, more precisely, that changeshistorical fact into myth. In Assmann’s definition, cultural memorymay contain an aspect of the sacred, as for example in ceremonies orfestive events. Also, collective memory and cultural memory have nor-mative and formative powers, since they serve to actively construct theidentity of a social group or of an individual. Aleida Assmann (2004) fur-ther refines the terminology. Identifying ‘four formats of memory’, shedistinguishes individual, social, political and cultural memory. In heranalysis, political memory differs from the other formats of memory inbeing more homogeneous and monolithic, less volatile and transient,and ‘emplotted in a narrative that is emotionally charged and conveysa clear and invigorating message’ (p. 26). In this book, we take the posi-tion that personal and social memory are already political, traversedand informed by ideology and politics, and that ‘cultural memory isalways about the distribution of and contested claims to power’ (Hirschand 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 medialand technological frameworks (Rigney, 2005). Here we want to refer tothe notion of technology that Foucault introduces in his first volumeof The History of Sexuality, in which he analyses ‘the presence of a veri-table “technology” of sex’ in bourgeois society (1998 [1976], p. 90). By‘technology of sex’, Foucault means that modern sexuality is not regu-lated by law, but by discourses of power. Thus, he understands sexuality


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as the effect or product of a ‘complex political technology’ (p. 127), forexample through institutionalised discourses and cultural practices.

In the same way, we can understand memory as an effect of a vari-ety of institutionalized discourses and cultural practices. That is whatMarita Sturken suggests in Tangled Memories (1997), when she launchesthe 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 shouldnot obliterate the process that is involved in creating memories. Ratherthan repeat and confirm the self-evident nature of memory, she arguesthat the illusory transparency of individual memory is in fact the out-come of complex technologies that produce cultural memory, throughobjects such as monuments, texts, icons and images. Her focus of anal-ysis is therefore on the material objects that convey cultural memory ormemorial practices. Following Foucault, she argues that those technolo-gies of memory are implicated in power dynamics, involving people inan active process in relation to institutionalized discourses and culturalpractices (1997, p. 10).

The aim of our book is to analyse memory as a technology, in orderto grasp the historical production of cultural memory in its many formsand expressions. Technologies of Memory in the Arts therefore focuses onthe varied technologies of memory as they find expression in art andpopular 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 andotherwise keeping our memories all equally affect how we rememberno less than what is remembered. Thus, the rise of national museumsin the nineteenth century served to construct and preserve the nation’scultural memory through rituals of canonization (Duncan, 1995), whilemore recently, the advent of home videos has transformed the way inwhich people shape their personal memories (van Dijck, 2007). In thatsense, we take the position that memory is always already mediated,following debates by Terdiman (1993), Huyssen (1995) and Radstoneand Hodgkin (2006).

The authors in this book address the cultural dimension of memory.At the cultural level, art and artistic practices most explicitly engagememory as representation. Memory is always re-presentation, makingexperiences, as it were, present again in the form of images, sensationsor affects. At the level of cultural memory, therefore, we are inevitablydealing with representations, performances and re-enactments of mem-ory. Foregrounding the work of memory, such as the processes of


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remembering and of forgetting and of selective amnesia, artworksand artistic performances form a particularly interesting site for thestudy of cultural memory as a social practice of self-representation andself-understanding.

As a technology of memory that links the present to the past andto the future, art has strong ethical and political aspects. This is par-ticularly evident in the case of memory of traumatic experiences –architectural design memorializing 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bomb-ing come to mind as recent American examples, as Marita Sturken andWouter Weijers discuss in Chapters 1 and 2 respectively. Documentariesof post-socialist Slovenia (see Maruša Pušnik, Chapter 11) or reproduc-tions of photographs of Hitler (in Frances Guerin, Chapter 9) equallyand forcefully demonstrate the political and ideological implications ofart as a technology of memory. Technologies of Memory in the Arts there-fore addresses the mediation of memory not only as a technologicalissue, but also as a political one. For instance, Julia Noordegraaf (Chap-ter 10) looks at the recycling of found colonial footage in contemporaryart as a political gesture in the context of a revision of colonial history,and Marta Cabrera (Chapter 12) explores some of the rare artworks thatcommemorate the violence of the civil war in Colombia. Ultimately,the book is about cultural memory as continuous movement, unsettlingand unsettled, producing new memories, cultural representations andsocial effects.

Art and popular culture are governed by specific rules and conven-tions of shared social practices. As such, they are engaged in non-linearprocesses of remembering and forgetting, characterized by repetition,rearrangement, revision and rejection. This can be seen in the liter-ary practice of rewriting canonical novels, for example Jane Eyre, as isexplored by Nagihan Haliloglu (Chapter 5), or the retelling of RobinsonCrusoe as a fallacious myth of progress, as discussed by Liedeke Plate(Chapter 6). It can also be found in the artistic practice of recyclinggraphic styles in comic strips, as Ann Miller shows in her essay (Chap-ter 4) on the resurrection of the comic strip with the heroes Blake andMortimer. Wouter Weijers argues that the complex practice of culturalmemory-in-the-making is reflected in the recycling of Minimalism tocommemorate the dead in Germany or at Ground Zero, while MartaZarzycka (Chapter 8) explores how female artists such as Frida Kahloand 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 auralstyles, intertextual references and intermedial relations, re-enactments


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and ritual performances. Artistic representations re-present the past, thatis, make it present again. As Mieke Bal puts it, ‘cultural memorization[is] an activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continu-ously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future’(1999, p. vii). In doing so, art inevitably selects to include certain aspectswhile excluding others. Cultural codes and conventions, no less thanmaterial support and technological means and tools, equally determinewhat can be re-collected and re-presented. As new technologies makenew memories possible, they also demand that older representations bere-visited and re-presented again, thus engaging art and popular culturein a dynamic process of re-vision and re-production.

Not surprisingly, the contemporary fascination of art with history andmemory is accompanied by developments in media technology thathave simultaneously a petrifying and a virtualizing effect, as Sobchack(1996) and Radstone (2000) have observed. The fossilizing effect of themedia lies in the fact that both individual and cultural memory are moreand more mediated by technology. This means that memories are notonly collected and saved by media, but are also reproduced and rep-resented by them (Huyssen, 2000; Hirsch and Smith, 2002). As JuliaNoordegraaf discusses in this volume, artists such as Fiona Tan recyclefound colonial footage in video art. The virtualizing effect lies in whatBaudrillard (1983) has termed a society of simulacra and Žižek (2002) hascalled the derealization effect of the media: anything that is filmed witha camera becomes more show and less reality. This effect of visual tech-nologies 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 dig-italised memory seems to reflect a crisis in narrative cinema as well asontological uncertainty.

Thus, modern technologies increasingly mediate both individual andcultural memory as media not only record and recollect memories, butactually shape and produce them (van Dijck, 2007). Digital media in par-ticular allow for new ways of storing, retrieving and archiving personaland collective memories and cultural artefacts that have far-reachingconsequences for the ways we remember the past.

Cultural memory

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


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we follow scholars of such varied plumage as German Egyptologist JanAssmann and literary scholar Aleida Assmann, American media theoristMarita Sturken, as well as Dutch cultural analyst Mieke Bal and Frenchsociologist 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 thatis not part of official history. As Sturken has put it, such memory ‘isshared outside of formal historical discourse, yet is imbued with cul-tural meaning’ (1999, p. 178). It is the French historian Pierre Nora whofirst formulated cultural memory as distinct from history. Arguing thatmodern, ‘cultural’ memory emerges from the split of history and mem-ory resulting from the historical shift from a predominantly rural toa predominantly urban culture on the one hand, and historiographicalself-reflexivity on the other hand, Nora proposes the lieu de mémoire (siteof memory) as the object of study for ‘another history’ (Nora, 1989).

Nora’s analysis of the factors that contributed to the emergence ofmemory and its crystallization around these lieux means that culturalmemory has its own – often unwritten – history. Richard Terdimanobserves that ‘memory has a history’ (1993, p. 3). In fact, the tendencyto view history and memory as opposites itself belongs to our historicalmoment. It is in the wake of feminism, postcolonialism and postmod-ernism that history came to be viewed as one of the grand narrativesdenounced as totalizing and negatively associated with public and pre-sumed objectivity, while ‘memory has become positively associated withthe embedded, with the local, the personal and the subjective’ (Radstoneand Hodgkin, 2006, p. 10).

Following Fredric Jameson’s famous imperative to ‘always historicize!’(1981, p. 9), then, this book insists on the importance of historicizingcultural memory. The preoccupation with memory that feeds contem-porary interest in and research on cultural memory is the product of aparticular historical configuration. In his seminal book on cultural mem-ory, 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 elec-tronic media, but also witnesses the end of ‘old Europe’ as we knew it,while people who lived through the horrors of the Second World Warare dying out. Identifying, like Andreas Huyssen (2003), the crucial rolesof media, politics and the Holocaust in making memory a central con-temporary concern, Assmann argues these factors together produce aneed for reflection and reminiscence.

Nora’s research into this new form of memory resulted in the monu-mental seven volumes of Les lieux de mémoire (1984–92), investigating a


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vast array of sites that range from monuments (such as the Panthéon), totraditions, customs and practices (including le café, meaning both coffeeand the coffeehouse). In the wake of Nora’s project of national memory-making and historiographical recovery, other European countries havefollowed suit and engaged in similar projects. For instance, a four-volume Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (German Sites of Memory) was publishedin Germany in 2001, another four-volume Plaatsen van herinnering (Sitesof Memory) appeared in The Netherlands between 2005 and 2007, whilea volume collecting Belgian sites of memory appeared in 2008 under thetitle Belgie, een parcours van herinnering (Belgium, a circuit of memory).

To understand the different rhythms of these research projects as tech-nologies of cultural memory, we would need to explore each country’sspecific investment in the various versions of their national past, in rela-tion to recent wars, political regimes, former colonies, and the formationof Europe as a political, economic and cultural project. By mappingsome of those trajectories, this book reflects on those trends from a morecosmopolitan perspective. This means that whereas we believe technolo-gies of cultural memory need to be analysed in their local and nationalcontexts, we are convinced they should also be thought about and rein-terpreted within the imaginary connection for which Kwame AnthonyAppiah retrieved the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ (2006).

‘Cosmopolitan’, however, does not mean ‘global’ by some otherword, substituting one totalizing grand narrative by another. Indeed,as we map the material, social, cultural, political, ideological and artis-tic/aesthetic dimensions of cultural memory, it soon appears we shouldnot only ‘always historicize’, as Jameson had it, but that we shouldequally ‘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 canvisit, from walking tours ‘in the footsteps of’ famous historical or fic-tional figures such as the Don Quixote trails in Spain, Hemingway’sParis or Virginia Woolf’s London (see Plate, 2006) to guided tours oftheir homes, such as, for instance, the Anne Frank House in Amster-dam. Included in the brochures of travel agencies and increasingly partof the cities’ marketing strategies, these sites then become tourist desti-nations in the current economy of cultural consumerism. In DestinationCulture (1998), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has shown how museumscompete with tourism in the production of ‘heritage’, marketing them-selves as tourist attractions and turning locations into destinations. This‘tourism of history’, as Marita Sturken has labelled the phenomenon inher study of consumer practices at sites of national trauma in the United


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States (2007), certainly has globalizing tendencies, affecting tourist prac-tices in places as distant and different as Auschwitz, Oklahoma City,Hanoi and Budapest. As Antze and Lambek so poignantly put it, ‘we allbecome the alienated tourists of our pasts’ (1996, p. xiii). On the onehand, then, we see that places are put on tourist trails. On the otherhand, we also see that this fascination and the commercial exploita-tion of this fascination assume different forms across the globe. Take,for instance, the Shoah, whose sites of memory are inscribed very dif-ferently within the cultural geographies of different countries. Packagedtours to Prague and Krakow often include, or offer the possibility ofincluding, a day’s visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In contrast, there are notours to Babi Yar near Kiev, where an estimated 100,000 people werekilled during the massacres of 1941 and the following years. In fact,the site is surprisingly difficult to reach for visitors of the capital city ofUkraine. These examples of geographically specific inscriptions of cul-tural memory, moreover, should not make us forget that many historieshave no sites for memory at all. In this volume, this forgetting is illus-trated by Marta Cabrera’s analysis of the painful absence of memorialsand commemorations of violence in Colombia.

The inscription of cultural memory in space requires attention tobe paid to the materiality of cultural memory and to the medium ofthis materiality. As Aleida Assmann argues in her book Erinnerungsräume(Spaces of Memory) (1999), individuals and cultures build their culturalmemory interactively through communication in language, images,objects and rituals. In other words, they need external media and cul-tural practices to organize and express their memories (p. 19). Thesemedia and practices are the subject of Marita Sturken’s discussion in thisbook of kitsch souvenirs and Elizabeth Wood’s exploration of childhoodobjects (Chapters 1 and 7 respectively). It is one of the reasons why wefocus on technologies of cultural memory.

Yet the spatial dimension of cultural memory does not only translateas a key issue for media studies and cultural geographies of memory,it also points to a fundamental feature of cultural memory today. Asthe essays in this book illustrate, the contemporary interest in the pastand in cultural memory, desirous of making the past present, takes on adistinct spatial dimension. Obviously, the materiality of memory hasa spatial dimension: it literally takes place. Objects, but also perfor-mances, thus emphasize the spatialization of memory that is such acrucial feature of contemporary memory culture. Indeed, it is in thisspatial 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 thatmakes it present again; times of yore become tangible, material andcapable of ‘touching’ us.

A new historical culture

The recent boom in memory that has come to pervade Western cul-ture since the 1970s has been accompanied by the conviction thatthis is only a moment in history. Reflecting on the destiny of thelieux de mémoire, Nora concludes that soon, ‘the need to exhume theselandmarks and explore these lieux will have disappeared. The era ofcommemoration will be over for good. The tyranny of memory willhave endured for only a moment – but it was our moment’ (1996,p. 637). For years now, scholars have searched for signs of ‘memoryfatigue’ (Huyssen, 2003, p. 3), convinced that the current fascinationwith memory would soon reach a point of saturation. In the context ofour contemporary culture of instant obsolescence, of the ever-increasingacceleration of history and faster cycles of innovation and novelty, it isindeed to be expected that the newness of the old and the novelty of thepast as fashionable interests would soon wear out. Surprisingly, however,this is not the case, as new pasts keep being retrieved, unearthed andmanufactured. One reason for this may be that, contrary to appearances,the point of saturation is nowhere near to being reached. Another maybe found in an intrinsic relation between the production of memoryand consumer culture.

Looking back on the fate of the lieux de mémoire, Nora wonders ‘whythis co-optation has taken place’ (1996, p. 609). Indeed, ‘The work wasintended . . . to be a counter-commemorative type of history’, but it wasovertaken by commemoration – an irresistible and all-consuming ‘com-memorative bulimia’ (p. 609). The idea that the academic, historicalproject was co-opted suggests it preceded its cultural and commercialco-optation; that it existed prior to and outside the sphere of consumerculture and was overtaken by it. This is akin to the notion that thereonce was an autonomous culture of art and intellect that has now beenenlisted by the all-engulfing capitalist machine which knows how tomake ready money out of anything faster that any academic can think,which ‘is utterly promiscuous, and will happily tag along with the high-est bidder’ (Eagleton, 2003, p. 17). But what if, rather than imagininga pure and uncontaminated culture of memory beyond the sphere ofcommercialism, we were to think of memory and the memory boom asinextricably linked with it? We would then need to rethink its cultural


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construction in art and artistic practices as inevitably informed by itseconomic 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 inthe interest of particular people in that culture and therefore solidlyideological and economic. As Pierre Nora phrases it: ‘Today, the histo-rian is far from alone in manufacturing the past; it is a role he shareswith the judge, the witness, the media and the legislator’ (2002). As dis-cussed in this volume, there are evident commercial interests involvedin the memorialization of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing of1995 or of the 9/11 attacks. Yet, as Liedeke Plate suggests in her essay onwhat she terms (after Bauman) ‘liquid memories’ (Chapter 6), the sameis true for those modes of cultural production we generally think of asbelonging to the more rarefied domain of art. In fact, the productionof literary and artistic memories is not only a political and ideologicalaffair but is framed by vested interests. This is corroborated by MarušaPušnik in Chapter 11 on the struggle over meanings of the imaginedpast in documentaries from post-socialist Slovenia.

In Technologies of Memory in the Arts, we thus conceive of the mem-ory boom and contemporary memory cultures as a constituent part ofeconomic globalization, one of the ways in which art and culture werereconceived as cultural products to be packaged and sold on the increas-ingly significant market of the culture industry. This is why we gatheressays dealing with popular culture and commodified objects, togetherwith essays dealing within artworks marked by the halo of an authen-tic signature by the artist, viewing them as a continuum relating to thesame consumer culture. This is not to say they are the same. But it isto stress that the past sells better than the future, from the paintings ofFrida Kahlo to the remembering and forgetting of colonial history.

From our introduction, it follows that Technologies of Memory in theArts specifically addresses the material construction of cultural memory.Some essays explore procedures of memory in both traditional and newmedia. Other essays investigate the role of digitalization of art and cul-ture in relation to memory. Generally, the focus of the book is on themateriality of representation and on the relation between the mediumand 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 andnew essays specifically written for this volume, which are then morefully introduced in the thematic introductions. Part I, Mediating Mem-ories, looks at the ways in which memories are mediated, exploring the


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materiality of cultural memory in such diverse artefacts as tourist sou-venirs, memorials and the representation of memory in recent sciencefiction films.

Part II, Memory/Counter-memory, focuses on intertextuality andrewriting as literary technologies of cultural memory. It explores howrewriting works counter-memorially, in the revival of the so-called ligneclaire (clear line) in comic strips, Jean Rhys’s rewriting of CharlotteBrontë’s nineteenth-century classic, Jane Eyre, and Jeanette Winterson’sretelling of myth in The Stone Gods.

In Part III, Recalling the Past, the focus shifts to the many ways inwhich the past is invoked in contemporary cultural practices, such asthe role that toys play in childhood memories, contemporary recyclingsof Hitler’s so-called Rednerposen (oratory poses) photographs, and thepossibilities of painting the traces of pain and trauma in the art of FridaKahlo and Alina Szapocznikow.

The final section, Part IV, Unsettling History, engages with representa-tions of cultural memory that disturb and upset the known and officialhistorical accounts. The essays here show the wilful construction orthe fundamental instability of cultural memory in visual representa-tions that change the authorized views of history, focusing on colonialfootage in documentary film and installation art, the redefinition ofSlovenian history in recent right-wing documentaries, and Colombianart that helps to shape a cultural commemoration of a violent past in aculture of disavowal and denial.

Technologies of Memory in the Arts unravels the complexity of practicesand discourses of cultural memory from many different perspectives. Byits focus on artistic and popular practices as technologies of memory,this volume seeks to provide a pertinent analysis of how art and popularculture work to settle and unsettle the past in the present. Its interna-tional scope serves to underscore how the many and varied practiceshave particular stakes in the complex processes of remembering andforgetting, of recollecting and disremembering, that make up culturalmemory.


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March 18, 2009 19:29 MAC/TEEM Page-13 9780230_575677_03_part01

Part I

Mediating Memories


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Introduction: Mediating MemoriesLiedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

When Pierre Nora (1989) situated the break between history and mem-ory in modernism, as we mentioned in the Introduction, he alsocharacterized memory as the realm of immediacy and presence. Mem-ory is thus understood as being ‘independent of the materiality of thesign’ and ‘unstructured by social technologies of learning or recall’, asJohn Frow explains (1997, p. 223). In Nora’s view, the lieux de mémoirethat come into existence in modernity indicate a lost world of a histor-ical time of traditions without rupture or conflict. Museums, archives,monuments and the like have transformed memory by a long pas-sage through history. These memory sites have in a way ‘degraded’immediate, unmediated, memory.

The notion of memory as unmediated experience has haunted cul-tural studies of memory. According to Susannah Radstone (2000), thememory crisis in the nineteenth century was the ‘felt break with tra-dition’ (p. 7), while the crisis in the late twentieth century is ratherinformed by the development of new media and electronic technologiesthat seek an experience of ‘immediacy, instantaneity and simultaneity’(p. 7). It is as if the media have taken over the promise of immediacy andauthenticity from memory. Ever since McLuhan (2002) argued in 1964that media are an extension of the human senses, and also an extensionof consciousness, it is impossible within contemporary multimedia cul-ture to maintain a view of memory as unmediated. The focus of mediaand cultural studies on media and information technologies guaranteesa foregrounding of the materiality of representation.

As Vivian Sobchack explains, audiovisual technologies of the twenti-eth century collapse the temporal distance between present, past andfuture. There is no longer a history that happened ‘before’ and are-presentation that came ‘after’ the event, but we are moving towards

15


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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 andnow; it ‘is transmitted, reflected upon, shown play-by-play, taken upas the stuff of multiple stories and significance, given all sorts of “cov-erage” in the temporal dimension of the present as we live it’ (p. 5).For Huyssen (1995), this collapse of the boundaries between past andpresent in contemporary fast-speed media pertains to the very crisisof memory. Radstone claims that in the contemporary remembranceboom, memory is aligned with issues of subjectivity and representa-tion, privileging invention and fabrication over authenticity and livedexperience (2000, p. 9). Scholarly research in the last decade testifiesto an understanding of memory as mediated by technology. For exam-ple, John Frow (1997) calls for an exploration of memory as ‘tekhnè,as mediation, as writing’ (p. 224), as structured by technological andinstitutional 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 onlyshaped by media, but media are also shaped by memory. Thus Josévan Dijck argues that ‘media and memory transform each other’ (2007,p. 21). Media technologies structure our process of remembering, just asremembrance affects the way in which we make use of media devices.Mediated memory thus results in concrete objects, products or perfor-mances, which people employ for negotiating the relationship betweenself and society, between personal and cultural memory (p. 21).

If we understand the medium as a process, and not as a thing, we canalso argue that it not only re-mediates, but that the medium itself alsoremembers. That is why media usually mediate each other, as McLuhanalready 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 prod-ucts 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 seemsto be shrouded in clichés and stereotypes. The essays that follow care-fully examine the materiality of mediation, by paying attention to thelayeredness of concrete objects and acts of mediated memories.

In the opening chapter, Marita Sturken observes how cultural arte-facts such as tourist souvenirs and kitsch objects operate as technologiesof memory in American culture. Her primary focus is on the intersec-tion of cultural memory, tourism, architecture and consumerism in the


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Introduction: Mediating Memories 17

United States in relation to the Oklahoma City National Memorial andthe debate over the memorialization of 9/11 at Ground Zero in New YorkCity. She is particularly concerned with the way that American cultureencourages a ‘tourist’ relationship to history, one that reveals the deepinvestment in the concept of innocence in American culture.

In Chapter 2, Wouter Weijers reflects on the minimalist aesthetic thatseems to have become the dominant style for public monuments, prob-ably because its ‘timeless’ and ‘apolitical’ forms allow for the privatecontemplation of loss. He situates the contradictory responses to thedesign Reflecting Absence by architect Michael Arad for the official 9/11memorial in New York City within the context of Modernist abstrac-tion. While minimalist designs can on the one hand be understood asthe creation of transcendent meanings, Weijers explains how minimal-ist memorials can on the other hand be read as part and parcel of today’sculture of the spectacle.

In Chapter 3, Anneke Smelik explores digital technologies in recentcinema on memory, such as Minority Report, Final Cut, 2046 and EternalSunshine of the Spotless Mind. Either in spectacular images or in multi-ple and fragmented narratives, the films raise questions of subjectivememory. Drawing on Deleuze’s thought, Smelik argues that the affectof memories provokes a non-linear, dynamic vision of time, undoingthe authority of the past that so often ties subjects obsessively to theirrecollections. The affective level also allows the spectator to establishan experiential relation to the film, embracing memory as a loop thatconnects present, past and future.


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March 18, 2009 19:30 MAC/TEEM Page-18 9780230_575677_04_cha01

1Tourists of History:Souvenirs, Architectureand the Kitschification of MemoryMarita Sturken

Technologies of memory take many forms, from photographs to archi-tectural designs, from docudramas to memorials, from talismans tosouvenirs, from diaries to the body itself. The aesthetic styles anddesigns of these memory technologies can span a broad range of tastecategories and stylistic intents, from the sentimental object of loss andmourning to the angry political statement of an AIDS quilt panel.Such distinctions of taste are, of course, deeply tied to class-basednotions of what constitutes appropriate taste in relation to memoryand loss. They are also crucial to understanding the relationship ofmemory and politics. It is the case that the aesthetics and forms ofcultural memory both enable and limit the memories that circulatethrough them. The aesthetics of technologies of memory are thus deeplypolitical.

In this essay, I examine a trend in the kitschification of memory thathas emerged in American culture over the past twenty years, and what itindicates about particular narratives of innocence and a consumer cul-ture of comfort in the United States. I am interested in the politicalimplications of kitsch forms of remembering and how an aesthetic ofreenactment, which is a key factor of kitsch remembering, enables cer-tain kinds of memory narratives and limits others. Is a particular kind ofkitsch aesthetics of memory emerging at this moment in history – a his-torical time framed by the events of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, andthe war in Iraq? I would like to look specifically at the way that the mem-ory of 9/11 is being encoded into a particular set of aesthetics of kitschand re-enactment at Ground Zero in New York City. Such a set of aes-thetics emerged in the context of a particularly troubling and extrememoment in American political history, when the stakes in reproducingnotions of innocence were very high in the United States.

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Souvenirs, Architecture and the Kitschification of Memory 19

9/11 souvenirs

My story begins with two souvenirs. The first is a plastic snow globepencil holder that contains a miniature of the twin towers of the WorldTrade Center standing next to an oversized St. Paul’s Chapel with apolice car and a fire truck sitting before it (Figure 1.1). When the globeis shaken, bright moons and stars float around the towers. It is labelled,‘World Trade Center 1973–2001’. I purchased it from an illegal streetvendor selling wares at a temporary table next to Ground Zero in LowerManhattan. My second souvenir is a teddy bear that wears a FDNYfirefighter’s uniform, which is sold as part of a broad (legal) consumernetwork 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 anobject of memory that depicts the insulated world of the US nation inthe small bubble-like worlds of its globe. We look into the small world ofa 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


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is to offer a sense of containment and, in this case, to narrate particularstories about the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Thesnow globe’s miniature world is not simply small, but animated. Whenshaken, it comes alive with the movement of moons and stars, offeringa kind of celebratory flurry that then settles back again.

This snow globe also has a very particular relationship to time. Itnotes the dates of the ‘life span’ of a building, the World Trade Cen-ter, 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’ demiseare already present. Time-wise, a snow globe is itself an object of timethat one is encouraged to ‘visit’ on a regular basis, absentmindedly giv-ing it a shake in a moment of distraction. Yet, a snow globe also offersa sense of time as a return – one shakes the globe, but it always returnsback to the landscape before the snow flurry. I see this snow globe notsimply as an object of kitsch, but as an object that embodies the waythat kitsch can produce a sense of innocence and comfort. The comfortof the snow globe derives in part from this expectation that it returnseach time to its original state.

The FDNY teddy bear is an example of the broader role that teddybears have played in the kitschification of memory and the predom-inance of a culture of comfort in the United States. The ubiquity ofteddy bears in New York City after 9/11 brought the national trend ofgiving teddy bears to the grieving and the sick to unusual proportions.Ever since the early years of the AIDS crisis, when people began to giveteddy bears to people who were ill with AIDS, the teddy bear has beenincreasingly deployed as a commodity of grief. This recent consumerismof comfort teddy bears is aimed at adult consumers, not children, andcarries with it the inevitable effect of infantilization – teddy bears haveproliferated in the comfort culture of breast cancer advocacy and at siteslike the Oklahoma City National Memorial. This FDNY teddy bear is anobject of memory – it is a reminder that several hundred New York Cityfirefighters lost their lives on 9/11, and that they left behind bereavedfamilies and colleagues. It is also an object that can aid in screening outmany other stories of 9/11 that have been overshadowed by the sancti-fication of the New York City firefighters – or the brutal truth that it waslack of preparation that fated them, rather than sheer heroism. A teddybear is a primary object of comfort culture. It is a tactile object – one issupposed 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 providecomfort was extraordinary – as early as the next day, the Salvation Armyhanded out teddy bears to people returning to the city. Importantly, theteddy bear promises comfort, not necessarily the comfort that thingswill 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 thatAmerican culture processes and engages with loss, and of the economicnetworks that support the consumerism of American kitsch. They are


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both mass-produced and labelled ‘Made in China’. They are thus pro-duced out of the elaborate global economic networks that manufacturethe objects of American patriotism (including the vast majority of smallAmerican flags, which are made in Korea and China). Their produc-tion of American innocence is the product of low-level, lowly paid,outsourced labour.

The snow globe and the teddy bear are both objects that participatein what I call the tourism of history; they form part of the broad arrayof cultural practices that reveal the deep investment in the concept ofinnocence in American culture. The tourist is a figure who embodiesa detached and innocent pose. In using the term ‘tourists of history’,I am defining a particular mode through which the American publicis encouraged to experience history through media images, souvenirs,popular culture, and museum and architectural re-enactments, a formof tourism that has as its goal a cathartic ‘experience’ of history. I amconcerned with the subjectivity of the tourist of history, for whom his-tory is an experience once or twice removed, a mediated and re-enactedexperience, yet an experience nevertheless. Tourists visit sites where theydo not live, they are outsiders to the daily practices of life in tourist desti-nations, they are largely unaware of the effects of how tourist economieshave structured the daily lives of the people who live and work in touristlocales. Tourists typically remain distant in the sites they visit, wherethey are often defined as innocent outsiders, mere observers whoseactions are believed to have no effect on what they see. It is the case thatthere now exist many forms of tourism, such as ecotourism, that attemptto produce different kinds of tourist subjectivities, but my intent here isto deploy the very modernist notion of the tourist as a metaphor – I wantto consider how this subjectivity of the tourist can serve as a metaphorfor the ways in which American citizens are encouraged to situate them-selves as innocent outsiders in relationship to history and in particularto world history.

The investment in reaffirming American innocence that underlies thetourism of history functions not only to mask US imperialist venturesbut also to obscure the degree to which violent conflict is a fundamentalaspect to American society. For instance, the narrative describing theterrorist attacks of 9/11 as comparable to Pearl Harbour as the country’s‘loss of innocence’ about being attacked on home soil helped to affirman isolationist shock – the jolting response that suddenly the rest of theworld had come into view to the American public, the anger of thatworld suddenly in focus. Yet, the narrative of innocence enabled the USresponse to avoid any discussion of what long histories of its foreign


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policies had done to help foster a terrorist movement specifically aimedat the United States and its allies. The cultural memory of events such as9/11 is intimately tied up with this culture of innocence. Narratives ofinnocence need constant maintenance in order to be sustained, and thismaintenance is manifested in many places including popular culture,tourism and memorials.

Kitsch

The tourism of history that I see in American culture is intimately tied tothe production of American kitsch. Kitsch has historically been consid-ered to be an aspect of mass culture (McDonald, 1952). The word itselfis derived from the German verkitschen, meaning ‘to cheapen’ (Broch,1968, p. 49). Thus, kitsch is often associated with cheapness both interms of cost and production, as well as with the idea that such cheapthings are without any cultural refinement or taste. Mass productionis a key component in this definition of kitsch, since these qualities ofcheapness are related to the mass production of objects with no rela-tionship to craftsmanship. Yet, a kitsch aesthetic is hardly restricted tocheap, mass-produced objects, though these may constitute the originof the term. Matei Calinescu notes that many objects that constitutekitsch, while they may be inexpensive, are intended to suggest richnessin the form of imitation gold and silver, and that luxury goods can oftenbe 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 thataccompanied modernity, with the rise of mass culture, the sense ofalienation that accompanied the shift to industrialization and urban-ization, and the widespread commodification of daily life. Calinescuwrites that kitsch ‘has a lot to do with the modern illusion that beautycan be bought and sold’ and that ‘the desire to escape from adverse orsimply dull reality is perhaps the main reason for the wide appeal ofkitsch’ (1987, pp. 229, 237). This sense of easy formulas and predictableemotional registers which form a kind of escapism is essential to mostdefinitions of kitsch.

In his well-known essay, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Clement Green-berg wrote: ‘Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitschis vicarious experience and fake sensations. [ . . . ] Kitsch is the epit-ome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends todemand nothing of its customers except their money – not even theirtime’ (1986, p. 12). While I am not interested in retrieving Greenberg’s


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dismissal of kitsch, I am interested in revisiting his analysis of theproblematic mechanics of kitsch.

Critiques of kitsch such as these have been largely understood withinthe framework of critiques of mass culture, and within that, the critiquethat mass-produced objects of prepackaged sentiment offer a cheap-ened way to engage with interpersonal emotions, tragic sites of loss,and political complexity. Yet, it is worth noting that kitsch objectsare often quite spontaneously mixed with objects that are understoodto be less prepackaged and more personalized and individual. In theUnited States, spontaneously created shrines at sites such as Shanksville,Pennsylvania or along the fence that surrounded the destruction of thefederal building in Oklahoma City, are as likely to have mass-producedobjects such as teddy bears and Hallmark cards as they are to haveobjects that are less likely to be seen as kitsch. Of course, these categoriescan be immensely problematic, since a handwritten note, understood inmany contexts as more authentic than a mass-produced souvenir, candeploy kitsch sentiment as well. In addition, there are many ways inwhich individuals make meaning with kitsch objects and do non-kitschthings with mass-produced souvenirs. It is not useful to understandingkitsch, particularly in the context of postmodern culture, to simply dis-miss tourist practices and the purchasing of kitsch souvenirs as activitiesthat are superficial and meaningless; certain kinds of tourist practices,broadly defined, enable people to respond to loss and make sense oftheir grief.

Yet, I also do not feel that the model of cultural analysis that seessuch cultural practices as people ‘making do’ with the symbols at handin order to make sense of loss tells us very much about what happenspolitically at such places. It may be that the purchasing and display ofa FDNY teddy bear allows someone to feel a connection to and sadnessabout those who lost their lives on 9/11. But in offering simple com-fort, such a teddy bear also disables certain kinds of responses. It is not aversatile object that can be employed for a range of responses; it is a cir-cumscribed one, precisely because of the message of sentimentality andreassurance it offers. When someone leaves a teddy bear at the memo-rial, it is to signal an empathetic and caring response, to offer comfortto the dead. When people purchase FDNY teddy bears in New York City,they are fulfilling a particular set of needs to feel connected to particulartraumatic events, a connection that the teddy bear enables in a narra-tive of simple comfort. However overstated this may sound, such a teddybear is ultimately not an innocent object.


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Kitsch as irony

While modern critics of mass culture have historically defined kitschas an aesthetic of the masses (and thus as an aesthetic of lower-classculture), contemporary kitsch cultures defy simple hierarchies of highand low culture or class-distinct cultures. In the context of postmodernculture, understanding kitsch thus means moving beyond these simpledefinitions of high and low, precisely because of the way that kitschobjects can move in and out of concepts of authenticity in contem-porary culture. Kitsch objects from history can also be imbued with akind of playful engagement with history, a kind of humorous pastiche.For instance, there are many levels of ironic engagement at work inthe proliferation of kitsch artefacts of the former Soviet Union and EastGermany. The proliferation of Cold War kitsch in places such as Berlin,where, for instance, the former Checkpoint Charlie site has been trans-formed into a tourist site where one can purchase Checkpoint Charliecoffee mugs and chocolate bars, demonstrates the role that kitschifica-tion can play in simultaneously processing and erasing history. Whatdoes the souvenir replication of the Checkpoint Charlie sign that oncemarked a site of oppression, a place where people were shot for attempt-ing to cross a border, do to notions of history? What kind of culturalmemory does it produce? In China, objects from the Cultural Revolu-tion now decorate the walls of ironic cafes in Beijing, and ChairmanMao dinner plates are sold as pricey collectibles at Sotheby’s. In manyways, this can be seen as an aesthetic of kitsch as irony, the reductionof historical objects into humorous souvenirs which reduce historicalevents to something containable, laughable, and hence less powerful.Yet, at the same time, we cannot deny that this process of kitschifica-tion also takes the edginess and tensions of history and makes themmore palatable and less present.

Kitsch as irony is a particular kind of kitsch aesthetics. Thus, when anobject 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 originalaesthetic status that is reread as being tasteless, a lava lamp for instance,but then recoded as valuable. Daniel Harris refers to the distancing asso-ciated with this second stage of kitsch as a ‘twice-removed aesthetic’that shifts toward irony (Harris, 1995, n.p.). Yet, the second, ironic andtranscoding stage of kitsch takes time. It is difficult, for instance, to thinkabout purchasing 9/11 souvenirs in order put them on ironic displaynext to nuclear-inspired household appliances from the 1950s that have


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gained value because they display the naïve and crass tastes of previouseras of popular culture, or even beside the Checkpoint Charlie souvenirs.

Kitsch’s relationship to ironic distancing and playful pastiche showshow many of the modern mass-culture critiques of kitsch fall short inthe context of postmodern culture. The challenge to understanding howkitsch operates today is to see the range of responses that it produces,to consider how it can encourage: 1) a prepackaged and unreflectivesentimental response; (2) a playful irony; and (3) a serious engagementwith history, simultaneously both innocence and irony.

The tourism of history of American culture is fuelled in many waysby the first category of kitsch, kitsch as a prepackaged and sentimen-tal response, which directly relates to its political meaning. This kindof kitsch is meant to produce predetermined and conscribed emotionalresponses, to encourage pathos and sympathy, not anger and outrage(though there is plenty of kitsch in many of the 9/11 artefacts thatpromise to get revenge). Even when a kitsch object might be used bysomeone in a non-kitsch way, as a means to recognize loss, it can rarelybe an incitement to historical reflection or political engagement. Kitschdoes not emerge in a political vacuum, rather it is more often than not astyle that responds to particular kinds of historical events and that indi-cates particular kinds of political acquiescence. The well-known Germancritiques of kitsch saw it as an element of the rise of fascism in NaziGermany, and kitsch has often been associated with a totalitarian or fas-cist aesthetic. Greenberg wrote: ‘the encouragement of kitsch is merelyanother of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek toingratiate themselves with their subjects. [ . . . ] Kitsch keeps a dictator inclose contact with the “soul” of the people’ (1986, p. 20). During theCold War, kitsch was the dominant style of totalitarian regimes in theSoviet Union, and dissident writer Milan Kundera famously wrote thatit was the function of kitsch to curtain off the abject: ‘Kitsch is the abso-lute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of theword; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentiallyunacceptable in human existence’ (1991, p. 248). Kundera argued thattotalitarian 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 tearsays: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tearsays: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by childrenrunning 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 emotionsshared by all of mankind, Kundera’s ‘second tear’, that gives kitsch abroader political meaning. And, when teddy bears are circulated as ‘uni-versal’ symbols that can ‘make us feel better’, they provide a means toparticipate in Kundera’s image of the universal second tear of emotion.The FDNY teddy bear says that Americans are innocent, unknowingand, 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 particularkind of prepackaged sentiment, but as conveying the message that thissentiment is one that is nationally if not universally shared, that it isappropriate and, importantly, that it is enough. When this takes place inthe context of politically charged sites of violence, the effect is inevitablyone that reduces political complexity to simplified notions of tragedy.To go back to my initial declaration, kitsch images and objects are notinnocent, they sell the idea of innocence, and at this particular momentin US history, that belief in innocence is particularly troubling.

The myth of innocence

In the aftermath of 9/11, the proliferation of kitsch consumerism wasquite stunning. As Salon writer Heather Havrilesky wrote on the first-year anniversary, ‘sifting through the consumer fallout from 9/11 canincite the kind of cultural vertigo heretofore only achieved by spendingseveral hours in a Graceland gift shop’ (2002, n.p.). Daniel Harris writes:

Does an event as catastrophic as this one require the rhetoric of kitschto make it less horrendous? Do we need the overkill of ribbons andcommemorative quilts, haloed seraphim perched on top of the burn-ing towers and teddy bears in firefighter helmets waving flags, inorder to forget the final minutes of bond traders, restaurant workersand secretaries screaming in elevators filling with smoke, standingin the frames of broken windows on the 90th floor waiting for helpand 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 nar-ratives. The focus of such images and objects is invariably not the whyof such events or the complexities of history so much as it is about pro-ducing narratives of redemption and comfort. Thus, many of the objectsthat circulate at Ground Zero offer a kitsch embrace of redemption,


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exemplified by images of angel figures surrounding the Twin Towers.This emphasis on redemption is a key element in the deployment ofsuch events for political gain.

The snow globes, the teddy bears and the images of the Twin Towerswith the angels and seraphim actively produce innocent subjects. Theyaffirm the broader American myth of innocence, a well-entrenched andheavily maintenanced belief that the United States is a country of pureintentions to which terrible things can happen, but which itself neverprovokes or initiates attack. This narrative of innocence and comfortfunctions to screen over the imperial projects of American history andits aspirations to empire, both historical and contemporary. Hal Fosternotes that in the post-Cold War context, the proliferation of nationalkitsch evokes many of the forms of Cold War totalitarian kitsch, whichwas itself a highly constructed façade of innocence. He writes:

. . . we are surrounded by ‘beautifying lies’ of the sort noted by Kun-dera – a ‘spread of democracy’ that often bolsters its opposite, a‘march of freedom’ that often liberates people to death, a ‘war onterror’ that is often terroristic, and a trumpeting of ‘moral values’often at the cost of civil rights. [ . . . ] the blackmail that producesour ‘categorical agreement’ operates through its tokens. For instance,in support of the ‘war on terror’ are the decals of the World TradeCenter towers draped with Stars and Stripes, the little flags thatfly 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 invokesa notion of the people. Thus, in the United States today, kitsch thrivesin a context in which the nation is deeply wedded to an abstract notionof populism which is distinct from the people. This is a highly con-structed sense of populism, through which the ‘American people’ areconstantly marshalled to affirm policies that are actually quite destruc-tive to the well-being of most of the American public. This is a sense ofpopulism that is so constructed and kitsch that it was easily inhabitedby a President who is a member of the elite. Thus, the kitschificationof traumatic and highly political events in the United States, such asthe Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11, allows for, if not facilitates,the means through which these events can both be depoliticized intoprepackaged 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.

Cultural re-enactment

Kitsch and re-enactment are closely allied. Whereas the kitsch objectsmooths over conflict and complexity in terms of circumscribing sen-timent, in cultural re-enactments the repetition of memory can oftenserve to reinscribe those narratives into containable frameworks. Sig-mund Freud believed, for instance, that the compulsion to repeat wasa mode through which most people would act out, rather than remem-ber, their childhood dynamics and traumatic experiences. For Freud, apatient needs to work through their resistances to seeing the distinctionbetween the present and the past in order to move beyond compulsiverepetition (Freud, 1958). The work of confronting traumatic memories isthus understood to give them representational and narrative form andto integrate them into one’s life-story. Traditionally, psychoanalysis hascontrasted compulsive repetition with this working through of trauma,yet this binary is highly problematic. One could argue that it is oftenthe compulsive repetition of a narrative that allows for the subjects tofeel some form of agency over the story of their own trauma, and theidea of a ‘working through’ of trauma implies too simply the emergenceof a new state of being in which the effects of trauma are properly man-aged (Brison, 2002). Here, I am interested in looking at the aesthetic ofcompulsive re-enactment in architectural design that has emerged in theaftermath of 9/11, in particular in New York City, and how it enables akind of kitschification of history.

Post-9/11 American culture proliferated with forms of cultural re-enactment, not the least of which were the many renderings thatcirculated of the now lost Twin Towers. For instance, in July 2002,when the New Yorker magazine asked a group of artists to reimagine thespace, the artists produced a series of ironic, oddly humorous, ambiva-lent, and whimsical proposals that almost all replicated the towers insome form (Tomkins, 2002). Despite its intention to use humour andcynicism to intervene in the hypersentimentalisation of the site, thisproject became an exercise in reimagining twin structures, two build-ings, figures of two. Artist Nancy Rubins inverted the towers with aproposal for two 110-storey underground structures, and graphic nov-elist Art Spiegelman proposed 110 one-storey buildings. Artists VitalyKomar and Alex Melamid, who are well known for their avant-gardework on issues of aesthetics and taste, produced a comical proposal for


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a farm on Lower Manhattan, with the Cortlandt Street subway stationsurrounded by cows and fields. Yet, the two silos of the farm are unmis-takable references to the two towers, hovering over the bucolic renditionlike a shadow of the past. Video artist Tony Oursler created two scaf-foldings in the shape of the two towers that would hold video screensonto which video coverage of 9/11 would be replayed in a continuousloop. He suggested that the footage be run for a period of time and thenburied, so that it would ‘consume itself’.

Re-enactment, much of it bordering on or fully immersed in a kitschaesthetic, has also been a key factor in a large number of the archi-tectural designs that were put forward for the rebuilding of GroundZero in the years after 9/11. British architect Norman Foster (sincecommissioned to produce a new office tower at Ground Zero) initiallydesigned two ‘kissing towers’ that he described as ‘two towers that kissand touch and become one’ (Goldberger, 2004, p. 10; Stephens, 2004,pp. 78–81). Foster’s plan, which consists of two towers angling towardseach other, held observation decks and ‘sky parks’. The design was oddlyreminiscent of the numerous children’s drawings that had proliferatedthroughout the city, in which the towers had been imagined as brothersembracing each other. Other designs, such as the one by Richard Meierand Associates, proposed to incorporate shadows of the Twin Towers, byextending two long piers into the Hudson River the size and shape of theformer towers, as if to install their shadow permanently (Stephens, 2004,pp. 82–5). The THINK project design, which came second in the designcompetition, offered two lattice structures of steel in the shape and out-line of the two towers, into which would be inserted several culturaland conference centres. Toward the top of the structures, an elongatedshape connected the two buildings, a shape that looked uncannily likethe image of an aircraft hitting the towers. This design, a re-enactmentnot only of the Twin Towers but also of the catastrophic events of 9/11,exemplifies the degree to which the architectural imagination of GroundZero 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’soffice complex, which was originally published in the New York Timesin September 2002. Eisenman, now best known as the designer of theHolocaust memorial in Berlin, designed a set of buildings with crumpledfacades designed to look as if they are in a state of perpetual collapse.The buildings appear from an overview perspective to be an explodedstructure; from the street, their facades seem to be collapsing down-ward 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. Asthe New York Times puts it, in all seriousness: ‘the buildings would echothe devastation wrought on 9/11 and offer a striking memorial to thefallen towers; at the same time they would provide three million squarefeet of new office space’ (Muschamp, 2002, p. 53). This design is sostrangely inappropriate, and so insensitive to the grief and pain that sur-rounds Ground Zero (one can hardly imagine survivors of 9/11 wantingto work in a building that reenacts the towers’ collapse), that I think itcan only be read as itself an indicator of grief, unprocessed, inchoate, ina continual state of re-enactment.

It is tempting to interpret the constant re-imagining and re-enactmentof the Twin Towers as a form of disavowal. Norman Foster explained hisproposal’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 wedesigned something completely different . . .’ (Pearman, 2003, n.p.). Tothink of these designs as a form of compulsive repetition is, of course,to indicate that they constituted a kind of overwhelming grief, one thatmust be couched in terms of architectural criteria rather than acknowl-edged. One could speculate that the grief evident in the constant desireto reimagine Ground Zero not as renewed but as a site of memory isalso, for the architectural community, about a disavowal of the role ofthe buildings themselves in the tragedy of 9/11. While no one believesthat buildings can be built to withstand the effects of being hit by jet-liners filled with fuel, it is nevertheless the case that the Twin Towers,like most other skyscrapers, were inherently unsafe for the people whoworked within them. Thus, to reimagine the Twin Towers is to disavowso much – to deny the fact that it was as much the buildings that killedpeople as the planes that destroyed them (many more people died fromthe buildings’ collapse than from the impact of the planes), that theywere symbols of architectural achievement at the expense of those whoworked inside them. It is to disavow the most harrowing images ofthat day, that of people falling/jumping to their deaths because theywere trapped by the buildings themselves. These architectural designsthus constitute technologies of memory that also effectively screen outthese images.

Reenactment of what took place on 9/11 is also a key element in themaster plan by architect Daniel Libeskind, which was approved in early2003. As the rebuilding process has become increasingly fraught anddivisive, Libeskind’s master plan has been rendered increasingly irrele-vant, yet it is worth re-examining his original plan, since its aestheticdemonstrates the way that re-enactment and memory have dictated


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visions of the site. Libeskind can be said to have won the design com-petition precisely because of his ability to negotiate this terrain fraughtwith aesthetics and mourning. Libeskind presented his proposal, Mem-ory Foundations, not as a reconstruction of Lower Manhattan so much asa memorialization of the site, and initially kept part of the slurry wallof the pit of Ground Zero exposed in his design, to pay tribute not onlyto the ‘bathtub structure’ of the foundation of the Trade Center but tothe experience of Ground Zero itself. Fully cognizant of the demand forsymbolism, he imagined a set of buildings that ascended along a spiral,culminating in a tall and slender skyscraper, later dubbed the FreedomTower, that would be 1,776 feet tall and would echo the Statue of Libertyacross New York harbour.

Libeskind presented his architectural design by portraying himself asan intensely patriotic New Yorker: ‘I arrived by ship to New York as ateenager, an immigrant, and like millions of others before me, my firstsight was the Statue of Liberty and the amazing skyline of Manhattan. Ihave never forgotten that sight or what it stands for’ (Goldberger, 2004,p. 8). Libeskind evokes a set of historical meanings as a culture figure – aJewish refugee, a patriot immigrant, and one of the primary interpretersof Jewish history and cultural memory. Libeskind’s presence in the pro-cess of rebuilding Lower Manhattan in New York City was thus coded asa redemptive one.

Libeskind’s plan for Ground Zero is not the first time that he hasused memory as a guiding means for design. As he states: ‘I have beentrying [in my work] to redefine the relationship between architectureand memory’ (Goldberger, 2004, p. 120). And, indeed, this is preciselythe same strategy that Libeskind deployed in designing his now-famousbuilding for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. As Noah Isenberg has writ-ten, Libeskind often described the Jewish Museum (as he did his designfor New York City) as a building about his own biography, and themuseum, which is a compelling edifice, has often been seen to be moreof a memorial than a museum (2002, p. 171).

In his philosophy of architecture and memory, Libeskind deploys akind of ‘narrative architecture’ that is intended to tell stories, what Mar-tin Filler calls a kind of updated architecture parlante of ‘buildings whoseforms “speak” of their function’ (2001, p. 28). Thus, Memory Foundationsnarrates a memory of the day of 9/11. It initially included ‘The Park ofHeroes’, demarcating the space where firefighters entered the buildings,and a ‘Wedge of Light’, a triangular plaza where the sun was supposed toreach from 8:46 to 10:28am each year on 11 September, each an explicitrestaging 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 Aradand Peter Walker’s design for the memorial at Ground Zero, ReflectingAbsence, Libeskind used an aesthetic of absence to reiterate the presenceof the two towers. This concept of the void has been a central elementof 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 elementsof 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 ele-ments of the design, elements that were seen by many as Libeskindwrapping himself in the flag. From its tower to its rhetoric of free-dom and equation with the Constitution, Libeskind’s original masterplan used narrative to inscribe the space of Ground Zero within adiscourse of American exceptionalism. New York Times critic HerbertMuschamp wrote a now-famous critique of it, accusing it of being‘astonishingly tasteless’ and ‘an emotionally manipulative exercise invisual codes’. Muschamp went further to state: ‘A concrete pit is equatedwith the Constitution. A skyscraper tops off at 1,776 feet . . . A prome-nade 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 stateof shock felt soon after 9/11, this plan would probably deserve firstplace. But why, after all, should a large piece of Manhattan be perma-nently dedicated to an artistic representation of enemy assault? It isan astonishingly tasteless idea. It has produced a predictably kitschresult (ibid.).

Here, re-enactment converges with kitsch to produce a narrative ofpatriotic embrace. Had it been built as intended, Libeskind’s memo-rial plan would thus have operated as a counterpart to what is oftendescribed as the ‘Spielberg style’ of history, in which simplistic symbolsare deployed to evoke empathetic responses in viewers. As Hal Foster haswritten: ‘The real pessimists glimpse a Trauma Theme Park in the mak-ing, with Libeskind a contemporary cross between Claude Lanzmannand Walt Disney, the perfect maestro for an age when historical tragedycan become urban spectacle’ (2003, p. 17).

While its Minimalist aesthetic makes it less kitschy, the memorialdesign by Michael Arad that is planned for Ground Zero, ReflectingAbsence, also participates in an aesthetic of re-enactment, using the two


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‘voids’ of the towers’ footprints to evoke absence in a way that replays,of course, their presence. As the fraught political process at Ground Zerohas succeeded in eviscerating the Arad design to the point of unrec-ognizability, its designation of the two voids looks increasingly like aterrible loss of public space that reinscribes a large area of the city into akind of memory replay.

In many ways, the re-enactment of Libeskind’s design and of ReflectingAbsence share a sense of suspended time with the snow globe souvenirfrom Ground Zero. In the souvenir, the Twin Towers are still standing,together, whole and untouched. Yet they are surrounded by police carsand fire trucks, and the sense of emergency is present. This reenactment,like Memory Foundations, reproduces again and again that sense of emer-gency. It hardly needs to be said, of course, that that sense of emergencyhas been exploited politically, and in the context of Ground Zero, ithas helped to enable a particular set of discourses of New York Cityexceptionalism, 9/11 exceptionalism, and American exceptionalism.

Re-enactment and irony

What, then, would be an aesthetic of re-enactment that would notdeploy kitsch sentiment that might engage irony rather than an easycomfort culture? Ironically, one of the architects of the most appallingdesigns for Ground Zero, Peter Eisenman, has created in Berlin (ini-tially in collaboration with Richard Serra, whose lasting influence on thedesign would seem to be present) a memorial that produces an experi-ence of memory that re-enacts, but which does so in an open-ended,unsentimental way. The location of the Memorial to the Murdered Jewsof Europe in the middle of Berlin, next to the former site of the BerlinWall, situates it in the middle of a city that has used architecture instunning and highly varied ways to integrate memory into the present:with buildings that are hybrids of old and new (Norman Foster’s Reich-stag building), buildings that place the skin of modern materials over apalimpsest of the brick and mortar of the past (the Akademie der Künste)and buildings that declare a break from the past in their futuristic aes-thetics (the Potsdamer Platz). One can certainly have sympathy with thecritical arguments that the memorial is too big, too central, too overde-termined. Yet, its achievement is in precisely the way in which it doesnot demand of visitors a particular, prescribed emotional (one might saykitsch) response. Eisenman has stated that he did not want the memo-rial 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). Walk-ing between the pillars of the memorial, one can have an experienceof the tenuousness of history, the inescapability of different paths. Asone gets deeper into the chasms and loses the city behind, one catchesglimpses of others moving through, fleeting and then gone, never tobe seen again. In walking through the memorial, one experiences thearbitrariness of life, its ungraspability.

Is it possible that architectural design that allows for this kind of open-ended 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 prod-uct of intense debate over several decades, and is a memorial to thosewho died in a tragedy that occurred more than sixty years ago. Never-theless, I would argue that the tourism of history has been a mode ofAmerican public discourse for some time. Americans are still caught,in many ways, in the repetition of snow globes, in the moment ofemergency and in the contained comfort zone of souvenirs and kitsch.Perhaps what Americans need in order to fully engage with the histor-ical implications of 9/11 and the sense of loss it produced in New YorkCity 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, Kitschand Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2007).


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2Minimalism, Memoryand the Reflection of AbsenceWouter Weijers

Within days, even hours after the collapse of the New York World TradeCenter on 11 September 2001, people felt an urgent need to create apresence of some kind to mark its disappearance. This rush to remem-ber is all the more striking since the metamorphosis of a historical placeinto a site of memory has always taken time: decades, even genera-tions. This was, however, not the case with the site soon to be calledGround Zero. As Richard Stamelman explains, using terms derived fromthe French historian Pierre Nora, a milieu de mémoire (the moment ofthe event itself in the historical here and now) was rapidly transformedinto a lieu de mémoire (a memory site) in order to turn the ‘nothing’of Ground Zero into ‘something’ (2003, p. 15). Many ad hoc proposalsfor memorials were made at the time, but to date we are still wait-ing for an official memorial to become a lasting place of remembrancefor the victims’ relatives and friends, and for the city, the nation andthe world.

In April 2003, the ‘World Trade Center Memorial Site Competition’was announced, and on 13 January 2004, the jury published a statementproclaiming the winning design of the eight finalists.1 The proposalcalled Reflecting Absence, designed by the young architect Michael Arad,was praised because it most eloquently fulfilled the demands of thememorial: ‘In its powerful, yet simple articulation of the footprintsof the Twin Towers, Reflecting Absence has made the voids left by thedestruction the primary symbols of our loss’, the jury’s statement reads(World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition, 2007). In time, andmuch to Arad’s chagrin, the design changed rather drastically due to allkinds of political interventions (Hagan, 2006, n.p.). I will discuss theimpact of these changes later on in this essay, but first I wish to concen-trate on the original design as it was chosen and praised in January 2004,

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Minimalism, Memory and the Reflection of Absence 37

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 artisticengagement with a notion of the past.

Let me first describe Arad’s winning design as it was originallyplanned. The design (Figure 2.1) features two huge negative spaces, eachoccupying a footprint of the obliterated Twin Towers, with screens ofwater cascading into gigantic pools, and then falling down even fur-ther into smaller square pools. Ramps lead from street level down tounderground walkways bordering the pools. Below, visitors find them-selves behind the curtains of water flowing down into the pool beforethem. A stone ledge with the names of the deceased chiselled in it sur-rounds both pools. More underground passageways enable visitors to


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reach smaller chambers meant for contemplation and a huge under-ground museum containing various ruined artefacts of the towers, aruined fire engine, and personal effects of the people who worked inthe buildings. In the footprint of the North Tower, a hole is planned inthe middle of the lowest recess. Below this opening, another space is cre-ated, 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)


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68 feet (21m) below street level, and houses a big, dark, stone box ofapproximately 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 memo-rial, is meant to contain the unidentified remains of victims (Dunlap,2006, p. 3).

Some people objected to its underground location. ‘We ask that thememorial 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 voicedamong, and even within, the various groups connected with the site.In addition, economical and political, and often plainly ideologicalissues interfere with every stage of the memory process of 9/11. By thespring of 2006, Arad’s design was amended and changed almost beyondrecognition.

Arad’s design is a technology of memory; that is, writes MaritaSturken, ‘not a vessel of memory in which memory passively residesso much as [a design] through which memories are shared, producedand given meaning’ (Sturken, 1997, p. 9). However, rather than sharingmemories, Arad’s memorial mediates them in a rather aloof way. Thisessay focuses on how the original design for the proposed monumentnegotiates between experiences of distance and proximity, by referringto a particular artistic language – the language of ‘Minimalism’.

Minimalism and the monument

Many reviewers have described Reflecting Absence as Minimalist andargued that with its Minimalist language of geometric, ‘timeless’ forms,it could rise above cultural, economic or sociopolitical differences andtranscend conflict. Thus, it would allow for a private contemplationof loss by mourners and others who could project their innermostthoughts upon the blank spaces. However, quite a few of the victims’friends and relatives felt estranged by its ‘Modernist abstraction’ andsaw it as somehow inappropriate for the ‘hallowed ground’ the site hadbecome. Although simple, geometric, austere designs have been consid-ered an appropriate form for monuments and memorials throughoutthe ages – in particular for sepulchral sculpture and architecture –recently many people have come to oppose the presumed dominanceof Minimalist aesthetics in public memorials. Peter Eisenman’s Memo-rial to the Murdered Jews in Europe (Berlin, 2005) is just one prominent


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example. As New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman writes, ‘[l]ately(see Ground Zero) Minimalism has become the default mode for ourmemorial culture, the proverbial blank slate onto which we inscribewhat we want the future to remember about us. Austerity and authority,Minimalist tropes, implying puritan spirituality, are serving the role thatangels did on sculptural monuments in the past’ (2004, p. 31).

Although Arad’s Reflecting Absence is not a work of Minimal art, itseems to imitate Minimalist sculpture to a high degree. Among its moststriking features are the empty spaces receding downwards, resemblingreversed ziggurat-like voids. They bring to mind the installation North,East, South, West, which artist Michael Heizer realised at Dia:Beacon inBeacon, NY. In particular, the ‘double negative’ space of North looks likea prototype for the overall design of the pools in the New York Citymemorial (Figure 2.3). A critic tellingly described Heizer’s installation atDia: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 remindedof 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 super-ficial, but also because of its title Die, with its allusion to death and itsreference 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 sculp-ture, Smith wrote about Die that it was ‘a complicated piece’ with ‘toomany references to be coped with coherently’. In a few sentences, Smithmakes oblique references to a religious edifice and even to a mausoleumand 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 sameyear, Black Box (1962), resembled a child’s tombstone so much that oneof his daughters was prompted to ask ‘who was buried there?’ (Storr,1998, p. 28).2 Apparently, Minimalist works of art evoke extra-formalreferences like these, and perhaps this is also the reason why they arethought to provide a proper aesthetic for memorials.

Nothing, however, could be further from the theoretical considera-tions of the artists who developed the so-called Minimal art in the early1960s. The Minimalists attacked widely recognised artistic goals such asthe creation of transcendent beauty, the expression of complex innerfeelings, or the unique interpretation of the world by the artist. Lookingback on his years as a sculptor in the early 1960s, Robert Morris, one ofthe most prominent and outspoken artists and theorists of Minimal art,wrote:

I was out to rip out the metaphors, especially those that had to dowith “up”, as well as every other whiff of transcendence [. . .] noto transcendence and spiritual values, heroic scale, anguished deci-sions, historicising narrative, valuable artefact, intelligent structure,interesting visual experience (Morris, 1989, p. 144).

How could such an apparently radical negation of anything usuallyconnected with memorialization be turned into a preferred ‘style’ tosymbolize and reflect upon destruction and loss? What is the relation-ship, if any, between the theories and practices of Minimalism as it wasdeveloped in the 1960s and its ‘fate’ as ‘the default mode for our memo-rial culture’ today? For a possible answer, I will return to three textsfrom the 1960s, texts that have by now reached an almost canonicalstatus within postwar art history. I will, however, not just focus on theseprimary sources but alternate reference to them with more recent reflec-tions of art historians and critics on Minimalism. Thus, my story willnot develop in a straight chronological order, but will jump back andforth between texts that now may be considered historical and later


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

The work of art as a specific object

In his essay ‘Specific Objects’, the artist and critic Donald Judd describedthe distinctive features of the best new art, which he characterized asneither sculpture nor painting (1975, p. 181). In Judd’s opinion, the pos-sibilities of painting and sculpture had become exhausted. He wantedto get rid of any hierarchical organization among the elements of awork of art and was against compositional ‘part to part’ relationshipswithin a painting or a sculpture. Since these were important features ofmuch ‘European’ Modernism, Minimal art positioned itself, contrary towidely held notions, against Modernist abstraction, even though in cer-tain respects it can be seen as Modernism’s radicalization (Foster, 1996,pp. 44–6). ‘Abstract painting before 1946,’ Judd writes, ‘and most sub-sequent painting kept the representational subordination of the wholeto its parts. In the new work shape, image, color and surface are singleand not partial and scattered. [. . .] The thing as a whole, its quality asa whole, is what is interesting’ (1975, p. 187). Judd also opposed theopinion of Modernism’s most important advocate, Clement Greenberg,who wrote that the ‘heightened sensitivity of the picture plane . . . doesand must permit optical illusion’ (1982, p. 8). Judd condemns the waysuch optical effects appeal to eyesight alone and favours art works thatare objects when he states, ‘[t]hree dimensions are real space. That getsrid of the problem of illusionism. [. . .] Actual space is intrinsically morepowerful and specific than paint on a flat surface’ (1975, p. 184).

What is at stake between a Modernist and a Minimalist view of artis, as Briony Fer later remarked, ‘a shift of emphasis onto another wayof attending to the object, of looking with a different set of interests inmind’ (1997, p. 132). Judd reduced the elements of his work to such adegree that all would connect self-evidently to unitary shapes (his ‘spe-cific objects’). The industrially manufactured rectangular boxes, madeof standardized materials such as steel, wood and aluminium, are placeddirectly on the floor, or are cantilevered off the wall. ‘The closest par-allel is architectonic,’ Alex Potts commented in 2000, ‘between say asarcophagus set some way up a wall and one resting in the middle of thefloor, [. . .] without the mediation of mouldings or brackets or a plinth’(2000, pp. 291–2). Though Judd’s works are seldom entirely closed andusually have a directional axis – often straight rows of identical boxes,


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‘one thing after another’ – which distinguishes them from the simpleand closed cube of Tony Smith’s Die, the box-like shapes have no priv-ileged front (Judd, 1975, p. 184). What is seen as front or side dependson the viewing position of the observer. The rather neutral overallshapes allow artist and viewer to focus on other aspects of the work’sappearance: its materials and colour, the sense of scale and occupancyof space.

To many art critics and art historians, writing in the 1960s as wellas more recently, the interaction between object and viewer is thequintessence of Minimal art, but in ‘Specific Objects’, Judd is hardlyconcerned with the position of the spectator. Even though Judd did notelaborate on this subject, Alex Potts considers the creation of a sense ofplace to be crucial to Judd’s art. According to Potts, ‘Judd takes the boxor cuboid shape as a basis for creating three-dimensional objects thatelicit from a viewer an intensified awareness of his or her immediate per-ceptual engagement with the things and spaces he or she is looking at’(2000, pp. 289–90). Potts adds that such a phenomenological insistenceon art concerned with the relation between self and physical world hadfor Judd a latent social dimension, since his art, though it did not articu-late existential truths, functioned by being embedded in the network ofrelations between self and world and self and others that constitute ourbeing 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-absorbedthing, but has the conditional autonomy of something intervening inand activating the relatively neutral space around it (p. 297).

This might explain, at least in part, the tendency of memorial designsto use Minimalist forms. Ground Zero, however, is hardly a neutralplace, and Arad’s box, with its single, closed form, its dominating size,and its contextual metaphoric connotations, is completely differentfrom Judd’s objects. Yet, in its articulation of a specific space, it shares animportant aspect with Judd’s work. To quote Potts’s comments on Juddonce more:

The mode of viewing that a work by Judd invites might be describedphenomenologically as one in which the human subject immersesher or himself in the objective world, setting up a symbiosis that canno longer be assimilated to the standard model in which a viewerlooks out at an object located apart from her or him. [. . .] Withwork such as Judd’s, a presence emerges that is not locatable in theviewed object itself but in some indeterminate region embracing theviewer’s interiorised awareness and the object with which he or sheis engaging (2000, pp. 305–6).


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Sculpture and viewer participation

Donald Judd’s fellow artist and theorist Robert Morris elaborated on theimplications of the bodily encounter of the spectator and the Minimalistart work. In his ‘Notes on Sculpture’, published in two parts in Artforumin 1966, Morris explicitly deals with viewer participation. Like Judd, heopposes sculpture consisting of clearly divisible parts that set up rela-tionships and he wonders whether a work could possibly exist that has‘only one property’ (Morris, 1968, p. 225). Though he admits that nosuch thing could exist, his remark alludes to a kind of form that consistsof parts held together in such a way that it offers a maximum resis-tance to perceptual separation. He calls such forms ‘Gestalt sensations’,like cubes or pyramids in which ‘one need not move around the objectfor the sense of the whole, the Gestalt, to occur. One sees and immedi-ately “believes” that the pattern within one’s mind corresponds to theexistential fact of the object’ (1968, p. 226). Since one already knowsthe Gestalt, all the information about the object itself is already estab-lished and exhausted. However, simplicity of shape does not necessarilyequate with simplicity of experience. To Morris, ‘the object is but one ofthe terms in the newer aesthetic’; it has not become less important, but‘less self-important’, since ‘the better new work takes relationships outof the work, and makes them a function of space, light and the viewer’sfield of vision’ (1968, p. 232).

Minimalism’s fundamental reorientation from the expressive work ofart to the kind of work that engages the beholder in a spatial and tempo-ral context has been described, in an allusion to Roland Barthes’s 1966essay on ‘The Death of the Author’, as ‘the birth of the viewer’ (Foster,1996, p. 50). Along with this transformation comes another shift fromthe private object to the public domain. ‘The ambition of Minimalismwas,’ as Rosalind Krauss later argued, ‘to relocate the origins of a sculp-ture’s meaning to the outside, no longer modelling its structure on theprivacy of psychological space but on the public, conventional natureof 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 implicationsof this shift when he discusses matters of size and scale. Morris beginspart two of his ‘Notes’ by quoting a few sentences from an interviewwith Tony Smith about the latter’s sculpture Die. Its height is just above


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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 mak-ing a monument’. In fact, Smith defined Die’s size in relation to thescale of the human body, and its dimensions reflect the proportions ofLeonardo’s famous drawing of the ‘Vitruvian man’, whose outstretchedarms are as wide as his body is tall. Smith wanted to increase the view-ers’ awareness of their own scale in relation to Die, and their own as wellas the work’s positioning within the exhibition space. Following Smith,Morris writes that in the perception of relative size, the human bodyestablishes itself as a constant, resulting in the fact that things smallerthan ourselves are seen differently than things larger. To Morris, smallerthings are more intimate and ‘essentially closed, spaceless, compressed,and exclusive. [. . .] The smaller the object, the closer one approaches itand 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 inwhich it exists. It is the greater distance, however, that structures thenon-personal or public mode. Due to this distance between object andsubject, physical participation becomes necessary. The experience of thework exists in time and leads to a strong awareness of oneself existingin the same space as the work.

Morris adds, however, that Minimalist sculpture does not belong to aclass of monuments. Even if the new sculpture makes a positive value oflarge size, it does not follow that the larger the object, the better it willestablish a more public mode. For Morris, a sculpture should be neithertoo small nor too large. Enormous objects elicit a specific response tosize as such, and beyond a certain size, the object can overwhelm, andthe gigantic scale becomes the prevalent aspect. ‘Only one aspect of thework 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 sizeas such as with the carefully scaled interrelationships of space and place(1968, p. 234).

This way of establishing direct relations, in which beholders becomeless aware of the sculpture and more aware of their own presence andexperiences in space and time, explains why Minimalist Gestalts are con-sidered by artists and juries as forms appropriate for memorial tasks –perhaps even more so than their supposed evocation of transcenden-tal meanings. But, even if Minimalism’s concern with the spectator isfundamentally tied to the public domain, the advanced art criticismconnected with it is directed towards an elite audience, which makesit hard to associate Minimalism with collective social experiences. Infact, the ‘hard-core’ Minimalism of the 1960s, in its demand for a


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specific kind of concentration, is a form of art particularly appropriateto carefully balanced spaces and museum-like circumstances. This, how-ever, has not prevented Minimalist aesthetics from entering the generalpublic’s domain.

With Morris’s ideas in mind, we can now understand the memo-rial’s dark box at bedrock as not just a monolithic abstract form, butalso a device enabling visitors to wander through space and time withboth body and mind while maintaining a sense of place. In somerespects, however, Arad’s box differs completely from Minimalist con-cerns. Judd hoped to avoid any sense of an idea or an intentionlying inside the object – both literally and conceptually. Although weknow the box of Reflecting Absence is hollow like all Minimal sculp-tures, unlike Judd’s objects this container does not so much refer tospace as to its emotionally meaningful content. Invisible and indis-criminate as it may be, the box’s emotionally charged core is itsraison d’être.

The box is big indeed and, as regards scale, even overwhelming. Soare the vast, monumental spaces of the monument. Although the boxrelates to its architectural environment in the North Tower footprint –its formal and emotional centrepiece – that environment also frames aninfinite distance. The framed view of heavenly spaces – the only featurein the memorial that may promise some kind of redemption – allowsnot only for the changing conditions of light, but also for sensationsof the sublime. These spaces are sometimes full of sunshine and wan-dering white clouds, while at other times they are filled with thunderand 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 thosemetaphors that ‘have to do with “up”’, transcendence, and heroic scale’(Morris, 1968, p. 144). Indeed, it seems as if in Reflecting Absence, Min-imal art’s basic assumptions have been turned upside down. Moreover,since the contemplation room is only part of the wider memorial withits twin voids and tall screens of falling water and its undergroundpassageways, chambers and museum, the aesthetics of size have sup-planted a Minimalist concept of scale. Soon after writing his ‘Notes onSculpture’, Morris changed his ideas considerably. He turned away fromMinimalism’s public dimension and the way the physical encounterbetween viewer and object was mediated and played out in a publiccontext. He feared that such a staging of art would lead to a corruptingcommodification of art in the modern world.


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The staging of art

Another contemporary writer severely criticized Minimalism at an earlystage, mostly because he considered the implications of Minimalism’sencounter between viewer and object problematic. In his essay ‘Art andObjecthood’ (1968), the Modernist art critic Michael Fried analysed,and condemned, the particular relationship between object and subjectthat Minimalism in his eyes played off against the Modernist claim ofimmediate visual experience. Fried’s arguments may explain why Mini-malist aesthetics have influenced the design of present-day monumentsand memorials, since he saw the Minimalist approach as fundamentallytheatrical.

Contrary to Modernist painting, according to Fried, Minimalismaspires to discover and emphasize its own ‘objecthood’. As such, accord-ing to Fried, it does not represent, signify or allude to anything at all.Shape and object are one and the same. Since Minimalism positioneditself against the relational character and the pictorial illusion of almostall painting, and since Minimalist shapes are experienced merely asobjects, Fried calls Minimal art literalist art. To Fried, the literalist sensi-bility is theatrical, because it is concerned with the actual circumstancesin which the beholder encounters the work. ‘The experience of literalistart is of an object in a situation – one that, virtually by definition, includesthe beholder,’ he writes. At the same time, however, the non-personal,public mode of the Minimalist object ‘distances the beholder – not justphysically but psychically’ (1968, pp. 125–6). The object encroaches onthe viewing subject’s space, which is also the result of a certain large-ness of scale, while maintaining a critical distance. From his analysisof Morris’s ‘Notes on Sculpture’, Fried concludes that even though theobject must remain the centre of focus, the situation itself belongs tothe beholder. ‘Someone has merely to enter the room in which a liter-alist work has been placed to become that beholder – almost as thoughthe work in question has been waiting for him. And inasmuch as literal-ist work depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him, it has beenwaiting for him’ (p. 140).

To Fried, the presence of literalist art is basically a kind of stage pres-ence. 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 anindeterminate, open-ended relation, subject to the impassive object on


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the floor. Fried even uses Tony Smith’s account of a night-time ride onthe unfinished New Jersey Turnpike in the early 1950s to illustrate hispoint (pp. 131–2; Wagstaff, 1966a, p. 19). Smith recalled a revealingexperience he had when he drove through the vast landscape of theturnpike while it was still under construction. That artificial environ-ment could not be called a work of art, he said, but it did something tohim that art had never done, because ‘there is no way you can frameit, you just have to experience it’. Since it is apparently the experiencealone that matters, Fried diagnoses the impact that the empty, aban-doned site had on Smith as characteristic of literalist art, even if the artitself was absent.

What Smith’s remarks seem to suggest is that the more effective –meaning effective as theatre – the setting is made, the more super-fluous the works themselves have become. [. . .] Smith’s account . . .

discloses, precisely in the absence of an object and in what takes itsplace what might be called the theatricality of objecthood (p. 135).

In discussing another condition of literalist art, Fried once again refersto Die. ‘Smith’s cube is always of further interest; one never feels that onehas come to the end of it; it is inexhaustible’ (p. 143). Fried considerssuch a ‘duration of the experience’ as

paradigmatically theatrical: as though theatre confronts the beholder,and thereby isolates him, with the endlessness not just of object-hood but of time, [. . .] time both passing and to come, simultane-ously approaching and receding, as if apprehended in an infiniteperspective (p. 145).

Space, time and the beholder

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


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At the same time, as Alex Potts observes, the object’s presence arousesunease, since the object, while encroaching on the viewer’s space, main-tains a physically and psychically critical distance. In his review ofFried’s aversion to Minimalism, Potts almost seems to describe the dis-turbing feelings of the victims’ survivors standing at bedrock in front ofthe black sarcophagus:

What most aroused the extreme disquiet expressed in Fried’s responseto Minimalist work was that the uncompromisingly simple formsand stark staging seemed to dissolve the framing of aesthetic expe-rience to which he was accustomed. The work did not just impingeuncomfortably on his visual and spatial awareness but got on hispsyche too. His unease combined an acute sense of alienation fromthe work with a disquieting sense of being engulfed by it, as if themeditations normally framing interactions with the world of objectswere momentarily suspended. [ . . . ] A Minimalist work could serve asa dumping ground for free-floating . . . anxieties . . . because it stagedsuch a direct physical encounter between the viewing subject and theobdurate otherness of the object, and seemed to lack internal articu-lations that might keep at one remove the irrational, highly chargedresponses such encounter could provoke (2000, p. 193).

One could further add Fried’s observation that literalism brings into playa kind of intersubjective drama in which the work becomes a quasi-human presence. Equally relevant is his remark that the experienceis potentially endless because there is no clear-cut climactic moment,which leads to ‘some form of repetitive looping’, with its rhythm ofpassing through repeated circuits, ‘making one acutely aware that timemoves on and that one never comes back again to exactly where one wasbefore’ (Potts, 2000, pp. 196–7). Such experiences of the endless pres-ence of absence come close to a process of mourning. This may explainthe use of Minimalist aesthetics in today’s memorial culture, as well asin the absence of a possible heroic identification or some final momentof illumination, for the opposition to this aesthetic.

One of the most important aspects of Fried’s elucidating essay is theway he draws attention to the affective dynamics of the interactionbetween viewer and artwork in Minimalism. While other writers weretreating this interaction in formal terms as the articulation of space,placement and scale, his attention to the performativity of Minimalismenabled him to point to its surrender to theatricality.


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Years later, the art historian James Meyer observed how artistic atten-tion has gradually shifted from work to room to spatial context: ‘Intoday’s museums we are accustomed to installations that are keyed notto the individual body and its perceptual grasp, but to an increasinglygrandiloquent architecture’ (2004, p. 223). These installations dependon the experience of size, and seem to have transformed the critical goalsof an earlier period, even though some of these later practices are alsodealing with acts of perception and are still connected to the body ofthe viewer. One now can walk through the sculptures, which overwhelmand engulf the viewer: ‘Such works rephrase the perceptual encounter asdrama, as spectacle’ (p. 226).

Theatrical memory

The original proposal Arad submitted for the memorial competition wasrelatively simple, with its two voids descending in two stages from theplaza to bedrock thirty feet below grade (Stephens, 2004, p. 40). Theunderground museum was not part of Arad’s initial design, but alongwith the passageways leading to it and other features that were incorpo-rated in the memorial, it became an integral part of the memorial after itwas relocated to its underground destination. Things went from bad toworse when in the spring of 2006, the costs of the memorial had esca-lated to almost a billion dollars and politicians demanded that Arad’sdesign be reconsidered. The twin pools in the footprints were kept, aswere the waterfalls. The names of the dead would now be inscribedabove ground. Almost all the underground galleries were eliminated,including the contemplation room with the sarcophagus, which had bythen been changed into a cenotaph anyway.3

It was announced that decisions still had to be made as to the newlocation of the remains and a family room, a delay that showed thatthese were no longer considered to be the touchstone of the memorial.Now the museum became the centre of a vast underground complexthat will de facto serve as the memorial. The focus of the undergroundspaces is no longer on the people who died, but on the audience. Inplacing the emphasis on the museum, the memorial’s silent evocationof loss was traded for the more literal experience of World Trade Cen-ter relics (Ouroussoff, 2006, p. 5). Such a context almost seems to bethe 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 impli-cations for museums of Minimalist art. In her essay ‘The Cultural Logic


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of the Late Capitalist Museum’, Krauss notices that the contemporarymuseum has done everything to create the experience of articulated spa-tial presence specific to Minimalism. She observes how not the art butthe museum itself – as a building – has somehow become the object. Insuch a situation, the spaces themselves increasingly emerge as the focusof experience. The contemporary, market-driven museum has much incommon with other industrialized and highly commodified areas ofleisure, which bring us simulacrum experiences rather than aestheticimmediacy: ‘So, with minimalism, the potential was always there thatnot only would the object be caught up in logic of commodity pro-duction, but that the subject projected by minimalism also would bereprogrammed . . . into the utterly fragmented Post-modern subject ofcontemporary mass culture’ (1993, p. 12). The dispersed subject awashin 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 pitfallsof its transfer to the public domain. One may well consider the origi-nal Minimalist voids of Arad’s design, and especially the contemplationroom with the black sarcophagus, as well suited for the task of mourn-ing. But one also has to acknowledge that the design, and even more thechanges it had to endure, focuses on the intensity of staged experiencesfor a mass audience, which will not be confronted with the temporal-historical implications of death and destruction, but will be absorbedin an overwhelming, spatial configuration. Such a fate will locate thememorial 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 itshuge voids and framed heavens and in the relics that show the devas-tating power of the attacks. Even if, for better or worse, Minimalism laidthe foundations for Reflecting Absence, its spectacular result is a far cryfrom 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 Boxto diminish the grave-like effect.

3. It was decided that the remains were to be kept in a separate climate-controlledroom, from which they would be more easily removable for further examina-tion in the future, when DNA identification techniques will have improved(Dunlap, 2006, p. 3).


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3The Virtuality of Time:Memory in Science Fiction FilmsAnneke Smelik

To say that memory has a privileged place in contemporary cinemarequires little demonstration; it is as ubiquitous as it is banal. In con-temporary science fiction films, however, memory – both as a themeand as a structural element – has become the site of a full-scale interro-gation and re-evaluation of traditional accounts of human subjectivity.The cult film Blade Runner (1982) initiated this trend by making digitalmemory a prominent feature of the Sci-Fi genre. Recent Sci-Fi films suchas Minority Report (2002), Final Cut (2004), The Butterfly Effect (2004 andits sequel in 2006), the manga film The Ghost in the Shell (1995), and theBritish television series Life on Mars (2006–7), represent fantasies aboutthe possibilities and impossibilities of digital technology to register anddelete individual memories. Films on memory that skirt the bordersof the science fiction genre include The Bourne Trilogy (2002, 2004,2007), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and the Chinese film2046 (2004).

In this essay, I will investigate the role of digitalization in cinema asa technology that literalizes memory, by exploring the way in whichscience fiction films feature what one could call a materiality of represen-tation. ‘Representation’, however, no longer seems the appropriate termin an era where digital aesthetics take contemporary films beyond theboundaries of classic structures of visual and narrative pleasure (Rodow-ick, 2001; Flaxman, 2000). I therefore prefer to use the term mediation(Hirsch, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Taylor, 2005), for the science fictionfilm mediates memory from the inner ‘medium’ of the subjective mindto the outer medium of digital images.1 My argument is based on thepremise that films mediate visual and narrative forms, thereby forginga new aesthetics, which can be described in terms of the sensation ofspectacle and affect arousal.

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The Virtuality of Time: Memory in Science Fiction Films 53

The science fiction films that I will discuss mediate the individualmemories of characters. Memory in these films is persistently individ-ual, functioning as an index for subjectivity, but bereft of any historicalor social moorings. Sci-Fi movies convey the futuristic fantasy that pri-vate memory can be captive of technology in such a way that it becomestransparent and visible, for example, by projecting it as images on ascreen. Individual memory can digitally be retrieved, represented, reme-diated, transformed or deleted. The films suggest that private memoryis a prison that keeps the subject chained to the past. Technology offersthe character liberation from his or her memories, and thus from thepast, opening up new vistas for the future.

The science fiction dream of exercising total control over memoryfits perfectly with what Radstone calls the ‘memory boom’ of our time(2000, p. 5).2 The persistent fantasy of uploading or downloading, reg-istering or manipulating personal memories stands in stark contrast,however, to the ways in which the human mind actually works. Per-sonal memory is highly subjective and frequently unreliable; in real life,remembering and forgetting are often beyond our control, or are sub-ject to a control that is all too human (as in selective remembering orforgetting). As contemporary culture puts emphasis on history, heritageand remembrance (Huyssen, 1995), science fiction films focus on retain-ing every bit of personal memory through digital technology in a desirefor ‘total recall’ – as the title of one of the Sci-Fi films has it. It wouldseem that remembering is ‘the radiant hero in the limelight’ and forget-ting ‘the shady villain . . . lurking behind the scenes’ (Brockmeier, 2002,p. 15). Such films thus offer the fantasy of mastery over that which sooften escapes our grasp: our private memories. In this way, the Sci-Fifantasy seems to respond to cultural anxieties around digital technolo-gies as pervading contemporary culture and transforming our relationto personal and archival memory.

The technological digitalization of memory in contemporary sciencefiction films results in two different trajectories: 1) the material visualiza-tion of memories; and 2) a fragmented narrative in which past, presentand future become confused. In either case, individual memory of thecharacters is highly infused with affect. If we accept the assumption thatwhat one remembers is always important (the rest one simply forgets),then one could say that memory is overdetermined by complex desiresand emotions. I am using affect in its Deleuzean sense as a moment ofintensive quality (Deleuze, 1986), or as a bloc of sensations waiting to beactivated by a spectator (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994). Affect is an expe-rience for the spectator that comes prior to meaning. It is, according to


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

Memory and morality

Digital technology has provoked some significant transformations inscience fiction cinema. Firstly, the image of the cyborg changes, fromthe hardware cyborg of the 1980s to the software and wetware cyborgs ofthe 1990s.3 The hardware cyborg combines a human body with technol-ogy in the form of implantations or prostheses: for example, the metallicfigures of the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and RoboCop (PeterWeller). In contrast, the software cyborg is a human who can hook upto a computer. For example, Johnny Mnemonic (Keanu Reeves) in theeponymous film can upload data into his brain by plugging in, whilethe mercurial T-1000 (Robert Patrick) in Terminator 2 (1991) can take onany form whatsoever because he consists of a computer program, andthus his substance is malleable. Finally, the wetware cyborg is a mixtureof digital technology and a ‘wet’ humanoid inside, like Cash (WynonaRyder) in Alien Resurrection (1997).4

Secondly, the technologies of memory shift to other grounds. Earlycyborg movies, such as Blade Runner (Silverman, 1991), RoboCop, TotalRecall and the Terminator films (Penley, 1991), tell stories about pros-thetic memory and the concomitant crisis of identity. Prosthetic mem-ory is typical of the cyborg movies of the 1980s and 1990s, whereimplantations complicate the relation between memory, experience andidentity (Landsberg, 2004). The films focus on anxieties aroused by theparadoxical experience of remembering events that the character hasnot lived through (Radstone, 2000, p. 8). Landsberg (2004) has shownthat the identity crisis of the cyborg is often visualized by surroundingthe characters with reflective surfaces such as a video monitor or com-puter screen. The mirroring surface allows for a moment of uncanny(because implanted) self-recognition and even self-reflection, in a scenethat is reminiscent of the Lacanian mirror phase (Landsberg, 1995).

In science fiction films of the twenty-first century, the story centresmore on the relation between the superior memory of the computerand the failing memory of the human being. Science fiction writerWilliam Gibson has claimed that for him, computers are no more thana metaphor for human memory (Cavallaro, 2000). Digital media have


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created new ways of saving, retrieving and archiving personal and col-lective memories (van Dijck, 2007), grafting onto the original memorysystem developed by Vannevar Bush, the Memex machine, and its laterapplication, Xanadu, by Ted Nelson, technologies that can be character-ized by their perfect storage capacity (Locke, 2000). In contemporaryscience fiction, the fantasy has undoubtedly become one of control.Therefore, with digital technology the concern is no longer with theimplantation of false memories, since the characters remember livedexperiences. Rather, the utopian fantasy now centres on total recallthat is enabled by the continuous enhancement of computer memory,while the dystopian fantasy focuses on digitalized memories that can bemanipulated.

One of the first films in this genre is Johnny Mnemonic (1995), basedon a few short stories by Gibson. The hero uploads certified data into hisbrain 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 temporar-ily download (and thus be deprived of) his personal memories of hisdeceased mother (as in Blade Runner, the mother functions as the Oedi-pal sign of human identity and memory [see Silverman, 1991]). If he isunable to download the computer data within 24 hours, he will die of‘information overload’. Only when he can discharge the data is he ableto reload the personal memories. Of course, Johnny is saved just in timeto retrieve his early memories of his mother.

The contemporary fascination with memory in Western society isaccompanied by developments in media technology that have a simul-taneously fossilizing and virtualizing effect (Sobchack, 1996; Radstone,2000). The fossilizing effect of the media lies in the fact that bothindividual and cultural memory are more and more mediated by tech-nology. This means that memories are not only collected and saved bymedia, but are also reproduced and represented by them (Huyssen, 2000;Hirsch and Smith, 2002). While this particular power of media has beendeplored as atrophying or debasing memory, Radstone and Hodgkin callattention to the fast-growing debate on the ways in which particularmedia may actually sustain and protect memory (2006, p. 12). Obvi-ously, science fiction films promote the fantasy that media technologyis not only helpful but also indispensable in the struggle for control overthe human mind.

The virtualizing effect lies in what Baudrillard (1983) has termeda society of simulacra and Žižek (2002) has called the derealizationeffect of the media: anything that is filmed with a camera becomesmore show and less reality. Something that you can watch again at


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any time by endless replay eventually becomes unreal, as if it were setapart from reality. This derealization effect also occurs with respect toimages from one’s own life, in repeatedly poring over old photos, Pho-toshopping them, or in replaying or remixing home movies. Sciencefiction films show images from personal memory as if they were indeedhome movies that can be endlessly remixed and re-viewed. Media tech-nologies thus play an important role in the derealization of personalmemory.

While contemporary science fiction films may not be concerned withthe kind of effects of media technology that worry cultural studiesscholars, they nonetheless do raise ethical questions about the use oftechnology. How are saved memories to be used? Do they tie people totheir past, imprisoning them, as it were? How are we to deal with trau-matic memories? Is the manipulation of memories legitimate? StrangeDays (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 pluginto such a squid and undergo the experiences as ‘real’. Characters canthus relive their own experiences and so keep their personal memoryalive. Alternatively, they can plug into the experiences of someone else.Perhaps unsurprisingly, squids with experiences of violence, sex anddrugs form a lively black market. The main character, Lenny Nero (RalphFiennes), is addicted to squids, reliving a happy relationship with a girl-friend who left him years ago. His friends reproach him for being ahostage to his past and refusing to live in the here and now. Strange Dayssuggests that squids have a drugging effect and keep people imprisonedin a fossilized past. By questioning the negative effects of the mediatingrole of technology in memory, the film addresses the loss of real andauthentic experiences.

Minority Report raises a similar moral issue: unable to process thetrauma of loss, a father relives repeatedly the memories of his dead lit-tle 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 addic-tion to mediated memories or to drugs is not really that different.5 BothStrange Days and Minority Report show examples of male characters whoare unable to come to terms with the loss of a girlfriend or a son, andhence fall back on melancholy memories (Freud, 2001). In Final Cut,the ethical question revolves around which registered memories shouldbe kept after somebody’s death. Should everything be saved, includ-ing bad experiences, or should the negative parts be cut, so that thebereaved can be comforted or cured by a smooth and seamless collectionof pleasurable images?


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The consequences of manipulating memory also play a central rolein Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but here it concerns the liv-ing and not the dead. The film poses the moral question of whetherpeople should have bad memories removed from their brain, with theimplication that they would no longer be able to learn from their mis-takes and experiences. The film suggests that, if their memory is deleted,people will repeat the same mistakes, like falling in love all over againwith the wrong person. In general, science fiction films tend to warnabout the inappropriate or potentially catastrophic uses of science andtechnology – a moral ending typical of Hollywood. Some of the filmsI have mentioned express an anxiety about the fossilizing and evenaddictive effects of technologies of memory, imprisoning people in apast to which they remain forever bound by the endless replay of dig-ital images. In contrast, others focus rather on the derealizing effect ofthese technologies, where the remixing or deleting of negative aspectsof someone’s life results in a cleaned-up version of the mind, untaintedby unwanted memories.

The frenzy of the spectacle

Science fiction cinema is, of course, a genre known for its spectacularspecial 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. Postmodernfilms on memory upset conventional linear narrative structures by mak-ing abundant use of flashbacks, as in 21 Grams (2003), Memento (2000)or Kill Bill (2003 and 2004).6 In the science fiction movies Minority Reportand Final Cut, however, memories are not presented as flashbacks, but asdigital films that the character can put into a computer to project ontoa screen or wall. In both cases, the diskettes are made of transparentglass, turning the material medium of the memories into a transparentand reflective surface. When John Anderton (Tom Cruise), in MinorityReport, calls forth his personal memories and projects them onto thewall, there is both a spectacular display of futurist technology and aliteral mediation of his memories. The memories are registered in anaudiovisual medium, as if the personal experiences had been recordedwith a camera. Certain visual elements indicate that it is a memory ofthe past: colours are more saturated; the edges of the frame are frayed,and the image radiates light from the middle. These almost mystical raysof light suggest that we are looking at the past, but they also enhancethe derealization effect. The images have a strongly emotional value for


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John, because they are his personal memories of his deceased little son.His endless replaying of the scene also turns the cinematic scene into apsychoanalytic scene of repetitive melancholy.

This kind of literal visualization of memories can also be found inthe film The Butterfly Effect or the television series Life on Mars. In bothcases, the memories are saturated with colour and are more vivid thanthe drudgery of daily life. In The Butterfly Effect, moreover, the memo-ries of the past are introduced by a waving, digitally manipulated imagemoving up and down, and finally disappearing into a vortex that sucksthe character into the past (it is a time-travel story).

Elsewhere, I have argued that in contemporary visual culture, andparticularly in science fiction films, different kinds of space collapse(Smelik, 2008). Real space, virtual space, inner and outer space over-flow into one another, confusing the storyline and, more often thannot, confusing the characters. As memories belong to the inner space ofthe mind, they are by nature virtual. It is important to realize that thefilms externalize and materialize memories by mediating them throughtechnology. They show, indeed, a fantasy of registering and projectingthe internal, personal memory of a character outwards, thus collapsinginside and outside, internal and external space.

In addition, the films introduce a fundamental time loop in whichpast and present collapse. In Minority Report, Anderton can communi-cate with the images projected on the wall: he talks to his dead son whoin turn reacts to him. In The Butterfly Effect, the traumatized main char-acter, Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher), discovers that he has the specialability to time travel, which allows him to remake his unhappy past(an endeavour that does not succeed because something goes dramati-cally wrong each time). We thus see how mediated memories introduceuncertain parameters and produce a fundamental ambiguity about spaceand time.

Visual technologies help to sustain the fantasy of reliving the past –of making the past present. In Radstone’s words, the memory boom ofthe late twentieth century is informed ‘by the experiences of immedi-acy, instantaneity and simultaneity’ (2000, p. 7). Science fiction filmsinsist on the presentness of past experiences: memories are always therefor us to view at any given moment. The effects of electronic technolo-gies have been noted before: Sobchack (1996) pointed to the collapse ofthe distance between event and representation, while Huyssen (1995)indicated the collapse of the boundaries between past and present. Con-temporary science fiction movies testify to those developments whilepushing them further in the direction of fusion. Whereas in video


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culture, images can be endlessly replayed, in DVD and Internet cul-ture, it is possible to remix and redesign them as well. Representationgives way to mediation. These films thus proceed in the direction ofthe manipulation of memories. Yet they also struggle with technologicalrestraints.

A closer look at Final Cut will illustrate this. A selected group of peoplereceives at birth a brain implant that registers all their experiences andthus functions as a repertoire for their memory. When one such persondies, a ‘cutter’ (the cinematic term for the person who does the edit-ing 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 docu-mentary or nature film by imposing on it the traditional linear structureof birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, career, decay and death.

Since all the seconds and minutes of somebody’s life are registered, thecomputer program has first to process vast amounts of information. Thisis represented as uncontrollable information overload. In a speedy mon-tage, we see images flash by the year, month, day and hour as shown atthe bottom of the shots. This information overload is visualized as asplit screen. At first it is a simple double screen, but it quickly explodesinto twelve, twenty-four, and finally to sixty-four images on the screen.The unrepresentibility of a lifetime collapses the time onto the space ofthe screen. The registration and documentation of memories is literallyunmanageable, unless it is severely edited and reduced to the definitiveone-minute version – the ‘final cut’ of the title of the film. This exercisealso 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 tech-nological problem in Final Cut. The implantation device in the brainregisters the experiences as if a camera were filming everything throughthe eyes of that person. The spectator of the memorial film thus sees theimages of the deceased’s life from a sustained subjective point of view;both the characters in the film and the spectators in the movie theatreliterally look through the eyes of the character. They can thus neversee the character himself. Such images pose a problem for the memo-rial film, made for the benefit of the surviving relatives: they never getto see the deceased person on screen, but are instead watching them-selves through the eyes of their beloved. This problem is sometimessolved by having the character look into the mirror: for example, ina montage shot of a man in pyjamas brushing his teeth in front of a


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mirror, in ten-year intervals, thereby showing the relentless process ofageing. The point-of-view camera perspective is thus necessarily narrowand exclusive, as well as downright incomplete.

The fantasy of total control over memory by a technology that canregister, retrieve and project recollections inevitably leads to questionsabout the truth-value of images. The images are supposed to be the regis-tration of somebody’s personal and highly subjective memories. In bothMinority Report and Final Cut, the visual recollections function as thesource of truth about somebody’s life. Where personal memories ‘in reallife’ are characterized by subjectivity, and especially by what is forgot-ten, repressed, or distorted, the films show an allegedly ‘factual’ versionof the past, because it is documented by an objective camera. Sciencefiction films thus create a binary opposition between the subjective, fail-ing memory of the individual and the objective and reliable memory oftechnology. Whereas the personal memory is immaterial, technologytransforms it into a medium that materializes memories. The memo-ries 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 ofmedia technology as objective, factual and truthful. It reinforces an ideaof the immediacy and transparency of media that became obsolete withthe advent of digital technology. No contemporary user of the Inter-net, of digital cameras, or player of computer games still adheres to thatoutdated view.

Yet there are some exceptions to this science fiction perspective. TheBBC television series Life on Mars, for example, dares to retain the ambi-guity until the very end of the series. The main character, Sam Tyler(John Simm), continually wonders whether he is mad, in a coma, suf-fers 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 alloptions open and leaves the spectator in uncertainty.7

In this context, it is interesting to note that many science fiction filmsfeature an element of ambiguity: the spectator does not really knowwhether the main character is paranoid or schizophrenic, or whetherto give credence to plot elements involving time travel or manipulatedmemories.8 These films often play on this ambiguity by having the char-acter 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 hisamnesia (which was caused by a car accident while on police duty). Hisrecurring pain, fear and insecurity stretching over the entire televisionseries 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 theviewer.

Most Hollywood films, however, are keen to substantiate the sciencefiction part of the story. In the last minute, the image of the herohas 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 unreliableState or of evil people abusing technology. Such closure is, however,not only less moving; it is also less convincing. The spectators can-not be completely persuaded by the happy conclusion because theymay see it as contrived. For instance, in The Butterfly Effect, the viewerhas watched so many versions of the past where something repeatedlygoes horribly wrong that the rather sudden happy ending seems plainlyincredible.

In contemporary visual culture, to see something implies its existence.This is, in the words of Linda Williams (1989), a ‘frenzy of the visi-ble’, a Foucauldian will to knowledge: to see is to believe and also toknow. 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 ofomnipotence. They make something visible that in real life remainscompletely outside the perception of others or beyond a reality check:memory. By visualizing virtual and ephemeral memories, the filmsmake them real and concrete. The first trajectory of the digital tech-nologies of memory that I trace in this article is thus the ruthlesslymaterial visualization of memories, which I call the ‘frenzy of thespectacle’.

Science fiction cinema petrifies memory through visual representa-tion, thus immobilizing memories and stripping them of their essen-tially elusive quality. Where digital culture as a whole is characterizedby virtuality (Rodowick, 2001), science fiction films, on the contrary,explore digital technology as a means of rendering the most virtual andfleeting aspects of the human mind as material, solid and unambigu-ous. The films fit in with a material culture that allows not so muchfor an unmediated but rather a mediated relation to the past, mem-ory and lived experience. They present memory as something that canbe 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 getslost in the visual materialization is the acknowledgement of the funda-mental instability of memory; that is to say, the notion that memory isby nature fleeting, ephemeral, virtual. In the second part of this essay,


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

Confusing narratives

The second trajectory that science fiction films pursue in the digitaliza-tion of memory is a fragmented narrative line in which past, present andfuture become thoroughly confused. The films in fact undo the linearityof the narrative structure. This narrative fragmentation allows for theaffect of the past to be processed. As was observed above, the ambigu-ous affect of memories is considered problematic in Hollywood sciencefiction movies unless they are smoothed by narrative closure. Indepen-dent films such as 2046 and Eternal Sunshine allow for the ambiguity ofaffect by foregrounding the ambiguity of memory, which results in anon-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 ofaffect rather than in terms of representation. This implies an attempt toget beyond the critique of representation as it has been dominant in filmstudies until recently. There have been several attempts to understandthe experiential relation to cinema, for example, the notion of ‘hapticvisuality’ introduced by Laura Marks (2000; 2002) or of affective expe-rience by Simon O’Sullivan (2006).9 For Deleuze, cinema, like any art,is never just representation but instigates always a process of affect andtransformation – which is another reason for preferring the term medi-ation to representation. Deleuze prompts us to view cinema (or art) as acreative production of both affect and thought (Bennett, 2006, p. 32). AsColebrook puts it: ‘Art may well have meanings or messages but whatmakes it art is not its content but its affect’ (2002, p. 24; emphasis inoriginal).

In the films that I am discussing, the affects are directly related tomemories. In her discussion of the writings of the cognitive psychologistSilvan Tomkins on affect, Armstrong writes that memory and affect arecontingent on one another because of their relation to time: as memorylooks forwards and backwards, ‘the original affect becomes rememberedaffect and remembered affect can evoke new affect’ (2000, p. 135). Ben-nett (2006) uses the term ‘affective memories’ (p. 28) as an aestheticcategory in art that produces an experience that is no longer framed byrepresentation (p. 27).


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I argue that the affective memories of the main characters in both2046 and Eternal Sunshine are enacted in a fragmented narrative, thusintensifying an affective experience for the spectator. It is not alwayseasy to keep the narrative layers straight in those two films, becausepresent, past and future are continually confounded. As the films are‘the kind of text which is disengaged from the linear sequence of mem-ory’ (Braidotti, 2002, p. 126), they could be seen as part of a minoritariancinema that unhinges the role of memory in subjectivity. The title 2046refers both to the future, the year 2046, and to a specific location, ahotel room with that number. The characters move in and out of thehotel room, which functions as a time portal. Without a conventionalnarrative structure, time and space collapse, bringing the vicissitudes ofdesires, memories and affects to the fore.

Eternal Sunshine tells the story of a failed love relationship, after whichthe former lovers proceed to delete one another from their memory.The film focuses on the moment when the male character seeks to erasehis memories. In the process of deleting them, Joel Barisch (Jim Carrey)finds himself transported back to the time of his memories. Realizingthat he is quite attached to those memories, he struggles to stop theprocess of erasure, but to no avail. The middle part of the film becomesa complicated mental journey in which past, present and future getthoroughly confused, confusing not only the characters but also thespectators. As in 2046, the dense narrative structure gets quite intricatebecause of the reorganization of linear time. This is digitally visualizedas follows: while Joel and his girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), runthrough the sets of their own past, the setting around them is literallydeleted; it disappears. As in the other science fiction films, we see a lit-eral materialization of inner space. However, unlike those Sci-Fi movies,Eternal Sunshine does not foreground narrative pleasure or visual spec-tacle, but rather the disconcerting affect of a past that is being undonewhile one is still in it.

In both films, the science fiction element is represented somewhatawkwardly. In 2046, surrealist colours suggest the future, and in Eter-nal Sunshine Joel is fitted with some kind of strainer on his head toerase the memories of Clementine from his mind. Obviously, thesefilms are not concerned with producing a convincing futuristic image.Rather, as mentioned above, the films are concerned with the portrayalof emotions of loss and longing. Affect is what matters in these films –an affective register that is directly related to remembering. In bothfilms, memory is a source of suffering; the loss of a loved one is stillpoignantly experienced in the present. In 2046, the main character,


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Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung), revolves endlessly in a perplexing carouselof present, past and future, thus never escaping from the emotions thathe passively and passionately endures. In Eternal Sunshine, the charactershope to be delivered from their emotional pain by deleting the ago-nizing memories, but that also blocks any possibility of learning fromfailures and of preventing them in the future. Upon reflection, Joelprefers not to lose his memories of Clementine because he recognizesthat 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 doomedlove affair.

In the cultural and social sciences, memory is generally consideredto be the core of identity. Both 2046 and Eternal Sunshine suggest thatmemory is what makes the subject: lived experience and its preserva-tion in memory are the source of one’s personality and inform one’ssubjectivity. Some critics, however, think that memory can be separatedfrom who we are. As Cardullo puts it in his analysis of Eternal Sunshine,the film suggests that ‘our memories, even if (or precisely because) theyare malleable or erasable, may somehow exist apart from our deeperimpulses, urges, instincts, or desires – which cannot be purged’ (2007,n.p.). Such an essentialist view divides our memories from our subjec-tivity and forecloses on any notion of the unconscious as a reservoirof affects, impulses and desires that include memories. Radstone andHodgkin are afraid that contemporary conceptions of memory tend toneglect the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious, where so manyof our memories are stored. They believe that our understanding ofmemory should still be informed by the psychoanalytic insight that:‘the subject is radically other to itself, driven by fantasies and desires ofwhich it has only the most limited awareness’ (2006, p. 19). Thus, weshould not turn our ‘backs on unruliness, on desire, on an othernesswithin’ (p. 95), with regard to our understanding of memory.

In my view, the layered complexity of memory in the fragmentednarratives of both Eternal Sunshine and 2046 presents a heterogeneousenactment of memory, which is highly affective and intensive. Remem-bering and forgetting are two sides of the same coin. The films showthat the science fiction fantasy of total control over memory is unrealis-tic and ought to give way to an insight into the ungraspable virtuality ofmemory. In the words of Rosi Braidotti this view takes into account thatmemory is stored ‘throughout the physical and experiential density ofthe 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 intri-cacies of memory and the impossibility of disentangling reminiscence


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

The virtual time of memory

We have seen that Minority Report, Final Cut, The Butterfly Effect, Lifeon Mars, Eternal Sunshine and 2046 all touch on the affective registerof memory. However, whereas Eternal Sunshine, Life on Mars, and 2046produce an elemental confusion within the story, Minority Report andFinal Cut exorcize the uncontrollable emotions by conveying them in aunidirectional storyline. In all cases, time, memory and affect are inex-tricably linked. When narrative coherence is restored, the impact ofaffect is contained, as in Minority Report and Final Cut, but when thetemporal organization implodes in the confusion between present, pastand future, affect is intensified, as in Eternal Sunshine and 2046.

I argued above that contemporary forms of cinematic and digital aes-thetics have taken films beyond the confines of classic structures ofrepresentation and narrative, whether it is the frenzy of the spectacle inHollywood movies, or the non-linear and complex narratives in inde-pendent films. Eternal Sunshine and 2046 are examples of the secondtrajectory where the notion of time does not imply a simple linear devel-opment from one point to the next. Instead, time is represented as avirtual process with the potential of being actualized.

Because cinema is a time-based medium, Deleuze devotes one of histwo volumes on cinema to time.10 Inspired by the philosophy of HenriBergson, Deleuze argues that the film image is connected to memory,for example in the flashback. Here we may bring together the notionsof memory, time and affect. Colebrook explains that the experience oftime is split in two: ‘There is the past or impersonal memory whichis virtual and the actual lines of lived time. The world or life we liveis an actualisation of this pure or impersonal memory, but memory ortime 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 andEternal Sunshine, where daily life is upset by an event from the past.In 2046, Chow Mo Wan relives an unhappy love affair with every otherwoman that he meets and whom he tries (but fails) to love, because eachnew relation reawakens the memories of the lost woman. As Colebrookpoints out, the memory can disrupt the actual present, because it is realand exists virtually alongside the present (p. 33). The fact that in thefilm the women all look alike enhances the confusion of actual andvirtual time.


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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 recollectionof his early childhood and Oedipal love for his mother. Memories getmixed up to the extent that they produce an altogether new present andeven future. This makes it quite a bewildering film to watch despite theattempt at narrative closure (near the end of the film Joel and Clemen-tine meet and have to decide whether to start their relationship all overagain – without their memories to guide them). Like in 2046, the confu-sion of time is not resolved. Eternal Sunshine and 2046 both foregroundthe complexity of time, collapsing the actual and the virtual experienceof time. While time turns inside out and outside in, the same happens tospace. As I have argued above, different kinds of space are entangled inmany science fiction films (but it is also the case for such diverse genresas medical documentaries, video clips and games): real and virtual spacecan 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 powerof memory is related to its affective qualities. The complicated sceneswhere the present enters the past activate an affective force.

As memory has a temporal element that is irreducible, it seems tolead naturally to the disruption of time. The films mediate the disrup-tive 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, butalso in the scenes of spectacular visualization discussed earlier, createsmoments of pure affect for the spectator. It is important to realize thatin a Deleuzean framework, affect is a material experience of sensationthat is corporeal in nature. We can understand such viewing experiencesas moments of intensive quality (Deleuze, 1986). As such, affect helpsus 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, generatinga new experience in the spectator (O’Sullivan, 2006). The role of thespectator is crucial here, because as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) argue,affect needs to be activated by the viewer. Just as memory is an act oftransforming the past, so is affect an act of active becoming. We canthus understand the science fiction films on memory as displaying thevery image of time, that is, as its process of becoming. Here we mayencounter the transformative power of cinematic affect, as it challengesspectatorial subjectivities.11 Cinematic affect may help us to rethinkthe spectator position in terms of understanding and affinity. Such a


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

Conclusion

In this essay, I have discussed the theme of mediated memory in thegenre of science fiction cinema. The digital technology of memory has,on the one hand, resulted in a frenzy of the spectacle, as in MinorityReport, The Butterfly Effect and Final Cut and, on the other hand, in frag-mentary narratives in which past, present and future are intertwined, asin Eternal Sunshine and 2046. In all these cases, time and space, insideand outside, the actual and the virtual, collapse. Memory affects theexperience of time, which in turn opens up to spectatorial affect. In myview, we need to take into account the ways in which memories arebound up with affect if we are to understand the ways in which Sci-Fifilms mediate and remediate memory.

To conclude, let me briefly draw out the implications of an analyticfocus on affect. Firstly, as a moment of intensive quality, affect pro-vokes a non-linear, dynamic vision of time. As we have seen, affectcreates a time continuum that envelops past, present and future, undo-ing the authority of the past that so often ties subjects obsessivelyto their recollections. Secondly, the notion of affect as an impersonalintensity enables the establishment of a relation to the outside world,that is, beyond the merely subjective or personal. This leads, on theone hand, to an understanding of the dissolving boundaries betweenthe human and the technological. For Deleuze, cinematic technologyfrees the human body, for example, in the camera and montage thatestablishes an impersonal observer: ‘this is not a human eye – evenan improved one’ (Deleuze, 1986, p. 81). One could say that the affec-tive experience of the image of time enhances this impersonal, perhapspost-human, view. On the other hand, the affective level requires thespectator to establish an experiential relation to the film. The regime ofaffect creates a different mode of creative spectatorship, pointing to itstransformative power. Affect is therefore closely related to the Deleuzeannotion of affirmation as a positive and joyful experience of cinema, eventhough 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 ofresistance, of change, of escape from the memory that keeps the charac-ter imprisoned. For the spectator, it is the moment when he or she can


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

Notes

1. See for an insightful discussion on mediation, the conversation of Hirschwith Kirstenblatt-Gimblett and Taylor (2005). Bolter and Grusin (1999) usethe term ‘re-mediation’ but that presupposes a shift from one medium toanother, which is not the case here, and also a rather dichotomous view oforiginal and copy.

2. This fantasy is in itself not new or unique to science fiction; as DouweDraaisma argues in his book Metaphors of Memory (2000), human memoryhas been described throughout the ages in terms of an artificial memory andas 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 moreandrogynous Keanu Reeves or Jude Law, or for women such as Wynona Ryderand Angelina Jolie (as Lara Croft).

5. The term ‘mediated memories’ was introduced by Radstone and Hodgkin inMemory Cultures (2006).

6. Contemporary Hollywood films thus both continue and revise the avant-garde preoccupation with memory and narrative of high modernist cinemaof 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, featuringa 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 withthe case of Sam Tyler, Drake is convinced that she is hallucinating rather thanexperiencing 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 sci-ence fiction films I discuss here. It is interesting to note that this form ofpsychological 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 witness-

ing in an essay on 9/11: ‘A Theme Park of Disaster: The Ethics of Post-9/11Spectatorship’, forthcoming in Arcadia, 2009.

12. I would like to thank Liedeke Plate and Robert Doran for their comments andsuggestions on this essay.


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Part II

Memory/Counter-memory


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Introduction:Memory/Counter-memoryLiedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

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 havethe effect of making modern memory markedly counter-memorial. Aswe explain in the Introduction, the democratization of History into his-tories has splintered the grand narratives of empire and progress intothe many and divergent (counter)-memories of the men and womenthat felt left out. The positive valuation of memory, Radstone andHodgkin write, is the result of its being ‘utilised in order to retrieve thatwhich runs against, disrupts or disturbs dominant ways of understand-ing the past’ (2006, p. 10). By this account, memory is counter-memory.Unsanctioned, subversive, from below or from the margins, it attemptsto overthrow or deconstruct the memory-as-history and to dislodge itfrom its position of authority. Memory resists amnesia. It refuses thepolitical and ideological ‘forgetting’ of people and events and counter-acting the ‘selective traditions’ (Williams, 1961) that overlook or silencethe experience of those who are not included in it. It is thus a move-ment against repressive memorialization emerging from all the nooksand cracks of the present culture of memory.

The view of memory as ‘always already’ a counter-memory can betraced back to Foucault. In his essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, heidentifies the historical sense as giving rise to ‘a view of history thatsevers its connection to memory, its metaphysical and anthropologicalmodel, and constructs a counter-memory – a transformation of historyinto a totally different form of time’ (1977, p. 160). Opposing the ideaof ‘history as knowledge’, as ‘reminiscence or recognition’, and as ‘con-tinuity or representative of a tradition’ (p. 160), Foucault’s conceptionof history as counter-memory implies it is actually a use of the past that

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is no more organically related to identity and truth than any other nar-rative use of the past. In fact, it can be understood as ‘just one moretechnology of memory’, as Carolyn Steedman says (2001, p. 66). Nei-ther memory nor counter-memory nor history constitutes the destiny ofa person or a people. Instead, they are uses of the past that try to masktheir own constructiveness as well as the non-neutrality of the subjectof knowledge – of the historian, but also of s/he who re-members.

The movement towards seeing history as always already counter-memorial is evidently crucial to artistic projects that remember by wayof rewriting. Thus, feminist ‘re-vision’ (Adrienne Rich’s term) attemptsto intervene in the production of cultural memory by telling ‘the otherside of the story’. Similarly, postcolonial intertextuality conceived asa ‘writing back to the centre,’ as Salman Rushdie memorably phrasedit, contributed to the characterization of postcolonial literatures ascounter-narratives. The essays in this section focus on rewriting as atechnology of cultural memory whose meanings, rather than beingstable, are seen to change as culture itself, in its relationship to the pastand in its understanding of that past, also changes.

Intertextuality, which basically means that texts are made of texts, re-inscribes those texts and thus remembers them. ‘Intertextual mnemon-ics’ certainly is one of the ‘strategies employed to implant and keepliterature in cultural and collective memory’ (Grabes, 2005, p. xi). (Theother strategies are genre, the canon and literary history.) As the cita-tion of texts that are ‘anonymous, irrecoverable, and yet already read’(Barthes, 1986, p. 60), intertextuality itself is also a mnemonics and canthus be understood as a technology of memory. As Bakhtin explainsin ‘Discourse in the Novel’, words remember the contexts in which theyhave been; they carry the ‘taste’ of these contexts, are shot through withthe intentions and accents of others. Novelists employ the words’ het-eroglossia to achieve their purpose, carefully orchestrating the echoesof the words’ previous contexts to resonate through the novel, usingintertextuality as a technology of memory to invoke these other worlds.

Nagihan Haliloglu’s reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in Chap-ter 5 evokes this understanding of intertextuality as reinscription andpolyphony in her notion of ‘writing back together’, while Ann Miller,in Chapter 4, shows how the recent Blake and Mortimer comic-stripalbums retrospectively re-contour Jacobs’s 1950s moral and political uni-verse, stripping it of colonial overtones unpalatable to a twenty-firstcentury readership. In Miller’s analysis the ligne claire (clear line) servesas a technology of memory that can summon up ‘the lost world ofcertitudes mapped out in the original albums’ only after adjustments


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Introduction: Memory/Counter-memory 73

to Jacobs’s referential system. Similarly, Plate argues that as re-visionsproliferate, ‘telling the other side of the story’ becomes a kind of shop-ping for alternative versions. In this (commercial) context, mythicalretelling can continue to work as a technology of memory that bringswomen’s stories into cultural memory and thus ‘alters or expands theoptions for the future’ (Belsey, 2005, p. 16). Together, the essays in thissection demonstrate how rewriting as a technology of memory worksto resist the supposed homogeneity and hegemony of ‘official’ or dom-inant memory yet is itself subject to change as the meaning of the pastitself changes. Rewriting, indeed, enacts ‘one of the crucial features ofcultural memory’, Catherine Belsey writes: ‘We remember the past notsimply as it was, but . . . as it will turn out to have been, in consequenceof our remembering it’ (p. 4).

In Chapter 4, Ann Miller turns to a bestselling series of comic-stripalbums, which have resurrected Blake and Mortimer, heroes created bythe Belgian artist E. P. Jacobs in 1946. She addresses the question oftechnologies of memory by considering the ligne claire, the characteris-tic drawing style used by Jacobs as well as by Hergé, which was subvertedby other artists for satirical purposes or postmodern irony. However,when Blake and Mortimer were resurrected in 1996, irony and pastichewere eschewed in favour of a convincing evocation of Jacobs’s vision ofthe 1950s. This was achieved by means of ‘a detour and mythologicalreworking,’ Miller argues.

In Chapter 5, Nagihan Haliloglu offers an intertextual reading of JeanRhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which relates memories that have been hid-den in the discursive space of Jane Eyre. She proposes ‘writing back’ asa technology of memory, an orchestration on the part of the writerthat gives expression to memories of certain subjects. She argues thatremembering in the form of self-narration and in the narrative spaceof a single novel reveals the similarities between the experiences of thetwo different colonial subjects of Antoinette (Bertha in Jane Eyre) andRochester.

In Chapter 6, Liedeke Plate discusses women’s rewriting as a powerfulpolitical and ideological tool in the shaping of cultural memory. Shehighlights the success of feminist re-vision as a technology of memoryaimed at affecting how we remember culturally central texts, yet submitsthat the role of rewriting has altered in the context of the present ‘liquid’culture of memory. Taking her cue from Jeanette Winterson’s retellingof myth in The Stone Gods, she proposes mythical retelling as a mode ofrewriting that is particularly suited to the contemporary condition.


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4The Astonishing Return of Blakeand Mortimer: FrancophoneFantasies of Britain as ImperialPower and Retrospective RewritingsAnn Miller

On 21 September 1996, the headline ‘Blake and Mortimer have beenfound!’ dominated page one of the French newspaper Libération.1 Thenext three pages were devoted to the same sensational event: the resur-rection of Belgian artist Edgar P. Jacobs’s comic-strip heroes, nine yearsafter their creator’s death. The phlegmatic, Eton-educated Captain Fran-cis Blake, never known to betray his emotions beyond the occasional ‘ByJove!’, the more volatile but intrepid physics professor Philip Mortimer,and the suave but unscrupulous Olrik, their implacable enemy, wereto meet again, thanks to a decision by the publisher Dargaud to pay10 million francs to buy out the Éditions Blake et Mortimer and theStudio Jacobs, which held the back catalogue and the copyright on thecharacters. Dargaud then invested a further 8 million francs in a mas-sive publicity operation, which included the handing out of 100,000free copies of classic Jacobs albums from the 1940s and 1950s to first-class TGV passengers, a strategy that suggests that the readership beingtargeted for the first of the Blake and Mortimer remakes was largely anadult one (Lindon, 1996, p. 2).

Dargaud’s financially motivated bid to evoke the childhood memoriesof a generation amounted to the commodification of nostalgia, some-thing to which the Jacobs albums were peculiarly well suited. A bookabout Jacobs by Gérard Lenne describes his own Blake and Mortimercollection as ‘the object of a fetishist cult’, and as having acquired ‘theexquisite taste of a madeleine’ (1996, p. 9), a reference which recursin Jean-Paul Dubois’s book on Jacobs: ‘Jacobs often has the effect of aProustian madeleine’ (Dubois, 1989, p. 18).

The new album, L’Affaire Francis Blake [The Francis Blake Affair], wasscripted by the Belgian Jean Van Hamme, a successful screenwriteras well as author of bande dessinée series including the prodigiously

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The Astonishing Return of Blake and Mortimer 75

bestselling XIII. It was drawn by the French artist Ted Benoît, best knownfor his sophisticated Ray Banana albums. The new Blake and Mortimeralbum sold no fewer than 700,000 copies in its first year, and toppedthe bestseller list not just for bande dessinée albums but for all books (deSaint-Vincent, 1998, p. 66). At the same time, sales of the back cata-logue, consisting of eleven albums by Jacobs written between 1946 and1971, 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 havesince appeared: another one by Van Hamme and Benoît in 2001, andthree more in 2000, 2003 and 2004 by a second team: the Belgian writerYves Sente and the French artist André Juillard. All of these albums haveenjoyed considerable commercial success: the 2003 album sold 600,000copies, making it the bestselling album of the year (Ratier, 2004, p. 3).

This essay will examine first of all the fascination of Jacobs’s ownalbums, which put forward a mythologized version of Britain, ‘a sortof magnified version of what Belgium would have been like if it hadn’thad to undergo the humiliations of defeat and occupation’, in the wordsof 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 worlditself is legible, and can be unproblematically encoded (1983, p. 40).The diagrammatic effect of the ligne claire makes it appear purely deno-tative: the dense ideological content of Jacobs’s work is presented asself-evident by the referentialism of the graphic line. In the Blake andMortimer remakes of the 1990s and the twenty-first century, it is theligne claire which acts as a technology of memory, through its powerto summon up the lost world of certitudes mapped out in the originalalbums. The second part of this essay will argue, though, that that worldis subtly and retrospectively recontoured in the new albums. Adapta-tions are made to Jacobs’s moral and political universe, most notably inrelation to the presentation of colonialism, given that the nostalgic fixoffered to contemporary readers is intended to assuage a rather differentset of cultural anxieties.

Imperial assurance and Cold War anxiety

Jacobs’s Blake and Mortimer albums represent Britain as a major worldpower in which liberal democratic values are upheld by a ‘naturalaristocracy’, in Dominique Petitfaux’s term, made up of intellectuals,government officials and army officers, whose lightly worn superior-ity is unquestioned by a deferential working class (1980, p. 4). As Luc


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Routeau has argued, the social world which Blake and Mortimer inhabitseems 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 Jackand Sharkey, are vulgar and mercenary. In Le Mystère de la Grande Pyra-mide [The Mystery of the Great Pyramid], for example, Sharkey menacesthe highly spiritual Egyptian priest Abdul Razek with a bullwhip, andthen tries to bribe him (Jacobs, 1955, p. 10). The devotion of Blake andMortimer’s Indian servant, Nasir, who had served under Blake in theIndian army, demonstrates the loyalty felt towards the British Empireby its colonial and ex-colonial subjects. In La Marque Jaune [The YellowChalkmark], for example, he hurls himself down the stairs to defendMortimer from a mysterious intruder, only to be struck down by anelectric charge that the intruder projects (1956, p. 29).

The beginning of La Marque Jaune gives a sense of the way in whichBritain’s identity as an imperial power is presented as eternal, part of anational narrative that seems to be set in the stone of its historic mon-uments. A narrative voiceover accompanies an image of the Londonskyline at night:

Big Ben has just struck one in the morning. London, the gigantic cap-ital of the British Empire, stretches out, as vast as an entire province,under the rain that has been falling for two days. The solid medievalsilhouette of the Tower of London, the heart of the City, is outlinedagainst the glowering sky (1956, p. 5).

Fredric Jameson has suggested that mass culture may be conceived notas mere manipulation but rather as ‘a transformational work on socialand political anxieties which must have some effective presence in themass cultural text in order subsequently to be “managed” or repressed’(1992, p. 25). Surprisingly, the anxieties which dominate the series donot seem to include the loss of empire, even though India had gained itsindependence in 1947, a year after the first Blake and Mortimer albumwas published, and independence struggles were going on in Africa andelsewhere for much of the period during which Jacobs was writing. Thethreat to Western civilization, as upheld by Blake and Mortimer, thatis most present in the albums, is not the potential hostility of the col-onized other, but the possibility of brainwashing and indoctrination.Concerns about the misuse of science to this end are mobilized bythe 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 plotis set in motion by the theft of the imperial crown, but this symbolicassault on the British Empire emanates not from the colonies but fromthe 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 suc-ceeds in turning pillars of the establishment, such as a high court judgeand the editor of the Daily Mail, into brainwashed zombies. Unease atthe prospect of the annihilation of individuality may relate as much tothe fear of standardization and mass production coming from Amer-ica as to the menace of communism from the East: we have notedJacobs’s tendency to associate American characters with crass materi-alism. A number of the albums do, though, have an explicitly Cold Warscenario. In the 1959 S. O. S. Météores [S. O. S. Meteors], the scientist, Pro-fessor Miloch Georgevitch, is working for a foreign power that aims touse the meteorological disruptions that he has created in order to invadeWestern Europe.

The unconscious of the text

It is, then, the forces of totalitarianism, not anticolonialism, that Blakeand Mortimer must defeat, and in this endeavour, they can actuallycount on the support of the colonies, with the exception of the occa-sional traitor, like the Bezendjas, who turns up in the Le Secret del’Espadon [The Secret of the Espadon], written in 1946, in the Makranarea of what would become Pakistan in 1947. Even this character is por-trayed not as an independence fighter, but as having sold out to thedictator of the evil empire of the ‘Yellows’ (Jacobs, 1950, p. 51). Thespectre of anticolonial insurrection is, admittedly, evoked in the 1957L’Énigme de l’Atlantide [The Mystery of Atlantis], but in highly displacedform. Blake and Mortimer, on holiday in the Azores, find themselves inAtlantis, 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 someof their descendants had become aggressive and had to be driven backover the frontiers. They are now being encouraged to invade and over-throw the benevolent imperial rulers by a renegade member of theimperial guard, helped by Olrik. The invasion is foiled thanks to Blakeand Mortimer, but Olrik accidentally breaches a floodgate, and Atlantisis swept away by floodwaters. Its inhabitants escape in spaceships to


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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 effectivelyrepressed at the end of every Jacobs’s album. Not only is the enemycomprehensively defeated, but the irrational and fantastique elementswhich had threatened the social order are evacuated from the narra-tive, whether, as in this case, by submersion or, elsewhere, by violentexplosion. A more unusual variant occurs at the end of Le Mystère de laGrande Pyramide, when the priest Abdul Razek induces amnesia in thetwo heroes (Routeau, 1976, p. 59). The reader’s confidence that orderwill be restored is undoubtedly strengthened by Jacobs’s frequent use ofsymmetry in the design of his pages. The unruliness of the monsters,machines, savage hordes or nature itself is contained by the aestheti-cised regularity of the page layout. Control is further asserted by themonologic assurance of the narrating position, as images, dialoguesand narrative voiceovers work in harmony. In fact, at the end of thealbums, the narrating voice frequently fuses with that of either Blake orMortimer. After the imperial crown has been recovered at the end of LaMarque Jaune, for example, it is Blake’s words that occupy the voiceoverbox and draw out the moral of the story: that true science works in theservice 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 mean-ing that exceeds the constraint of the narrative voiceover. There aretwo recurring visual motifs which seem to figure the return of cer-tain elements of the unconscious of the text that cannot be resolvedor banished. The fact that women are almost entirely absent from thealbums simply reflects the context in which Jacobs was working, whichdemanded a suppression of the heroes’ sexuality. There is, though, anabundance of disturbing episodes in which the heroes are trapped incaverns which threaten to suffocate or engulf them with water, a ratherobvious metaphor for a fear of the female element (Jacobs, 1956, p. 49).This undermining of the untroubled masculinity of the heroes recursin another motif, that of the eye within a circle which appears in anumber of the albums, usually when one of the heroes is temporarilyimprisoned and perceives that he is being watched through a spy-hole.These sudden and terrifying instances of a gaze from the place of theOther work to unsettle the easy authority with which the heroes inhabitthe socio-symbolic order. Furthermore, there is the occasional possibil-ity 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 notwith the representatives of the law but with Olrik, who has now left thescene, and whose space we are invited to occupy.3 As his pursuers burstin through a door into the office of the editor of the Daily Mail, whomOlrik has just kidnapped, the optical point of view is from the editor’sdesk, where Olrik has left a piece of paper displaying the symbol of themarque jaune (1956, p. 15).

The Blake and Mortimer remakes:renewing the reference systems

When Blake and Mortimer were resurrected in 1996, it would have beenpossible to re-envision the series in a number of ways: perhaps the readercould be offered the perspective of Olrik, or the treacherous Bezendjasor even that of Nasir, the faithful Indian servant. However, the pub-lishers had correctly surmised that what would make the public buythe new albums in large quantities was the belief that they were beingoffered a Proustian madeleine, and this would preclude any radical depar-ture from Jacobs’s ideological universe. It would also be imperative toavoid postmodern pastiche. The technological conduit for the reawak-ening of childhood memories was to be the faithful reproduction of theligne claire, but this undertaking was not entirely straightforward, giventhat the distinctive graphic style had itself acquired a new set of mean-ings. Its capacity for conjuring up the worldview of Hergé and Jacobshad been exploited in the 1970s by the Internationale Situationnistefor purposes of political satire, and it had subsequently been appropri-ated 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 quo-tation’ (1984, p. 87), which replicates its referentialism only in orderto contest the realist illusion through highly self-conscious intertextu-ality. Benoît and others had also used the ligne claire in their illustrativeand advertising work, so that by 1996 it had taken on a certainmodish irony.

If the legibility of the ligne claire was to be renewed, there would haveto be some adjustment of Jacobs’s referential system in order to makethe albums credible, and the madeleine palatable, for a late twentiethand twenty-first century readership. The ideological consensus takenfor granted by Jacobs could not simply be reactivated in the postcolo-nial and post-Cold War world into which the new albums emerged, inwhich counter-narratives had challenged the monologic authority thatthe original albums could so effortlessly display. Moreover, a cultural


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accretion had overlaid Jacobs’s perception of 1950s Britain with a set ofvisual references taken from cinema rather than from the fantastique lit-erature on which he had drawn. The much-heralded retour of Blake andMortimer would require a detour and a mythological reworking.

In the Van Hamme and Benoît albums, the detour is away fromJacobs’s nineteenth-century literary sources and towards cinematicsources. In order to create the reality effect craved by readers, they usethe ligne claire to reproduce a vision of 1950s Britain that would befamiliar from films. The 1996 L’Affaire Francis Blake is largely based onHitchcock’s film The 39 Steps, with an espionage plot in which Blake pre-tends to have sold out to the enemy in order to unmask the real, highlyplaced traitor. The Scottish locations of the film are carefully evoked,and there are several knowing references to the original: the spymasterDeloraine has six fingers on his left hand, for example. Hitchcock’s filmwas made in 1935, but by drawing on it, the authors are still able to offera representation of Britain less ideologically marked for 1990s readersthan Jacobs’s own: the spymaster is a businessman, the Indian servantNasir has disappeared, and the key role played by a female characterwho wins Mortimer’s admiration allows for the discreet heterosexu-alization of the heroes, thereby avoiding any suggestion of a campsend-up.

The second Van Hamme/Benoît collaboration, L’Étrange rendez-vous[The Strange Meeting] (2001), moves still further away from Jacobs’s uni-verse. The album is set almost wholly in America, home of the massculture that was so distasteful to Jacobs, but which is lovingly recreatedby Benoît’s drawings of suburban interiors, gas stations and cinemas.Both décors and plot are reminiscent of 1950s Sci-Fi films, the cult statusof which is perhaps a filmic equivalent to the fetishism that surroundsJacobs’s albums (Van Hamme and Benoît, 2001, p. 10). An adjustmentin the relative status of Britain and America is made as Blake ruefullynotes how much better equipped the American armed forces are thanthe British.

The Sente/Juillard albums are more striking still for their reconfigura-tion of Jacobs’s universe. The first offers a realignment of Jacobs’s ColdWar scenario. La Machination Voronov [The Voronov Plot] (2000) is a spysaga set in 1957. The evil Soviet scientist trying to control the worldturns out to be a Stalinist dissident, and the Soviet government actsin concert with MI5, represented by Blake, to defeat him. Moreover,Voronov’s machination has considerable resonance for contemporaryreaders: he tries to spread a virus which attacks the immune system ofits victims.


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Rewriting the colonial narrative

It is the second Sente/Juillard collaboration, Les Sarcophages du 6èmecontinent [The Sarcophaguses of the Sixth Continent] (2003–4), a doublealbum, that will concern us here. Homi Bhabha discusses the notionof the ‘supplement’ in relation to narratives of nation, and it may beargued 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 arguesthat the force of the supplementary ‘lies . . . in the renegotiation of thoseterms, times and traditions through which we turn our uncertain, pass-ing contemporaneity into the signs of history’ (Bhabha, 1990, p. 306).The ‘minus’ in the original is, as we have argued above, any acknowl-edgement that the colonial subjects were other than loyal and gratefulbeneficiaries 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 upto a plurality of narrating voices in quite the way that Bhabha goes onto envisage.

The albums have a double timeframe which includes episodes setin India in the twilight of the British Raj and, in this respect, maybe likened to the ‘elegiac narratives about the closing of the imperialperiod’ which, as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have suggested, had cometo prominence in Britain in the 1980s, exemplified by the films A Pas-sage to India (David Lean, 1984) and Gandhi (Richard Attenborough,1982), the former ‘ton[ing] down the cautious anti-colonialism’ ofE. M. Forster’s original novel and the latter ‘subtly prettifying the Britishrole’ (Shohat and Stam, 1994, p. 123). Shohat and Stam quote SalmanRushdie’s denunciation of what he sees as a Thatcherite attempt torefurbish the image of empire, ‘the artistic counterpart of the rise of con-servative ideologies’ (Rushdie 1992; quoted in Shohat and Stam, 1994,p. 123). Writing twenty years later, in a context in which the antag-onisms underlying the imperial imaginary had resurfaced in alarmingways, Sente and Juillard imbue the conventions of the ‘Raj nostal-gia genre’, in Shohat and Stam’s term, with a mood of anxiety anda highly Jacobsian sense of the irrational. Equally Jacobsian is thereassertion of Western rationality and, implicitly, imperialist ideology, atthe end.

We learn in the first volume of Les Sarcophages that Mortimer’s iden-tity as a Western male unified subject occludes a trauma from his past.


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The album is set in 1958, at the Universal Exhibition in Brussels, withwhich Blake and Mortimer are both involved, but it contains a flashbackto Mortimer’s teenage years, presumably about twenty years previously.This flashback doubles as an extraordinary retelling of the narrative ofcolonization and decolonization. When visiting his parents in India,where his father was an army doctor, Mortimer had fallen in love withan Indian princess, Gita. This love, clearly powerfully sensual even if notconsummated, was reciprocated (Sente and Juillard, 2003/2004, p. 22).However, Mortimer was tricked into missing a rendezvous with theprincess by his boyhood Indian friend, Sushil, who then stabbed her.Mortimer was forced to leave India both by his own father, furious atthe scandal, and by Gita’s father, who told him that she had committedsuicide 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 allthe while to an English woman. This trauma of loss and guilt returnsfor the adult Mortimer in the form of nightmares, but also in the formof the strange figure of the reincarnated emperor Açoka, the princess’sfather, who, in 1958, is behind a plot to sabotage the Brussels Exhibitionby using a cyber-guided Olrik. At the end of the album, it is revealed thatthis 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 shebelieves to have abandoned her.

This is an interesting reversal of the rape myths that are often usedas allegories for colonization: here is an Englishman who, far from rap-ing an Indian woman, failed to consummate his love for her, and itis because he scorned her (or so she thinks) that she hates him. Weunderstand that a union between the two sweethearts and, on a sym-bolic level, their countries, would have been possible, had they not bothbeen betrayed by the independence fighter Sushil. It may be noted thatearly in the flashback, when the young Mortimer first arrives back inIndia from his school in England, Sushil sends him a note saying, ‘QuitIndia now, Philip Mortimer. This is not your home any more’ (Sente andJuillard, 2003/2004, p. 12). This is presumably intended to evoke the‘Quit India’ campaign led by Gandhi, even if anachronistically, sincethat did not start until 1942. So the independence movement havingdestroyed the love affair between Britain and India, the ex-colony hasturned into a terrifying woman. Mortimer, moreover, will be obligedto kill her, because she is holding a knife against the throat of Nasir, thefaithful Indian servant, who has made a reappearance in this album. (Welearn 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 colonialOther and the female Other, both of which had been repressed allthrough the original Blake and Mortimer series, and both of which nowemerge in disconcerting ways that correspond to cultural anxieties of thetwenty-first century. Colonial guilt is projected back onto the colonized,and the male anxiety that had been present only in the form of certainobsessive visual images in the original Jacobs albums, now comes to thesurface and is embodied as the monstrous castrating woman. Resolutionis 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 ofJacobs’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 Mys-tère de la grande pyramide, one panel shows Brussels Midi station andone shows the Metropole hotel, before the hero leaves on the airportbus (Jacobs, 1954, p. 45). The almost complete absence of Belgiumfrom the original series and its return in the new series are both logi-cal. If a seemingly unassailable imperial Britain might well serve as therepository of fantasies of Belgian and French readers in the 1950s, forwhom the experience of defeat and occupation was a recent memory,it is perhaps harder to identify with the imminence of post-imperialdecline which must be read back into the Britain of Blake and Mortimerfrom the standpoint of the twenty-first century. Conversely, from thatsame standpoint, 1950s Belgium can be portrayed as a country on thethreshold of modernity. The belated, indeed posthumous, entry of Bel-gium into the Jacobsian imaginary enables it not to be encumberedby its own colonial history. This is disposed of in a subplot: Belgianinvolvement in the Congo appears to be limited to the medical pro-grammes directed by Mortimer’s friend Dr Claes, and for the CongoleseMukeba, the supporter of independence, the enemy is the thuggish andracist frontiersman Van den Brand, whose role in trafficking uranium isuncovered by Blake and Mortimer with Mukeba’s help.

The independence movement seems, then, to be an affair betweenindépendantistes and the white settler population. It is not Belgium asimperial power that is mythologized by Les Sarcophages du 6eme conti-nent, but the accession of the country to modernity in 1958. The realityeffect is assured through the careful replication of photographic docu-ments from the period, showing the king and his brother at the opening


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ceremony of the Universal Exhibition, and the Atomium is promoted tothe 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 particu-larly insistent for contemporary readers. This dramatic scene cannot failto recall the panels in Jacobs’s Le Secret de L’Espadon, in which the EiffelTower and Big Ben are destroyed by the totalitarian ‘Jaunes’, provokingfrissons of terror in their readers. Lenne remembers his own response:‘Ah, that Eiffel Tower smashed in two!’ (1996, p. 164). In a post 9/11climate, however, such images are still more powerful. The threat tothe Atomium will be averted, of course, and intimations of what SlavojŽižek has called ‘the frailty of the symbolic edifice’ (1991, p. 36) will bebanished, thanks to Blake and Mortimer.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have aimed to show that the extraordinary success of thenew Blake and Mortimer albums has depended on their careful evocationof the universe created by Edgar P. Jacobs. The technology of memoryhere takes the form of the replication of Jacobs’s characteristic graphicline, the ligne claire, redeployed by contemporary artists to depict avision of the 1950s that would be pleasurable for readers, both throughthe recycling of images of Britain and America familiar from films and,in the case of Les Sarcophages, the recycling of documentation that ispart of the national iconography of Belgium as a country defined by itsmodernity. The credibility of the new albums for readers in the 1990sand the twenty-first century has depended on an ideological disinvest-ment in relation to the Cold War, and a working through and resolutionof anxieties about the colonial Other and about women that were absentor heavily repressed in the original Jacobs albums. I have furthermoresuggested that contemporary readers may find echoes, through plotlinesand through scenes depicted, of social and political concerns that havearisen only in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Blakeand Mortimer have, then, continued to restore order, but have done soin the context of an evolution of the collective imaginary, haunted by anew 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 ProfesseurSato [The Three Formulas of Professor Sato] which was completed by Bob de Moorin 1990, after Jacobs’s death in 1987.

3. Interestingly, the cover of Lenne’s book, drawn by Ted Benoît, contains a meta-representative portrayal of the artist at work. Only Jacobs’s hand can be seenas he sits at his desk surrounded by drawing implements, but a reflection canbe seen in the mirror. The idealised self-image of the artist which is reflectedback is not that of either of the heroes but that of Olrik.


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5Writing Back Together:The Hidden Memoriesof Rochester and Antoinettein Wide Sargasso SeaNagihan Haliloglu

I lived with that woman upstairs four years, and before thattime she has tried me indeed: her character ripened and devel-oped 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 agonieswhich must attend a man bond to a wife at once intemperateand 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 marriageupon 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 hover-ing, as it were, above his head. Rochester is a wealthy Englishman whohires Jane Eyre to look after his protégée child at Thornfield Hall. Hefalls in love with her, but their marriage is prevented when Jane dis-covers that Rochester is already married to Bertha Mason. Rochester,who has been hiding the fact of his marriage, and hiding his madwife upstairs, is forced to reveal the truth about the ‘madwoman’ fromthe 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 thehouse, 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 letsus glimpse at what it has been hiding. As Aleida Assmann explains, theattic is a metaphorical figure for ‘latent memory’ – a sort of repositorywhich is there and can, by will or violence, be brought to reveal what itstores (1999).

86


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Writing Back Together: Rochester and Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea 87

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) can be considered a prequel toJane 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 elaborateon his unfinished disclosure, as yet another subject partially silencedand forced to forget by the dominant discourses of the time.

In this essay, I propose ‘writing back’ as a technology of memoryand a ‘ritual of remembering’ by way of a narrative project. This nar-rative project is an orchestration on the part of the author wherebymemories of certain subjects, especially politically repressed ones, aregiven expression. I argue that Wide Sargasso Sea is such a ritual ofremembrance, where Rhys stages the self-narrations of Rochester andAntoinette (Rhys’s name for Brontë’s Bertha), with a view to providingthese 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 throughwhich the ritual of remembering is staged. Remembering in the formof self-narration and in the narrative space of a single novel, I argue,reveals the similarities between the experiences of these two differentcolonial subjects.

In The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin elaborate onSalman Rushdie’s phrase ‘write back’, and say that apart from nation-alist aspirations of writers from the ex-colonies, novels redressing theimage of the colonies as portrayed by colonial powers also set outto ‘question the bases of European and British metaphysics, challeng-ing the world-view that can polarize centre and periphery in the firstplace’ (1989, p. 37). Wide Sargasso Sea certainly also questions relationsbetween centre and periphery, and treats what seems to be peripheral ina Victorian text as the central theme. If technologies of memory are theways in which cultural memory is constructed and deconstructed, thendeconstructing the hierarchies between established categories throughinventing or discovering hidden memories can be conceptualized as atechnology of memory as well.

In my reading, it is Jane Eyre that qualifies the memories revealedin Wide Sargasso Sea as ‘hidden’. Accordingly, I will first examine thesort of discursive space Wide Sargasso Sea provides in contrast to JaneEyre that facilitates the expression of certain memories. I will theninvestigate the various subjectivities the colonial system brings about,in order to locate Rochester and Antoinette in this set of power rela-tions. In this framework, the particular instances where the character ofRochester ‘remembers’, or narrates events from the Caribbean past, willreveal to what extent his exclusion from the ‘English family’ brings his


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predicament close to that of Antoinette. A subsequent investigation ofthe way that intersubjectivity is staged in Rhys’s novel will expose theintimacies occasioned by the resemblance of the experiences and mem-ories of the two subjects. The intimacies of these subjectivities will thenbe tested out on the way both subjects regard remembering and forget-ting, to see how Antoinette arrogates agency in using technologies ofmemory.

Self-narration and memory

Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette, a white Creole in the WestIndies, who marries an Englishman and is, after a short and disastrousperiod of married life, shipped off to England in pretty much an incapac-itated state. Although Rhys has renamed Bertha as Antoinette and fallsshort of naming the husband Rochester, all the other names are con-sistent and the characters are recognizable from Charlotte Brontë’s JaneEyre. The figures of Bertha and Rochester, in their embodiments in JaneEyre, have come to stand for certain archetypes, and their stories, I argue,have become part and parcel of cultural memory when it comes to thecolonial past. In their seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic, SandraM. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have read Antoinette/Bertha as representingthe suppressed psyche and sexuality of Jane Eyre:

Thornfield’s attic soon becomes a complex focal point where Jane’sown rationality (what she has learned from Miss Temple) and herirrationality (her ‘hunger, rebellion and rage’) intersect. She never,for instance, articulates her rational desire for liberty so well as whenshe stands on the battlements of Thornfield, looking out over theworld (1979, p. 348).

As Gilbert and Gubar point out, once the walls of the attic have beentorn down to reveal what was inside, the leading female character isentrusted with even more self-confidence, pointing indeed to the epis-temological importance of the attic and how it can be used for furtherself-definition. Thus, the ‘madwoman in the attic’ has, in time andthrough interventions such as Rhys’s, become proverbial, reigning overa wider semantic field.

The self-narrations of Antoinette and Rochester remind us once morethat different contexts bring about different practices of self-narrative.In Wide Sargasso Sea, these narrations collaborate to paint a picture ofthe ‘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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order to preserve collective knowledge and experiences and to pass theseon to the next generation (1992, p. 80). I read both Jane Eyre and WideSargasso Sea as such technologies of memory, the latter revising the dic-tates of the former. For as Mieke Bal has argued, individual interventionscan and do influence cultural memory:

Because memory is made up of socially constituted forms, narrativesand relations, but is also amenable to individual acts of interventionin it, memory is always open to social revision and manipulation.This makes it an instance of fiction rather than imprint, often socialforgetting rather than remembering. Cultural memory can be locatedin literary texts because the latter are continuous with the commu-nal fictionalizing, idealizing, monumentalizing impulses thriving ina conflicted culture (1999, p. xiii).

If indeed some fictions work towards social forgetting – like the apparentforgetting in Jane Eyre – then others work towards remembering, espe-cially that which has been forgotten in previous acts of memory.1 Thelatter is what Wide Sargasso Sea does. Rhys’s attempt to introduce thehidden memories of Rochester and Antoinette functions as a rethink-ing or revising of a specific part of cultural memory, by introducing newself-narratives.

Although there is no explicit reference to the act of narration in WideSargasso Sea, when we follow the novel to the end, we see that both char-acters are remembering from across the water, from England. It is crucialto acknowledge this location of remembrance: certain modes of remem-bering are available only to those who have left the colonies behind.Moreover, as Gillian Whitlock points out, ‘vision of myth making aboutcolonial spaces represents them as sites of longing and ambivalence,held in utopic/dystopic tension’ (2000, p. 179). Rhys’s novel embod-ies this tension, albeit not in the formulaic sense of allocating thedystopic for the narration of the settler and the utopic for the whiteCreole. Instead, Wide Sargasso Sea achieves a narrating space where boththese characters touched by the imperial project have this tension singlyin themselves, manifested in their narrations. Indeed, this mixture ofthe utopic and dystopic, this unresolved longing for the Caribbeanspace even when one is there, is what makes these narrations akin toeach other. Part of the hidden history I refer to in my title are there-fore the memories that Rochester recovers through an utopic mode ofremembering filled with longing bordering on nostalgia, a rememberingwhich he categorically despises in Jane Eyre.


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That Rochester’s account of his time in the Caribbean in Jane Eyresounded too negative was a concern of Rhys’s, which, she admits ina letter to her editor, is one of the reasons she wanted to write WideSargasso Sea (Angier, 1985, p. 26). The secret history that she wants toreveal has to do as much with Rochester’s position as with the perceivedmadness of Antoinette. Rhys has the following to say about the whiteCreole stereotype that Jane Eyre has generated: ‘I was vexed at Brontë’sportrait of the “paper lunatic”, the all wrong Creole scenes and aboveall the cruelty of Mr Rochester’ (Angier, 1985, p. 44). If we give credenceto Rhys’s dictum that ‘there is always another side’ (p. 27), then this isalso true for the telling of personal history, and no Caribbean historyof Antoinette would be complete without Rochester’s account. In WideSargasso Sea, this is an account that is more detailed and one in whichhe is allowed to speak in terms exceeding the confines of the Victorianfictional world of Jane Eyre, where any propensity towards sensuousnessmust be quelled and denied.2 Indeed, when we consider the various sub-jectivities staged in the novel, it becomes difficult to brand it as solelythe story of the madwoman told from her own side. It is a novel wheredifferent voices are staged in an orchestrated way.

The first overall narrative strategy that we encounter in Wide SargassoSea is the division of the book into three parts of unequal length. Thefirst part is Antoinette’s fragmented narration of her childhood. The sec-ond part, of almost equal length, is the story of the short-lived sharedlife of Rochester and Antoinette. This part begins with Rochester’s nar-ration, switches back and forth between him and Antoinette twice andthen ends again with Rochester. The third part, much shorter than thefirst two, starts with Leah the cook’s narration, but where, in fact, all ofthe talking is done by Grace Poole, Antoinette’s keeper – ending againwith Antoinette’s narration. These changes in narrative voice providespaces in the novel where the dynamics of the ritual of remembering canbe observed. The passage from one voice to another, sometimes stagedas a transformation of one subjectivity into another, seems to suggestthat repressed memories can only be truly recalled through the narra-tive force of more than one narrator. It has to be staged, as it were, as acollective act of remembrance. Thus, Wide Sargasso Sea is a writing back,not only on the part of Antoinette but, along with other characters, ofRochester, who is a very particular male subject in the colonial orderof things.3

In order to understand the importance of revealing the hidden mem-ories of Antoinette and Rochester in the same narrative space, we firstlyneed 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 twocharacters represent. The term ‘colonial’ denotes all those subjects whoare implicated in the imperial system – this use of a generic term,though it can be tricky at times in its inability to express differenti-ated identities within the colonial system, calls our attention to thefact that the categories such as settler, colonial and post-colonial havecome about through historical and narrative transformations. Howellsidentifies Rhys’s two novels that introduce a prominently West Indiancharacter, Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark, ‘as illustrating theshift from colonial to postcolonial’ (1991, p. 23). This shift, I believe, isparticularly pertinent to Rhys’s writing in her attempts to make thesevarious positions and their transformations, or even transmutations,manifest to the reader. Thus, a ‘colonial’ subject can mean any oneof the subjectivities in the continuum of settler, colonial and postcolo-nial. Different identities and subjectivities develop along with historicalevents, conquests and emancipatory acts. In this string of historical andnarrative transformations, I am interested, within the space of Wide Sar-gasso Sea, in the interaction between the categories of the settler andthe colonial.

Performing colonial identities from the Settlerto the Creole

Settlers are the representatives of colonial power, acting as colonial see-ing agents who want to make an inventory of the land in order to rule iteffectively. Generally, the term is reserved for the first generation of set-tlers who are still very much strangers to the colony (Renk, 1999, p. 19).The term ‘colonial’, however, is more liberally used in critical discus-sions. It can mean the indigenous people, the indentured labour, andthe descendants of the settler people, who, after a while, are distancedfrom the English family, chiefly because, as Kathleen Renk explains, theycannot practise the English language as an institution any more. In theCaribbean, due to the effects of Middle Passage – that is, the transporta-tion of slaves from Africa to plantations in the Caribbean – both thecolonizers and most of the colonized are at the same remove from thelandscape, but it is now the English language through which it has tobe interpreted. Though this may at first seem to favour English both asa social and lingual practice, the practice of an English way of life andsticking to a purely English vocabulary soon proved to be problematicand hindered the settlers’ interaction with their surroundings. The dif-ficulty of acquiring an identifying relationship between self and place,


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

After all, why should the free settler, formally unconstrained, andtheoretically free to continue in the possession and practice of‘Englishness’, also show clear signs of alienation even within thefirst generation of settlement, and manifest a tendency to seek analternative, differentiated identity? (1989, p. 12).

While Rochester can be categorized as the ‘settler’, Antoinette hasmoved on to this differentiated identity. Martina Ghosh-Schellhornargues that this is the ‘Creole’, which she conceptualizes as transitional(1998, p. 178). This transitional identity, resulting from the distancefelt towards both the English language and the landscape at the sametime, lets us read one subject’s predicament in the other and is thereforepertinent to my discussion of the collaborative remembering in whichAntoinette and Rochester are engaged.

Indeed, just as Antoinette performs her identity in this transitionalspace, so does Rochester. The transformative space of the Caribbean,simulated in the eclectic narrative space of Wide Sargasso Sea, enables thereader to see the changes in these characters. The novel seems to suggestthat only through holding a conversation together can the two identi-ties, but especially that of Rochester, subvert the expectations inscribedinto their subjectivities by previous narrations. While in Antoinette thesettler has transformed into the Creole, in Rochester the colonial seeingagent will transform into something else: if not into the Creole, theninto a white subjectivity that understands its limits and admits its awein the face of something it cannot quite dominate. Robert Kendrick putsthe stress on Rochester’s particularity as a white male in the settler roleand considers the novel as a space where Rochester reframes and reviseshis position in the patriarchal and colonial discourses:

Though the changes that occur in the characters of Antoinette andJane have been much noted and discussed, the efforts of feministreadings to chart Antoinette’s and Jane’s rearticulations of their rela-tions to the patriarchal discourses embodied by Rochester have notexplored fully the possibility that Edward himself rearticulates andredefines his position as a masculine subject, as he re-examinesthe ethical implications of the masculine prerogatives that he hasenjoyed and abused (1994, p. 36).4


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Indeed, it is through his remembering and narrating in Wide SargassoSea that Rochester reconsiders his position as a white male subject. Heremembers the unsettling experiences of the settler in the Caribbeanwistfully, a remembering which he has tried to relegate to his wife inthe attic in the fictional world of Jane Eyre. For Rochester, rearticulatingand redefining his position as a settler is possible only by reframing hisdiscourse concerning his marriage – that is to say, through a retellingand fuller narration of the events that took place in the Caribbean. InWide Sargasso Sea, he gives the lie to his own statements in Jane Eyreconcerning his marriage as having been a catalogue of ‘hideous anddegrading agonies’ as he recollects the night when Antoinette druggedhim with an obeah potion she has procured from Christophine, her nowemancipated slave:

I had never seen her look so gay or so beautiful. She poured wine intotwo glasses but I swear it was long before I drank that I longed to burymy face in her hair as I used to do. I said, ‘We are letting ghosts trou-ble us. Why shouldn’t we be happy?’ She said, ‘Christophine knowsabout ghosts too, but that is not what she calls them’. She need nothave done what she did to me. I will always swear that, she need nothave done it (Rhys, 2000, p. 87).

We can read the above passage in the register of what Kendrick callsthe ‘intriguing representations of how Victorian subjects lived at oddswith the dominant cultural narratives of class and gender’ (1994, p. 36).Rochester’s self-confessed complicity in the sensual world of Antoinettecan thus be seen as a resistance to the cultural narrative of the prude andcivilized white male reining in the wild Creole. This, it seems, is one ofthe ways in which Rhys re-evaluates the ‘cruelty’ of Rochester, througha recuperative re-articulation of his relationship to Antoinette.

What works even more towards an understanding of Rochester’spredicament is the representation of his relationship to his family, andthrough it, the rules of Victorian British society, especially that of patri-lineal primogeniture, according to which the second son is ignored ininheritance. After being informed about Antoinette’s mother’s madness,Rochester writes an imaginary letter to his father, who had sent himto the Caribbean to find himself a rich bride: ‘I know now that youplanned this because you wanted to be rid of me. You had no loveat all for me. Nor had my brother. Your plan succeeded because I wasyoung, conceited, foolish, trusting. Above all because I was young youwere able to do this to me’ (Rhys, 2000, p. 84). But the following is


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what he actually writes: ‘Dear Father, Unforeseen circumstances, at leastunforeseen by me, have forced me to take this decision and I am cer-tain 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 asmine’ (ibid.).

Here we see the fate-determining role of the English family and howone’s agency is determined vis-à-vis one’s distance to it, not only in thecolonies but also in the ‘mother country’. This is, as Kendrick points out,a re-examination of masculine prerogatives, which includes the passageof wealth to the first-born son. The set of Victorian values that dis-possesses Rochester has already dispossessed Christophine, Antoinette’sliberated slave, and through marriage has dispossessed Antoinette too.The remembering in Wide Sargasso Sea, then, brings out experiences thatare similar for each of them and that have to be kept silent in Jane Eyrein order to conform to Victorian social discourses. Remembering revealsthe intimacies that have taken place between the fortunes of the twocharacters. Their mutually mirroring predicament is in turn reflected inthe novel’s way of representing their subjectivities.

Rather than confine the two narrations to different parts, Rhysaccommodates them within one, drawing attention to the interac-tion between the two subjectivities and how they remember. The waywe attach meaning to this interaction depends on the way we per-ceive the political dynamics – as warring or collaborative – of thisritual of remembering. At the start of Wide Sargasso Sea, the agencyappears to be all Antoinette’s. The appearance of Rochester’s voice thenseems to intervene in Antoinette’s voice. However, I would like to readthe proliferation of narrators as more collaborative than warring. Thestaging of intersubjectivity, Gillian Whitlock argues, is a decolonizingactivity, and I suggest that like all decolonizing activities, it is alsode-essentializing:

If binaries, thinking in terms of origins and authenticity, centre andperiphery, and the separation into consistent and homogenous iden-tities are fundamental to colonizing discourses, then the work ofdecolonization is to return ambivalence and duplicity, and to look tointersubjectivity in cultural formations and texts. All this is impliedin ‘intimacies’ (Whitlock, 2000, p. 6).

In Wide Sargasso Sea, the intimacies that Whitlock calls our attentionto, I would argue, can be best observed at points where the narratorchanges. 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 ofthe other, but also through letting their discourses, as Trin Minh-Ha putsit, ‘leak into each other’ (1989, p. 94). The adoption of certain aspectsof the discourse of the other, for instance, the way they express theirfeelings for the island, also works towards that end. In both the remem-brance of Antoinette and Rochester, the Caribbean remains alien to agreat degree. Whereas Rochester claims that he is the stranger to theisland, Antoinette speaks explicitly about the similarity of their posi-tions vis-à-vis the island, an understanding that their narratives havealready been working towards:

‘I feel very much a stranger here,’ I said. ‘I feel that this place is myenemy 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 ofit, because it is something else. I found that out long ago, when Iwas child. I loved it because I had nothing else to love, but it is asindifferent as this God you call on so often’ (Rhys, 2000, p. 82).

Thus, Rhys seems to be warning her readers through Antoinette’sstatement that they should not be surprised to find Rochester’s andAntoinette’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, categoriesalways leak’ (1989, p. 94). Perhaps the best example of this leakagein Wide Sargasso Sea is when Antoinette first cuts in on Rochester’snarration in the second part of the novel. It happens, as it were, unbe-knownst 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-personnarration resumes:

I did not look up though I saw him at the window but rode on with-out thinking till I came to the rocks. People here call them MounesMors (the Dead Ones). Preston shied at them, they say horses alwaysdo. Then he stumbled badly, so I dismounted and walked along withthe bridle over my arm. It was getting hot and I was tired when Ireached the path to Christophine’s two-roomed house, the roof shin-gled, not thatched. She was sitting on a box under her mango tree,


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

Christophine perceives Antoinette here almost like a changeling, andthe reader is startled just as much. The fact that Antoinette is riding thehorse and that she distances herself from the landscape, transferring theknowledge 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 stag-ing of intersubjectivity, is what Rhys’s technology of memory achievesin the text of Wide Sargasso Sea.

Another intimacy that takes place between the two subjectivities istheir approach to and relative agency in engaging acts of memory, point-ing to collaboration in their efforts to re-paint their past together. WhenChristophine suggests that Rochester and Antoinette separate and thatRochester 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’tforget. I laughed’ (p. 102). Rochester’s ‘She won’t forget’ is replete withmeaning. His wording suggests that he will not let her forget to whomshe ‘belongs’. But it is a double-edged weapon with which Rochesterinvests Antoinette. For if he lets the memories of the Caribbean live on,latent in Antoinette’s mind, there will always be the danger of thembeing exposed to the public through unexpected means. Rochester,however, believes that he can assign the remembering to Antoinetteand that once he locks her up, there will be no more need to deal withthe past:

Very soon she’ll join all the others who know the secret and will nottell 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 daywhen she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like allmemories a legend. Or a lie (p. 112).

In this passage, Rochester suggests that it is the white male, howeverdisempowered by the centre, who can use technologies of memory towrite or delete histories. But memory is not the exclusive property ofRochester: other subjects can use it to their own ends and the novel


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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 hasnot recognized her because she has not put on her red dress: ‘I lookedat the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across theroom. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. Iwill remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now’ (pp. 121–2).This ‘something she must do’ is, of course, to ‘remember’. Her ‘I willremember’, then, turns ironic, for whereas Rochester would have herremember whose wife she is, and under whose rule she must live, shewill remember instead the injustice and meet Rochester’s violence withher own violence. Thus, remembering does not always work towardsmaking the subaltern remember the hierarchies and the feared violencethat has helped put them in place: it can also work in a recuperative wayto lend the oppressed agency.

Revising cultural memory

Wide Sargasso Sea can thus be seen as a project to revise cultural memorythrough self-narration – one that requires a certain degree of violenceon the part of Rhys, of intruding upon previous plots. This intrusionresults in the emancipation not only of the oppressed, but of other sub-jects who had previously been deemed as sovereign, as in the case ofRochester. With its revised context of power relations, Wide SargassoSea provides a different narrative space than Jane Eyre. In the dynam-ics of this ritual of remembering, the utopic and dystopic are dealt outequally to Rochester and Antoinette: Rochester is allowed to rememberscenes of unity as well as of discord in collaboration with Antoinette.Although in the novel Rochester suggests that he will not let Antoinetteforget, his self-narrative in Wide Sargasso Sea reveals that he has notmanaged to forget either. Just as Rochester locks Bertha/Antoinette upin the attic and transfers upon her the business of remembering, soRhys, in turn, unleashes the hidden memories of Rochester. Thus, WideSargasso Sea functions as a ritual of remembering where Antoinettemoves, even if partially, from hysteria to historia and Rochester fromthe stiff-upper-lipped Englishman to someone who has not just suf-fered but also partaken in passion. In this respect, Wide Sargasso Seais a transformative space that suggests that if we are to consider thenovel as a writing back, then Rochester’s narrative is also crucial tothis ritual.


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Through the transformative narrative spaces that Rhys provides inthe novel, the two subjectivities meet and adapt to each other’s idiom.Their experiences in the Caribbean inform their subjectivity, which wesee approach one another throughout the novel. These intimacies arestaged, not just to salvage some authority for Antoinette from Rochester,who is conventionally thought to represent the consistent homoge-neous identity of the white male, but to give him a more plausibleand perhaps redeemable history. The articulation of Rochester’s hid-den memories show that one can be victimized by the patriarchal andcolonial systems in a variety of ways. The agencies of both Antoinetteand Rochester is defined through their distance to ‘the English fam-ily’, and this in turn is reflected in how they use self-narration as atechnology of memory. As we have seen, in both Antoinette’s andRochester’s narration, writing or speaking back to perceptions aboutoneself is made possible by recalling and narrating one’s life storyonce again.

In this re-narration, which is a mode of writing back, the dynamicsbetween the centre and periphery are deconstructed. This is accom-plished by questioning the privileges attendant upon certain colonialpractices – primarily of ownership and inheritance that revolve arounda particular understanding of ‘the English family’. While this institu-tion 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 wherethe discourses of both can be investigated for their variances and theirconvergences. The fact that the past is reconsidered not just by onebut two archetypal characters lends more authority to the text as anintervention in cultural memory. Thus, I argue, writing back in a (post)colonial context offers itself as a technology of memory that is recuper-ative and restitutive through revealing the hidden memories of not justthe disenfranchised, but the colonizer as well.

Notes

1. Jane Eyre can, at the same time, be read as both revealing and concealingRochester’s past and Antoinette’s history. Critics have shown that both read-ings are possible; for the literary detective, there are enough passages in JaneEyre that help an unbiased reader reconstruct a more rounded version of BerthaAntoinetta 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, andinexperienced, I thought I loved her . . . Her relatives encouraged me: competi-tors piqued me: she allured me: a marriage was achieved almost before I knewwhere I was’ (Brontë, 1994, pp. 302–3).

3. Indeed, the narrations of Grace Poole and Leah the cook also need to betaken into account when considering the novel as a remembering of neglectedhistories. This essay, however, focuses on the way the two subjectivities ofAntoinette and Rochester interact.

4. Kendrick goes on to argue that ‘[t]his question must be addressed if the depthand potential of Brontë’s ethical revision of gendered subjectivity in her “orig-inal” work, and the reaffirmation of this re-vision in Rhys’s “supplement” areto be recognized, for the novels of Brontë and Rhys offer intriguing represen-tations of how Victorian subjects lived at odds with the dominant culturalnarratives of class and gender’ (1994, p. 36).


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6Liquid Memories: Women’sRewriting in the PresentLiedeke 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 andliterary critic Adrienne Rich famously wrote: ‘Re-vision – the act of look-ing back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a newcritical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural his-tory: it is an act of survival’ (1972, p. 18). Rich’s words have had a majorimpact 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 allplumage, that ‘we must redo our history, . . . review, reimagine, rethink,rewrite, revise, and reinterpret the events and documents that constituteit’ (Gilbert, 1980).

Re-vision is a technology of cultural memory. The rereading andrewriting of texts is one of the central ways in which culture buildsits literary heritage. Feminist re-vision, rereading and rewriting well-known texts from a new critical perspective, literally intervenes in theproduction of cultural memory: it affects the way we read and under-stand these texts and transforms the way we remember them. Forinstance, Jean Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre, also discussed by Halilogluin Chapter 5 of this volume, has so effectively transformed the way wenow remember Charlotte Brontë’s nineteenth-century novel of develop-ment that most recent adaptations of the novel, whether for television,stage or the big screen, and ranging from novels to films to plays

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Liquid Memories: Women’s Rewriting in the Present 101

and operas, all refer to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as part of Brontë’snovel’s subtext (see Rubik and Mettinger-Schartmann, 2007). Produc-ing both the texts that constitute cultural memory and the sentimentsand ideologies that accompany it, feminist re-vision has been particu-larly successful in opening it up to negotiation over which stories areto be included in it, who is entitled to define it, and which meaningsit holds. Indeed, putting the old stories together differently, consti-tuting them anew, it successfully demonstrated what Marita Sturkensees as memories’ most valuable insight, which is ‘the stakes heldby 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 ofmemory whose impact on the cultural imagination has altered. Drawingon the notion of a memory culture we are in the midst of today, whichfirst emerged in the 1970s and has been developing since to reach itsapogee in the 1990s and beyond (see Nora, 1996; Huyssen, 2003; Rad-stone and Hodgkin, 2006), I argue that in a culture as obsessed withthe past and as saturated with memories as ours, the very means of cul-tural memory production is itself affected by this memory surplus. Thisessay, then, is based on the premise that Western culture’s relation tothe past has changed. It submits that if, as Richard Terdiman writes,‘memory has a history’ (1993, p. 3), so do its technologies. How mem-ories are produced, shared, passed on and given meaning is not stablebut changes over time, as both the social frameworks and the mediaof memory change too. In particular, I suggest, women’s rewriting asthe remembering differently of a culture’s so-called classics in order toproject a feminist future does not work in the same way and to thesame effect as it did thirty-five years ago, when Rich first articulatedthe concept of re-vision. I therefore start by delineating re-vision as afeminist technology of memory: a tool designed to re-member the pastdifferently and thus to affect and transform cultural memory, work-ing to demythologize its central texts so that out of the revised pastnew futures can emerge. Suggesting that in ‘liquid times’, as sociologistZygmunt Bauman refers to our present, such tools are implemented todifferent effect, the second part of the essay turns to Jeanette Winter-son’s The Stone Gods to explore mythical retelling as a technology ofmemory closely related to re-vision yet better adapted to the contem-porary liquid condition. Liquid memories, then, is the name I give tothose fluid retellings that, far from settling or being settled, bring thepast into the present in a movement that remains open to a future inbecoming.


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Feminist re-vision

When Adrienne Rich coined the term ‘re-vision’, she formulated a femi-nist practice of reading and writing that is also a technology of memorythat looks back (in anger) in order to look forward.1 Soon to become ‘theemblem of the Women’s Studies enterprise’ (Lourie, Stanton and Vici-nus, 1987, p. 3), it is a rereading of the ‘old texts’ that is to open the pastto alternative stories, which in their turn would open new possibilitiesin the future. Firmly wedged between past and future, ‘re-vision’ belongsto historical time conceived as a progressive sequence of events. It pred-icates social transformation on a notion of progress – of the present asa moment marked by change resulting from the unfolding of time, outof the past and into the future. And it trusts in the value of historicalknowledge: the belief that one can learn from the past and put suchknowledge to productive use, ‘to imagine a future that serves womenbetter’, as Catharine Stimpson puts it in ‘The Future of Memory’ (1987,p. 263). For as Rich writes: ‘Until we can understand the assumptions inwhich we have been drenched we cannot know ourselves. [. . .] We needto know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we haveever 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, re-vision is a tactic of memory, a strategy to redress and reform wrongfulrepresentations by remembering differently. Writing is a medium ofremembrance and re-vision, a re-writing that inscribes obscured livesinto cultural memory, allowing them equal share in the cultural imag-ination. In this sense, re-vision is a re-presentation that has everythingto do with who and what we remember. In particular, it is invested inwhose version of the story we remember. Not surprisingly, therefore,a great many re-visions are rewritings of the classics as told from theperspective of one of the ‘marginal’, usually female, characters fromthe rewritten text. These retrospective first-person narrations includethose of many wives – Bluebeard’s latest bride in Angela Carter’s ‘TheBloody 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) hasCassandra tell her story and Margaret Atwood (2005) gives a voice toPenelope – as well as ‘minor’ or secondary characters from well-known,mostly nineteenth-century novels, for instance: Jane Fairfax, the ‘sec-ond heroine’ from Jane Austen’s Emma (Aiken, 1990), Mary Reilly, Jekyll


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and Hyde’s maid in Stevenson’s novella (Martin, 1990), and Adèle, JaneEyre’s tutee in Brontë’s novel (Tennant, 2002).

Obviously, then, Rich’s ‘re-vision’ has proved a powerful politicaland ideological tool in the reshaping of cultural memory. Historieshave been retold and canonical texts rewritten; counter-narratives andcounter-memories have proliferated. Today, indeed, it sometimes seemsthere is hardly a story left that has not been turned over and told fromanother perspective, and from The Journal of Mrs Pepys (George, 1998)to novels about Captain Ahab’s wife (Naslund, 1999), Scarlett O’Hara’smulatto half-sister (Randall, 2001), or Proust’s beloved fugitive, Alber-tine (Rose, 2001), feminist rewritings have enriched our repertoire ofstories with accounts of untold ‘lives of the obscure’.3 These re-visionarynarratives have affected and transformed our understanding of the textsthey rewrite, unsettling the cultural meanings attached to them. Tellingwhat Molly Hite terms ‘the other side of the story’ (1989), they havealso changed how we remember our classics and canonical texts to greateffect. For as Rich observes in a subsequent introduction to her famousessay, as a result, ‘[w]hat is changing is the availability of knowledge,of vital texts, the visible effects on women’s lives of seeing, hearingour wordless or negated experience affirmed and pursued further inlanguage’ (1979, p. 34).

Multiplying the perspectives on literary history and our so-called cul-tural heritage,4 feminist re-vision can be seen to rejoin the goals ofwomen’s history as defined by Joan Kelly: ‘to restore women to historyand to restore our history to women’ (1976, p. 809). Feminist art, liter-ature, and scholarship have been defined as ‘a means of redressing theofficial “forgetting” of women’s histories’ (Hirsch and Smith, 2002, p. 4).Their methods, like those of feminist re-vision, have been described asa ‘re-membering’ of women’s histories (Lourie et al., 1987, p. 3), whiletheir purpose has been identified as the undoing of the hegemonic andauthoritative version of History (and his story). Characterized as a formof ‘counter-memory’, women’s studies has in fact always more or lessdirectly engaged issues of cultural memory (cf. Lourie et al., 1987; Hirschand Smith, 2002, p. 3). Contributing to the shift of attention from ques-tions of history to questions of memory, feminism’s critical and artisticpractices establish it as one of the social movements that, in the 1970s,worked towards the democratization of history: the opening up of his-tory to ‘all those forms of memory bound up with minority groups forwhom rehabilitating their past is part and parcel of reaffirming theiridentity’ (Nora, 2002, p. 5).5


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There is, however, yet another sense in which re-vision contributedto challenging the historian’s monopoly. It follows from what SusanSuleiman describes as ‘the contemporary – and contemporary feminist –insight that the stories we tell about reality construe the real, rather thanmerely reflect it. Whence the possibility, or the hope, that through therewriting of old stories and the invention of new forms of languagefor 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 supple-menting of past narratives with untold obscured lives, the issue nowis no longer simply one of representation (and re-presentation), butabout the conditions and possibility of willing new futures into being.Emphasizing the selectivity of all narration – the notion that ‘storiesinevitably 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 vari-ous areas of our brains’ (Dubuc, 2002) – re-vision becomes emblematicof the human activity of (cultural) remembrance. Rather than a matterof mending or correcting history, re-vision is as much about memory asabout the structures, social, psychological and political, of rememberingand forgetting – in short, about the technologies of memory.

A productive feminist concept that has affected the lives of manywomen and men in their relations to stories told and untold, to narra-tive knowledge and to historical time, ‘re-vision’ can thus be said to havechanged not only the ways in which stories, histories and her-storiesare told, but also how the past is conceived. Enabling the productionof the past as so many small and local narratives, it has contributedto the transformation of our relationship to the historical and culturalpast. In the years that saw the development of Rich’s term into a fem-inist imperative, cultural critics and philosophers such as Jean-FrançoisLyotard observed the atomization of History into histories, of grand nar-ratives into petits récits (Lyotard, 1979). Re-vision, I submit, played a vitalrole in this process. Indeed, the imperative to re-vision served as a cata-lyst 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 thedomains of knowledge and cultural production most visibly affected bythe so-called re-visionary imperative. Yet, if it has helped ushering innew uses of the past, has it not also contributed to the loss of a sense ofthe future? Elsewhere, I have argued that feminist re-vision has helped tomake the past one of our prime commodities, sold on the cultural mar-ket 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, whatis ‘re-vision’ still to do, as the contours of a return to grand narrativesseem to draw themselves on the cultural and political horizon?

Consuming memories

As a medium of remembrance that re-plots the past so as to better fit ourideas of ourselves and of our present, ‘re-vision’ has been instrumental inthe transformation from a view of history as destiny to a view of the pastas a storehouse of alternative possibilities serving to enrich the presentbut holding no real purchase on the future. Paradoxically yet crucially,retellings, rewritings and other cover stories contributed to extendingthe logic of consumer culture to the past. As the so-called ‘democratiza-tion of history’ turns into what the French historian Pierre Nora terms‘a new, unpredictable, and capricious use of the past’, the dynamics ofpresent and past are turned around. Today, indeed, and as Nora aptlyremarks, ‘What matters is not what the past imposes on us but whatwe bring to it’ (1996, p. 618). This radical change in the dynamics ofpresent and past can be seen to rely on the notion, so fundamental tofeminist re-vision, that any narrative rests on the suppression of otherways of telling the story and that social change will result from telling‘the other side’. This, of course, implies that no single narrative can dojustice and bring desirable changes to all. To begin with, and as HélèneCixous phrases it, ‘all narratives tell one story in place of another story’(1997, p. 178). The logic of narrative, however, does not only implyselection and therefore the ‘forgetting’ of alternative versions. It alsoobfuscates that, in the words of Jeanette Winterson, ‘inside the storytold is the story that cannot be told’ (2007, p. 127). Whereas there isalways another side to any told story, depending on the time, locationand individual situation, versions will be preferred, selected and cho-sen to match the mood of the day. With the past increasingly being amatter of selection, of picking and choosing, it soon turns ‘ripe for con-sumption 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 ofshopping, an activity shaped in the likeness of shopping’ or ‘is derivedfrom the pragmatics of shopping’ (2000, pp. 73–4), the opening up ofhistory to a plurality of histories and memories in effect becomes a kindof shopping for alternative versions.

Let me unpack this a little. As Nora explains it, the social phe-nomenon of the democratization of history is a historical developmentconcurrent with the temporal one of the so-called ‘acceleration of


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history’, which ‘essentially means that the most continuous or perma-nent feature of the modern world is no longer continuity or permanencebut change. An increasingly rapid change, an accelerated precipitationof 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 ofbooks with the titles Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Life (2005), LiquidFear (2006) and Liquid Times (2007), Bauman describes our present con-dition as characterized by fluidity. Life is liquid, our jobs impermanent,and our relations volatile. In this context, with everything a matter ofchoice, shopping around becomes our prime activity: scanning, survey-ing, 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 myriadpossibilities, so does the past. Increasingly conjured up for its own sake,‘the past’ becomes a matter of choice, retrieved and recovered not for itsexemplary value, but for what Gilles Lipovetsky terms ‘the emotional-memorial value associated with feelings of nostalgia’ (2005, p. 60).6 Thisextension of the logic of shopping to our relationship to the past impliesthat ‘the past’ gets caught in the cycle of newness, subjected to market-ing and consumption, evidently no longer capable of structuring life.7

In the context of this temporal and sociological transformation of lifein ‘liquid times’, re-vision increasingly appears unable to serve to revisitthe past in order to project new futures. In a world characterized by com-mercialism and permanent flux, the retelling of well-known stories fromalternative points of view becomes part of the shopping, of selectingever new versions. As such, it leaves the future for all practical purposes‘inaccessible’, outside the reach of our collective imagination (Gum-brecht, 2004, pp. 120–1). The profound change that has taken placein our relation to the past, then, also has far-reaching consequences forthe way we envision the future. As Nora explains, in the past, ‘it wasthe way in which a society, nation, group or family envisaged its futurethat traditionally determined what it needed to remember of the pastto 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 thefuture. 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 intoa 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 ofshopping for alternative versions, how is one to project a better futureout of it? And if one no longer learns from history – if the model accord-ing to which ‘one learned from history . . . no longer works’ (Huyssen,2003, pp. 1–2) – how does one avoid history repeating itself? Winterson’snovel The Stone Gods (2007) addresses precisely such questions, therebypresenting itself as an eminently suitable locus for the exploration ofwomen’s rewriting in the present. The Stone Gods, indeed, compellinglyposes the question of our responsibility towards the future, showingit to be inscribed in the present rather than to be reached for out ofthe past. Framing the obligation to remember and to retell in termsof oral traditions of storytelling and mythmaking, it suggests mythicalretelling as a technology of memory fitting to the liquid present con-dition. Having established a short history of women’s rewriting and acontext in which it functions (the liquid modernity of consumer mem-ory culture), I therefore now turn to a reading of The Stone Gods in orderto illuminate how the novel articulates the moral imperative of cul-tural remembrance today. Subsequently, I will elaborate on the notionof myth as an open form of retelling more adequate to the present liq-uid condition, responding at once to the need to remember and thenecessity for an engagement in a dialectic of past and future, ideologyand utopia.

In The Stone Gods, indeed, the future is perpetually on the horizon.First represented in the world of Orbus, a seemingly near-future oframpant consumerism, technological advance, total state control andimpending ecological catastrophe, it then returns in the apocalypticpost-atomic world of Wreck City, the surplus world of Tech City thatresembles Orbus but takes place 65 million years later. Both Orbus andWreck City are dystopian worlds satirizing our own. Their resemblancessuggest that, as Karl Marx notoriously had it, ‘History repeats itself’.8

They also suggest that history as progress is a myth, caught in the cycli-cal return of ‘the same old story’. Speaking of the future as one of ourown making, these worlds also represent futures resulting from a failureto learn from the past and an inability to imagine the future as otherthan more of the present. Shown to be the consequence of a culturallack of appreciation for books, literature, history and the imagination,the repeating worlds of The Stone Gods formulate a scathing critique ofour liquid times. They also present a powerful intervention in myth’srelationship to historical time and in the dynamics of the present to theliterary 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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Futures past

Winterson’s novel is ostensibly about ecological disaster resulting fromconsumerism, warfare, our formidable capacity for producing waste, andthe lure of technology as an instrument of domination. It is also, andperhaps foremost, about the stories – indeed, the myths – that sustaincontemporary society. One of these myths is Robinson Crusoe, DanielDefoe’s eighteenth-century novel of a shipwrecked mariner who bydint of his labour survives for twenty-eight years on a desert island,the last four years in the company of Friday, the native who becomeshis servant. Robinson Crusoe is usually read as a myth of civilization asprogress, fuelled by radical individualism, a Protestant work ethic, andthe accumulation of capital. In Robinson Crusoe, the potentialities of theindividual find their realization in the conquest of the environment andin the subjugation of the native subject.

Myth and the retelling of myth play an important role in Winterson’sfiction. Her novels frequently reference and rework culturally centraltexts. In fact, starting with her self-representation as a little girl ‘justbeginning to enjoy a rewrite of Daniel in the lions’ den’ with FuzzyFelt in her autobiographical first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit(1985, pp. 12–13), Winterson’s narrators regularly show a concern withstorytelling that is also and foremost a concern with the retelling of theclassics of Western civilization as a way of inscribing oral traditions ofstorytelling into the writing of literature. Retelling is evidently centralto Weight (2005), a recent novel that not only retells the myth of Atlasand Heracles, but also takes retelling as its theme. Its leitmotif, indeed,is the phrase ‘I want to tell the story again’, and this ‘recurring lan-guage motif’, as Winterson calls it (p. xiv), speaks of narrative desire asdesire for re-narration, for repetition and myth’s return. An inauguralrewriting in Canongate’s series The Myths, Weight explicitly reflects onmyth’s relationship to history and the individual life, countering theview of myth as destiny with myth as multiple telling and choice. Inthis context, retelling becomes the means to the end and an end ontoitself. ‘That’s why I write fiction,’ Winterson explains towards the endof Weight, ‘ – so that I can keep telling the story. [ . . . ] Always a newbeginning, a different end’ (p. 137).

In The Stone Gods, Winterson echoes, rewrites and recreates the verymale and masculinist myth of Robinson Crusoe, a novel that, Ian Wattpointed out half a century ago, ‘seems to fall . . . naturally into placewith . . . the great myths of our civilization’ (1951, p. 95). Allowingthe myth to interact with the narratives of history, The Stone Gods


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both repeats the myth and remythologizes it. The distinction betweendemythologizing and remythologizing, which I derive from LaurenceCoupe (1997), serves to distinguish mythical retelling from feminist re-vision. The difference can be explained as follows: feminist re-vision,operating in the mode of typology, works towards closure; appropriat-ing the story it rewrites for alternative ends, it aims to demythologize it,explaining it away and substituting another story for the one we usedto know.9 In contrast, mythical retelling taps into myth’s radical poten-tial for open-endedness. Traditionally, myth is a particular kind of story:an oral story that presupposes retelling, needing to be told and retoldto achieve the status of myth (Kirk, 1974). Myth works according to theprinciple of repetition with a difference, implying ever further retellings.It can thus be seen to have some kind of built-in reproduction mech-anism that makes retelling and rewriting an inherent part of it. Thisinbuilt narrative dynamic ensures that myth is never fixed but is in per-manent flux, changeable and changing with every telling, which makesit particularly suited to the spirit of the present, ‘liquid’ age, adapted toits fluid character yet retaining a sense of futurity. Mythical retelling isthe fluid encounter of the individually lived life with the told story, theliquid memory inscribing the individual with the collective – or, alter-natively, allowing the collective and cultural memory to be impacted bythe individual.

How, then, does Winterson’s The Stone Gods exemplify women’srewriting as remythologizing? As I have already pointed out, The StoneGods 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 ecolog-ical disasters, all of them caused by a culturally sanctioned masculinedrive to domination, colonization and conquest. These parts are linkedthrough repetition, citation and recurrence, and by centring on a pro-tagonist of the same name (though not always of the same gender). Inthe first part, entitled ‘Planet Blue’, Billie Crusoe is a recalcitrant femalecitizen of Orbus, interested in history, the past and the natural life, liv-ing on a farm, and refusing to subject herself to the high-tech life ofOrbus with its ‘womb-free’ births and ‘genetically Fixed’, forever young-looking people. To get rid of Billie, she is put on the starship that issent off to explore the newly discovered Planet Blue that is to presenthumanity with a second chance and the possibility of beginning again.On this ship, called Resolution in remembrance of the one commanded


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by the British explorer James Cook, Billie falls in love with an arti-ficially intelligent and stunningly beautiful robot named Spike. Theirstory comes to an end as Planet Blue is prematurely destroyed by themiscalculations of the crew’s captain, who meant to kill the dinosaursliving there but instead ruined the entire planet. This, we eventuallylearn, was 65 million years ago.

In the second part, entitled ‘Easter Island’, Billy Crusoe, now male, isshipwrecked on Easter Island in 1774, left behind during Captain Cook’ssecond voyage of discovery in search of the mythical Terra Australis. OnEaster Island, ecological disaster results from trying to appease and wor-ship the island’s Stone Gods. As the last of the trees is felled, leadingto the total destruction of the island and its inhabitants, Billy falls inlove, this time with a marooned Dutchman named Spikkers. The thirdpart takes place ‘Post 3War’ – post-Third World War. In the imaginednear-future of an apocalyptic post-atomic world that follows ‘the bru-tal, stupid, money-soaked, drunken binge of the twenty-first centuryworld’ (p. 164), Billie is now an employee of MORE-Futures (MORE isthe name of the global company that rules post-Third World War) work-ing on the Robot Spike (now only a head). Walking out of the gardensof 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 theyare taken in by Friday, a former economist with the World Bank, whooffers them shelter in his book-lined shack. Eventually, on the disusedLovell telescope, they pick up a signal from the past that turns out to bethe chronicle of the first Billie Crusoe’s arrival on Planet Blue, a planetdescribed as ‘strikingly similar to our own planet, sixty-five million yearsago, with the exception of the dinosaurs, of which we have no recordon Orbus’ (p. 202).

Crucial for Winterson’s treatment of the Robinson Crusoe theme isthat she evokes the myth and the worldview it sustains but does notactually go back to the myth itself to set it correct. Neither lookingback nor entering the old text from a new critical direction, Wintersondoes not simply demythologize Robinson Crusoe to show it to be aboutcolonialism, capitalism and conquest. This is probably because this isreceived knowledge: we all know that already. Instead, she challenges itsplace in contemporary culture – its ways of sustaining the contemporaryworldview, its function as dominant ideology – a challenge to our wayof treating the world she frames as a repetition of the hubris of RobinsonCrusoe and his like. It is, then, on this point that The Stone Gods differssignificantly from the feminist re-visions I evoked earlier, for rather thanworking 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 ofcontemporary culture, the repeating worlds of The Stone Gods also showhistory as teleology and as progress to be itself a myth, caught in a cycleof repetition and return. Instead of buying into the myth of history asleading 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, tochange us,’ as Coupe puts it, ‘to maintain the interaction of myth andhistory’ (1997, p. 189), starting with the interaction of myth with ourpersonal histories.

Myth and memory

Myth, then, is not only about its ‘eternal return’, as Mircea Eliade hadit, its coming back, again and again, whether in the same or in a dif-ferent form. Nor are its literary uses confined to what T. S. Eliot oncecalled ‘the mythical method’, which he defined as ‘simply a way of con-trolling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immensepanorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (1923,p. 483). In contrast to such a use of myth as ‘manipulating a continuousparallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ and thus attributingan archetypal, unchangeable quality to the (fictional) world it literallyinscribes, myth here is taken to be defined by its capacity for change, foradaptation and transformation. Already in Weight, Winterson exploredthe possibilities of mythical retelling by weaving her personal story intothe fabric of the myth. This, of course, is how myths are lived; in manyoral 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 theindividual, but for collective, cultural identity. Nor is it, as a technol-ogy of cultural memory, about repeating worlds and repeated stories.Instead, it is about its being set back in cultural orbit, its being put backin circulation. And in this re-circling and recycling, what matters is itsencounter with the individual subject’s life-story.

This movement of myth’s return as rewriting is explicitly stated inwhat we might call ‘the book within the book’ episode in Winterson’snovel. 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. Theanecdote, which Winterson works into her subsequent version of hernovel, connects the individual lived life to the return of myth. For as sheweaves the story of her own adoption into this line of The Stone Gods,Winterson also brings in the reader as rewriter and reteller. Theorists ofreading have been telling us that picking up the text and reading it is


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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 interventionthat is to prevent the world repeating itself. The writer, however, canonly try and create the conditions for this encounter to happen. As Billieexplains, 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 theCircle Line. A repeating world’ (p. 203).

The metaphor of the myth on the Circle Line, orbiting London’smetropolitan life and waiting to be picked up and actualized in reading,retelling and rewriting, suggests myth is a story that holds the possibil-ity of change. Retelling myth temporarily opens up the narrative to anew future as potentiality while linking up to the past as already there.Thus, mythical retelling enables us to think of change outside of histor-ical teleological time. This is evidently not the same as to say that everynew retelling becomes assimilated to some mythical origin or merelyrepeats it. Instead, what I here propose is not to conceive of myth asoriented towards a past it (re)actualizes, but rather to see it as a particu-lar kind of story and storytelling that, by its very nature and definition,implies change and transformation in and through retelling. As Coupepoints out, ‘All myths presuppose a previous narrative, and in turn formthe model for future narratives. Strictly speaking, the pattern of promiseand fulfilment need never end; no sooner has one narrative promisebeen fulfilled than the fulfilment becomes in turn the promise of furthermyth-making’ (1997, p. 108).

Myth as ‘permanent possibility’, to use Coupe’s expression (1997,p. 100), is in fact repeatedly underscored by Winterson. Her novelWeight, 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 StoneGods, a self-quotation that reads: ‘Everything is imprinted for ever withwhat once was’ (2007, p. 207). There is a difference of emphasis, to besure, between the notion, central to Weight, that the stories are there,‘waiting to be written. Re-written’ (2005, p. xiv) and the notion, centralto 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 thebody of the universe – is conceived in terms of memory and forgetting –of forgetting the lessons of history, yet of remembering that there oncewas 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, movingfrom myth-making as world-making to the retelling of myth as consti-tuting a universe, that is, as constituting an entire system of worlds. Itis, then, in this shift of emphasis and this change of scale, in the self-reflective movement of mythical retelling as the remembering of mythand the forgetting of history that The Stone Gods most powerfully inter-venes in the discussion about what retelling can do in liquid times. Therepeating worlds inside the novel evidently prove myth to be a narrativemode particularly appropriate to the fluid and ever-shifting mixture ofhistory, memory, and fiction that presently make up our various versionsof the past and of the future. At the same time, the universe totalling allthese repeating worlds represents a conceptual system that seems the fic-tional equivalent of that contemporary liquid modernity capable onlyof 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, memorychanges, and with it, the technologies of memory. With the loss of his-torical time as the linear unfolding of time, out of the past and into thefuture, more cyclical or circular modes of understanding time are calledfor. To this end, I proposed an exploration of myth as a viable and pro-ductive successor to women’s rewriting as re-vision. As I suggest, mythi-cal retelling as a re-narration that brings the past into the present whileremaining open to future retellings is better adapted to the liquid mod-ern condition than rewritings that work to demystify and demythol-ogize. Also, it does more justice to the counter-memorial impulse ofwomen’s rewriting as a feminist technology of cultural memory: its opencharacter implies the possibility for retelling, not to substitute one storyfor another, but to hold in potentiality many and varied meanings andmodalities of telling. As Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Stone Gods illus-trates, women’s rewriting as mythical retelling projects the possibility ofnew futures that are not just the repetition of the same old story, butserves to inscribe futurity as perpetually present in potentiality.

Notes

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


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Elaine Hedges notes ‘the anger – healthy, constructive anger – that the writers. . . express’ (Hedges, 1972, p. 2).

2. In her collection of poems The World’s Wife, Carol Ann Duffy gives a voice tomany wives from history and myth (Duffy, 1999).

3. ‘The Lives of the Obscure’ (1938) is the title of an essay by Virginia Woolf. InA Room of One’s Own, Woolf already breaks a lance for rewriting, saying, ‘Itwould be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about the shelvesfor books that were not there, to suggest to the students of those famous col-leges that they should rewrite history, though I own that it often seems alittle queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why should they not add a sup-plement to history, calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name sothat women might figure there without impropriety? For one often catchesa glimpse of them in the lives of the great, whisking away into the back-ground, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear’ (1993,pp. 41–2).

4. For a critical discussion of the term ‘heritage’, see Stuart Hall’s ‘WhoseHeritage? Un-settling “The Heritage”’ (1999/2000).

5. Nora, in fact, speaks of a shift of meaning that he deems dangerous, observ-ing that ‘what we today call “memory” – a form of memory that is itselfa reconstruction – is simply what was called “history” in the past’ (2002,pp. 4–5).

6. This ‘emotional-memorial value’ is, of course, central to the so-called expe-rience economy – an economy that, as its theorists Pine and Gilmore(1999) have argued, is geared towards producing not goods and services, butmemorable experiences.

7. ‘The more we summon up historical memory and dramatize it, the less itstructures the elements of ordinary life,’ Lipovetsky writes (2005, p. 61).

8. Marx’s famous aphorism is in fact a misquotation. The opening sentences of‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ actually reads: ‘Hegel remarkssomewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as itwere, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second asfarce’ (1978, p. 594).

9. 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).

10. 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


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Introduction: Recalling the PastLiedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

Contemporary cultural practices invoke the past in a more or less con-scious attempt to make the past present. The essays in this part of thebook look at objects and performances of cultural recall. As we men-tioned in the main Introduction, artistic representations re-present thepast, making it present again. In this part, then, we focus on ‘the pre-sentification of the past’ (Gumbrecht, 2004, p. 123) as it manifests itselfin, for example, childhood toys, photography or art. The point here isthat objects and performances of cultural memory recall and adopt thepast as part of the present, or as Antze and Lambek put it: ‘Memoryacts in the present to represent the past’ (1996, p. xxiv). According toMieke Bal, these acts of memory raise the question of agency, ‘of theactive involvement of subjects . . . who “do” the remembering’ (1999,p. xv). The essays in this part trace the dynamic involvement of sub-jects in the process of making the past present again in the culturaldomain.

Acts of memory have a function in the construction of identity,whether it is a personal or a more public form of identity. As FrancesGuerin argues in Chapter 9, photographs of a dictator such as Hitlercan function as propaganda in the making, by representing a consciousconstruction of the public image as a weapon in the struggle for politicaldominance. On the other end of the spectrum, childhood toys may helpto retrieve forgotten, often happy, personal memories of individuals andthus assist in the refashioning of their personal autobiographies, as Eliz-abeth Wood describes in Chapter 7. The old toy evokes a past time andmakes it tangible; it is as if we could touch, feel, and smell it once again.Likewise, in Chapter 8 Marta Zarzycka demonstrates that the memoriesof artists such as Frida Kahlo and Alina Szapocznikow become publicacts ‘of commemoration, of testimony, of confession, of accusation’

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(Antze and Lambek, 1996, p. xxv). In creating a dialectical relationshipbetween painful experiences and the representation of those experiencesin paintings or sculptures, the artists are capable of producing continu-ity over discontinuity. The cultural shaping of memory into narrative,visual or theatrical forms thus takes on a performative meaning, whichboth underlines and displaces the fragility of memory.

Whether the acts of memory are personally or collectively moti-vated, the tangible objects or performances make the past present.The weathered toy, the painted scar in a painting, or the photo-graph of Adolf Hitler all create an image of time that carries a certainexperience. Memory is thus shown to be made of lived time. Per-haps the acts, objects, and performances of cultural memory can beunderstood as a defence against the cruel progress of time. Recallingthe past is then a conscious act to ward off the fragility of recollec-tions. In tracing the technologies of memory in different forms ofcultural practices, the following essays testify to the power of memorialagency. The articles in this section show how memory constructs dif-ferent aspects of identity, moving from the more personal to the morepublic level.

In Chapter 7, Elizabeth Wood explores the notion that objects andmaterial culture serve as a medium to access a shared understandingand cultural memory of childhood. The analysis examines the implica-tion that toys have in creating the collective memory of childhood intwentieth-century American culture and the effects of cultural norms inconstructing and reconstructing narrative experiences of childhood bychildren and adults. The cultural memory of childhood is linked to thepresence of objects from childhood, whether in personal collections, orin those in the general public.

In Chapter 8, Marta Zarzycka explores art as ‘memory work’ by delvinginto 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 thetool for retrieving the memory of flesh. She analyses how artworks caneffectively account for traces of remembering pain or trauma, and at thesame time mediate the appropriation of pain for the viewer. Zarzyckashows how art functions as a technology of memory of pain and traumain the work of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and the Polish artistAlina Szapocznikow.

In the final chapter in this section, Frances Guerin focuses on thecontemporary recycling of photographs of Hitler in his ‘oratory poses’,the so-called Rednerposen. She claims that recontextualizations of theserare photographs reveal little about the photographs in their original


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Introduction: Recalling the Past 119

context and everything about our own anxiety over how to rememberthe traumas of the past. The recycling of the photos in magazines, exhi-bitions and films creates new memories for the historical present, butforgets or erases the past through decontextualization. Guerin arguesfor the importance of retaining at least the traces of the original imagesthrough complicating the relationship between past and present, thephotographs and their representation, in a new time for a new audience.


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7The Matter and Meaning ofChildhood through ObjectsElizabeth Wood

Introduction

The National Toy Hall of Fame at the Strong Museum in Rochester,New York boasts 38 toys that have achieved national significance andlongevity and are part of a collective American memory of childhood.The hall of fame includes some of the most well-known toys of the twen-tieth century: Barbie and GI Joe, crayons and Play-Doh, games such ascheckers and Scrabble, Lego, teddy bears, and many more. Toys such asthese, selected for their iconic nature, illustrate the dominant culturalvalues, definitions and expectations of childhood in the United States,particularly in the late twentieth century. These objects are a technologyof memory, serving as a medium to symbolize and express the concept ofchildhood for many adults. The meaning of these artefacts is reinforcedin the wider culture through the constant construction of childhoodthrough individual and collective attitudes, behaviours and memory.Toys may be the most obvious symbols of childhood, but these are notthe only artefacts that mark the meaning or experience of youth.

Everyday objects from childhood can serve as a technology of per-sonal memory. A recent example is that of Christian Boltanski’s FavoriteObjects (2000), an exhibition that includes images of 264 beloved posses-sions of schoolchildren at the Lycée Français in Chicago. Though no onecategory constitutes more than a quarter of the objects displayed, at least35 of these are surprising to the adult eye. These objects include: a lavalamp, licence plate, calculator, ceremonial sword, decorative plate and aglobe. 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 objectsincluding an ice-cream scoop and a tablecloth. Clearly these objects can

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The Matter and Meaning of Childhood through Objects 121

help better define the role of objects as a technology of memory and ameaning of childhood.

In countless exhibitions, books and in the media, favourite objectsfrom childhood stimulate discussion ranging from the political to thephilosophical. When viewed through the lenses of anthropology, soci-ology, history and, of course, material culture, the meaning and contextof these objects – whether toys or other mementoes – express both apersonal and collective memory of childhood. I begin this essay withan exploration of this technology of memory by examining childhoodobjects using examples from my research. Next, I present a broad def-inition of collective memory. Then, I suggest ways in which toys linkthe two ideas in American culture and end with some reflections onthe ways in which the artefacts of childhood reconnect adults throughmemory. Through all of this, the persistence of these objects and arte-facts of childhood help people reinforce their sense of identity andpersonhood, and break through the commonly held detachment ofchildhood.

Biographical objects, identity and personal memory

As Gaston Bachelard notes, objects are a ‘material testament to who weare, where we have been, and perhaps even where we are heading’ (1968,p. 4). Over time, everyday objects can become familiar things that cre-ate emotional and physical responses which invoke past experiences(Hooper-Greenhill, 2000, p. 110). These objects become a mediator ofmemories; they act like a mirror reflecting who we were and who we are.Proust was well aware of this phenomenon. He writes: ‘Objects retainsomething of the eyes which have looked at them . . . a thing which wehave looked at in the past brings back to us, if we see it again, not onlythe eyes with which we looked at it but all the images with which atthe time those eyes filled’ (1927, p. 284). Accordingly, a person can seeand remember their childhood through an artefact – a technology ofmemory.

Artefacts from childhood serve as contributors to the collective mem-ory, but many are also part of a personal narrative. These objects anchorthe storylines of personal narratives and function as representations ofa particular time and space of childhood. The discourse on the socialconstruction of identity and age relationships emphasizes the constitu-tion of the self in context of experience and the social construction ofchildhood. In this sense, identities are influenced by how people telltheir stories and how they interpret their experience through particular


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objects or artefacts. Hoskins calls these ‘biographical objects’: these aremetaphors imbued with self-definition, markers of history, experienceand relationships (Hoskins, 1998, p. 7). Biographical objects focus onour relationships to time, delimit the concrete space that defines anindividual, and demonstrate the user’s everyday experience. Articulat-ing the personal meaning of objects in the biographical sense shapesan understanding of the deep connections between artefact and subjectrather than the broad collective meaning and memories of childhood.

To understand the value of this technology of memory, there mustbe recognition of the biographical objects as contextual and specific tocertain people, places and experiences. The things people keep have asmuch to do with who they are, as does the influence of any book, toy orperson they might encounter in their childhoods (Fleming, 1996, p. 7).The stories and the objects of childhood represent an account of life’sexperience. Such objects stand in for important messages and interac-tions and can keep the memory of strong and powerful experiences. Asmaterial objects, they represent the intangible concepts and ideas thatcannot be explained except through language and experience. For thisreason, the objects help keep those experiences alive in the mind.

In research documenting the meaning of objects, the theme of iden-tity consistently appears (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981;Whitmore, 2001; Wood, 2005). The object becomes a mediator, aswell as a tangible metaphor, of experience and of memory (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000, p. 115). In particular, toys and other objects of child-hood become elements of socialization and, in part, create a sense of self,or a sense of destiny (Sutton-Smith, 1986, p. 214). Sutton-Smith definesthese idiosyncratic artefacts as toys of agency. A personal memory, morethan a collective memory, develops in relationship to and through iden-tification 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 accountthe extrinsic and intrinsic qualities of the artefacts, I believe there isanother meaning of the object that illuminates the connection betweenthe object and the subject’s sense of being in the world. This meaningof the object is made through the interaction of context, experienceand the relationships between the object and the subject (Wood, 2005,p. 36). The following brief examples help to illustrate the personal mean-ing applied to the object that is unique and situational and one thatevokes a deep sense of identity. These abstract references are what pro-vide us with access to the meaning and memory of childhood. The


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objects mediate the temporal, spatial and ritualized experiences of child-hood and demonstrate some of the ways in which objects function as atechnology of memory. Each person’s story is a rich and complex def-inition of identity and life’s experiences. These examples describe eachsubject’s recognition of the object in preserving or containing some partof their identity.1

Anne’s tablecloth contains the signatures of family members fromfour generations. Each member has signed the tablecloth during the hol-iday meal each year since the 1950s, and later it would be embroideredby one of the women in the family. To Anne, the tablecloth serves asa metaphor for making her place in the world, both literally and figu-ratively, by being present at the holiday table and by signing her nameon the cloth. The memory of the holiday table and the act of signingthe cloth brings Anne into the real, solid world. The permanence ofher 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 wasknowing that I wouldn’t be able to sign the cloth. That it wouldn’tbe just that moment that I wouldn’t be there, but forever I wouldn’thave been there.

Mariam shared with me a novelty chewing-gum holder given to herby 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, toMariam 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, butstill, 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 housefor many years. She recognizes that this particular painting helps herconnect her life together. As she told me:

I think almost everything that I keep is about memory and continu-ity, it’s not letting go of your past. Or not wanting to. Whether it’spart of your memory, it’s saved there and you can see it, it fills inthose gaps.


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Laura Jean presented a number of childhood objects including a tat-tered old book. As she explained the meaning of the book, there wasa clear indication that each item represented some aspect of her per-sonal life rather than of the broader world. Perhaps trying to rationalizeits importance, she felt it should have a significant provenance, in herwords a ‘history’. As she explained:

I brought that book with me because it also represents a lot of whoI am, and who I have become . . . as an adult I think that this thingshould matter, because it would be nice to say that this [book] had ahistory 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. Hecontinues to play these games with a group of men he has known forover twenty-five years:

I have more concrete memories about times that I spent with myfriends doing role-playing games than I do of much of the rest ofmy childhood . . . This game has endowed me with unique traits thatI enjoy, and every time I use this twenty-sided die, it reminds meof that.

In each of these examples, the object functions as a mediator of thesubject’s identity and memory of childhood. The objects richly describea 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 themconnect to the memory of childhood on a regular basis.

A second prevalent theme marking objects as technologies of mem-ory is the connection to time (Whitmore, 2001, p. 59; Wood, 2005,pp. 67–75). Identity can only be created retrospectively, and savedobjects represent an aspect of time which links to the subject’s memory(Freeman, 1993, p. 9). Subjects in the research consistently recognizedthemselves in a timeless relationship between the object, their child-hood and their own lifetimes. Equally important is the recognition thatthey cannot determine when the object came into their lives, rather ‘ithas always been there’. They define this as a sense of continuity or con-sistency of their identity, as well as of their relationship to the objects.Many of my subjects commented on the fluidity of time when reflectingon the object from their childhood. Again, some examples.


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

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 backpretty much completely into my mother’s kitchen. The counter isright here, the stove is over there. I’m at the table. I’m in it. I’m inthe kitchen. I can smell things cooking, and I can see my mother. It’svery immediate.

Katy, a young woman in her mid-twenties, talks about a baby blanketmade for her by a grandmother. The blanket shows signs of wear andmany repairs. Much of the original fabric is faded, but still intact, show-ing a patchwork of gingham that echoes the farmlands where she grewup. Katy sees the blanket as a map of her life:

I really hated it when people would say I had to get rid of [myblanket] because I was getting older. I didn’t understand why get-ting older meant you had to give up something you loved. [. . .] But Ikind of like the idea that you can hold on to something and it mightchange 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 relation-ship between the subject and object is perceived as unchanging. Theeffects of time in these situations are not clock time, but lived timeand a lived relationship to the object. While the world around themchanges, the subject’s relationship with the object does not. This helpsto maintain a sense of identity.

The artefacts of childhood create a technology of memory that linksidentity and time. As a biographical object, the meaning relates to per-sonal relationships, development of identity, and lived experiences. Inshort, the object’s context and the experiences with the objects make allthe difference. The biographical object clearly demonstrates a personalmemory, and, I argue, a meaning deeply connected to individual ratherthan shared identity. Toys, like other artefacts, as material culture, carryassigned meanings. But these meanings can shift according to personal,social or cultural contexts. Often toys, especially those inducted into theNational Toy Hall of Fame, represent a broader meaning of childhoodrather than a personalized view. The collective memory, then, is onethat is drawn out of a social and cultural context of childhood.


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Collective memory of childhood

Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton suggest that artefacts act assocializers and organizers of people (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 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 medi-ate memories of childhood past, present and future. The objects ofchildhood are entwined in the social fabric, but we cannot as childrenarticulate their meaning or experiences in the language of adults. Theobjects from childhood help to construct the collective memory andmeaning of childhood.

Artefacts of childhood – namely toys, but perhaps the numerouseveryday objects discussed earlier – become a medium to communallyunderstand and reconstruct the meaning of childhood. At any time,these artefacts can evoke a meaning of childhood even if the objectis not among those with a personal connection. These are the type ofobjects shown in the Toy Hall of Fame. In this manner, the artefactscould be defined as ‘universal’, continually viewed as young, fresh ornew (Hoskins, 1998, p. 8). These are the things one would expect to seewhen talking about childhood objects; these are the artefacts that helpmost people remember childhood.

Beginning in the early twentieth century the concept of play and theuse of toys became solely the domain of children (Cross, 1997, p. 14). Asa result, the collective understanding of childhood reflects only a certainage range marked by extensive play with toys. The collective memory ofchildhood in American culture is one that reinforces the ideals of inno-cence and imagination, and something left behind as a person growsolder. In this manner, toys are the domain of childhood; childhoodends once the toys as cast aside (Hall, 1909, ch. 5). Paradoxically, whileAmericans believe that they cannot return to their childhood or youth,they also fear the idea of growing old (Chudacoff, 1989, p. 6). The col-lective memory of childhood in American culture is one that reinforcesthe generalized ideals of innocence and imagination (the ideals whichenable an entry into the Toy Hall of Fame), not necessarily the distinctexperiences and relationships that help us develop or create our identity.

The notion that once a person leaves childhood, he or she can neverreturn was fuelled in the early part of the twentieth century by theemerging definition of adolescence as a distinctly different phase inhuman growth (see Hall, 1909). This definition included ceasing to usetoys and other objects already collectively understood as part of child-hood. Added to this were the influences of industry and technology, and


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

Childhood’s toylandWonderful world of joylandWouldn’t it be fineIf we could stay there forever more. . .

Ooh, toyland, toylandWonderful girl and boylandOnce you leave its bordersYou can never return again

(MacDonagh and Herbert, 1903)

This idea of a childhood left behind is reinforced so often in popularculture that the symbolic importance of objects from childhood blendsseamlessly into the fabric of our lives. Without a strong biographicalconnection to the objects, most of the personal memory is lost. Thecollective memory simply places these artefacts into a variety of broadnarratives to the extent that people usually see past any personal con-nections to childhood. A notable example of this is the movie CitizenKane, summed up in one word, ‘Rosebud’. The dramatic tension of thefilm centres on the reporters discovering the meaning of Rosebud. Theviewer is in on the secret; they see and experience the meaning of a sled,called Rosebud, a biographical object of Charles Foster Kane. Because thesled, as sled, is part of a collective memory of childhood, it is dismissedfrom having significant meaning. By the film’s end, the reporters aredesperately seeking anything to make sense of Kane’s last words. Theclosing camera shot includes the following description:

[Thompson] picks up his overcoat – it has been resting on a littlesled – the little sled young Charles Foster Kane hit Thatcher withat the opening of the picture. Camera doesn’t close in on this. It justregisters the sled as the newspaper people, picking up their clothes andequipment, move out of the great hall (Mankiewicz and Welles, 1941).

Though right under their noses, the sled, as part of the collective mem-ory of childhood, is dismissed in its entirety. It was not expected that


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a sled could have such significance to a grown man of Kane’s stature.The collective memory does not always evoke personal meaning, andyet this is a critical component that helps create the collective meaning.

There are reasons to attend to these childhood objects as a tech-nology of collective and personal memory. The collective memory ofobjects seeks a continuity and sameness of our childhoods in a way thatwill link us to others (James, 1993, p. 141). This affect leads towardsvarying degrees of nostalgia toward childhood. The culture holds upcollective artefacts as a way to mediate and define childhood, perhapsto trigger personal memories. The collective memory often construesthese objects as artefacts of historical significance (Fleming, 1996, p. 38).Personal memory generated through biographical objects brings to theforeground representations of particular events through time, as wellas personal experience and circumstances and the feelings associatedwith those events (Bruner, 2004). What remains is an effort to makesense of the connections between the personal and collective memoryin 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 child-hood ultimately led to the social constructions of age in America (Cahanet al., 1993, p. 195). Although toys are not the single most definingobjects of American childhood, their social and cultural meanings arecompletely intermixed with the concept of childhood. This provides aplace to begin to understand the relationship between these objects andthe collective memory of childhood and how they serve as a technologyof memory.

The early part of the twentieth century marked a change in soci-etal views of the life of children, their growth and development thattranslated into new methods of teaching, parenting and indulgences(Chudacoff, 1989, p. 48). This paralleled the mass production and devel-opment of toys and parenting guides. Equally important to this shiftwere the changing perceptions of childrearing in which parents were,and are still, encouraged to provide toys that promote educational andskill development. Furthermore, this cultural construction of both childand toy, later amplified by the use of television to market products, rein-forced a concept of children as fundamentally different (Cross, 1997,p. 149). Adults increasingly lost their understanding of the way theirchildren play; toys and other objects designated for a child audiencecreated a fantasy world no longer accessible to adults.


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As described above, adults tend to have specific memories of theirown childhood, yet often place them in opposition to the collectiveidea of childhood. Baxter suggests ‘adults use toys as a means of defin-ing age, gender, and social class as a mechanism for delegating tasks,behaviours, and attitudes’ (2005, p. 42). As adults reinforced the con-struction of childhood, this built up a mythology of childhood as afictionalized, and certainly idealized, narrative conception of that periodof life. In part, this is because childhood itself is a referential frameworkseen only as the past. The experiences of adults mixed with the collec-tive objects of childhood in American culture, like those in the Toy Hallof Fame, represent middle-class idealism and the enduring promise ofinnocent and happy childhood, perhaps another twist on the ‘AmericanDream’ (Steinberg and Kincheloe, 1997, p. 16). A result of this is that amajority of the broadly defined artefacts of childhood represent a some-what limited view of the experiences and meaning of the experience ofchildhood.

The definitions of personal memory and collective memory, as dis-cussed above, share a general construction of the relationship of time,space and self. Where the collective memory and related objects of mate-rial culture suggest a generalized, mythologized sense of childhood, thebiographical memory and its objects, drawn from the same culturalmilieu, share an intimate, personal definition of our lives. The elementof time, childhood as the past, creates a felt distance between adultand child which further places childhood within this mythology (James,1993, p. 81). Adults seek to identify themselves in relation to the broaderchildhood 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 primarilythrough the technology of toys, is created outside of our own experi-ences. In short, the collective memory is simply a ‘toy’, and in particular,one that is decentralized and fragmented in our identity. It is merely abrushstroke to suggest the memory. Yet, when personalized and inter-preted from individual experience, the object becomes more than justa toy. Embedded within the object are distinctive memories and expe-riences with relationship to others across time. With this notion of toyas a technology of memory, there must be ways to enable the personalmemory to exist in concert with the collective definitions of childhood.


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The challenge to this phenomenon is that without a personal con-nection, the memories are never quite right. Through objects of thecollective memory, the childhood referenced is in the indefinite, as ‘achildhood’, or in the most delusional sense, ‘The Ideal Childhood’, onerich with imagination, innocence and a variety of toys. When looking atan object in a museum, the viewer should be stimulated to recall theirown version of the toy in addition to the broader collective meaning.The viewer should be able to make a distinction that makes the objectpersonal, something from ‘my childhood’. Because the collective mean-ing of childhood is in the past, it makes it even more difficult to accesspersonal memories and meaning, particularly without objects to medi-ate the experiences. Winnicott’s (1971) theory of the transitional objectis an apt way to conceive of these artefacts as a way of both holding onto childhood while at the same time moving on. At the personal level,these objects can mediate the unknown future and preserve the knownpast (Gibson, 2004, p. 288).

At the collective level, one must consider whether the same type ofmediation is possible. Childhood is culturally shaped and defined, andever-changing. In the twentieth-century United States, a childhood issupposed to be full of happiness, innocence, freedom, creativity andimagination. Yet the themes of individual childhood refer more to iden-tity development, a sense of security, and specific relationships. It is nowonder that the collective memory is in conflict with personal memory.Individuals strive to recall personal memories in the spirit of the collec-tive memory. But it does not always work. Every object from childhoodis 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 spe-cial meaning and purpose. The objects are irreplaceable; they cannot besubstituted.

Conclusion

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


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of childhood. As the artefacts in personal collections cease to becomeimportant, they are generally discarded. It is only when reconnectingwith the artefacts that people often wish to re-engage in their own per-sonal narrative. The resulting effect is a memory created collectivelythat provides only a generalized and somewhat idealized conception ofchildhood. When the artefacts can help make connections to personalnarrative, the memory can be truly felt. This means a direct and personalconnection to the artefact is necessary.

Childhood artefacts in the collective memory are time-bound gate-ways to another part of adult lives, whereas biographical objects andpersonal memory provides continual access to experiences and mean-ing. Collectively, adults use toys as markers of age distinction and todifferentiate the roles and relationships of children. The mythology ofchildhood and of toys in particular leads to the development of an inac-cessible time, one filled with expectations of freedom, imagination andinnocence. Yet, when looking closely at personal collections of objectsfrom childhood, there is a distinctly different story. A personal memoryof childhood is aided by biographical objects that evoke the relation-ships and experiences that shape identity. This means that a direct andpersonal connection to the artefact is essential.

As a footnote to the opening example, the Toy Hall of Fame had a newentry in 2005. It is, quite wonderfully, an object of both personal andcollective memory of childhood. This recent inductee is the cardboardbox. Though it seems terribly bland next to Barbie, the cardboard boxseems to evoke many more personal memories for me than does Barbie.This is a perfect example of the lingering thread of personal experiencesborne out in the simplest of things we can all collectively remember aspart 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 ofmale involvement is not uncommon; Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Haltonsuggest that ‘the selves of men and women represent different sets of inten-tions or habits of consciousness: They pay attention to different things in thesame 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 havesaved objects from childhood, may be based on different reasons from thoseof women. It is not unreasonable to conclude that while men do keep thingsfrom their childhood, they are not initially preoccupied with the meaning orreflective nature of the objects when given the opportunity to talk about them.


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8The Force of Recalling:Pain in Visual ArtsMarta Zarzycka

Painful iconographies

Pain is overly present in the visual culture at the end of the twentiethcentury and the beginning of the twenty-first. Bombarded with imagesof pain, acutely aware of the traumas going on in every corner of theglobe as brought to us through the media, we are no longer able to thinkof pain as something private that emerges from within. Due to the ever-increasing medialization of images of war and trauma, pain can no moresimply proceed from a body of an individual without ever engaging withanother body. The private and the public aspects of pain, together withthe processes of narrating and witnessing, have reached hyper-visibilityin the forms of paintings, photographs, television and the Internet.

In the light of contemporary discussions of recovered memories andthe limits of representing catastrophes of humanity, one might face var-ious questions and uncertainties: are we actually able to revoke the painof others, rather than that of only one person – the self? Shall we, afterSusan Sontag, argue that, ‘No “we” should be taken for granted whenthe subject is looking at other people’s pain’ (2003, p. 7)? And, if there isno ‘we’ when confronted with suffering and agony, should we talk aboutsharing and transmitting the memory of pain at all? Despite those hes-itations, critics such as Hal Foster (1996) and Roger Luckhurst (2003)claim that a veritable trauma culture seems to be thriving in the artworld, seducing academics just as it seduces the public.1 Popular culturedeals with trauma and pain as much as contemporary art does. Singu-larity and intimacy merge with collective forms of representation andremembrance. Seltzer (1997) argues that the private and public registerscollapse in the case of pain and trauma, resulting in a pathological pub-lic sphere, that is, prime-time dramas, hospital series, Tarantino-style

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The Force of Recalling: Pain in Visual Arts 133

films, and the recent emergence of the gorn genre (horror and porn inone). The ‘traffic in pain’ signifies the economic exploitation of a visualexchange where the weak, the sick and the Third World are objects ofscrutiny and scopophilic practices.2 In ‘wound culture’, as Seltzer callsit (1997, p. 3), the very notion of sociality and connectedness, exhibi-tion and witnessing, is operative through the body that is torn open andon display for viewers. The (memory of the) damaged body of an indi-vidual becomes a public spectacle, satisfying the audience’s attractionto atrocity.

The memory of pain

Although contemporary Western culture allows for representations ofpain mostly within a medical context, associating pain with doctors andsurgeries, or media coverage of war and natural disasters, art is anotherprivileged discourse where pain can manifest itself. While theorists oftrauma and memory have so far paid relatively little attention to visualarts (Bennett, 2005), a substantial critical literature on trauma, memoryand representation has nevertheless increasingly involved art theory.Although pain and trauma have been traditionally declared beyond thescope of language and as not conforming to the codes of representation(Bal, 1999; Felman and Laub, 1992; Van Alphen, 1997), art may nev-ertheless engender ‘new languages of trauma that proceed from livedexperience’ (Bennett, 2005, p. 24). The iconography of pain, particu-larly embellished by heroism, martyrdom, sacrifice and courage, hasa long tradition in art history, from the godly revenge on Laocoönto the Crucifixion and the maternal mourning in the Pietà. Visual artsthroughout the centuries aimed at transforming pain from a privatesensation into a public spectacle. Fleshly experience has been turnedinto cultural and theological heritage. The visual icons such as devo-tional imagery were the most effective means of storing and retrievingmemories, 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 videosby Bill Viola (Nantes Triptych, 1992; The Passions, 2000) to the works ofAnish Kapoor (Marsyas, 2002), pain has long been penetrating art. Fol-lowing the Holocaust, artists such as Christian Boltanski, Anselm Kieferand Eva Hesse have been dealing with both the individual and the col-lective character of trauma and pain and with the question of howtheir (un)representationality can be stretched. Also, art engaging with


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postcolonial literature and theory in the 1980s formed a vivid accountof past traumas and painful experiences (Bennett and Kennedy, 2003).

Art testifies to the fact that pain and memories do not produce ahomogenous group of bodies who share that pain (Ahmed, 2004). Inpresenting two artworks by two different artists, Frida Kahlo and AlinaSzapocznikow, I hope to reveal the particularity of painful experienceand counter the universalization, and therefore also the commodifi-cation, of suffering. The two artworks I engage with, The Two Fridasby Kahlo and Alina’s Funeral by Szapocznikow, can effectively accountfor traces of remembering pain. Although the two artists come fromdifferent backgrounds and different cultures, they both illustrate howremembering pain can be negotiated by the artist herself as well as theviewer. The location, aetiology, and prognosis of each artwork are quitedifferent, but they both constitute a space where the recalling of pain isperformed.

My aim is to unsettle the memory of trauma conceptualized as afloating, disembodied condition, ready to be appropriated by scholarsand the wider public (Bennett, 2005) and argue that the memory sys-tem can go ‘deeper’ than cultural remembrance alone. Art presentingpainful bodies strongly engages the process of remembering. The origi-nal point of pain is transformed through the circulation of images intoremembered pain. If memory is a process (Bal, 1999), nothing could bea stronger documentation of that process than an artefact. If memoryis about encounters, visual arts are the space of that encounter. Mem-ory 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 andmemory – terms that have been stretched out to the point of becom-ing almost ungraspable – moves our understanding beyond what thefields of medicine, clinical psychology, literary studies and anthropol-ogy can offer us. Pain is described as an aspect of clinical conditions,sexual practices, metaphysical rituals, power relations and political actsof repression, but rarely is the reality of the painful body as immediateas in the encounter with an artwork.

The concept of pain, with its fluidity and intersectionality, formsan especially useful critical category. Race, ethnicity, gender, religion,sexuality, class, disability and other markers of difference do not actindependently of one another in the experience of pain. Therefore,the artworks of Kahlo and Szapocznikow should be put in the contextof women’s art, where the presence of pain, suffering and trauma isoverwhelming. Regardless of the medium or overt context, artworks bywomen artists have usually been presented as a gendered embodiment


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of the artist in various degrees of exposure, producing meanings for abodily, gendered experience. Pain and self-violence have been playedout differently by many contemporary women artists, including GinaPane, Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta and Orlan. Artists such as NanGoldin, Cindy Sherman, Tracey Emin, Doris Salcedo and Tracey Moffatalso engage with the problem of representing painful experiences. Show-ing the experience of pain fundamentally owned by someone, their artat the same time questions a singular subjective account. While pain isstill constructed in popular discourse as overly present but unspeakable(Scarry, 1985), those visualizations may provide usable words and sen-tences that can work against the silence of pain imposed on the sufferingsubject.

Frida Kahlo (1907–54) has been one of the most widely known artiststo convey suffering and pain. Her art shows how the direct experienceof the body in pain is always shaped and modified by specific humancultures, religions and myths. She represented the different stages ofher painful body throughout her life – pain’s intertwining with medicaldiscourse, its institutionalization, its tendency to turn into a hagiogra-phy, its (lack of) sexuality, its loneliness, its violence, and its penetrativeforce. She demonstrated that the self in pain undergoes many differen-tiated stages of being and states of transition. At the same time, thisself is easily conceptualized as victimized and marginal. In catching and‘freezing’ her body in different stages of destruction and recovery, Kahloengaged in recalling and re-assembling her identity through the processof representation. The memory of her body persists throughout her artis-tic production, forming a testimony of her lifelong suffering, enabling aviewer to remember the artist through different stages of her visual diary.

The concept of memory is crucial to the work of Polish artist AlinaSzapocznikow (1926–73), a Holocaust survivor who died of cancer whiledesperately trying to preserve traces of her fading body. Although thepresentation of Szapocznikow’s art has often been selective and frag-mentary, complying with the cultural silence surrounding cancer in the1970s, she was the first female artist in postwar Poland to representher own malfunctioning body. The concept of pain moving betweenand across bodies, the balancing act between the historicity and collec-tiveness of trauma, and the intimacy and silencing work of cancer arecentral to my analysis.

I will now trace the constructions of pain in and across internaland external spaces of both the body and the artwork as an object andconnect those constructions to the process of self-memorialization andwitnessing.


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Memorizing the self

Most of the two hundred paintings Frida Kahlo produced during herlife were self-portraits. Dramatizing the central subject – herself – shecarefully chose her settings and directed the stories her pictures told.The constant repetition of her own face might be a way for the artist ofmemorizing herself. Kahlo began to paint lying in bed, using a mirrorto examine her own face and body. Kahlo’s portraits are the record ofthe physical and mental changes she underwent. They accompany along series of physical traumas – starting with polio, which Kahlo gotat the age of six; a serious accident at the age of eighteen; and finallythe amputation of her leg at the age of forty-six and her death shortlyafterwards. The accident had a lifelong effect on Kahlo’s body. She wason a bus that collided with a tramcar and was pierced by a metal rod thatbroke her spine in three places, fractured her pelvis, and dislocated andcrushed 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 andcorrect her spine. The number of operations on her vertebrae and foot –thirty-two in total – is terrifying. Many medical authorities questionedtheir necessity even during her life (Lindauer, 1999). Those operationsmarked stages in Kahlo’s biography. They intertwined with good andbad periods in her marriage, provided reasons for travels, and collidedwith her love affairs. The process of self-representing has served as aneffective mode of tracing back the artist’s identity and re-constitutingthe subject.

The Two Fridas (1939, oil on canvas 173.5cm×173cm, Museo de ArteModerno, Mexico City) shows two women, both representing Kahlo, sit-ting next to one another on adjacent chairs and holding hands againststormy skies (Figure 8.1). Facing the viewer, both figures are linkedthrough a system of veins, with their hearts exposed. One of them isdressed in a white Victorian dress, another in a dress typical of theTehuana region of Mexico.3 The ‘Victorian’ Frida controls the bloodflow with surgical clamps; the drops of blood form a decorative patternon her skirt. ‘Tehuana’ Frida holds a portrait of Diego Rivera, Kahlo’sbeloved husband. Painted during Kahlo’s divorce from Rivera, this dou-ble self-portrait has been commonly read as the portrait of an unlovedFrida (in Victorian dress), and the one Rivera still loves (in Tehuanadress, which he favoured). It has been noted that the face of Frida inTehuana dress is darker than the other, therefore referring to Kahlo’sdual heritage: a German father and a Mexican mother (Herrera, 1989).


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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 isnot broken, it was concluded that Kahlo’s Mexican roots were the mainsource of her strength.

However, even Kahlo herself suggested explications of this work thatwere wider than solely her divorce. The use of the heart, rather thansymbolizing unrequited love, has its roots in indigenous iconography.Both faces, in fact, are different shades of dark, representing a socialcaste once esteemed as the true Mexican. Frida dressed in a Europeanway would be criolla, a Mexican of Spanish descent, whereas the otherFrida would be mestiza, of mixed European and Indian heritage (Lin-dauer, 1999). The Mexican/European split can be thus problematizedand therefore cannot serve as the single valid interpretation.

The complex problem of the double self-portrait illustrated by The TwoFridas, one of Kahlo’s most famous paintings, implies the construction of


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the self in a process of remembering. Eric Cassell, a practising internistwho 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 theillness. In becoming ill and burdened with pain, the self often finds itselfreduced to malfunctioning biological tissue. Kahlo may have performedthis repetition and replication of her own body to reinforce the memoryof the self in the constant balancing act between illness and recovery. Itcan also be assumed that the multiplication of her own body serves asan outward projection of herself.

In psychoanalysis, projection is understood to be a defence mecha-nism that allows the subject to come to terms with certain impulsesby attributing them to someone else. One might argue that Kahlo cap-tured the process of projecting symptoms, complaints and heartachesonto the body of another, while at the same time keeping them all.Kahlo performs here both the role of the suffering subjects and its wit-ness, the giving and the receiving of painful testimony. Acknowledgingthe painful body of another (in what might be a reciprocal process) issimultaneously the process of recalling one’s own pain. The witnessingof the self’s own fading creates the place from where such experiencecan be spoken. It is through these processes that this double self-portraitbecame a tool to fight against the limitation of silence imposed by painand disability.

Another important factor referring to the concept of memory isKahlo’s use of space and its connection to the process of recalling. Theartist presented how pain made her reorganize not only her relationto the past and its re-enactment, but also her lived spatiality, its loca-tion and positioning. Remembrance and commemoration often takethe 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 frag-mented stories (Smelik, 2003). Those lieux de mémoire (Nora, 1996) mightnot only be monuments – they can also be our bodies. We remem-ber ourselves in certain places, just as we remember certain places inourselves. Elkins (1999) uses the concept of proprioception, the body’sinternal sense of itself, one of its fundamental senses, situating the bodyin a space and a given space within the body. To a certain extent, wecan see that sense of a body as a memory. Simultaneously, Elkins pointsout that proprioception is often disturbed in the presence of acute pain.The structure of the The Two Fridas, where the space in which the bodyexists 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 twohearts, one may feel twice as much heartache.

Space and time have always been crucial correlates of any context ofcorporeality. As Grosz explains, space is not simply an empty recepta-cle, independent of what it contains; ‘rather, the ways in which spaceis perceived and represented depend on the kinds of objects positioned“within” it, and more particularly, the kinds of relation the subject hasto those objects’ (Grosz, 1995, p. 92). Space is transformed according tothe subject’s affective and instrumental relations with it. In the nor-mal course of events, a subject is able to open up the space aroundit 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 becomesrestricted and unpredictable; to reach across it or to move from onepoint to another costs much more time and effort. The self-mapping ofthe body changes; the place that hurts often becomes more pronouncedthan other places on the body. The forces consolidating the self in spaceand in time crumble (Braidotti, 2006). The space shrinks to a restrictedspot; the range of possible actions and developments in space becomesseverely constricted.

In reading Kahlo’s art, a reinvestigation of the spatio-temporal loca-tion of the painful body is necessary. The spatial positioning of themultiplied subject in The Two Fridas is centred on the constant super-imposition of the inside and outside of the body. Through the processof externalizing her bleeding and malfunctioning organs, Kahlo stressedpain’s immediacy and the power of its impact. Borrowing motives fromWestern textbooks of obstetrics, Kahlo literally showed externalized,fragmented, detached organs, tied by a net of veins. She referred tomedical procedures, based on ‘processes of removal (incision, cutting,removing and reduction) or addition (inlaying, stitching and injec-tion)’ (Grosz, 1995, p. 34), which altogether alter the body. The relationbetween the inside and the outside has a long tradition in research onpain; behavioural and clinical studies point to the differences betweencutaneous pain, involving skin damage which is easy to locate, anddeep pain, which often is diffuse and difficult to locate (Melzack andWall, 2003).

The interchange of bodily notions of inside and outside is equallypresent in Kahlo’s other paintings. The externalizing mechanism is, forexample, visible in Henry Ford Hospital (1932, oil on metal 30.5cm ×38cm, Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico City). The experience ofpain here is lifted away from the body into its external attributes, such


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as fragments of bone and a foetus. But Kahlo also internalized pain bytransferring objects of the external world into the body. In paintingslike The Broken Column (1944, oil on canvas 40cm × 30.5cm, MuseoDolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico City), Kahlo’s body is cut open, reveal-ing objects inside – in this case, an Ionic column – transmitting outwardssensory responses to the dysfunctional backbone of the artist. By inter-nalizing pain, Kahlo presented it as inscribed not only on, but alsointo the body. This could be read as an attempt at a healing process:the technique of visualizing the source of pain (and then extractingit) is nowadays a common practice among cancer patients and has itssources in shamanism and its rituals of ‘pulling’ the pain out of thebody (Stacey, 1997).

The memory of oneself is in Kahlo’s case a reconstitution of oneself inspace, negotiating between the singularity of the memories of pain andtheir witnessing. Nigro and Neisser (1983) contrast two ways of remem-bering personal experiences: to ‘see’ the event from one’s perspectiveas in normal perception, or to ‘see’ oneself engaged in the event as anobserver would. Several factors contribute to the determination of per-spective – for example, the memories becoming older and more faded –but Nigro and Neisser also report that many subjects claim they canchange to another perspective at will. That phenomenon of ‘snappingout of oneself’ can clearly be seen in Kahlo’s painting. Memory is linkedhere to the conception of separate selves, where each memory is objec-tified and bracketed, but nevertheless connected. That split between selfand 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 asa changing product of specific periods and particular locations (Morris,1991), but as an abstract, time-unbound entity. Being in pain is a situa-tion that often excludes direct memory of the past and expectations ofthe future. My point in this section is instead to present pain as a time-oriented biochemical process, the networking of nerve pathways andbodily reflexes, and as a subjective experience formed by specific minds,senses and cultures. In the art of Alina Szapocznikow in particular thenotion of time is almost palpable.

The temporal structure of pain in the works of Szapocznikow maybe interconnected with her biography. Like Kahlo, Alina Szapocznikowhad 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 dis-ease, which deprived her of any prospects of maternity; and finally, shebecame a cancer patient. Szapocznikow was thus confronted with suffer-ing, pain and the degradation of her body at an age usually reserved forblooming and thriving. She had learned the limits of her body alreadyas a young girl, witnessing the destruction of bodies everywhere aroundher. Later, in the face of terminal cancer, the artist tried to preserve her-self in her art in first unchanged and gradually dramatically distortedshape and form. The body in Szapocznikow’s art has the character of anobject retrieved, exhumed and memorized.

Szapocznikow’s work is about trauma without explicitly declaringitself 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 intimatephotographs to the self-evident images of Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas.Her art puts her viewers in touch with an incredible volume of pain – herHolocaust experience, tuberculosis and cancer – and makes them reflecton the violence exercised on Szapocznikow’s body by aggressive medi-cal procedures, the Nazis, and her own failing immune system. Treatingpain as a force that fundamentally changes one’s organism and identityrather than removing one from the social sphere, her sculptures presentan alternative to cultural and testimonial accounts of remembering.

Alina’s Funeral (1970, polyester, cotton, photographs, wood, artist’sclothes, 135cm×210cm×50cm, National Museum, Kraków) was madeafter the artist had an operation (Figure 8.2). The sources are silent aboutthe specifics of the surgery, but it was most probably a mastectomy. Theartwork is made of shapeless, tumour-like sculptures wrapped in ban-dages soaked in polyester with clothes and photographs melted into it. Ithas two zones that are placed against a rectangular black base. The upperzone consists of rhythmically connected tumours with photographs offriends, family and the artist’s dog. The lower zone represents threetumours containing jeans, a shirt and a photograph of the artist, form-ing one big cluster which could symbolize the dead body. There is someconfusion in the distinction between mourners and the mourned. Pho-tographs in the upper zone could represent people who came to thefuneral, looking down at the dead body, or they could assume a rolesimilar to angels often placed at tombstones, testifying to the loss andabsence of the subject.

The process of mourning, explicit in this artwork, is always the processof 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


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Figure 8.2 Alina’s Funeral, Alina Szapocznikow (1970)


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motive, possibly made to process her own impending death, and tobecome available to a viewer as a body to be mourned. Ars moriendi,the theatre-like quality of funerals, is characterized by the artwork’s dec-orative character performing the role of vanitas. The configuration ofthe tumours situates the spectator in the role of the mourner, in thepresent. But the gap between the body of the mourner and the mournedis here breached by playing with sets of oppositions. Each oppositionis 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 out-side. The semi-transparent mass around the objects makes them appearlarger or smaller than they really are, reflecting them differently as theviewer moves. Also, as years pass, the polyurethane becomes increas-ingly opaque, making the faces on photographs less and less visible forthe next generations of viewers.

The negotiations of space in the body in crisis are different here thanin the paintings of Frida Kahlo, demanding from the viewer a differentkind of presence and engagement. The volatility of the represented bodyis experienced viscerally. The spectator’s sense of the weight, depth, spa-tiality and interior and exterior of the object and of his/her own bodyis disturbed and troubled. Alina’s Funeral is driven by a desire to create atestimony that moves beyond the two-dimensional surface of a canvas.One could also argue that through the process of dying, increasing pas-sivity and resistance to stimuli, the body in Alina’s Funeral becomes morepresent in space, more present to the touch. The notion of heaviness,gravity, thickness are reflected by the bold, massive blocks of sculpturethat take up space rather than create it. There is no possible outline ofthe 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 thesubject portrayed.

The concept of time is intrinsic to Szapocznikow’s work; it requirestime for the viewer to move and walk around it. It is the passing qualityof the body that ‘makes’ her sculptures. The concept of the temporalityof the body is here modified by its illness. Szapocznikow’s body had lostits integrity long before Alina’s Funeral was made, during her experiencesin camps and hospitals. The body is preserved and mummified, but atthe same time, marked by the organic vitality of tumours. It remindsone of the major role that time plays in cancer: the tempo of growth,the moment of detection, the periodical character of chemical treat-ment. The temporality of cancer does not manifest itself here in clock


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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, becausepolyurethane combined with air grows and hardens rapidly. The tempoof work therefore had to be fast, grasping the moment before the chancewas lost. That repeated form of a tumour in Szapocznikow’s art evokesthe process of cancer as a disease of uncontrolled cell growth, but alsoas the dynamic repetition of genetic reproduction. While form, regu-larity, logic, control and a unity of design and function are admirablein biological systems, in cancer all of these virtues are lost to randomlyrepetitive 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 individuallife (Ahmed, 2004, p. 202). As Cassell (1991) has argued, suffering canfrequently be relieved by causing the sufferers to ground themselves inthe absolute present. Szapocznikow’s sculpture can in this respect beinterpreted as freezing a moment of the life of the body and abstract-ing 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 prog-noses immediately form a line of events. She calls these narratives,pervasive in popular imagery of cancer cultures, teratologies: the talesof monsters and marvels, the heroic fight and hope for victory. In herartwork, Szapocznikow questions that linearity by revealing the distur-bances of temporality and self-perception that result from cancer. Thebody in cancer becomes connected to a kind of not yet, which is opposedto a linear temporality as seen from a historical perspective (Duden,1997). The fear of the painful future suppresses a rhythmic, coherentnarrative.

In the absence of this coherent narrative, what is the viewer to makeof these images of trauma, pain and loss which do not easily map them-selves onto memories? What Kear writes in describing photographs ofatrocities applies here as well: ‘The time of viewing the image moves itbackwards simultaneously, constructing a narrative exegesis which posi-tions the body [in the fabric of the image] as both agent and referent’(Kear, 2005, p. 109). The key to understanding our reception mightbe the concept of sense memory. Charlotte Delbo (1995), poet andHolocaust survivor, differentiates between ordinary memory, which isconnected to thinking processes and words, positioned within an intel-ligible narrative framework, and sense memory, which is connected tothe processes of trauma and its affective impact, without a narrativeframework, inscribed in the body and realized through sensory recall.


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Sense memory operates through the body to produce a kind of knowl-edge in the body of the witness. Delbo compares this memory to the skinof a snake that cannot be shed. The connection between memory andskin, registering the physical imprint of the event, is not new: Deleuze(in Bennett and Kennedy, 2003) employed the metaphor of a membraneto describe a memory made up from different levels of the past that canbe inhabited in different times and in different spaces by different sub-jects. Relating memory to trauma, Ahmed calls a ‘good scar’ the scar thatallows healing, ‘but the covering always exposes the injury, reminding usof how it shapes the body’ (Ahmed, 2004, pp. 201–2; my italics).

In Szapocznikow’s art, issuing from her scarred, painful body, butalso from the longer and broader transpersonal experience of war, sensememory is ever-present, existing beyond a personal or individual expe-rience. Alina’s Funeral is perhaps the artwork where a living subject, fullof memories, turns into an object for others to memorize. Memory hashere the role in making the most fundamental sense of self possible.Without memory, both the artist and the viewer would be perpetuallyconfined to an eternal present. The memories of others are impressed onthe painful subject, making it a work in progress, in which embodiment,memories, interconnectedness, communication and constant exchangeplay a crucial role (Braidotti, 2002). The sculpture is the chronicle ofthe artist’s disappearing body, producing knowledge about the passingquality of every body, and preserving the fragility of remembrance.

Affective memories

Pain has to be felt by somebody. In isolation, pain ‘intends’ nothing; itspassivity and lack of relatedness make it “‘suffered” rather than willedor directed’ (Scarry, 1985, p. 164). Pain, although one of the most undo-mesticated of human experiences, may construct an empathic agencythat connects subjects: ‘In the register of the imaginary the pain of theother not only asks for a home in language but also seeks a home inthe body’ (Das, 1997, p. 88). The bodies in the artworks I have discussedare bodies in which the experience and remembrance of pain have beendomesticated.

My choice to trace pain in artistic production and organize it alongthe axes of temporality and spatiality comes from the ongoing debateabout whether the images of suffering in popular media can corruptthe ability to be compassionate (Moeller, 1999). Pain and torment areoften represented as a spectacle, demanding from the viewer a positionof either a disengaged spectator or a coward, implying that any other


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positioning is impossible (Sontag, 2003). Sontag postulated that the onlypeople with the right to look at images of suffering are those who areable to alleviate it or who could learn from it, the rest being simplyvoyeurs, whether conscious or not. Learning from pain would be notseeing pain as a result of a mistake, an accident or a crime, but reflectingon the complex mapping of suffering, the privileged location of not-suffering and the connections between them. Those connections wouldgo beyond extending sympathy to war victims, for example, but ratherinduce a reflection on one’s own positioning in the world where wartakes place. Viewers of art and consumers of war images in mass mediaboth have to learn to live with this positioning in an ethical way thatis not dismissive or romantic. That might result in forgetting. Rather,one should consider the possibility of re-enacting the past and redeem-ing what has been understated or overstated. The attempt to representand interpret images of pain demands not only an ethics, but also anaesthetics of looking.

Sontag’s view on watching painful images takes on a new mean-ing today: the pictures of the writer, taken by her long-time partnerand photographer Annie Leibovitz in the months before Sontag diedand immediately after her death in 2004, caused much controversywhen they were published by The Guardian in October 2006 and in thebook A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005, an autobiographical compilationof photographs by Leibovitz. Instead of images memorizing Sontag’scourage and academic distancing from her own suffering, one sees Son-tag’s perplexing physical transformation, fear, resignation and sadnessin the face of cancer. That could be one of the reasons why many havedenounced these pictures as too revealing and tasteless. Pictures of Son-tag as she was laid out in the mortuary gurney with the bruises from anIV still vivid on her arms raise further questions about the ownershipand appropriation of memories.

The problem of positioning oneself when facing the pain of othersis 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. Althoughan intimate experience, pain involves an ethics of acknowledgementand sharing. It is never simply ‘subjective,’ but rather lived and negoti-ated at an intersection of bodies. Elkins describes how pain signifies themode of awareness of one’s body in the very first moment of receptionof artwork:

Most of the time, in looking at visual art I am concerned with simplethings like the feeling of a turn of the head, or an eye that moves


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

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

Conclusion

The temporality and spatiality of the painful experience make pain intoa force that is not only contained, but also contagious and acknowl-edged rather than denied. Pain is described by Rilke as ‘abusing oursenses and their “dictionary”’ (quoted in Elkins, 1999, p. 1). As one triesto emerge from the momentum of the artwork back into one’s life, thecontrast is such that the resumption of one’s life appears to be ‘a hope-lessly inadequate response to what we have just seen’ (Berger, 1980,p. 38). That ‘abusing’ of senses, which could serve as one of the goalsart takes upon itself, creates new chances for the subject in pain and forthe subject witnessing pain. All too often disengaged from the material-ity of the body, pain becomes confusion; it is always difficult to theorizeclearly about confusion, let alone recall it in an effective way. Art canhelp convey the memory of pain through the embodiment, materialityand structure of an artwork. In this encounter, the spectator’s under-standing 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, butalso as an actualization, of the process of memorizing pain and thetransmission of that memory. They do not allude to already existingor archived memories, but are highly constitutive elements of artists’identities. In addressing artistic practice, my methodological assump-tion was that we can derive a certain form of knowledge about painfrom images; knowledge that is not entirely reducible to cognitive tra-ditions. It is rather the concept of affect that allowed me to structurethe reception of Alina’s Funeral and The Two Fridas. Affect, a real-timesomatic experience (Deleuze, 1989), addresses the spectator’s own bod-ily memory, and is therefore able ‘to touch the viewer who feels rather


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than simply sees the event, drawn into the image through a process of‘affect contagion’ (Bennett, 2005, p. 36). Arguing that artworks repre-senting painful bodies can offer a space where affectivity passes fromone body to another, my aim was to show how memory manifests itselfin the process. Bennett (2005) argues that affect in art does not operateat the level of simply arousing sympathy for predefined characters, butrather comprises a force of impact going beyond an individual’s ideasof oneself and beyond one’s ideas on morality. In visual arts, affectcan be seen as a fundamental component of an interaction betweenartist, artwork and viewer. Moving beyond predictable responses to aparticular narrative scenario, the affect goes further in its power toimmerse the artist, the art object and the viewer in a circuit of sen-sations that ruptures the individual modes of remembrance and self-reflexivity.

In using the affectivity of pain, the artworks of Kahlo and Szapoc-znikow perform the act of remembering. Through that act, pain can betransformed from a self-contained and un-relational occurrence into aself-modifying one. An encounter with an artwork may often be themoment where we, as embodied viewers, realize that the cultural arte-fact we are looking at is a materialized act of memory performed by thebody that had at some point experienced pain.

But memories, like artworks, require care. They are archives of feel-ings, dealing with loss, helplessness, fear and pain, functioning torecover 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 lacerationsin 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 ofthe 1990s, where encounters with extremities such as birth, death and insanitywere usually suppressed. The remembering of past traumas and recalling themhas been increasingly present in the cultural discourse since the 1990s, rangingfrom a great number of war victims’ testimonies, through prime-time hospitalshows such as E.R., to what Luckhurst calls pathography – a genre of individualmemoirs of illness and trauma. Luckhurst mentions Oscar Moore’s columnPWA (Person with Aids) in The Guardian and John Diamond’s cancer columnsin the The Times of London in 1997.

2. I take this formulation from the title of the exhibition of press photographyBeautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, held at the WilliamsCollege 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’swork. It became so integral to Kahlo that sometimes she painted it devoid of itsowner, without a body inside (see My Dress Hangs There, 1933, oil and collageon hardboard, 46cm × 50cm, private collection).


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9Photographs that Forget:Contemporary Recyclings of theHitler-Hoffmann RednerposenFrances Guerin

In 1926 and 1927, Adolf Hitler and his personal photographer, HeinrichHoffmann, took a series of photographs in which Hitler posed beforea mirror while listening to recorded versions of his own speeches. Thesubject and his photographer were engaged in the search for an image ofthe master orator. Unlike the proliferation of images of Hitler that werepropagated in the 1930s and 1940s, the Rednerposen, or orator poses,were not made with publication in mind. These are images of a Führer inthe making; they are engaged in a search for an image not yet found. Notonly does the photographic aesthetic reveal a stylistic experimentationthat at times exposes the image to be in process, but the subject – AdolfHitler, the dictator of the German people – is also a work in progress.

The Rednerposen are a form of propaganda that seeks to articulateHitler as the modern, socially integrated leader who is also godlike,beyond human accountability. The photographs declare him to be anordinary man with an affinity with his people and, simultaneously,a symbol of unity, strength and power. In these images, Hitler’s pos-ture and facial expression, and compositional elements such as thechiaroscuro lighting, present Hitler as transcendent. At the same time,his conservative black suit and the nondescript darkened studio, forexample, articulate him as an Everyman, no different from the Germanpeople to whom he delivers his message. The Rednerposen are amongthose images that search for what Ian Kershaw, expounding upon anotion conceived by Max Weber, throughout his work refers to as thecharismatic leader (Kershaw, 1987, pp. 8–9). And, of course, they are alsoimages that contribute to the manipulation of power in the service ofeventual evil. Above all, however, the Rednerposen are fascinating stud-ies 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.

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Photographs that Forget: Recyclings of the Hitler-Hoffmann Oratory Poses 151

Interpretation of these images could follow a number of other pos-sible routes. For example, I argue elsewhere that they are portraits ofa modern dictator that were to have an influence on representationsof political leaders in the twentieth century (Guerin, forthcoming). Ihave also interpreted the kineticism of Hitler’s performance and thechiaroscuro lighting for their connections to the Modernist discoursesthat surround the photographs and, by extension, the images’ explo-ration of the parameters of Modernist photography.1 Alternatively,interpretation could focus on the challenge to the photographic author-ship of the well-known photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. This line ofinquiry would expose the struggle between Hitler and Hoffmann fordominance over the creation of Hitler’s public face. In his interpreta-tion of the Rednerposen photographs, Lutz Koepnick reads the ‘somaticexpressiveness’ of Hitler’s body as reflecting the modern emphasis onspeed and mobility, a performance strategy for visualizing power and, inturn, mobilizing the nation. Koepnick’s approach via the performanceand masquerade of Hitler’s body as a political polemic to undo bourgeoisstratifications is, like mine, validated through recourse to historical con-textualization. The same incompleteness, the same status as an imagein the making, not only enables these and other complementary argu-ments and approaches to the Rednerposen, but it also opens them to thepossibility of appropriations that have met a number of different, oftenconflicting, critical purposes.2

In this essay, I discuss the recycling of the Rednerposen in ongoingattempts to construct and reconstruct the memory and meaning of thepresent moment and its own historical traumas. In that sense, the pho-tographs are a particular instance of a technology of memory. I willfocus on two exemplary instances of recycling: the six Rednerposen pho-tographs that accompanied an article in The New Yorker magazine on the‘Hitler explanation industry’ (Rosenbaum, 1995), and the inclusion of ahandful of the Rednerposen in Underexposed, a travelling exhibition oncensorship inspired by the non-profit organisation Index on Censorship(2001). Underexposed opened at the Proud Galleries in London, and wasaccompanied by a publication that subsequently had an American andfurther British editions (Jacobson, 2002). My examination of these twoinstances of recycling reveals the distance that we, particularly thoseof us outside of Germany, now maintain from the Nazi past. Thus, therecycled images open onto a situation in which, contrary to conven-tional formulations of cultural memory, it is not the fatal impingementof the past onto the present that spawns urgent investigation. Rather,danger and destruction arise from a visible ‘forgetting’ of the Nazi pastin re-presentations absorbed by an obsession with their own cultural


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

Recycling

The Rednerposen have been freely, even unselfconsciously recycled.Indeed, they were first brought to public attention through their recy-cling as part of a comprehensive exhibition of all the Hitler-Hoffmannphotos at the Munich Stadtmuseum, curated by Rudolf Herz in 1994(Herz, 1994). They have reappeared in other exhibitions such as Underex-posed (2001), magazines such as The New Yorker (1995), Harper’s Magazine(2002), and in the 2004 film The Goebbels Experiment, directed byLutz Hachmeister. The Rednerposen can also be found on a number ofwebsites, including www.histoire-image.org, www.unitedscripters.com,and www.seedsofdoubt.com. Given their relative obscurity as archivalimages, it is not surprising that most viewers only know the Rednerposenin their reprinted form. For to access and consider such photographs intheir archival context is the privilege of a few specialist researchers.

In keeping with artistic and commercial practices of recycled archivalimages, the Rednerposen are always recontextualized in their new narra-tives (Bruzzi, 2000). While the rearticulation of meaning is inevitable,when the subject matter is as charged as a portrait of Adolf Hitler, theconsequences can be disturbing. There are undeniably profound ethicaldilemmas that appear in the recontextualisation, dilemmas that oftenstem from the papering over of historical and political detail. To besure, the discrepancies and complexities of the relationship between theimage in its archival and recycled contexts are important. However, themore interesting, indeed the more immediate question that I address inthis article is this: How, behind the concern for the presence of the pastin contemporary cultural memory, do the recontextualizations exposean indifference to the profound horror of Hitler and the historical nar-ratives written under his direction? Ultimately, this indifference leads toa type of ‘forgetting’ that is the defining trait of these technologies ofmemory.

The majority of recycled Rednerposen were produced in the last twentyyears. Why is this? Are we now able to integrate the nightmare orches-trated by Hitler into our cultural fabric, when before it was too close forcomfort? On occasion, the recyclings weave Hitler’s image into our own


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contemporary narratives, not only of the past, but narratives that focuson the political issues on our doorsteps, as opposed to those that were ofconcern in the late 1920s. Do the contemporary appropriations, as theyclaim, underline an increased awareness of responsibility for the Holo-caust – especially outside Germany, in the English-speaking world? Thatis, does the very appearance of the images signal our willingness to con-front their existence and the history that lies behind them? By exten-sion, is this gesture of confrontation a measure of our ability to distanceourselves from this moment? Or do the recyclings bring us closer to thepast? Are they an indication of our continued fascination with historicalevents and people in which we see, but cannot recognize, our own reflec-tions? What indeed do they tell us about our relationship to the past?

Before turning to these larger issues, I will examine how attempts havebeen made to integrate the images into the present. In this capacity, I amprompted to ask myriad questions: What is the nature of the process ofmemorializing enabled by the images? Do they ensure the viewer is alertto the historical significance of the image? Does the redeployment teachus new things about German history? Where is evil in these images? Dowe 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 his-tory they tell? Does the new context encourage a fascination with Hitlerin the twenty-first-century audience? If so, what are the contours of thisfascination? And, most urgently, how does this weigh upon our pictureof the crimes that lie behind these images, that is, the Nazi Holocaust?

In the early 1980s, Saul Friedländer asked these and similar questionsof the recycling of history in fiction films and writings that exhibiteda so-called fascination with the magic and myth of Hitler and Nazism(Friedländer, 1984). Friedländer’s questions about the aesthetic specta-cles are open-ended and intended to spawn ongoing discussion. Evenbefore Friedländer articulated the questions, critics grappled with themin a less focused way in relation to fictional narratives such as Syber-berg’s Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (1978). Questions concerning thereappropriation of Nazi iconography and Hitler imagery also began tobe asked thirty years ago. The topic became particularly charged inthe 1970s with Anselm Kiefer’s provocative and controversial perfor-mance of the Sieg Heil salute in paintings and photographs such asthe Heroische Sinnbilder (1969–1993). A leading critic and theorist ofthese re-presentations of German history, Andreas Huyssen, contin-ued the debate when he questioned whether satire and irony – twomodes of discourse also found in recyclings of the Rednerposen – areappropriate ways to deal with such a horrendous moment in history(Huyssen, 1989).


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Underlying all of these arguments is a tension between the terror ofGerman history and the intense longing to move through it, and ulti-mately beyond it. Today, historians acknowledge that the memory ofthe Holocaust is culture-specific, and its presence in the German imagi-nation understandably holds a different place from that in its British orAmerican counterparts (Kansteiner, 2006). Nevertheless, irrespective ofthe specificities of cultural context, the questions asked by Friedländermaintain their urgency: even if the tension between past and presentis forgotten in the overwhelming urge to understand the present, it isalive subterraneously as long as the rare archival images in their recycleddocumentary form are in existence.

To be sure, the two instances of recycling of the Rednerposen discussedhere are of a different genre to the fictional re-presentations of Hitlerand Nazi iconography in 1970s Germany. Neither in their publicationin Underexposed, nor in The New Yorker, are the images redeployed inthe name of art, of historical mourning, or memorial. Similarly, theymake no claims to a concern with German history or its representa-tion. These are popular representations – albeit highbrow – that displaya certain curiosity as to what might in another context be understoodas dangerous, manipulative images. Similarly, a distinction between thephotographic realism of the Rednerposen photographs and fictional per-formances of these same images must also be made. Performances suchas Kiefer’s or Charlie Chaplin’s representation of Hitler in The Great Dic-tator (1940) are fictional re-presentations. Thus, they make no claim tohistorical veracity and articulate their status as interpretations. By con-trast, the redeployment of the Rednerposen is premised on their historicaltruth, and this claim to authenticity contributes to the fatality of theirdetachment from the historical past. They are offered as unmanipulatedre-presentations of the past and yet, in their particularity as technologiesof memory, they pay no heed to the violence of this past. Even more dis-turbingly, they forget the significance these images once carried in theinterests of creating memories of their own, memories of the historicalpresent.

If Friedländer’s questions and the fictional re-presentation of Naziimagery motivate my approach to the recycled Rednerposen, the solu-tions are sought through reflection on a different form of culturalmemory: recycled historical texts and images of the Holocaust. TheRednerposen and other photographs fabricated in the Hoffmann studioin Schellingstrasse have only recently resurfaced from the archive. Inthe wake of their discovery, these and other images have been rede-ployed, often uncritically, in narratives that are removed from the


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original historical moment. Images such as the Rednerposen are oftenre-presented with little or no attribution or explanation. While criticshave been examining the recycling of archival Holocaust images andits ethical ramifications for some time now, the reuse of other imagesfrom Second World War Germany have been less studied.3 Even thoughimages of Hitler engage with a different set of issues and problems fromthe depictions of Holocaust victims, to understand them within thediscursive framework provided by images of victims makes salient anawareness 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, JamesYoung discusses fictional and factual representations of the evil and theviolence of the Holocaust. He claims that the question is never whetheror not these texts and images should be published or republished, butalways whether and how we blindly participate in the exploitation andperpetration of power by publishing and looking at them. He main-tains that the concern of historians of Holocaust representation is neverthe accuracy or truth of the representation and its correspondence toevents, but what the consequences are of interpretation, the ‘pluralityof meanings . . . these texts generate and the actions that issue from thesemeanings outside of the texts’ (Young, 1988, p. 4). Questions in this veinmay have become well rehearsed in the analysis of Holocaust imagery;however, they have not yet been asked of images such as the Rednerposenand, in particular, images taken by and of the Nazi perpetrator. Despitethis silence, over the past ten years there has been an increase in theoccurrence of representations of Hitler — especially, use of his image toaddress issues of a contemporary rather than historical order. It is time, Icontend, to examine the significance of these representations4 and, par-ticularly, to examine examples that abnegate their responsibility to thepast and its tainting of the historical present. For in these creations ofcultural memory of the present, we are becoming amnesiac towards theunresolved past and its ever-present threat to puncture the fragile veneerof the present. The consequences of this pave the way for the repetitionof past traumatic historical events in the present moment.

Underexposed

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


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or manipulated’ (Jacobson, 2002, p. 22). The photographs in the exhi-bition and the accompanying publication were, in short, never meantto be seen. At least, in the section to which the Rednerposen belong, theimages were, for political reasons, censored prior to circulation. Thus,the Hitler-Hoffmann Rednerposen find their way into the exhibition onthe basis of Hitler’s order to have the negatives destroyed. While any ofthe dozen speech poses could have been included in the exhibition, thecurators chose and cropped five of the most reproduced poses: in one,we see Hitler in profile pose with his fists tightly clenched, the right oneraised and pushing toward the power of victory, his gaze intently fixedbeyond the left-hand side of the frame, his gestures exaggerated by theharsh frontal lighting which is reflected in the full-length mirror behindhim. The gestures and features of both Hitler and the photographs areemphasized to differing degrees in the five Rednerposen.

Also significant is the context provided by the other images in theexhibition and publication. Hitler’s image keeps company with, forexample, the bloody, distorted face of Allan Lee Davis as he is exe-cuted by electric chair in Florida in 1999; a gleeful Nicolae Ceausescuentertaining at home carving an oversized animal while his visitorsawait their feast; an Iraqi soldier burnt to a cinder behind the wheelon the road to Basra in 1991; frenzied mourners ripping the cloth fromAyatollah Khomeini’s corpse at his funeral in Tehran on 4 June 1989;cannibalism in Stalinist Russia; summary executions of supposed insti-gators of pro-democracy demonstrations in China in 1989; and theremnants of massacres by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

Instinctively, what is most disturbing about the inclusion of the Red-nerposen in this narrative is the disrespect shown toward the image. Notonly is there a decontextualization of Hitler’s image, but perhaps moredisconcertingly, the victims of war, genocide and political brutality thatare either represented or called to memory through the depiction ofdevastating historical events and despotic leaders are reduced to journal-istic curiosities when juxtaposed with images as apparently unrelated asHoffmann’s portraits. As propaganda in the making, the Rednerposen rep-resent a conscious construction of the image as a weapon in the strugglefor political dominance. Hoffmann’s image is a contrived studio portraitthat deliberately fabricates a historical narrative. Thus, the Rednerposenbelong to a different genre of image than those that surround themin Underexposed. They do not document the heinous results of a vio-lent massacre or the bloodied remains of an inhumane State slaughter.There is nothing ghastly or gruesome about Hitler practising his speechposes, 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 journalisticimages that clandestinely capture traumatic public events.

In their new context, the Rednerposen become iconic of one ofthe many political deceptions, genocides, wars and public traumas ofthe twentieth century. This narrative disturbs because it makes theunbearable comprehensible, makes it accessible as one among manytwentieth-century political traumas. The image becomes easy, catego-rized as something it is not. It is ersatz for the mass destruction of aHolocaust too intolerable to behold. The opposite could also be true.The ramifications are equally disturbing: perhaps when we look at theRednerposen 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 theresultant tendency is to forget the mass public trauma that lies behindthe poses in this narrative.

In short, the place of the Rednerposen in Underexposed puts the manu-facture of Hitler’s image on a continuum with Salvador Allende’s defenceof his government against the military coup in Chile, the inhumanityof capital punishment in the United States, the decadence of the Roma-nian dictatorship, the terror of being a victim of the secrets and lies ofthe Western Allies in wars in Korea, Europe and the Middle East. Thisvein of presentation is only a short step away from histories that sum-mon Hitler’s image as an abbreviated articulation of the extremity andcorruption of specific events, whether it be the Holocaust or other eventsgeographically and historically closer to home.5 In both cases – the Red-nerposen as metonym, the Rednerposen as agent in a narrative trajectorywholly external to its own logic – all historical specificity is lost to thedrama created through juxtaposition with the other images, through thenarrative of fabrication into which the Rednerposen are placed.

The caption accompanying the images in the 2001 Underexposed exhi-bition and publication tells us that the Rednerposen series was neverpublished, that Hitler ordered Hoffman [sic] to destroy the negativesimmediately, on the basis of the fact that they ‘explode the myth ofHitler’s natural hypnotic, demagogic skills’ (Jacobson, 2002, p. 22). Thisfact, Hitler’s ‘censorship’ of the images, legitimates their inclusion inthe exhibition and publication. Due to the absence of bibliographicalinformation, it is unclear where the curators have acquired this infor-mation. To be sure, even if the information were correct, the contextgiven the Rednerposen in Underexposed – housed in a narrative of imagesthat were indeed banned – functions to efface their devastating signifi-cance for the Nazi past in the interests of exploring contemporary issuesfor which they are convenient examples. There is substantial evidence


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to confirm that the Rednerposen were circulated in postcard and placardform in the 1920s. They were also included in the Illustrierte Beobachter,the illustrated press arm of the Nazi Party, overseen by Hoffmann. Thefirst one appeared on the title page of the issue of the paper of 28 Jan-uary 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 publicappearance at a rally in Berlin’] (Illustrierter Beobachter, 1928b). Simi-larly, Herz’s Munich exhibition included examples of the Rednersposenpublished with a script along the bottom that were distributed as post-cards in 1926–7 (Herz, 1994, pp. 110–11). The script was always takenfrom 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, andsnarling with resolve towards the left side of the frame, is accompaniedby the text: ‘If sixty million people had only one will, to be fanaticallynational, the weapons would swell out in the fist. On the day that Ger-many breaks with Marxism, it breaks in truth for eternity its chains’(p. 110). In addition, Herz includes a 1937 text from the film critic Bern-hard 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 propagandamessage is realized. Even if Hitler and Hoffmann were unsure of theeffect of these images on the public, there was enough confidence tohave them published once the text was added.

Herz does confirm that Hitler ordered that the Rednerposen be with-drawn from circulation shortly after their publication. Nevertheless,according to Herz, Hoffmann was as eager to mine the commercial valueof photographs of Hitler as he was to photograph his subject at closerange. Thus, perhaps in spite of an insistence on Hitler’s part to havethem censored, Hoffmann ensured that printed copies did circulate, ifonly in a limited edition and for the briefest of times. Irrespective of thestory behind their publication, there is ample evidence to confirm theywere published at the time of their production. Underexposed not onlynarrativizes the images in a way that denies their potential to memori-alize, interrogate and critique Hitler’s representation and, subsequently,his crimes. In its zeal to slot the images into a particular historical narra-tive, the exhibition and publication also misrepresent the Rednerposen.Most significantly, the images’ historical significance is manipulatedto accord with contemporary concerns about censorship. The Redner-posen are thus redeployed in the name of creating cultural memories


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for the present, with all traces of their historical currency convenientlyevaded.

The story of Hitler’s search for an image, the transformation of polit-ical leadership within modernity, and the manipulation of Modernisttechniques to sway an entire nation are all forsaken for matters that arecloser to home. In exchange for a focus on the strategies that seduceda nation to unite and obliterate itself, in the narrative of Underexposed,the Rednerposen are simply another set of images that tell a truth abouttwentieth-century history where lies had previously been propagatedin the guise of political wisdom. In Underexposed, the Rednerposen areused to represent government suppression of atrocity in the interests ofmanipulating public opinion. The images are re-located in a narrativeengaged in a search for the truth about history and the veracity of theimages that see that history. To be sure, while this might have formedone aspect of the intentions behind the Rednerposen in the late 1920s, itis, strictly speaking, a late twentieth-century obsession.

In addition to their focus on images that were never published, theexhibition and accompanying publication were also concerned withwhat the image did not see, what images in the press conceal from pub-lic eyes. By inversion, this is, nevertheless, still a search for the truth ofimages and their relationship to history. Photos such as the one show-ing Jews being transported from Hamburg to a detention camp in 1947,on a train complete with wire-protected windows and watched over byBritish soldiers, because they have been denied entry into Palestine, dis-play a discrepancy between what the image shows and what we know ofhistory (Jacobson, 2002, pp. 230–1). The truth lies in what we think wesee, the distance from, and the absence and simultaneous revelation ofhistory and historical truth. We think we see German soldiers overseeingthe deportation of Jews to concentration camps: this is the image we areaccustomed to seeing, and therefore, it might be the mistaken truth ofwhat we see in the image. In the same vein, an image of Hitler practisinghis speeches before a mirror is at odds with what we know of his repu-tation as a spontaneous orator. Thus, when we look at the Rednerposenin their new context of Underexposed and, particularly, side by side withimages designed to deceive, we begin to wonder whether we are lookingat a spontaneous moment of oratorial excitement or in fact a contrivedstudio portrait. The questions regarding what we are actually looking atbegin to abound. These relations between the image and history, issuesof truth, documentation, the legitimacy of a memory dependent on animage wont to deceive, are all contemporary concerns, and not those ofthe 1920s.


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According to their presentation in Underexposed, therefore, the Red-nerposen discourse on the power of the image to tell the truth andsimultaneously 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 thecreation of a face for a modern leader. Neither is it significant that theimages in their archival context emphasize different aspects of history –most prominently, the changing face of leadership and its representa-tion in the early twentieth century. Their status as documents of richcultural and historical memory gives way to a fiction, a memory createdto authenticate a present that lies outside the image (Struk, 2004).

It could be argued that the meanings derived from the appropria-tion and recontextualization of the Rednerposen are inevitable. To besure, even an interpretation that attempts to locate the works in theirarchival context imposes continuities of a different kind. Neverthe-less, what matters here, what is pointed up by this reappropriation ofarchival images, and what we have a responsibility to take away fromthe interpretation given by Underexposed, is that in the search for whatreally happened, for the truth of history in photographs of the past, ourexisting knowledge and assumptions will inevitably overwhelm whatis actually pictured. By extension, we have a responsibility to developa self-consciousness of our viewing position. And as critics of cultureand memory, we need to remain aware that we are dealing with imagesthat, however curious and apparently benign, must nevertheless beapproached with deference to what lies behind them, to the secrets ofthe historical and archival context.

Underexposed reminds us that we live in an era when the media arenot to be trusted, when we must, first and foremost, be suspicious if weare to be responsible citizens. This is the thrust of the exhibition andits publication. And we must extrapolate from what we have discoveredthrough this interpretation. Although our suspicion toward the massmedia is healthy and to be applauded, we cannot afford to repeat the de-contextualization and forget the imperative to look at what is actually inthe image, rather than what we want to see. Simultaneously, as we shapethe visual memories of the present, we must be more aware of whatamounts to our dissociation from the past through its appropriationon the surface of images. If the cultural memories of the present arenecessarily built on the forgetting of the past, then it is imperative thatthis inauthenticity be overtly articulated as such. Only then will we takeresponsibility for its continuing presence in the cultural and historicalimaginary.


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The New Yorker

In another example of the many republications and representations ofthe Hitler-Hoffmann Rednerposen, in 1995 the six images accompaniedan article in The New Yorker. The article addresses what the author, RonRosenbaum, calls the ‘Hitler explanation industry’ (Rosenbaum, 1995,p. 50). Rosenbaum’s article details some of the numerous theses devotedto explaining the cause of Hitler’s evil, the psychological, theological,philosophical explanations of why he did what he did. Rosenbaumargues that Hitler explanation theories are cultural self-portraits, ‘waysof distancing ourselves from him. And ways of protecting ourselves’(p. 55). Like the presentation of the images in Underexposed, these expla-nations of such frightening historical realities as Hitler’s hypnotic powerover his audience ‘hold up a dark mirror to our own anxieties’ (p. 55).Thus, for example, Rosenbaum cites the perspective provided by the1990s cult of the serial killer afflicted by low self-esteem to explain Hitleras another Ted Bundy or Hannibal Lecter. When Hitler is explainedas another serial killer who was the victim of a dysfunctional fam-ily, it does not so much offer insight into Hitler’s psyche as it revealsthe late-twentieth-century fascination for the complex and damagedpsychological life of the serial killer.

Indeed, Rosenbaum’s claims can be pushed even further: by exten-sion, any critique, explanation, and in the case of the Rednerposen,renarrativization of historical documents necessarily speaks from a plat-form of the present. This is unavoidable. We may even go so far asto say that Rosenbaum’s article itself does the same. For ‘ExplainingHitler’ entertains the same multiple, often conflicting, interpretationsof history and Hitler’s role in it as are made by leading Hitler scholarsin Britain, Germany and the United States. This is typical of the post-modernist relativism of the mid-1990s, especially as it is played out inpopular highbrow magazines such as The New Yorker.

The Rednerposen images appear at the end of the article and share thepages 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 illustratethis idea; they simply sit side by side with it, inciting provocative asso-ciations for the reader. The copy line underneath the Rednerposen reads‘Some theorists have traced the source of Hitler’s transformation — andcharisma – to hypnotic suggestion’ (p. 69). Once again, this reappro-priation of the Rednerposen is in the service of an argument positingthe manipulation of an unsuspecting public. That is, the context of


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The New Yorker ensures that the lies told by the image of political deceitare exposed. Thus, in The New Yorker, the images perpetuate the con-temporary suspicion of the image’s ability to tell the truth – the imagecannot be trusted, and was used by Hitler to mesmerize and deceive.

In addition, the photographs belong to a culturally and historicallyspecific discourse of the 1990s: there is no single causal explanation ofthis inconceivable evil, but there is nevertheless a necessity to continuelooking. This could be seen to be following the same logic as the neces-sity to continue the search to explain the Holocaust. We must nevergive up the search as this would be to forget the crimes committedin the name of Hitler and the Nazis. Rosenbaum’s line of argument isborne of a postmodern fin-de-siècle belief in the impossibility of everfinding that single explanation for Hitler’s motivations and the Holo-caust he brought about. The Rednerposen are accompanied in the articleby other Hitler-Hoffmann images, and they also sit side by side withexamples from the contemporary press, a family snap shot of the youngHitler, a 1932 Heartfield montage and an unattributed image of Hitlerat the Berghof from 1937 – a rare and unusual image that I would haveliked to know more about. All of these images, like the theories Rosen-baum expounds upon, may be no more than representations, but if wecontinue to scour them for ways of ‘explaining Hitler’, we will inchever closer to understanding ourselves through the lens of this enig-matic evil. The sustained commitment to looking for an explanationwas 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 Underex-posed and The New Yorker, the Rednerposen are appropriated for discourseson the photograph as evidence, as a historical document in the narra-tive of twentieth-century traumas other than those that resulted fromHitler’s crimes, the search for truth via the twists and turns in thelife of an image. The historical significance of the Rednerposen in theirarchival form is obscure and difficult for audiences of today to access; itis removed from our experience of images and the values we place onthem, the expectations we have of them. Therefore, we look to the Red-nerposen for their representation of something else, something similar orcloser to what is on our minds today. We may even look at them withincredulity, as pictures we did not know existed, with surprise, even sus-picion. 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 his-torical context. Such are these technologies of memory that they havegenerated an expression of our historical and cultural remove from theRednerposen. Ultimately, they will also underline our failure to hold oneof the great traumas of the twentieth century in our conscious minds.In turn, this is the defining characteristic of these recycled images astechnologies of memory of the present.

Returning to the questions I asked at the beginning of this chap-ter: what do these re-contextualizations tell us about our contemporaryrelationship to Hitler and Nazi history? It is obvious through my read-ing that the new narratives of Underexposed and The New Yorker divorcetheir viewers from the images’ archival value and historical context.However, what is striking here is that we are not distanced by there-presentation because the history and the crimes behind the Redner-posen are too heinous, too unbearable to represent. Underexposed, forexample, is replete with gruesome images – massacres, physical tor-ture, cadaverous remains, murders in process. Thus, there are plenty ofimages from which we recoil, but the Rednerposen are not among them.Neither do the publications ask their viewers and readers to identifywith, or to become implicated in and thus responsible to, the history towhich the Rednerposen belongs. The photographs’ black and white sta-tus, even their crudity, their hastily shot experimental nature relieve usof this burden. They are more like curiosities than historically insight-ful documents. The aesthetic is suitably distant from the slick, colourcompositions of charred, battered, and bloodied bodies in close-up.It pales beside images whose captions remind us of the geographi-cal and temporal proximity of many of the world’s crimes. Similarly,Hitler’s excessive performative gestures give an irony that encouragesa more critical perspective towards the images. For these, and the rea-sons outlined above, re-presentation consciously eschews historical andemotional identification.

Perhaps most disturbingly, the distance we experience derives fromthe need to make the Rednerposen more relevant to the history ofthe twentieth century as we understand it today. Sixty years after theHolocaust, these events appear to be losing their grasp on the culturalimaginary as singular, irrefutable, incomparable and inconceivable. Thisis not only because the historical events are increasingly distant in time,and because we have lived through other genocides, but also becausethe images that document the Nazi Holocaust and those who perpe-trated it engage with a set of issues that are different from those takenup by images today. Above all, in the 1920s and throughout the 1930s,


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there was an unshakeable belief in the veracity of the image and a zealto mine the power of its persuasion. In the two cases of recycling, his-tory is brought into the present through a familiar narrative: in thecase of Underexposed, twentieth-century political violence, and in TheNew Yorker, the perpetual search for causal explanations of enigmaticpersonalities. And while these respective narratives contribute to theexperience of the present and its memory, they do so at the expenseof remembering the past as embodied, vital and indispensable to thiscultural present.

Today, the Rednerposen are technologies of memory reappropriated inthe interests of reinforcing a familiar narrative about the image, partic-ularly the politically charged image. Images are not trusted to tell theirown truths; we cannot access them unless we are given elaborate con-texts and juxtapositions. In the case of Underexposed, the new context isfirst and foremost a narrative on the power of the image to deceive, andin the second place, on the importance of the truth of the image for ourunderstanding of events as historical, for the creation of cultural mem-ories of these same events in the present. This, certainly, was not theonly, or the primary, intention of the Rednerposen in their archival form.

Thus, republication of these rare archival images of Hitler has returnedus to the same dilemma that Friedländer posed all those years ago: thatwhenever we represent transgressive images, if we dare to cross the lineand look through the lens of the perpetrator, we risk the possibility ofrevoking all meaning. In addition, when we put them in a new contextor narrative, we automatically bring them into our own cultural andintellectual milieu. As a consequence, the continuing reproduction ofthese images becomes simultaneously an expression of our most pro-found fears and our otherwise mute yearnings. In the case of the useof the Rednerposen in Underexposed and The New Yorker, these fears anddesires are about images. The evil perpetrated by their subject matter hasbecome incidental. I would argue that the dilemmas posed by Friedlän-der have returned, only in a different guise. The resurfacing of archivalimages has thus reopened the wound, a wound in which the image andits status in the visual and cultural memories of the present have becomemore important than the devastating history that lies behind them.

Lastly, it is undoubtedly more productive to interrogate the politi-cal and ethical status of the images in their recycled form than it isto police the boundaries of recycling practices. Similarly, my argumentfor a historical contextualization for understanding them as propagandathat searches to define the image of Hitler-as-Führer could well be metwith the criticism of itself remystifying, and thus obscuring, the political


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import of the Rednerposen. Nevertheless, to interpret them within thelarger discourses of the photograph, of constructions of power and sub-jectivity, nationhood and identity in 1920s and 1930s Germany, satisfiestwo productive ends. First, it enables us to see that at the time oftheir production, these images were complexly conceived propaganda.Indeed, they drew on and contributed to discourses on visual, culturaland political representation in the contemporary culture. Thus, at thetime, they would not necessarily have been seen as naïve or particu-larly dangerous. This gives insight into the way Nazism functioned forall involved. Second, the historical approach enables the building in ofa critical consciousness in which the historical, cultural and politicaldistance between then and now is foregrounded. This consciousness,in turn, creates the space to imagine how images such as the Redner-posen might more effectively be put into contemporary discourses ofthe photograph as a technology of remembering as opposed to one offorgetting.

Notes

1. The elements that can be identified as Modernist mark the portraits as radicallydifferent from those of previous German leaders, particularly, Bismarck andWilhelm II. See Herz (1994) for a discussion of the photographic representationof 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 imagestaken 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 ofrepresentations of Hitler imagery and Hitler’s image. See, for example, Kleeblatt(2002).

5. Even when the similarity of gestures and deeds is striking, the compari-son of George W. Bush, for example, to Adolf Hitler is dangerous as itcollapses the historical and real nature of Hitler’s and Bush’s actions. Onwebsites such as http://seedsofdoubt.com/zendaba/bush-not-hitler1.html andhttp://semiskimmed.net/bushhitler.html, the Rednerposen are juxtaposed withimages of George W. Bush in oratorical mode.


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Part IV

Unsettling History


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Introduction: Unsettling HistoryLiedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

In the main Introduction, we write that ‘cultural memory is a sharedknowledge of the past that is not part of official history’. Shared yet con-tested, outside formal historical discourse but productive of the materialand immaterial culture that can form its ‘sources’ and produced by someof the same technologies, cultural memory clearly has a complex rela-tionship to history. In Tangled Memories, Marita Sturken first writes that‘[c]ultural memory can be distinct from history yet . . . is essential to itsconstruction’ but soon afterwards acknowledges there is so much bor-der traffic between them that the distinction is hard to maintain (1997,pp. 4–5). More recently, Andreas Huyssen observes ‘a fundamental dis-turbance . . . between history as objective and scientific, and memory assubjective and personal’ (2003, p. 2). The recent debates about memoryversus history underscore that the relationship of history to memory isnot only complex, but is also changing, from the unification of mem-ory and history demanded by the rise of the nations throughout thenineteenth century, to their irremediable severance in modern times.

Today, indeed, history and memory are generally seen as fundamen-tally at odds, with memory serving sometimes to bolster and other timesto unsettle history. In the wake of historiographical self-reflection andunder the pressures of various memory-groups, history had to relinquishits status as the record of the people’s past, becoming instead the self-conscious study and narrative account of the past. Traditionally focusedon political, social and economic events, history inevitably excludes theexperiences and memories of many individuals. Therefore, it is by lay-ing claim to memory and by foregrounding the memories of individualsand of social groups, that history came to be unsettled. The essays in thispart, then, focus on this movement of unsettling history – that is, ofshaking it up, showing its foundations to be unstable and constructed

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in the interests of particular, usually dominant, groups – colonial set-tlers, dictatorships and other repressive political regimes. Showing thoseversions of history to effectively silence, erase or forget memories of thepast that do not fit their version of history, these essays also address theircontinued haunting presence in cultural memory as well as the anxietiesover remembering and forgetting to which their presence attests.

In this part of the book, cultural memory is viewed as instrumental inthe process of unsettling history. ‘Cultural memory,’ Sturken writes, ‘isa field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for aplace in history’ (1997, p. 1). Technologies of memory, in this context,are the means by which this negotiation takes place: the object, imagesand representations, but also the artistic practices and narrative andaudiovisual techniques used to produce and give meaning to culturalmemory. To be sure, there is a sense in which individual memories andthe collective, social memory laid down in history are always in tension.As Carolyn Steedman puts it in Landscape for a Good Woman, ‘[p]ersonalinterpretations of past times – the stories that people tell themselves inorder to explain how they got to the places they currently inhabit –are often in deep and ambiguous conflict with the official interpretativedevices of a culture’ (Steedman, 1986, p. 6). As the place where individ-ual and collective memory meet and intersect, cultural memory is oneof the central sites for reworking past events, for rethinking, re-viewing,and reimagining the past; indeed, for not letting the past settle intohistory. The essays in this part therefore explore cultural memory as thelocus for the transformation of history – its re-production in the present,but also its deconstruction by various means. Focusing on specific tech-nologies of memory that work to disturb or upset the known and officialhistorical accounts, these chapters show the wilful construction or thefundamental instability of cultural memory in visual representationsthat change the authorized views of history.

In Chapter 10, Julia Noordegraaf looks as the re-use of colonial footagefrom the Dutch East Indies in the compilation film Mother Dao: TheTurtlelike (1995) by documentary filmmaker Vincent Monnikendam andin the works Smoke Screen (1997) and Facing Forward (1999) by visualartist Fiona Tan. The representation of audiovisual material is a way ofbringing documents of the past into the present. Noordegraaf illumi-nates how the confrontation with these works encourages contemporaryviewers to reflect upon their relationship to (Dutch) colonial history.The way in which the archival material is presented and deconstructedallows for a more critical perspective on this historical period.


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Introduction: Unsettling History 171

In Chapter 11, Maruša Pušnik offers a critical analysis of the cre-ation in documentaries of collective memory in post-socialist Slovenia.She shows how narrative and visual strategies redefine specific histor-ical events and periods of the nation. Such popular representations ofhistory set a new agenda for public debates on history. Functioning astechnologies of memory, the documentaries produce different meaningsof the past that are concordant with a new regime of right-wing politics.The films reproduce and sustain a collective memory that is based onthe elimination of the Yugoslav period and communism, and on theinvention and glorification of Slovenia’s ancient and recent past.

In the last chapter, Marta Cabrera draws attention to the state ofamnesia concerning the violent past of Colombia. While the mass mediaand the absence of adequate monuments and commemorations seemto contribute to the perpetuation of this amnesiac state, the visual artshave addressed issues of memory, identity and violence. Cabrera crit-ically assesses visual artworks from the last decade by sculptor DorisSalcedo, video artist José Alejandro Restrepo, and photographer andvideo artist Juan Manuel Echavarría. She argues that their work con-tributes to the construction of cultural memory amidst what has beentermed as a ‘low-intensity conflict’.


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10Facing Forward with FoundFootage: Displacing ColonialFootage in Mother Daoand the Work of Fiona TanJulia Noordegraaf

We shall never reach the past unless we frankly place ourselveswithin it. Essentially virtual, it cannot be known as somethingpast unless we follow and adopt the movement by which itexpands into a present image, thus emerging from obscurityinto the light of day (Bergson, 2005, p. 135).

In 1926, the Dutch cameraman Iep Ochse recorded a fascinating sceneon the island of Bali, Indonesia: three toddlers cheerfully smoking acigarette. The brief shot – it lasts eleven seconds – shows three nakedchildren that fill the frame; they are seated facing the camera, theyoungest sitting on the eldest boy’s lap. The latter vigorously inhalesand exhales, creating a cloud of smoke that fills the screen. He thenpasses on the cigarette to the boy on his right and lovingly grooms thelock of hair of the youngest child (Figure 10.1). When this shot was usedin a film for the Dutch newsreel production company Polygoon in 1940,the scene was accompanied by a spoken commentary, saying ‘Thesebabies take advantage of the fact that mother went shopping’ (TropischNederland, 1940). The scene is thus being explained as an example ofinnocent, naughty behaviour that occurs when mothers leave theirchildren alone.

In her film installation Smoke Screen of 1997, visual artist Fiona Tan(born Indonesia, 1966) deconstructs this reading of the scene. Tan editedthe shot in a short compilation film that is supposed to be played in acontinuous loop. In the beginning, her film uses the traditional docu-mentary format: we see the shot, followed by a title card that explainsthe place and estimated date of the recording. The second title cardrepeats the 1940s reading of the shot: babies taking advantage of thefact that mother went shopping. After that, however, the film becomes

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Facing Forward with Found Footage 173

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

more ambiguous. Again we see the toddlers, now followed by the enig-matic title card ‘Boys will be men’. How are we supposed to interpretthis text? Is smoking part of a ritual marking the transition from child-hood to manhood? Are we to reflect on the fact that these children havesince grown up to be men?

The uncertainty about the meaning of the images increases furtherwith the next title card ‘With my own eyes’. Whose eyes have actuallywitnessed this scene? From the first title card we know that the shot isarchival footage – ‘Indonesia, maybe 1930’ – so the scene cannot havebeen witnessed by the artist herself. But then who saw and recorded it?Or does the text perhaps refer to the viewer, who is confronted withthe filmic documentation of the scene and thus sees it ‘with her owneyes’? Finally, the film shows the artist herself, with a toy camera heldbefore her right eye (Figure 10.2). Now the confusion is complete: is ita game? Does she re-enact the recording of the original situation witha toy camera? Are we now watching the artist watching somebody elsewho 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 textsand images are highly ambiguous. By constantly repeating the imagesof the toddlers and alternating them with different texts and the shotof the artist herself, the meaning of what we see becomes increasinglyblurred. The contrast between the old, archival footage and the new,self-reflexive texts and images invites the viewer to adopt a more distantstandpoint. From this standpoint, the relation between the camera, thepeople filmed, the artist, and the viewer is being questioned. Who arethese children? Where does the footage come from? To what extent wasit staged? What has become of the kids? But also: Why are we lookingat 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, itsdisplacements and the effects of these displacements on the inter-pretation of these images and their link to the past. Central to thisinvestigation are three case studies: the film and video installationsSmoke Screen (16mm film installation, 1997, loop) and Facing Forward(video projection, 1999, 11 minutes) by the Indonesian-Australian artistFiona Tan and the feature-length documentary film Mother Dao: theTurtlelike (Netherlands, 1995, 90 minutes) by the Dutch documentary


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filmmaker Vincent Monnikendam. Both Tan and Monnikendam workwith colonial footage from the Dutch East Indies produced between the1910s and 1930s and kept in various audiovisual archives in the Nether-lands, such as the Royal Institute for the Tropics and the Filmmuseumin Amsterdam. They both use this archival material to create so-calledcompilation films: films that are entirely based on existing footage.

The discussion of the films is primarily focused on their effect onthe contemporary viewer’s engagement with the colonial past of theDutch in Indonesia. The central questions are: How do Tan’s installa-tions and Monnikendam’s documentary film construct our present-daymemory of the colonial past? How can contemporary artworks like theseaddress specific cultural and historical problems, such as the legacy ofcolonialism in our present time?

The compilation film can be seen as a specific technology of mem-ory, one that uses montage, or editing, as a tool to intervene in the waywe remember the past. Both Monnikendam and Tan employ montageas a tool in the deconstruction and reconstruction of cultural mem-ory, in particular the memory of the colonial presence of the Dutchin Indonesia. Montage here operates on two levels: first, on the level ofthe compilation film itself, and second, on that of the exhibition con-text. In order to analyse how the exhibition context influences the wayin which compilation films function as technologies of memory, I com-pare a feature-length film that was shown in cinemas and on televisionto two works that were conceived as museum installations – a short,silent film installation (Smoke Screen) and a longer video installationwith sound (Facing Forward). Although one can argue that each individ-ual presentation changes the way these works are seen and interpreted,I here focus on the cinema and the gallery space as settings that arecharacterized by two distinct types of spectatorship. Of course, the dis-placement of colonial footage already commences at the archive, whichattributes meaning to the material by means of selection, classification,description of and access to colonial footage (Stoler, 2002). In this arti-cle, however, I specifically focus on the reuse of colonial footage in theworks of Monnikendam and Tan.

Before analysing these cases in more detail, I first discuss the compila-tion film as a specific technology of memory. Subsequently, in order tounderstand how the displacement and montage of archival elementscan serve as an alternative way of connecting past issues to presentconcerns, I discuss the Mnemosyne project of the German art histo-rian Aby Warburg. This discussion provides the theoretical backdrop for


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understanding the construction of colonial memory discussed in thecases below.

Compilation films: ‘Editing as a window cleaner’

Contrary to the traditional historical documentary, compilation filmsuse archival footage not as illustration of real events, but as imagesthat draw attention to the constructed nature of media productions.Because of their self-referential nature, these films, which are also knownas ‘found-footage films’ or ‘archival films’, have the potential to cri-tique, challenge and possibly also subvert the power of cinematographicrepresentation (Wees, 1992, p. 39).1

The main technique employed in these films is montage: the film-maker takes shots from different films and reassembles them in a neworder. The new order of the shots creates unexpected connectionsbetween them – connections that are often underlined by the use oftitles, spoken texts or music. For example, in Bruce Connor’s A Movie(1958), images of an officer staring into a submarine periscope are alter-nated with images of a scarcely dressed model reclining in a provocativepose – a sequence that is concluded with images of a torpedo speedingthrough water, followed by a nuclear explosion and walls of waterengulfing a battleship and a surfer. In a mocking way, this sequence cre-ates visual links between sexual desire and military aggression, while itsimultaneously focuses attention on the conventional editing strategiesthat link individual shots through implied cause and effect relationships(Wees, 1992, pp. 43, 45).

Compilation films literally displace the footage they use: images areremoved from their original context and represented in a new one. Thisdisplacement entails a shift in meaning: in the new context, the sameimages can mean differently. As Fiona Tan puts it: ‘The recycling of filmfragments or photos breathes new life into the images; they are liberatedfrom the harness of their original context. Recycling makes it possible tosee images in a new way. Recycling creates new images. Editing as a win-dow cleaner’ (2000, p. 127).2 As such, the displacement and re-editingof archival material in compilation films can be a tool for rememberingthe past differently.

Remembering art history: Aby Warburg’sMnemosyne project

This technique has a precedent in the way in which the nineteenth-century German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) used


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photographic reproductions of artworks to analyse the relationshipsbetween them. Warburg is best known as the originator of the disci-pline of iconology: a method for deciphering and interpreting symbolicreferences in artworks. But where followers such as Erwin Panofskydeveloped iconology as a method with positivist or neo-Kantian ambi-tions, Warburg’s iconology was critical, in that it stressed the creativeact of interpretation. As art historian Philippe-Alain Michaud observes,‘Warburg replaced the principle of detachment governing the under-standing of works with a principle of invention. Research did not simplyreflect a theoretical attitude; it had to be imagined as a practice aimingto reactivate its object and experiencing its attraction in turn’ (2004,p. 32).

In his vast library, which was moved from Hamburg to Londonin 1933 and is now part of the Warburg Institute, Warburg collectedthousands of books. The organization of these books was not a staticarrangement; Warburg constantly regrouped them in order to reflectnew ideas about the interrelation of facts. He thus used the physicalarrangement of the books as an objectification of his thought, a methodthat helped him to fathom the psychology of artistic creation (Michaud,2004, p. 235).

Warburg also collected thousands of black and white photographsof sculptures, paintings, prints, tapestries and other forms of imagery.For his Mnemosyne (Memory) project, which aimed to create an atlasin images (an ‘art history without a text’, as he himself described it),Warburg arranged these photographic reproductions on black panelsin order to find new and unanticipated interpretations of the relation-ships between works from different times and places (Michaud, 2004,p. 240). In this way, he used the technique of montage ‘to activatedynamic properties [of individual artworks] that would be latent ifconsidered individually’ (p. 253). The result is similar to the effect ofcinematographic montage: ‘The Mnemosyne panels function as screenson which the phenomena produced in succession by the cinema arereproduced simultaneously’ (p. 260). According to art historian GeorgesDidi-Huberman, what was characteristic of Warburg’s photographic pan-els was their exchangeability: the photographs could always be taken offthe panels and endlessly be recombined with other images, thus keepingtheir meaning open and avoiding a final point of interpretation (2002,pp. 459–60).

The method Warburg used in his Mnemosyne project resembles theway our memory works: images of past objects and events (in his case,photographic reproductions) are combined and recombined in con-stantly changing constellations. As a consequence, our interpretation


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of the objects and events from the past is constantly changing too; eachtime we approach them from a different perspective. Writing historythus becomes a subjective and creative process, where ‘the researchergives meaning to something that has no meaning – not in understandingbut in reproducing the world in the closed universe of representations’(Michaud, 2004, p. 236).

From this perspective, there is little difference between Warburg’smethod of reproducing the historical development of art and the waycontemporary artists use the archive as a site for developing alter-native memories or reconstructing forgotten pasts. In his discussionof Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean and Sam Durant as exemplars ofartists working from what he calls ‘an archival impulse’, art critic HalFoster indicates that these artists present their archival materials ‘asactive, even unstable – open to eruptive returns and entropic collapses,stylistic repackagings and critical revisions’ (2004, p. 17). The aim ofthese works is to ‘fashion distracted viewers into engaged discussants’(p. 4). Artists do so by elaborating on the found image, object andtext and presenting them in a new form. A closer look at the worksof Monnikendam and Tan will now demonstrate how compilationsof archival footage can become technologies for reconstructing ourmemory of the colonial past.

Reconstructing colonial memories in Mother Dao

The film Mother Dao: The Turtlelike opens with a creation myth of theisland Nias, just off the coast of Sumatra, where ‘Mother Dao’ is seen asthe creator of Earth and all life. Her nickname, ‘the turtlelike’, refers tothe slightly rounded shape of the horizon that resembles the shape of aturtle. The creation of the earth is represented by recordings of volcanoeruptions and explosions – strong images that symbolize the birth ofnew and unspoilt land. Those images are followed by shots of variousIndonesian peoples, from Sumatra to Papua New Guinea. The film seemsto suggest that these were the first inhabitants of the new land.

Subsequently, we see the arrival of the colonial Europeans. First, thereis only one man, on horseback – presumably a missionary, who exploresa coastal path on the isle of Nias. Soon, however, he is followed by manymore men in white tropical suits who start felling trees in order to beable to exploit the land. A shot of a colonial officer dressed in white,addressing the male population of Nias from a platform, introduces thecentral theme of the film: the unequal power relations that are the resultof the European intervention in Indonesia.


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The opening sequence is more or less representative for the restof the film. Images of Indonesian landscapes, peoples and rituals arealternated with images of the colonial presence in Indonesia – shotsof plantations, factories, trains and other signs of modernization thatseem to penetrate the land – and shots of the lifestyle of the Europeancolonials that strongly contrast with the shots of the living and work-ing conditions of the indigenous peoples. Although there is no clearlydefined narrative in the film, the alternation of those different types ofimages results in a film that is highly critical of the colonial presence inIndonesia.

Monnikendam makes clever use of the propagandistic nature ofthe original footage. As in other compilation films, Mother Dao usespropagandistic imagery and turns it against itself: images originally cel-ebrating the production processes in the tobacco factory now mainlyshow the dirty and dangerous circumstances in which the local work-ers have to do their work.3 We cannot help but notice the proud andsmug faces of the supervisors, dressed in pristine white suits and hatsthat contrast sharply with the half-dressed and often dirty workers. Thefilm achieves this effect through montage: the unexpected and some-times crude contrasts between the images of working conditions infactories and the luxurious and cheerful life of the colonials makes usaware of the contradictions and unequal power relations in colonialIndonesia. For example, the film contains a scene of the winnowingof kapok – images that are beautiful but that also demonstrate the dirtyand unhealthy working conditions in this industry. These images arefollowed by a shot of the easygoing life of a colonial family, suggestingthat these families sleep on the mattresses for which the locals producethe kapok.

In this way, the film forms a critical note in a culture of memorythat has been dominated by romantic constructions of colonial history(van Vree, 2005). The specific memory that Monnikendam attempts todeconstruct is exemplified by the newsreel Tropisch Nederland (TropicalNetherlands) of 1940, a remake of the presumably lost 1926 newsreelNaar Tropisch Nederland (Hogenkamp, 1988, p. 32) that contains a lot ofthe material Monnikendam reused for Mother Dao. This filmic report of aocean journey from the Netherlands to Batavia (present-day Jakarta), viavarious Indonesian islands, was made to raise the interest of the Dutchpopulation in a life in the colonies. Combining images of moderniza-tion brought by the colonials with images of traditional, local customs,the film expresses a romantic view of colonial Indonesia as a placewhere locals and colonials coexist in a peaceful harmony. In Mother


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Dao, Monnikendam deconstructs the discourse of Tropisch Nederland bypresenting the same footage in different juxtapositions. For example,where in Tropisch Nederland shots of a missionary hospital are used tostress the modernization of health care implemented by the Dutch (thecommentary track indicates that ‘here, magnificent work is done for thebenefit of the indigenous population’), in Mother Dao the same imagesintroduce the dramatic climax of the film: close-up images of peoplewith a skin disease and of dying babies, followed by shots of a localfuneral ritual.

The film thus constructs a new view of the colonial history of Indone-sia: the Dutch invaded an unspoilt country and brought hunger, deathand destruction in the name of modernization and progress. This recon-structed memory is supported by the use of sound. Monnikendam leftout the explanatory voiceover that is so characteristic of traditional doc-umentaries and replaced it with old and recent poems and songs that arespoken in Bahasa Indonesia and expressing sadness and despair result-ing from deceit, exploitation and striving for profit. In addition, there isa soundtrack by the Dutch composer Jan Dries Groenendijk, which com-bines sounds recorded in Indonesia with new, electronic sounds. Thefilm thus adds an Indonesian soundscape to the Western perspective ofthe images.4

Montage here functions as a means to deconstruct one memoryof colonial Indonesia and substitute it with another. The film pre-miered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam on 2 February 1995.Besides a broadcast on Dutch television, the film was subsequentlymostly screened in cinemas, in particular at various film festivals in theNetherlands and abroad. To what extent does this exhibition contextinfluence the way in which Mother Dao functions as a technology ofmemory?5

As film scholar Ann Friedberg explains, cinema spectatorship has tra-ditionally been characterized by the projection of a luminous image ina dark room, viewed by immobilized spectators who have a passive rela-tion 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 spec-tatorship changed: it does no longer rely on the dark room, it allowsfor a certain level of mobility, and it has become less linear, giving theviewer more control over the when and where of viewing (pp. 136–47).6

In particular, the remote control has turned every viewer into ‘a ready-made montagiste, cutting and pasting images from a wide repertoire ofsources at the push of a button’ (p. 142).


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Friedberg argues that contemporary cinema and televisual specta-torship is characterized by a ‘mobilized “virtual” gaze’, a gaze thattravels ‘through an imaginary elsewhere and an imaginary elsewhen’(p. 2). In this sense, viewing a film in the cinema or on televisionis a means towards travelling virtually through time, in particularbecause of cinema’s ‘ability to be repeated, over time, imparting toeach spectator a unique montage-consciousness’ (p. 103). It is exactlythis ‘unique montage-consciousness’ that Mother Dao addresses: thespectator is aware that the filmmaker uses footage from another timeand presents this in a new order that changes the meaning of theoriginal footage. During the ninety minutes it takes to watch thefilm, the viewer is invited to reconstruct the filmmaker’s montageand to reflect on the possible earlier meanings of the footage thatthe filmmaker now deconstructs.7 Thus, watching Mother Dao on TVor in the cinema can be considered montage in time, whereby thespectator’s reconstruction of the filmmaker’s montage results in theformation of a new, critical memory of the colonial presence ofIndonesia.

Facing forward in the gallery space

Fiona Tan addresses this particular travelling through time in hervideo installation Facing Forward. For this work she chose ethnographicfootage from the collection of the Netherlands Filmmuseum and editedit into a film of eleven minutes. The film opens with a black and whiteshot of a large group of non-Western (Indonesian?) men who face thecamera as if they were having their portrait taken. In the middle, threewhite men (missionaries?) are seated, flanked by other white men inmilitary garb and leisure wear. This opening shot is followed by othershots of (Indonesian) men and women staring silently in the camera.The flicker and the scratches in the images, as well as the fact thatthey are in black and white, suggest that we are watching archivalfootage.

The images are accompanied by a soundtrack consisting of a gongand 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 antic-ipation. This minimalist soundtrack continues throughout the film. Thefilm then takes us on a car ride to an unidentified Indonesian citywhere the passers-by look curiously into the camera lens. We hear avoiceover reading a passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1978) – a


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text about travelling through time and place. The voice-over cites MarcoPolo, who explains to Kublai Khan: ‘that what he sought was alwayssomething lying ahead, even if it was a matter of the past. Arriv-ing at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that hedid not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are orno 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 shotsof people from various parts of the world who are apparently made topose in front of the camera. This impression is reinforced by the inclu-sion of shots of a white man operating a film camera who is wearing aheadband decorated with four feathers. A shot of two African womenwearing face masks epitomizes the contrived nature of the footage:women who do not want their faces to be seen are being forced to ‘faceforward’.

At the end of the film, the images from the opening sequence arerepeated, accompanied by the voiceover that resumes the narrationfrom 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, whereanother of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had beena possible future of his and is now someone else’s present’ (voiceovercommentary in Facing Forward, 1999; after Calvino, 1978, p. 29).The film ends with a shot of two young girls shyly smiling towardsthe camera.

Like Mother Dao, Facing Forward focuses attention on the constructednature of cinematographic representation. As in Smoke Screen, the repe-tition of images, accompanied by texts that complicate the meaning ofthe shots, encourages viewers to reflect on the meaning of the archivalimages and the colonial past to which they refer. Contrary to MotherDao, however, the deconstruction of the colonial discourse in Facing For-ward does not lead to the formation of a new, coherent perspective onthe Dutch presence in Indonesia. Instead, the work draws attention tothe process of creating meaning itself. As Ernst van Alphen states, ‘Tan’svideos and films all reflect on how the medium functions as an agentthat creates specific relationships between the viewer and the image’(2002, p. 59). In doing so, Tan not only stimulates spectators to developa specific interpretation of the images, but also to reflect on the gazewith which they regard the people portrayed: ‘The cultural other issubjected 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 makingsense of the past is supported by the fact that Smoke Screen and FacingForward were conceived as installations for museum galleries.9 Contraryto cinematic and televisual spectatorship, where viewers are more orless required to sit still and watch the film as it unfolds over time, in thegallery space, both the images and the spectator are mobile. Boris Groysexplains that ‘a video or movie installation in a museum neutralizes theban of motion that determines the viewing of these pictures in a moviesystem. Pictures and spectators are allowed to move at the same time’(Groys, 2001, n.p.; see also Groys, 2003). According to Groys, this situa-tion causes a certain tension, putting the viewer ‘in a state of doubt andhelplessness’: the time-based nature of film and video installations nei-ther allows the viewer to fully determine his or her own time of viewingnor makes it possible to view all the works in their entirety. It is thisfundamental uncertainty that gives the works their aesthetic value: ‘Theaesthetic value of the media installation in the museum mainly consistsof picking the confusion, the uncertainty, the missing control of theviewer about his time of attention in a museum exhibition – that usedto give the illustration of total organization – as a central theme’ (Groys,2001, n.p.).

Consequently, compared to the cinema or television spectator, theviewer of film and video installations in the gallery switches ‘from apassive position to a more interactive one, from an observer separatefrom the apparatus to a participant’, as Friedberg writes in relation toanother context (Friedberg, 1994, p. 144). One can argue that in thespace of the gallery, the viewer is invited to continue the editing processthat the artist has started. According to film scholar Raymond Bellour,installations guide the viewer towards composing and recomposing theimages and words that are being presented (2000, p. 8). Groys explainsthis active participation of the viewer from the fact that the installationof film or video in the museum focuses attention on the medium itself:‘It creates an ideal place for an analytic and linguistically based reflectionon video and movie pictures.’ This focus on reflection, Groys maintains,‘causes the viewer to adapt the selective and analytic strategies of therespective artist and to become an active consumer of media himself’(2006, n.p.). Since the viewer’s physical movement determines the waythe images, words and sounds of the installation are recomposed, inthe gallery space, the montage in time that characterizes the viewing ofcompilation films on television or in the cinema theatre is extended tomontage into space.10


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Conclusion

As I have argued above, Mother Dao deconstructs the romantic and nos-talgic view of the colonial presence in Indonesia and replaces it witha critical discourse, emphasizing the unequal power relations and dif-ficult living and working conditions of the indigenous population. InFacing Forward and Smoke Screen, Fiona Tan uses a different strategy: herinstallations focus attention on the process of attributing meaning tothe archival images itself, inviting her viewers to reflect on their role inmaking sense of these images. What do these analyses teach us about theway in which compilation films function as technologies of memory?

Cinematic montage offers the possibility of deconstructing earliermeanings attached to the images, meanings that remained uncon-scious in earlier times (as in the case of a propaganda film like TropischNederland) or that have been forgotten. The compilation filmmakeruses editing and sound to draw attention to the production and recep-tion history of these archival images. This is why the compilation filmfunctions 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 impor-tant, its circulation as a symbolic commodity’ (Zryd, 2003, p. 47). Theresult is a new, self-reflexive discourse on the past. As filmmaker andfootage researcher Sharon Sandusky states, compilation filmmakers usu-ally ‘offer enough clues to allow the audience a window into how theythink, thereby avoiding a second-generation brainwashing technique’(1992, p. 12). The viewer is asked to participate in the montage of thefilmmaker by reconstructing his or her new configuration of the images.

When the compilation film is watched in the cinema theatre or ontelevision, the viewer is bound to the filmmaker’s ordering of the images,and hence, the viewer’s participation consists in reconstructing the film-maker’s new discourse. I see this as a form of montage in time, both inthe sense of the linear montage of the images and in the sense of trav-elling through time, connecting the present of the viewer to the variouspasts embodied in the footage. Yet, while cinema and televisual spec-tatorship allow for travelling through time, the viewer cannot activelychange the order of the images and is thus bound to the filmmaker’snew discourse.

In contrast, in the gallery space, the viewer is invited to actively con-tinue the editing process that the filmmaker has started. The physicalmobility of the viewer shifts the attention from the montage at thelevel of the film itself to the way in which the viewer participates in


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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 andspace, makes it a technology for remembering history in a dynamic andopen way, connecting past issues to the present concerns of contem-porary viewers. As Hal Foster indicates, the archival elements reused incontemporary visual artworks serve as ‘found arks of lost moments inwhich the here-and-now of the work serves as a possible portal betweenan unfinished past and a reopened future’ (2004, p. 15). This connectionbetween past, present and future is achieved through ‘affective associa-tion’ (p. 21). This is particularly prominent in Tan’s Smoke Screen andFacing Forward. Her use of close-ups and medium shots of people facingthe camera stimulates our affective association with the people and theirhistories. The texts, sounds, and new images that she uses at the sametime support the formation of this affective relation and emphasize thedifficulty of relating these histories to our present-day concerns.11 Thisway of working echoes Aby Warburg’s employment of montage to ‘elab-orate 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 waythat makes those images productive for understanding ourselves via theunknown other. Paradoxically, we can get closer to the past if we aremore aware of the distance that separates us from it. The further MarcoPolo travels, the more he is being confronted with his past, the less heunderstands who he is: ‘Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The travellerrecognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not hadand will never have’ (voiceover commentary in Facing Forward, 1999;after Calvino, 1978, p. 29). In this sense, Facing Forward invites us toreflect on who we are, where we came from, and where we are going: wehave to look back in order to face forward.

Notes

1. Jay Leyda was the first to distinguish archive-based films as ‘compilationfilms’. See his Films Beget Films (1964). Wees (1992; 1993) was one of thefirst to try and establish a clear classification for the great variety of films thatuse 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-footagefilms – based on non-archived material, literally ‘found’ in private collections,commercial stock-shot agencies, garbage bins, etc. – and archival films – based


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on material from archival institutions. I actually doubt whether, as he claims,‘the archive is an official institution that separates historical record from theouttake’ (2003, p. 41).

2. Sandusky (1992) offers a psychoanalytic account of how the compilationfilm – which she terms ‘The Archival Art Film’ – can function as a cure forthe manipulation of our desires by what she calls ‘The Toxic Film Artefact’.

3. As Michael Zryd states, ‘Ironic recontextualization mines the subversivepotential inherent in much archival footage’s source as official discourse,whether located in the sphere of government, corporate sponsorship, or theentertainment/news media industry. The footage speaks anew as evidence –but less as evidence of an event than as evidence of the folly of the officialdiscourses from which the archival footage springs’ (2003, p. 51).

4. Although the soundtrack helps to counter the Eurocentric perspective of thefootage, in some cases it results in an embarrassing exoticism. As Delpeut haspointed out, almost all images of the local population and their rituals areaccompanied by an ominous sound composition that seems to emphasize thestereotypical image of the elusive and ‘dark’ side of the Indonesian peoples(Delpeut, 1995).

5. It is worth noting that at the screening of Mother Dao at an internationalfilm festival in Japan in 1997 the audience definitely saw a different versionof the film than audiences elsewhere, since the Japanese customs authoritiesordered that a 12-second scene, in which male sex organs are visible, be cutbefore the film could be shown (Internet Movie Database, 2008).

6. Friedberg discusses the impact of virtual reality devices on cinema and televi-sual spectatorship. Because she wrote her book before the widespread use ofDVD and new media (the Internet, iPods, mobile phones), she does not takeinto account the radical control over the time, place and order of viewingthese media allow. As Mother Dao was broadcast on TV and shown in cinemasonly, I think her argument on spectatorship is still pertinent to the analysisof montage at the level of the exhibition context.

7. See Sharon Sandusky’s discussion of Daniel Eisenberg’s compilation film Dis-placed Person: ‘Displaced Person asks the audience to consider that since thefilm material isn’t gone, perhaps the meaning behind it also remains. Thisleaves the audience with the project of confronting the underlying meaning,precisely because earlier generations did not’ (1992, p. 16). This search forearlier meanings in displaced footage is a means to retrieve what Mary-AnnDoane has called ‘subjective residues’ of cinematic texts that remain beyondthe initial viewing (quoted in Friedberg, 1994, p. 134).

8. The inclusion of the shot of the artists with a toy camera in Smoke Screen is ofcourse a quite literal reference to the ‘observing self’.

9. It is worth observing that Facing Forward and Smoke Screen have mostly beenshown as installations in museums and galleries. Smoke Screen has once beenprojected on a large screen attached to the front of De Balie, a centre forculture and debate in the heart of Amsterdam. It would be interesting toinvestigate the implications of this urban screen space setting for the viewingand interpretation of this work, but that falls beyond the scope of this article.

10. Fiona Tan’s video installation Tuareg (1999) is a case in point: a filmic image ofa group of children is being projected on a transparent screen that is supposedto 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, onthe other side of the screen it is reversed. A different soundtrack on both sidesunderlines the changing perspective on the image evoked by the viewer’sphysical displacement in space.

11. Foster speculates that the attempts of artists working from an ‘archivalimpulse’ to connect things previously disconnected is motivated by a senseof failure in cultural memory, of society’s incapacity to remember the past; inspite of the omnipresent ‘memory industry’, archival art suggests that ‘thisindustry is amnesiac in its own way’ (2004, pp. 21–2).


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11Documentaries and MediatedPopular Histories: ShapingMemories and Imagesof Slovenia’s PastMaruša Pušnik

Popular mediated histories

The sociohistorical context of post-socialist Slovenia since 1991 has pro-vided an opportunity for the creation of new national knowledge.1 Sincethen, Slovenian cultural memory has been extensively created anewthrough various cultural representations of past events which functionas technologies of memory – from historiographical books, museumexhibitions, school textbooks and news programmes to documentaryfilms. These texts set the agenda for public debates and mobilizedpeople’s interests in specific historical events, figures or periods fromSlovenia’s past, while at the same time burying and suppressing otherviewpoints.

This chapter’s main purpose is to explore the role of the media, espe-cially documentary films, in the shaping and reshaping of memory inSlovenian society. I hope to show how the films created a new produc-tion of the past and how people – through documentary visualizationsof history – are thus educated in understanding and rememberingthe past in different ways. On the one hand, I focus on the waysmemories and histories are shaped through documentary films. Onthe other hand, I examine the influence of the contemporary socio-political context in Slovenia on such a popular, but professionally andacademically supported, rewriting of history. The persistent change ofthe national discursive regime from the early 1990s onwards and theempowering of right-wing politics in recent years play an importantrole in redefining dominant values, ideas, perceptions and visions ofthe past.

In contemporary media societies, documentaries have become one ofthe principal means for people to learn about history: ‘Just as television

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Mediated Popular Histories in Slovenia: Shaping Memories of the Past 189

has profoundly affected and altered every aspect of contemporary life –from the family to education, government, business and religion,’ GaryR. Edgerton asserts, so ‘the medium’s non-fictional and fictional por-trayals have similarly transformed the ways tens of millions of viewersthink about historical figures and events’ (2001, p. 1). The techni-cal and stylistic features of documentaries strongly influence historicalrepresentations and history itself. The two inherent properties of thedocumentary medium are intimacy and immediacy, since documentaryrepresentations are usually consumed in the privacy of people’s homesand tend to present history as personal dramas or melodramas. Yet, doc-umentary films are broadly perceived as part of the non-fiction genre,legitimate and objective presenters of the past because of their creativetreatment of actuality (Winston, 2000, p. 19). When people enter theworld of such media representations, and especially when they are con-fronted with the documentary genre, the images of the past in thesedocumentaries tend to be taken for reality (Hall, 1997; Nichols, 1991).In order to understand the impact of documentary films on people’s per-ceptions and the acceptance of the new politics of truth about the past,it is necessary to analyse documentaries at the semantic, discursive andideological level.

Media as technologies of memory: theories and methods

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


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I am particularly interested in how cultural memory is stabilized in acertain society and how it selects only some references to the past, whileat the same time pushes others into oblivion. The working of Sloveniancultural memory is based on various archival tactics, documents andtraces of the past, or anti-oblivion defence-systems, as Assman definesthem (2004, p. 31). The documentary is a material medium that usesvarious verbal and visual devices for storing information. In this regard,it can also influence the processes of creating cultural memory as well aspolitical, national identification.

Pierre Nora’s concept of the lieux de mémoire is useful for under-standing cultural representations of the past (textbooks, museums ordocumentary films, for example) as sites of memory that offer selectiveimages of the past. Although Nora (1989) focuses mostly on materialsites of memory, such as monuments, cemeteries or public ceremonies,sites of memory can also be symbolic or textual while their basic func-tions are identical – to inhibit time, to preserve a sense of continuityand to fix specific knowledge of the past. Despite the common percep-tion of cultural memory as a fixed, unchangeable fact of the past, it is afluid and contingent category that is subject to the dialectics of remem-bering and forgetting. Some knowledge can be submerged for years andthen 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 mem-ory can have real and material consequences, because cultural memoryis always externalized in social action and internalized in individualidentification.

In this respect, media can be understood as technologies of memory.Many authors agree that in contemporary societies media texts – alongwith school discourse – are the primary producers of people’s knowledgeabout history and of their memories (Sturken, 1997; Hardt and Bren-nen, 1999; Edgerton, 2001; Huyssen, 2003; Evans, 2004; Morris-Suzuki,2005). Today, the past is visualized to such an extent that visual mediahave become the main instruments for archiving various past eventsand helping people remember (Sturken, 1997; Zelizer, 1998; Hardt andBrennen, 1999). People also show great interest in the popular rep-resentations of the past in documentaries because of their aesthetics,developed with the help of multimedia technology and computer-generated effects. With their attractive audiovisual stories about thepast, which mediate apparently authentic historical scenes, and withtheir disseminative power, the documentaries provide new means tostore, recollect or transform memories and so to (re)organize the past.


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In order to examine how documentaries shape a specific knowledgeof the past and promote specific memories, I will use Michel Foucault’sarchaeology of knowledge to dig out knowledge of the past and hisgenealogy to explain the development of this knowledge. This methodcan help to reveal how knowledge of the past is chosen, how it isnarrated, 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 thepresent than about the past, the analysis of media representations ofthe past can be used as indicators of the present sociopolitical contextand national identity politics (1995, p. 31). Cultural memory shouldbe viewed as a space of discursive struggles because it feeds a battlefor the meaning of the past and for the survival of specific knowledgeof the past in different groups. To borrow Antonio Gramsci’s conceptof 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 hegemonicposition in people’s memory is constantly challenged by rival and oppo-sitional interpretations (1971, pp. 351–70). People’s knowledge and theirbehaviour are subjected to and disciplined by the interpretative limita-tions cultural memory imposes. Their knowledge about the past and thefeeling of all-encompassing consent places individuals within a specificcollectivity. Offering a sense of certainty, safety and the continuity ofexistence, ‘the culture of memory’ (Matsuda in Hutton, 1997, p. 385)thus produced includes a network of power and knowledge that shapesimages of the past and of the present.

Documentaries and the struggle for memory

In recent years, passionate political conflicts and public debates aboutthe meaning of the past for modern Slovenia started flourishing anddividing the Slovenian public, politically and culturally. Slovenianmedia have become flooded with history, both recent and ancient. Onthe one hand, there appears a strong need to invent ancient Slove-nian roots. On the other hand, there is a strong need to differentiateSlovenia from Yugoslavia and the Balkans, by rewriting the fifty years ofcommon Yugoslav history and reinterpreting the socialist period. Partic-ularly important is the powerful, politically motivated need to redefinethe roles of the antifascist Liberation Front involving the resistant Par-tisans versus the collaborating Home Guards during the Second World


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War.2 A number of cultural representations try to reshape the meaningof the Second World War in Slovenia – now offering a directly opposite,but no less extreme, view of the good and bad sides. During the socialistperiod in common Yugoslavia, the Liberation Front and the Partisanswere one of the most important signifiers of Yugoslav brotherhood andunity, always represented as heroes, while the Home Guards were foreverdepicted as villains or simply not mentioned at all. In contemporarydebates, the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies’ have shifted position. Suchone-sided interpretations of history, allowing neither ambiguity norplurality, bring about radical transformations of people’s memories. AsFarrel Corcoran maintains, the unstable conditions and non-consensualinterests in divided societies form a perfect laboratory for analysing therelationship between cultural representations and political power in thestructuring of memory (2002, p. 63). Specific memories are selected,controlled, instrumentalized, and legitimized within the public con-sciousness in order to generate a public consensus and build a coherentideological identity.

In the following pages, I will analyse three documentary films pro-duced in Slovenia after 1991 that try to establish a new agenda forremembering and forgetting. Through their treatment of the Slovenianpast, these films enable us to observe major shifts in Slovenian cul-tural memory that are also present in the broader public discourse andpolitical debates. The first film, Ko potrka vojna [When War Knocks atthe Door] (Bogdan Mrovlje, 2002), focuses on the ten-day independencewar fought in Slovenia against the Yugoslav People’s Army in 1991. Thesecond film, Zamolcani – moc preživetja [Concealed – the Power of Sur-vival] (Jože Možina, 2004), concentrates on the partisan killings of theHome Guards during the Second World War and the ensuing communisttotalitarian regime. The third film, Backup: Slovenska beseda na Koroškem[Backup: The Slovenian Word in Carinthia] (Miha Dolinšek, 1995), goesfurther back into the past and presents a story of the development of theSlovenian nation from ancient and medieval times onwards. It examinesthe ancient roots of Slovenia and characterizes Carinthia, which is todaypart of neighbouring Austria, as the cradle of Slovenianness and the lostSlovenian land.3

The three documentaries operate as technologies of memory.Although the films offer selected images of the past, the documentaryas a genre is perceived as factual programming that provides authen-tic images of the past and not as fiction. Media genre conventionsdefine 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 asauthentic representations of the past rather than wilful constructionsof history. The arguments of Susan Sontag (2001) and Roland Barthes(2000) in relation to photography can equally be applied to documen-tary film; it too addresses viewers with a certain authoritative voice ofauthenticity and objectivity, and it offers an illusion of reality, as if wewere just watching a mirror reflecting the past. The documentary oftenachieves this aim by using techniques that are characteristic of fictionalgenres, such as special uses of cameras and editing, computer-based post-production and even acted-out scenes. The documentary today borrowstechniques from TV news production, the fiction film industry andprime-time entertainment dramatic storytelling.

Aesthetics of documentaries: picturing the past

In order to get a better insight into the functioning of aesthetics as a wayof redefining the past in these documentaries, we can identify specificdiscursive strategies, narrative techniques and semantic regimes. One ofthe most important features is the narrative structure. The three docu-mentaries offer apparently very simple and clear stories about the past.When War Knocks at the Door tells a vivid story about the birth of theSlovenian nation state, which emerged in blood through victory in the1991 independence war. Concealed presents a self-evident story aboutthe Partisans who slaughtered people en masse during the Second WorldWar and about all communists as tyrants and murderers. Backup featuresan obvious story about the more than one-thousand-year existence ofSlovenia as a nation and its millennial oppression by Germans and Aus-trians. This film especially puts in the picture the foundational mythof the origin of Slovenia in the state of Karantanija – the mythologizedeighth-century state-like formation located on the territory of today’sAustrian Carinthia. These simplified accounts of the past constitute notonly an entirely new way of interpreting the past, but also embody thecurrent anxieties and priorities of Slovenian society.

The present tense is the grammatical imperative in these documen-taries, while the lack of a past tense puts emphasis on those past eventsthat are most relevant from the present perspective. This confirms SteveAnderson’s thesis that media representations of the past are mostly usedfor 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


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part constructs the culmination, and the solution offers the moral ofthe story.

Concealed, for example, starts with a specific melodramatic dra-maturgy in which an older woman searches for the grave of her slainparents in a forest, and closes with a scene in which she finds theirgrave and breaks down in tears. The film clearly aims to arouse an emo-tional response from its viewers. This is confirmed by the reaction ofthe historian who is presented as an authentic and neutral voice in thestory, but who also breaks down in tears when the camera zooms in onthe ‘evidence’ – the excavated victims’ bones – in his hand. The plotincludes 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 rep-resented very one-sidedly, only to confirm the dominant story of theinnocent victims and the guilt of their executioners. The narration ofthe documentary has a simple and comprehensible structure under-scoring the moral of the story: there is a problem and a solution, andbetween them there is the cause. The film thus provides an implicitjustification of who is bad and who is good. When War Knocks at theDoor also establishes a particular relationship between the different per-sonal testimonies of the soldiers who fought on the Slovenian side,through a number of shots of military arsenals and newspaper imagesof ruined houses, bridges and roads from the 1991 war. Personal tes-timonies are foregrounded and form the essence of the story, just asin Concealed.

The emphasis on the personal stories confirms and legitimizes thebroader interpretative framework of the documentaries. Viewers of suchhistorical drama documentaries enter the past through a melodramaticstructure and individual testimonies, which are narrated from a specificpoint of view. Since viewers are emotionally touched, they can easilyidentify with the actors of the represented past. Narrative techniquesand discursive strategies grant strong symbolic meanings to these pastevents, which are narrated only by those who have the privilege to havea voice in these documentaries. All other voices that could construc-tively contribute to understanding the complex and multidimensionalcontexts of the past are silenced. We hear voices of Slovenian soldiersbut not of Yugoslav soldiers, voices of victims of the Home Guards butnone of the Partisans, voices of the historians who support this kindof interpretation of the Second World War, but not of those historianswho support other interpretations. It is painfully clear that the threedocumentaries 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 currentSlovenian society.

The documentaries are also based on a linear narrative structure: pastworlds are presented in a straightforward manner with clear causesand consequences. In Backup, for example, there is a chronologicaloverview of the collective development of Slovenians since ancienttimes, through Karantanija in the eighth century to independent Slove-nia in the 1990s. Yet, whole eras are left out, including the fifty years ofsocialist Yugoslavia. The films thus select, emphasize, and incorporatespecific events within a coherent story, while excluding other importanthistorical events and episodes. In Concealed, the Partisans and commu-nists are persistently represented as the cause of all the evil that befell thepeople after the war. Such narrow, not to say bigoted, chronological andlinear narratives obscure historical complexities. Although the story attimes skips a few decades or centuries, the audience may not notice thisbecause of the compelling linear flow of the narrative structure. Mak-ing the gaps unnoticeable and unimportant, the documentaries thussmooth over any inconsistencies.

The selection of topics in documentaries likewise shapes people’s per-ceptions of the past in a specific way. It is particularly disturbing tosee how selected topics and past events reproduce and legitimate cer-tain myths about the Slovenian past. Backup puts forward the image ofa modest and constantly endangered Slovenian language and culture,threatened first by the Ottomans and later by the Germans and Austri-ans. The stories of offensive and aggressive Others are played over andover again, but the film fails to mention that in the six hundred yearsof the Habsburg Empire the sense of an imagined Slovenian communityonly came to the fore in the final seventy years. Instead, this period isrepresented as six hundred years of repression of Slovenia. The empha-sis on the mythologized democratic inauguration of the Slovenian dukesin Karantanija introduces the dichotomy between an ancient Sloveniandemocracy versus German and Austrian dictatorship.

In Concealed, the Partisan killings of the Home Guards during the warare highlighted and equated to the communist revolutionary move-ment, while the broader contexts of the Second World War or Nazicrimes are left unmentioned. The documentary exclusively presents thestories of those Home Guards who were killed, and not of those whowere persecuted, brought to court or fled to other countries. This isa way of conveniently ignoring the Home Guards’ collaboration withthe Germans, because there are no voices to answer unpleasant ques-tions about that collaboration. A similar manipulation is employed in


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When War Knocks at the Door, where the ten-day independence warof Slovenia is glorified. The Balkan threats are stressed by referring to‘Yugonostalgics’, ‘aggressive’ Serbs, and the demonised Chetniks – eventhough these were, in fact, never involved in combat in Slovenia. OtherYugoslav republics and their complex roles and situations in the war arewholly absent; there is no reference to the shared Yugoslav history.

The linguistic level of the story is equally important: how is thenarrative verbalized, what register of language is chosen, and how arethe events and people described? In Concealed, the slain Home Guardsare persistently referred to as ‘civilians’ or ‘victims’. In some cases, itis not clearly indicated that they were organized military groups whocollaborated with the German army and worked against the Partisans.The Partisans, on the other hand, are discredited at the verbal level asthey are dehumanized and demonized through the repetition of wordssuch as slaughterers, criminals, murderers or communist revolutionar-ies. Such a choice of language selectively ascribes collective guilt to onegroup only. The entire Partisan movement is equated to a poorly definedcommunism, which is effectively criminalized because it is left un-discussed. The historian who narrates the documentary actually likensthe Liberation Front and the Communist regime to the Nazi regime andthus presents the Partisans as Nazi-like criminals. At the same time, theHome Guards are presented as true Slovenians who fought against com-munism. Their collaboration with and their fight for the Nazi regime isconveniently left out of the picture.

The documentary uses the historian as an expert voice to legit-imize the story and provide professional credibility to this particularview. Such expert voices of authoritative speakers are generally used inmedia discourse to give credibility to a story, as they are in the gen-res of news and documentary. John Hartley refers to them as ‘accessedvoices’ that are subordinated to the structure of the story, whichimplies 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 militaryand war vocabulary, creating the image of a bloody struggle. Throughthe repeated use of such rhetoric, Slovenia is presented as a real nationborn out of war and struggle. Such language calls on the viewers toidentify with the images of their brave fellow Slovenians. The narrator’sphrases such as ‘All Slovenians stood on the same side. Everybody co-operated in that war’, subjects the viewers to easily identifiable collectivenational positions, even though most Slovenians did not have much


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direct experience of that war and participated in it mostly as distancedviewers, filled with anxiety and fear.

In the documentaries, the narrator’s voice is usually male, suggest-ing a certain authority and determination, while the (rare) female voicereflects sensitivity and innocence. Inserts of female voices are employedto arouse emotions. In Backup, for example, a female voice is appliedto the gentle telling of old folktales and poems that are reinvented fornational purposes. Concealed uses female voices to read victims’ lettersto their families.

One of the most important signification systems in documentariesis their visual rhetoric, including editing, lighting, black and whiteor colour technique, camera angles, camera movements, slow-motionshots, acted scenes, and so on. Acted scenes depicting the past are par-ticularly persuasive ways of telling a story. When there is no authenticfootage of the past available, the producer can use actors to portray aspecific past event. These acted scenes are built into the story as if theywere authentic. Usually they are juxtaposed with shots of archival docu-ments or historical material objects, giving viewers the impression thatthey are really watching the past, in this case true national heroes ofSlovenian history. Backup uses many acted scenes picturing the ancientand medieval past by using both black and white and colour shots. Theuse of both techniques and the insertion of still photographs into thestory is a common way of giving additional credibility to a story. Visualrhetoric pulls viewers into the story and therefore into the past. It pro-duces an effect of reality, since it creates the illusion that the picture ismerely a window through which we are looking at the past.

Visual images also have the potential to provoke strong feelings – forexample, the regular use of close-ups or extreme close-up shots whenpeople present their personal testimonies in visible pain or tears. In Con-cealed, 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 closeto the spectator, calling for sympathetic identification. It enables view-ers to choose sides, although their compassion concerns the survivingrelatives and not necessarily the dead Home Guards.

One final technique that I want to discuss is the soundtrack. Thereis increased pleasure in consuming visual images together with appro-priate sounds or music. Sound effects and music create a suitableatmosphere and help people to reveal their emotions as individualsand as audiences (Frith, 1986, pp. 68–9). The pleasure in music, whichpre-eminently signals the characters’ emotions and offers viewers a


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direct emotional experience, is then simultaneously individualized andshared. Music can construct the cinematic world; it is a source of atmo-sphere and can thus convey the emotional significance of a specificscene. Sound and music are commonly used to emphasize emotions,to stir up fear, horror, compassion, pity or disgust. The soundtrack alsohelps to confirm the interpretation that the story offers.

In Backup, the audience hears the shattering of glass, the barking of adog, the sounds of owls and thunder when the film tells about Germansand Austrians or about the unjust setting of the Slovenian-Austrian bor-der after the First World War. The documentary Concealed systematicallyuses horror and scary music in the background when the victims’ rel-atives talk about the Partisans’ killing of Home Guards, or about thePartisans and communism in general. In When War Knocks at the Doorcarefully selected melancholic and slow Slovenian pop-music tunes arerepeated throughout the whole film, glorifying the young Sloveniansoldiers who fought in the independence war.

The many different narrative and audiovisual techniques and discur-sive strategies that I have discussed effectually structure the viewers’perceptions of the represented past. In this regard, the cinematic cre-ates strong symbolic meanings of past events. The narrative style ofdocumentaries may be highly poetic, yet the aesthetics do have polit-ical effects. As we have seen, the films tell stories about the past that arebuilt 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 badcommunist Partisans and their innocent victims, including the HomeGuards. In When War Knocks at the Door, glorifying representations ofthe defence and resistance of brave Slovenian soldiers are contrastedwith representations of an aggressive Yugoslav army. In Backup, modestand humble Slovenians are antagonistically opposed to greedy Germansand Austrians.

The actors in the story not only signify but also personify specificpast events. In all three documentaries, Slovenian history is presentedas a collection of personal dramas between protagonists and antago-nists. Above all, the privileging of close-up shots and the use of thepresent time produce an illusion of ‘being there’. Documentaries informviewers about the past, but also produce a reality effect making thespectator experience the past as the present. The problematic aspecthere is that those three films interpret social, political and cultural mat-ters through personal testimonies, while the broader context is sorelymissing.


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Ideologies of documentaries: rewriting the past

The selected documentaries depict a new agenda of historical eventsand build a new mythical image of Slovenia’s past. They evidence thethree main shifts or changes in the reinterpretation of Slovenia’s pastthat are a part of contemporary media and other cultural discourses inSlovenia. First, since the 1990s, Slovenia favours a strong focus on con-temporary history, especially in its glorification of the ten-day war forSlovenia’s independence in 1991. In the documentary When War Knocksat the Door, the war is turned into a myth to be preserved in the cul-tural memory of the nation. The birth of a nation is usually seen as oneinvolving struggle and blood; when this is not actually the case, it canbe invented as such through various cultural texts. When War Knocksat the Door contains all the characteristics of war discourses; it buildson chauvinistic and macho discourses masculinizing the war, the past,and the nation. The bodies of the young Slovenian men who were sol-diers 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. Theirmasculinity is also put forward through images of their children anddescendants. The message of such storytelling is that the nation is strongenough to survive. Yet, death is also glorified and dramatized as a sacri-fice committed in the name of the nation. Although the documentaryshows no dead bodies, death is present at the verbal level through therepeated mentioning of the number of casualties in this war. The war ispresented as a worthy myth to be remembered by the audience.

The second significant – and possibly the most aggressive – ideo-logical turn can be observed in the redefinition of the Second WorldWar. The role reversal between the formerly good but now bad Parti-sans and National Liberation Front, and the formerly bad but now goodHome Guards is particularly disturbing. Also the redefinition of Slove-nia’s relations with Yugoslavia, and the erasure of the socialist period,reveals a new, problematic ideology. The Partisans and the Second WorldWar, important signifiers of the brotherhood and unity of all Yugoslavnations during the 1945 to 1990 period, are now facing a redefinition forthe new purposes of Slovenia’s ruling right-wing politics. The mythifica-tion, dehumanization, and demonization of the Partisans are part of theestablishment of a new regime of ‘truth’. The Partisans are representedinequitably as radical and ruthless communist revolutionaries, not asmembers of the Liberation Front who fought against Nazi occupiers. Asa matter of fact, most Partisans were never members of the Communist


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Party. This false representation equates the Liberation Front with thecrimes of the communist regime, while the Nazi regime is concealedand the collaborating Home Guards are sympathetically characterizedas sensitive patriots, acquitted of Nazi collaboration. Such representa-tions push the cultural memory of Slovenian people through significantchanges and introduce the historiography of oblivion.

The purpose of this kind of historiography is not simply to reviseunderstandings of the past, but to obliterate the memory of certainevents from public consciousness (Morris-Suzuki, 2005, p. 7). The doc-umentaries achieve their goal by shifting the public discussion andhistorical interest away from the bigger picture (the atrocities of the Sec-ond World War, the Holocaust) towards a rather narrow view (Partisancrimes, slain Home Guards). The films refuse to set the story within thebroader historical context of the Second World War and its aftermath,and subject a small number of selected facts and figures to sustainedcritical scrutiny. The social amnesia, to borrow Andreas Huyssen’s term(2003, p. 6), that these documentaries produce and foster is too exten-sive to be ignored. It can have serious consequences for opening orclosing public debates. It will also have a formative effect on culturalmemory. The documentaries promote a new politics of truth that rear-ranges past events to justify the current situation and legitimize dubiouspolitical actions. The present political and cultural alliances withinSlovenian society are produced on the basis of this reinterpretation andreconstruction of cultural memory.

The third significant shift in the revisionist Slovenian historiogra-phy is the glorification of Slovenia’s ancient history, by focusing onthe ancient – imagined – origins of Slovenians and by presupposing alinear development from a tribe to a nation. The documentary Backupreintroduces all these topics. It produces a foundational myth by grosslyoverrating certain interpretations of Slovenia’s origin. The mythologicalKarantanija as an ancient Slovenian state is turned into a national myth,which is today stressed much more than it used to be during the periodof Yugoslavia. The film reinvents folk traditions and stories about thepast, which are to be remembered as originally Slovenian, producing afalse sense of an indigenous ‘national species’.

Conclusion

As technologies of memory, documentaries reproduce and sustain thedominant discursive order in Slovenia and accordingly try to recon-struct 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 cometo occupy hegemonic positions in recent years. In Slovenian society,there are still many unresolved issues, which encourage growing par-tial interests to redefine certain past eras and events. There are strongimpulses to rewrite history and to reorganize Slovenian cultural mem-ory. The agents of such mnemonic change are manifold and reveal theinterplay of many motives.

Concealed designates the aspirations of the Slovenian Roman CatholicChurch and the descendants of the Home Guards who after the SecondWorld War emigrated mostly to South America. Both parties attemptto claim property confiscated by the communist regime. By equatingcommunism with Nazism and the Partisans with criminals, both agentsare trying to relativize their collaboration with the Nazi regime and jus-tify their claims to the property that in their eyes was confiscated by acriminal regime.

In When War Knocks at the Door, the aspirations of both theseparties are accompanied by the aspirations of those Slovenians whofeel uncomfortable with the socialist Yugoslav past. They emphasizethe European character of Slovenia because the transition to capi-talism gave them the opportunity to acquire material wealth. Thethird documentary, Backup, includes the aspirations of the majorityof Slovenians who feel a need to have a place in the history of greatnations, to be recognized, respected and admired for the ancient demo-cratic principles introduced by their mythological ancestors, and tobe included in the European family on equal grounds to any othernation.

The conglomerate of all these aspirations provides fuel for themnemonic change and the urge to build a new national history, oneoriginal and magnificent enough for its citizens to be proud of. Inthis sense, the change of cultural memory confirms Eric Hobsbawm’sidea of history as the raw material for nationalist ideologies (1993,pp. 7, 13). History can be mobilized to support a specific image of anational identity or a particular political regime. For such purposes, newsymbols and sites of memory have to be erected. Once such reinter-pretations of the past firmly enter the cultural memory, they come topass for reality and start restructuring present identities. Documentaryfilms have the power to disseminate a particular historical conscious-ness and to privilege certain memories over others. They have thepower to connect people passionately with the past, by bringing themnot just interpretations of the past but also drama, entertainment andpleasure.


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Notes

1. Historically, the Republic of Slovenia, with approximately two million inhabi-tants, is closely connected to the broader area of the Balkans. After the downfallof the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Slovenia joined the coalition of Serbia andCroatia, and in 1918 a new state was formed – The Kingdom of Serbs, Croatsand Slovenians. After the Second World War, Slovenia became part of the newsocialist state of Yugoslavia. In the late 1980s, Yugoslavia was flooded withethnic nationalisms. The gap between the different discursive structures in theYugoslav republics was growing bigger, and the ideology of brotherhood andunity of all Yugoslav nations was no longer enough to prevent the downfall ofYugoslavia and the establishment of an independent Republic of Slovenia in1991.

2. During the Second World War in Slovenia, counter-revolutionary military,political or intelligence services and organizations appeared, which collabo-rated with the occupying German and Italian armies. The best organized wasSlovensko domobranstvo (Slovenian Home Guards/Slowenische Landeswehr),which was established by the German administration in September 1943 afterthe Italian surrender. Domobranci were armed, paid, and equipped by NaziGermans, and their numbers grew over the years. After the Second WorldWar, many members of Home Guards squads fled from Slovenia, but a signif-icant number were captured by foreign liberation armies. Some of these werereturned to Slovenia, while others escaped to Latin America or other parts ofthe world. Those who were returned were persecuted, brought to court or killedby the then Yugoslav communist authorities.

3. The province of Carinthia has been divided since 1920 between three nationstates: Slovenia, Austria and Italy. A major part became a federal Austrianprovince; a smaller southern part became part of Yugoslavia/Slovenia, whilea small part was annexed to Italy. A substantial part of the Slovenian-speakingpopulation that lives in Austrian Carinthia is characterized as a Slovenianminority. Accordingly, images of Carinthia as ‘a grief of Slovenia’ and ‘thelost Slovenian land’ have been dominating Slovenian people’s perceptions ofCarinthia for decades.


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12Impossible Histories: Violence,Identity, and Memory inColombian Visual ArtsMarta Cabrera

Selective memories cannot be avoided, but they can becounteracted.

(Davies, 1995, p. 11)

With the seemingly over-pessimistic title ‘Impossible Histories’, I refer toa particular condition present in Colombian culture, where the ‘forest’of narratives of violence cannot be incorporated into a historical nar-ration, one capable of making sense of such violence. As I will argue,this is caused by a complex weaving of memory and oblivion, visibil-ity and invisibility regarding the issue of violence. Violence is centralin the production of collective identity, as the past is punctuated byviolent events often followed by veils of official oblivion (Pécaut, 2003;Sánchez, 2003).

In Colombia, violence is highly visible in a number of spaces: fromacademia to mass media, from literature and the visual arts to theambiguous space of rumour. Yet, there is an evident lack of monuments,public rituals and commemorations to remember violence, to the pointthat the State’s obligation to build a monument in memory of the vic-tims of a 1987 paramilitary massacre is more a matter of punishmentthan a perceived need to commemorate. Because of this absence of for-mal remembering of violence, the spaces of art play a key role in thearticulation of the multiple narratives of violence. They have, however,ended up constructing a ‘dense forest with deceptively homogeneouscontours’ (Coronil and Skurski, 1991, p. 333).

Indeed, the Colombian historical imagination appears as circular; thecivil wars of the nineteenth century seem to have prolonged themselvesinto the twentieth, in the bloody bipartisan confrontation known asthe 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 1963study states, this confrontation ‘echoes’ in the subsequent wave of vio-lence, 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 Partyleader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, unleashed a violent riot known as El Bogo-tazo and is well inscribed in collective memory through images andnarratives dealing with the massacres, and the horrendous tortures anddismembering of bodies that characterized it. La Violencia ended withthe so-called Frente Nacional [National Front], a political strategy basedon the alternation of the presidency between the Liberal and Conser-vative parties every four years, over a period of sixteen years. Whileorder was restored and general amnesties and official pardons weregranted, power sharing produced more exclusion, providing the groundsfor the creation and strengthening of guerrilla groups. The tradition ofpardon and oblivion failed to provide a real closure to the traumaticevent, as people were supposed to simply ‘forget’ what happened. AsDaniel Pécaut (2001) argues, the difficulty in differentiating rests onthe frequency of the episodes, which makes them appear as continu-ous, thus making the processes of social construction of memory evenharder.

While the visual arts of the 1950s and 1960s, testimonial in somecases, mostly relied on realism and figuration in their denunciation ofthe horrors of La Violencia, since the 1990s there appears to have beena turn in representation, evidenced by an interest in moving beyondthis realm of unambiguous images as well as in interrogating the roleof images and narratives of violence in the construction of Colom-bian cultural memory. German Egyptologist Jan Assman’s notion ofcultural memory is useful in analysing such a turn. As he argues, culturalmemory is characterized as

compris[ing] that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specificto each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilizeand convey that society’s self-image. Upon such collective knowl-edge, for the most part (but not exclusively) of the past, each groupbases its awareness of unity and particularity (1995, p. 132).

Following Assman, cultural memory is characterized by: first, its powerto provide a group with a concrete identity by tracing boundaries ofidentity; second, by reconstructing traces of the past that are signifi-cant in the present; third, by working on a stable formation of collective


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Violence, Identity and Memory in Colombian Visual Arts 205

meaning and knowledge; fourth, by organizing common knowledge;and fifth, by creating a hierarchical system of values structuring knowl-edge and; finally, by its self-reflexivity.

The visual arts of the 1990s can be seen to play an important rolewithin the realm of cultural memory by interrogating the archive of vio-lent images and narratives (as much as its omissions and blind spots),the rituals of amnesty and official oblivion, as well as the cultural back-ground of Catholicism and race and class hierarchies and their role inthe production of the notion of natural, cyclical violence in Colom-bia. The attention to issues of suppression and forgetting runs parallelwith the rise of a globalized discursive formation dealing with issuesof memory, trauma and commemoration (Huyssen, 2000). It is alsoconcomitant with the domestic situation becoming considerably morecomplex, with drug trafficking and paramilitarism completing the sceneof a ‘four-army confrontation’: guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug traffickersand the National Army (Martín-Barbero, 1998).

The strategies employed by the visual arts in this period seek to dealwith a repository of images and narratives of horror and death as wellas with a need to bring traumatic events into the phantom publicsphere. Yet because they install violence as natural and constant, theyalso hinder discussion and analysis, relegating the task of mourning tothe private sphere. As a result, it not only leaves society without valu-able resources in its construction of shared memory, but also doublesviolence ‘in the act of terror and in the repression of bereavement’(Feldman, 2004, p. 183). The labour of visual representation has animportant function in breaking the commonsense understanding ofterror present in cultural memory as cyclical, endless, unmotivated,ubiquitous, present in daily life as much as in the memory of the past, asif it were a living force or an explanation for everything (Taussig, 1992,p. 19): ‘violence drew the peasants’, ‘violence came’, ‘violence displacedpeople’, and so forth (Sánchez, 2003, p. 53). In this respect, Colombiaseems to be slowly burning in the furnaces of a low-intensity conflict.

In what follows, I explore the ways in which visual arts can functionas a technology of memory to open spaces of negotiation between pri-vate and public, memorializing and forgetting. To do so, I discuss threeinstances of the contemporary visual arts in Colombia, all dealing withissues of memory, commemoration and violence, by well-known con-temporary Colombian artists exhibiting both domestically and abroad –a choice made on the basis that this symbolic production is key increating a certain collective image of the Colombian nation at homeand abroad.


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My starting point is the work of photographer and video artist JuanManuel Echavarría, which illustrates some of the difficulties of dealingwith issues of violence. I argue that, despite the undeniable power of thesome of his images, they are still unable to disengage from the represen-tational dynamics articulating narratives of cyclical, unending violence.Next, video artist José Alejandro Restrepo’s work Musa Paradisiaca is dis-cussed as an exploration of the power of mythical images in legitimizingdifferent forms of violence situated in the same space, although set apartin time. This work in particular seems effective in investigating the con-texts of violence and differentiating its forms, breaking away from thenotion of violence as an uninterrupted and undifferentiated line thattraverses Colombian history. Finally, the works of sculptor Doris Salcedodealing with the 1985 events at the Palace of Justice in Bogotá attest tothe imperative of bringing into public consciousness a tragedy that stilllacks closure.

Imagining violence

The work of photographer and video artist Juan Manuel Echavarríadealing with contemporary political violence in Colombia is sober andprovocative; it is also problematic in its association of image and mean-ing in a rather restricted fashion. His work Retratos [Portraits] (1996)illustrates this point. Composed of a series of black and white pho-tographs of dilapidated mannequins on the sidewalk, Portraits associatesviolence and indifference: ‘When I found them – tortured, destroyedand marked by violence . . . and saw how people looked at the clotheswithout 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 man-nequins into floating signifiers separated from the specificity of theirsituation. In consequence, the photographs of the dolls are only capa-ble of referring to decadence and mutilation in an abstract way. Theimages are recodified through a series of statements: the title Portraitsrefers not only to human beings and the local reference, but also theartist’s comments, and the mannequins as obvious stand-ins for thehuman body. All this comes to signify the omnipresence of violenceexerted 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 ofobvious manipulation, produces metaphors within the linguistic andcultural conventions embedded in Colombian culture, where the notion


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of circular, omnipresent violence persists. The same can be argued forthe series of black and white photographs called El Testigo [The Witness](1997). In one of these pictures, an emaciated white horse stares at theviewer from a solitary landscape. In another, a calf’s eye in close-up con-fronts the camera lens. Animals here are clearly stand-ins for humanbeings, and the preferred reading is once again violence incarnated inthe ever-present massacre: ‘In order to kill one must reduce the otherto an animal’, Echavarría explains. ‘Sometimes the victims of Colom-bian massacres, such as Mapiripán, have been taken by their aggressorsto the public slaughter house. This I mention because the look in thecalf’s eye is very perturbing. It is as if it had registered the horror left bya massacre’ (quoted in Herzog, 2004, pp. 197–8).

Mapiripán, a coca-growing village in southeastern Colombia, was thebackground for a horrendous massacre that occurred from 15–20 July1997. It was committed by the paramilitary group United Self-DefenseForces of Colombia (AUC), which took over the village for the durationof the massacre and tortured and killed at least thirty people. The casebecame especially notorious when it became known that the Colombianarmy was implicated in the killings. Eventually, the Colombian state wascondemned for it by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2005.

While an analogy between the slaughtering of animals and that ofhuman beings might have been accurate and possibly effective in thecase of Mapiripán, Echavarría’s El Testigo limits itself to establishing aconnection between the wide-open eye of the calf and an unseen inci-dent of violence – the reference to a real-life event was added a posterioriby the artist in an interview with curator Hans-Michel Herzog. My argu-ment, then, is that the evasion of an engagement with specific incidentsof violence is very problematic in the Colombian context because ter-ror is endowed with nearly supernatural qualities. As a result of thenumerous incidents of violence that have no apparent resolution andthat articulate collective memory into narratives of circular violence, itis everywhere and anywhere as if it were a magical force or a ghostlysubstance that circulates through objects, persons and animals alike. ElTestigo refers to this ominous, constant presence of violence, to hover-ing, unseen threats. Surely, nothing is more terrifying than an invisiblemenace. Yet in this understanding of violence and terror, the identity ofboth victims and perpetrators is dissolved, and further interrogation oreven accountability is precluded.

Echavarría’s metonymical construction of the hypothetical event ofviolence in El Testigo as a massacre is quite significant; it points to theimportance and visibility of this occurrence in narratives of violence


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in Colombia since the time of La Violencia. Massacres are also relevantin their positing of the punished body as site of both violence andmemorializing, as Allen Feldman (1991) has noted. According to Feld-man, in sacrificial models of memory-formation, the body becomes thesite where conflicting political forces publicly display domination andpower, but it also becomes a site of remembrance – through its deface-ment and mutilation. Although Feldman’s example is Northern Ireland,the same dynamics of spectacularity and memorializing can be observedin the Colombian case, as María Victoria Uribe notes:

So transformed [after mutilation], the corpses were displayed inhighly visible places, so that neighbors and the authorities could findthem easily. The bodies of murdered persons became terrifying alter-ities, pedagogical and exemplifying texts that always achieved theirobjective: to frighten the local inhabitants away from the area, theirhouses, and their livestock (2004, p. 89).

More recently, Echavarría has shifted strategies, moving away frommetaphor and metonymy towards the testimonial, as in the video Bocasde Ceniza [Mouths of Ash] (2000). The title is a reference to the historyof colonization, as the Spaniards named the mouth of the MagdalenaRiver thus, having arrived there on Ash Wednesday. Again, a narrativeof 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 thatviolence began with the conquest. The artist’s views on the violentconnotations of the place rely as well on a generalized view of violence:

A lot of bodies are thrown into rivers to make them disappear. Thou-sands of bodies upon which violence has been exercised have beendragged by this country’s rivers during the last fifty years, and in myimagination I always see the corpses floating as far as the mouth ofthe Magdalena River which is were Colombian water flows into theCaribbean (Echavarría, quoted in Herzog, 2004, p. 189).

Bocas de Ceniza, however, does not refer to the topic of the imagina-tion of terror centred on the geographical space of Bocas de Ceniza, noris it related to the location alluded to in the title, nor the history of theplace, 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 songsin Afro-Colombian traditional fashion about what happened to them,what they saw, or how they survived. The videos are sober, framed bythe video screen, with no background information provided (besidesthe first name of the singer) and limited to close-ups of the singers thatfocus on the expression of their eyes – ‘I need those eyes,’ Echevarría isquoted 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 withthe position of the camera, become implicated in an emotional dramawith the characters onscreen (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996; Walker andChaplin, 2002). The choice of close-ups conveys proximity, staging animaginary relation between the viewer and the viewed (Kress and vanLeeuwen, 1996, p. 134). This formal composition, coupled with thesubject-matter, has made this a widely celebrated work – moving andcompelling.

Bocas de Ceniza, however, is problematic in its avoidance of more con-textualized narratives. It relies on the testimonies of the victims as asource of reality and legitimacy that acts as if no frames of reference wereneeded – the same dynamics of representation employed in Colombiantelevision news. Representation and reality are thus equated, naturaliz-ing images as if they had not been subjected to editing decisions. Thisis indeed naïvely imagined by the artist: ‘I have just been a mediumthrough which others can express themselves’ (Echevarría, quoted inHerzog, 2004, p. 193). The singers, in fact, do not need the mediumthe artist offers, because their songs are expressly destined for the publicsphere, meant to be sung in concerts and festivals or gatherings. Whatthis work actually does is take the singers out of their communal, per-formative context and place them in the space of the museum for theirconsecration as ‘art works’, as an ‘authentic’ representation of the realityof Colombian violence.

The singers, surrounded by a halo of Otherness and exoticism, allbelong to a racial minority, one that has been repeatedly victimized, inthe past and in recent years. They sing, with a mixture of performanceand pleasure, about their horrendous experiences in a way reminiscentof medieval troubadours, thus offering an authentic social memory, pro-viding the viewer with ‘A Taste of the Pain of the Other’, which was therather unfortunate title of a group exhibition featuring Mouth of Ash.2

As is the case with other cultural artefacts such as documentariesand autobiographies featuring the act of witnessing, Mouth of Ash gravi-tates between a universalized understanding of terror and an emphatic,


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identificatory response. The universalizing tendency hinders deeperengagement 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 intopositions of hierarchical observation, compulsory visibility, and non-reciprocal appropriation of the body in pain. It displays simultaneouslyboth 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 havenot been articulated (or only partially) in collective memory is Doris Sal-cedo’s work on the 1985 events at the Palace of Justice. On 6 November1985, thirty-five members of the M-19 guerrilla group (born from feel-ings of frustration and exclusion originating in the allegedly fraudulentpresidential elections of 19 April 1970) took over the Palace of Justicein downtown Bogotá. Their hostages included the Supreme Court andthe people working in the building, as well as those running errandsthere that day. After twenty-eight hours and a military raid that includedartillery shelling which resulted in a raging fire that destroyed the build-ing, all of the rebels and eleven of the twenty-five Supreme CourtJustices were dead and at least eleven people disappeared, most of themcafeteria workers. The courthouse was entirely rebuilt four years later,and today, only a plaque with the names of the magistrates who diedin the siege reminds passers-by of the events of November 1985 – noother information is provided and no other victims are mentioned inthis rather invisible monument.

Surprisingly, the events disappeared from public memory, and morethan twenty years later, the final fate of some victims is still unknown.No one has ever been punished for the carnage, and no definite respon-sibility has been fixed either on the government, M-19, or on bothparties.3 The siege, however, began to receive renewed attention in 2005on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, when the Supreme Courtcreated a Truth Commission in order to restart the investigation, in anattempt to provide as much closure as possible to the tragic events. TheCommission officially began its work in November 2005 and deliveredpartial results, to general disappointment, in November 2006.

At the time the tragedy was taking place, sculptor Doris Salcedo wasreturning 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 pub-lic space relating to the events of 1985 with the aim of reinscribingthem in the public sphere. Thus, the titles of Salcedo’s installations 6de Noviembre [6 November] (2001) and Tenebrae Noviembre 7 1985 [Tene-brae 7 November 1985] (1999–2000), seek to transport the viewer to aprecise, tragic and nearly forgotten moment in the Colombian past. Herworks deal with this event with great economy of means. The work 6 deNoviembre, for instance, consists of thirteen chairs with elongated legs,cast from lead and steel, disseminated across the exhibition space asremnants of a tragedy, creating an area of chaos. It conveys not only thenotion of assault, but marks out a space of exclusion where the viewerstands on the threshold between the site of violence and everyday life.Similarly, Tenebrae Noviembre 7 1985 features tipped-over chairs withelongated legs positioned in the exhibition space blocking the accessof the public, barricade-like, positioning them as impotent bystanders –almost as witnesses.

Salcedo uses furniture as metonymical displacements to convey theabsence of those whose presence gave the objects their function. Nobodies are revealed in the perceptual space (based on invisibility, repre-senting a lack of power) that is created between the visible world andthe absence of those who have died. Loss, grief and mourning are themajor issues Salcedo seeks to address. Her work engages ‘with the con-cept of the monument or memorial, not as commemorative form of anevent but as a means of addressing the radical discontinuity between theevent and its experiencing, a form that bears witness to that which can-not be accounted for’ (Merewether, 1998, p. 17). The two works do notrepresent the event, but rather memorialize it, as did the 2002 commem-orative action, the ephemeral sculpture Noviembre 6 y 7 [November 6 and7]. Described by the artist as ‘a piece in permanent movement that tookplace over time’ (Herzog, 2004, p. 155), it consisted of 280 chairs quietlyand gradually appearing suspended from the walls of the rebuilt Palaceof Justice over two days, the actual time of the massacre. The first chairdescended quietly at 11:35am, marking the time of death of the firstvictim. The action was interrupted at 10pm on the first day, remindingthe viewers that the siege was interrupted for the night because a mas-sive fire hindered the operations. Both the attack and the action wereresumed the next day at 6am At 2pm, more chairs were lowered, albeitintermittently until 7pm, marking the last moments of the siege. Likeseventeen years earlier on that date, daily life had been disrupted, butthis time the disruption took place through an action memorializingnot only the incidence of violence, but its actual victims. In this case,


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the ephemeral quality of the piece marks the absence of closure of thehistorical event itself and the need to open a space for remembrance.

Salcedo’s works are simultaneously effective and failed technologiesof memory, occurring at an intersection between remembering and for-getting. 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 Colombianjustice system’ (Salcedo, 2003, p. 29), Salcedo is also aware of their lim-its: ‘This is what my work is about: Impotence, a sum of impotence, notbeing able to solve anything, or to fix a problem, not knowing, not see-ing, 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 theprivate and public spheres in a ritual of shared remembrance, generatinga ‘political space not only of commemoration but of an ethics based oncollective memory and continuity’ (Franco, 1985, p. 14).

Archaeology of violence

In contrast to Salcedo’s evocative pieces in which bodies remain con-cealed, in Musa Paradisiaca [Heavenly Muse] (1994–97), video artist JoséAlejandro Restrepo places side by side images from nineteenth-centuryEuropean travelogues describing the potentialities of the tropics andnews bulletins about massacres in Urabá (Colombia’s tropical banana-growing region). Restrepo employs these images not as repositories ofhistorical truth, but rather as forms of power, a power whose primarysource is myth – which entwines with history to the point of becominginseparable.

In other words, Musa Paradisiaca tries to act on memory by denat-uralizing images and reflecting on the way mythic images function inhistory, and how history in turn relies on mythic images. The goal isto trace continuities and discontinuities between forms of violence bymeans of an intertextual dialogue. The only commonality is the title ofthe work itself – Musa Paradisiaca (the scientific name for the commonbanana):

I began to weave together Linnaeus, Pliny the Elder, and what theArians called soma (the sacred spiritual food of the priests), with theexuberance of the plantain, together with Urabá, whose history has adifferent tone: that of uninterrupted massacres since 1928. I devotedmyself to gathering all the chronicles about war and banana planta-tions, not only in Urabá but also in the battles of the European Union


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

Indeed, all of these associations persist beyond the neocolonial nine-teenth 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 massacredby the Colombian army. The event is well inscribed in collectivememory, as Gabriel García Márquez retells it in One Hundred Yearsof Solitude (1967). In the 1960s, guerrilla movements infiltrated thebanana-workers’ unions. By the 1980s, the region was again the site ofviolent, collective death as a struggle for power between the guerrillasand paramilitary groups associated with the landowners erupted. Bothsides carried out killings of workers until the paramilitary, allied to thearmy, took control of the area in 1996.4

Restrepo articulated this complex weave formally in an installationthat features bunches of bananas, each one with a small televisionscreen attached to its lower end. A round mirror on the floor allows theviewer to see fragments of news bulletins from Urabá, as well as imagesof a nude couple in a luxuriant natural scene, simultaneously heavenand hell, surrounded by the forbidden fruit: the banana, the heavenlymuse. Upon subsequent visits, the viewer witnesses the slow decay ofthe bananas, which permeates the exhibition space with its smell. Thisprocess expresses at once the passing of time, decay and death. It asso-ciates the senses of the viewer with history and myth. In this way, MusaParadisiaca ultimately seeks to reveal different forms of violence coex-isting, sedimented, layer upon layer, in a single geographical space – areading of violence’s continuities and discontinuities that contributes tocrushing its apparent uniformity and circularity.

The dis/continuity revealed in the use of mixed images, narrativesand references reveal scepticism towards linear historical narratives,making Restrepo wonder if video art is capable of creating ‘a counter-memory, of liberating the forces of creative chance, the simultaneityand divergence of topics, partial trajectories and labile, new temporaland signifying structures that are closer to myth’ (Restrepo, quoted inPini, 2001, p. 118). In this sense, Musa Paradisiaca condenses and revis-its the multiple, often contradictory, codifications contained in imagesof a particular geographical space (Urabá). It interrogates the physicaland epistemological violence underlying past and present models ofprogress and productivity designed for the region, as well as the long-lasting narratives of natural and sexual abundance of the tropics, as


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

Visual arts as technologies of memory

Cultural memory, which is characterized by ‘its distance from the every-day’ (Assman, 1995, p. 129), is the product of representation more thandirect experience. In this sense, the notion of violence as articulating thecollective can be reworked through the patient interrogation of its texts,images and narratives, making memory a crucial tool in the determina-tion of societal responses to terror. The contemporary visual arts, in theirquality of technologies of memory (although not massively producedor circulated), are then capable of becoming a valuable counterpart toa monolithic understanding of terror and violence. It suffices for it toexplore the conditions of their production as characteristic of the sym-bolic order, as a weave of both private and official representations withinwhich a culture models its self-image (Harpham, 2002).

Undoubtedly, dealing with the entwining issues of violence, identityand memory is a difficult albeit necessary task where there is no simplesolution or clear closure, as I hope to have illustrated with the analysisof three works by Juan Manuel Echavarría. His work, its critical acclaimnotwithstanding, still carries within it many representational dynamicsrelating to the understanding of violence as natural and cyclical.

Violence, indeed, continues to be a defining force in Colombian col-lective memory. Yet appropriate spaces and means of commemoration,public rituals, and coherent historical narratives are still lacking. Nev-ertheless, I strongly believe that the visual arts can work with memoryin the construction of a historical narration that is capable of breakingwith the notion of the circularity of violence by showing the continu-ities and discontinuities of a painful history. Juan Alejandro Restrepo’sMusa Paradisiaca certainly illustrates this.

As part of a visual archive with links to cultural memory, art is alsocapable of exposing the local ways in which memory formation occurs.Art can open up spaces of commemoration for victims and painfulevents, thus enabling the long-delayed remembrance of violence in thecollective consciousness of Colombia. The works of Doris Salcedo seekto do this.

The situation in Colombia is increasingly becoming more complex,gradually involving larger parts of the population, and revealing newlayers of involvement by different social segments. Strenuous analysis istherefore becoming increasingly urgent. It shows the need to untangle


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

Notes

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 withher 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 hereyes, ‘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 thefate of the persons who survived the siege and left the building alive only todisappear after. Responsibility, in this case, has been placed on the military.

4. Today, the region produces most of the Colombian banana crop. The produc-tion is owned by multinationals such as Chiquita and Dole, as well as by locallandowners. Both multinational and domestic banana companies were men-tioned in May 2007 by jailed paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso as havingpaid paramilitary forces in exchange for their ‘security services’.


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March 19, 2009 16:18 MAC/TEEM Page-216 9780230_575677_19_bib01

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March 19, 2009 16:20 MAC/TEEM Page-232 9780230_575677_20_ind01

Index

Italic page numbers indicate illustrations

2046 (Wong) 63–56 de Noviembre (Salcedo) 2119/11 souvenirs 19–21, 27 see also

September 11, 2001

A Movie (Connor) 175–6absence, representing 210–12acted scenes, in documentary

films 197adolescence 126adults, definitions of childhood 129‘aesthetic of quotation’ 79aesthetic styles, memory technologies

18affect 53–4, 62–5, 66, 67affective association 185affective memories 145–7Ahmed, Sara 145Alina’s Funeral (Szapocznikow) 134,

141–5, 142Alphen, Ernst van 182American innocence, and tourism of

history 22–3amnesia 171Anderson, Steve 193Antze, Paul 9, 117Appiah, Kwame Anthony 8Arad, Michael 33–4, 36, 50archaeology of knowledge 191architecture

Berlin 34as re-enactment 29–339/11 32–40, 48, 50–1

archival films see compilation filmsarchival material, re-use of audiovisual

material 174Armstrong, Isobel 62art

ethical aspects 5as memory work 118political aspects 5

representations of pain 133–4staging of 47–8works as specific objects 42–3

‘Art and Objecthood’ (Fried) 47artists, use of archival material 177Assmann, Aleida 3, 9, 86, 189Assmann, Jan 3, 7, 89, 204association, affective 185

Bachelard, Gaston 121Backup: the Slovenian Word in Carinthia

(Dolinšek) 193, 195, 198, 201Baer, Ulrich 210Bakhtin, Mikhail 72Bal, Mieke 6, 89, 117, 134Barthes, Roland 193Baudrillard, Jean 6, 55Bauman, Zygmunt 101, 105, 106beholders see also viewers

space and time 48–50Bellour, Raymond 183Belsey, Catherine 72–3Bennett, Jill 62, 133, 134Berlin, use of architecture 34Bhabha, Homi 81biographical objects, identity and

personal memory 121–5Black Box (Smith) 41Blake and Mortimer

anxieties 76–7Belgium, in Blake and Mortimer

83–4cinematic sources 80Cold War 77, 80–3evocation of originals 84imperialism and colonialism 76–7Jacobs’s albums 75–9masculinity, threatened by the

feminine 78nature of reader’s pleasure 78rape myths 82

232


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Index 233

referential system, adjustment79–80

remakes 79–84representation of Britain 75–6resurrection 74–5rewriting colonial narrative 81–3sales 75satirical appropriation of style 79Sente and Juillard albums 80settings 83–4unconscious of the text 78Van Hamme and Benoît albums 80

Bocas de Ceniza (Echavarría) see Mouthsof Ash

bodyinside and outside 139–40as lieu de mémoire 138and national identity 199as site of violence and memorial

208space and temporality 143

Boltanski, Christian 120Braidotti, Rosi 64Brockmeier, Jens 53Bullock, Alan 161Bush, Vannevar 55

Cabrera, Marta 171Calinescu, Matei 23Calvino, Italo 182, 185cancer 143–4Carter, Angela 102Cassell, Eric 138, 143–4childhood

in American culture 126–31collective memory of 118

childhood artefacts 121–2, 125,126–8

children, changing societal view of128

cinema, about memory 17cinema spectatorship, as changing

180Citizen Kane (Welles) 127–8Cixous, Hélène 105class base, of taste 18close-ups, in documentary films 197codes 6Colebrook, Claire 54, 62, 65

collective memory 2, 3of childhood 118, 126–8and childhood artefacts 126–8childhood context 125documentaries of 171and toys 128–9

Colombiahistorical imagination 203–4Palace of Justice hostage taking

210violence 203visual arts and cultural memory

205colonial film footage, displacing

174–5colonial, meanings of term 91colonial memories, reconstructing

178–80, 184colonialism

re-use of audiovisual material 170represented as love affair 82subjectivities of 86in writings of Jean Rhys 91

comfort culture, teddy bears 21comic strips, recycling 5 see also

Blake & Mortimercommemoration, spatial practice

138commercialism 10commodification 74, 104compilation films 174–6,

184–5computers, as memory 54Concealed – the Power of Survival

(Možina) 193, 194, 195, 196,198, 201

Connor, Bruce 175–6consumption, of memories 105–7conventions 6Corcoran, Farrel 191–2corporeality, space and time 139cosmopolitanism 8counter-memory 71–2Coupe, Laurence 112crises of memory 15Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly

122, 126


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234 Index

cultural memory 3, 6–10defining 1–2, 189, 204–5and feminist re-vision 103globalising 2and minimalism 40reconstruction 200–1relationship to history 169revising in Wide Sargasso Sea 97–8role of visual arts 205within society 190

cultural re-enactment 29–34cyborgs 54

Dargaud 74David’s role playing games 124deconstuction 5Delbo, Charlotte 144–5Deleuze, Gilles 53–4, 62, 65, 66, 67,

145democratization, of history 71, 103,

105–6demythologizing, and

remythologizing 109derealization effect 6, 55–6Destination Culture

(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett) 8Dia:Beacon 40Didi-Huberman, Georges 177Die (Smith) 40–1, 43, 44–5, 48digital memory, in science fiction

films 52digital technology 17, 54digitalization 52, 53Dijck, José van 4, 6, 16, 55‘Discourse in the Novel’ (Bakhtin) 72discourses, surrounding images 164distancing, of childhood 127, 130–1documentary films see also Slovenia

aesthetics of 190, 193–8choice of content 194genre conventions 192–3ideologies 199–200rewriting the past 199–200role in shaping memory 188–9selection of topics 195soundtrack 197–8and struggle for memory 191–3use of acted scenes 197use of language 196

use of personal stories 194use of tenses 193use of voices 197visual rhetoric 197

Echavarría, Juan Manuel 206–10,214

Edgerton, Gary R. 189Eisenmann, Peter 30–1, 34–5, 39El Bogotazo 204El Testigo (Echavarría) see The WitnessEliade, Mircea 111–13Eliot, T. S. 111elites, as audience 45–6Elkins, James 138–9Erinnerungsräume (Spaces of

Memory) 9Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

(Gondry) 57, 63–6ethics, of images 164experiencing 48

Facing Forward (Tan) 180–4, 181, 185fantasies, utopian and dystopian 55fascism, and kitsch 26Favorite Objects (Boltanski) 120Feldman, Allan 208feminist re-vision 100–1, 102–5 see

also re-visionFer, Briony 42Filler, Martin 32Final Cut (Naim) 56–60Fire Department of New York teddy

bear 20, 21–2flashbacks 57fluidity 106focus of experience, shift of 51forms, of memory technologies 18fossilizing 6, 55Foster, Hal 28, 33, 132, 177, 185Foster, Norman 30, 31Foucault, Michel 3–4, 71–2, 191found-footage films see compilation

films‘Four Formats of Memory’

(Assmann) 3Frente Nacional 204Freud, Sigmund 29Fried, Michael 47–8, 49


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Index 235

Friedberg, Ann 180, 183Friedländer, Saul 153Frow, John 16furniture, representing absence 211futures

past 108–11willing new 104

galleries, spectators in 183, 184–5Gasché, Rodolphe 81geography 8–9Gestalt 44Ghosh-Schellhorn, Martina 92Gibson, William 54Gilbert, Sandra M. 88, 100globalization, memory as part 11globalizing

cultural memory 2historical tourism 8–9

gorn 133Gramsci, Antonio 191Greenberg, Clement 23–4, 42Grosz, Elizabeth 139Ground Zero

architect plans 30–3changes to project 50

Groys, Boris 183Guattari, Félix 66Gubar, Susan 88Guerin, Frances 118–19Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich 106

Halbwachs, Maurice 3, 189Haliloglu, Nagihan 72, 73Harris, Daniel 25, 26, 27Havrilesky, Heather 27Heavenly Muse (Restrepo) 212–14hegemony 191Heizer, Michael 40Henry Ford Hospital (Kahlo) 139–40heritage 8Herz, R. 158Hirsch, Marianne 52, 55, 68n, 103,

165nhistorical culture, new 10–12historical documents,

renarrativization of 161historicizing 7

historychallenged by images 159changing view of 105as counter memory 72democratization 71, 103, 105–6effect of kitsch 25images and understanding 160–3popular mediated 188–9and tourism 16–17tourists of 21–3unsettling 169–70uses of 201women’s 103

Hitler, Adolfrepresentations 154explanation industry 161imagery, reappropriation

153–5Hobsbawm, Eric 201Hodgkin, Katharine 7, 55, 64, 71Hoffman, Heinrich 150, 158Holocaust, as culture specific memory

154Hoskins, J. 122Huyssen, Andreas 16, 58, 153, 169,

200

iconographies, painful 132–3iconology 176identities

colonialism 90relationship between self and place

91–2identity

biographical objects and memory121–5

and language 91–2and memory 64memory and violence 214memory in construction 117–18and remembering 1retrospective creation 124social construction 121–2transitional 92

identity crisis, of cyborgs 54ideologies, documentary films

199–200


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236 Index

imagesas challenge to history 159discourses 164as means of persuasion 164political and ethical status 164remixing 59and understanding of history

160–3imperialism, narratives of 81‘Impossible Histories’ 203individual memory 2, 3Indonesia, reconstructing colonial

memories 178–80, 184innocence 22, 27–9instability 12, 61interaction, memory building 9,

94–5intersubjectivity, Wide Sargasso Sea

(Rhys) 94–5intertextuality 12, 72irony 25–7, 34–5, 153

Jacobs, Edgar P. see Blake andMortimer

Jameson, Fredric 76Jane Eyre (Brontë) 86, 90Jen’s ice cream scoop 125Johnny Mnemonic (Longo) 55Judd, Donald 42–3, 46

Kahlo, Frida 134depiction of suffering and pain

135, 136–40use of space 138

Kear, Adrian 144Kelly, Joan 103Kendrick, Robert 92, 94Kershaw, Ian 150Kiefer, Anselm 153Kimmelman, Michael 40Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 8kitsch

Checkpoint Charlie 25Cold War 25Cultural Revolution 25definition and understanding of

term 23–4, 25as irony 25–7and modernity 23

and non-kitsch 24and politics 26and postmodernism 25as prepackaged sentimental

responses 26and re-enactment 29

kitsch remembering 18, 19–21Ko potrka vojna (Mrovlje) see When

War Knocks at the DoorKoepnick, Lutz 151Krauss, Rosalind 44, 50–1Kundera, Milan 26–7

La Machination Voronov(Juillard/Sente) 80

La Marque Jaune (Jacobs) 76, 77, 78La Violencia 204L’Affaire Francis Blake (Van Hamme)

80Lambek, Michael J. 9, 117Landsberg, Alison 54language

in documentary films 196–7and identity 91–2

latent memory 86Laura Jean’s book 124Le Mystère de la Grande Pyramide

(Jacobs) 76, 78Le Secret de l’Espadon (Jacobs)

77, 84Lecigne, Bruno 75L’Énigme de l’Atlantide (Jacobs) 77–8Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire

(Halbwachs) 3Les lieux de mémoire (Nora) 7–8, 10Les Sarcophages du 6ème continent

(Sente) 81–3, 84L’Étrange rendez-vous (Van Hamme)

80Libeskind, Daniel 31–3lieu de mémoire 7, 15, 138Life on Mars (BBC) 60–1ligne claire 72–3, 75, 79, 84ligne de mémoire 190Lipovetsky, Gilles 106liquid memories 101liquidity 106literalism 47–8, 49location, and remembering 89


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Index 237

Luckhurst, Roger 132Lyotard, Jean-François 104

Mapiripán massacre 207mass culture, as transformational 76materiality 2, 9

of memory 61McLuhan, Marshall 15, 16meaning 24, 182, 184media

fossilizing effect 6, 55as mediated 16shaped by memory 16as technologies of memory 190as untrustworthy 160virtualizing effect 6, 55

medial frameworks 3mediation 11–12, 15–17, 52–3Meier, Richard 30Memex machine 55Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

(Eisenmann) 34, 39–40memories

affective 145–7as competitive 71consuming 105–7use of 56

memoryin construction of identity 117–18culture-specific 154four formats 189and identity 64identity and violence 214materialization 61and morality 54–7and myth 111–13obliteration 200personal 53prosthetic memory 54relationship to history 169technologies of 3–6theatrical 50–1

‘memory boom’ 53memory fatigue 10, 32Memory Foundations (Libeskind) 32–3memory-making, national 7–8Meyer, James 50Michaud, Philippe-Alain 176Miller, Ann 72, 73

Minimal artas appropriate for memorials 45development 41and Modernism 42, 47networks of relationships 43, 45objecthood 47in public domain 51sense of place 43

minimalism, and monuments 17,39–42

Minority Report (Spielberg) 56, 57, 60Mnemosyne (Warburg) 176–8Modernism, and Minimal art 42, 47modernity 15, 23montage 174–5, 177, 180, 184, 185montage consciousness 180monuments, and minimalism 39–42morality, and memory 54–7Morris, Robert 41, 44, 45, 46Mother Dao: The Turtlelike

(Monnikendam, Vincent)178–80, 184

mourning, and remembrance 140–5Mouths of Ash (Echavarría) 208–9Možina, Joze 192Mrovlje, Bogdan 192Musa Paradaisiaca (Restrepo) see

Heavenly MuseMuschamp, Herbert 33museums, as focus of experience 51myth, and memory 111–13mythical retelling 73myths

as alternative to rewriting 113capacity for change 111of innocence 27–9of rape 82retelling 107, 108, 109, 112

narrativecoherence 65confusing 62–5in documentary films 193–4, 195fragmentation 62–3

narrativesof imperialism 81of pain 144personal 121–2repetition of 29, 31


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238 Index

narratives – continuedretelling 82supplements to 81transformative power 98

national pasts, investments in 8National Toy Hall of Fame 120Nazi iconography, reappropriation

153Neisser, Ulrich 140Nelson, Ted 55New Yorker, re-imagining Twin Towers

29–30Nigro, Georgia 140Noordegraaf, Julia 170Nora, Pierre 7–8, 11, 15, 36, 103,

105–6, 190North, East, South, West (Heizer) 40,

40nostalgia

for childhood 128commodification 74

‘Notes on Sculpture’ (Morris) 44Noviembre 6 y 7 (Salcedo) 211

objecthood, Minimal art 47objects

biographical 121–5connection to time 124creation of meaning 122–3favourite 120–1as mediators of experience and

memory 122–4and memory 118

Ochse, Iep 172omnipotence 61Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

(Winterson) 108

pain 118memory of 133–5presence of images 132recycled through art 5spatio-temporal location

139temporal structure 140–1timelessness 140visualizing 140

pastcommodification 104in contemporary cultural

practice 12as manufactured 11as part of present 113revision 200–1value of 106

patriotism, objects of 22Pécaut, Daniel 204personal memory 53

biographical objects and identity121–5

and toys 128–9persuasion, through images 164petrification, in science fiction films

61photography, techniques 206–7Plate, Liedeke 73political memory 3political status, of images 164populism, US 28Portraits (Echavarría) 206postcolonial intertextuality 72postmodernism, and kitsch 25Potts, Alex 42, 43, 49‘presentification of the past’ 9projection 138proprioception 138–9Prosthetic Memory (Landsberg) 54Proust, Marcel 121public domain, Minimal art in 51public monuments 17public sphere, pathological 132–3Pušnik, Maruša 171

Radstone, Susannah 7, 15, 16, 53,55, 58, 64, 71

‘Raj nostalgia’ 81rape myths, as allegories 82re-enactment

architectural 29–33as close to kitsch 29cultural 29–34and irony 34–5

re-presentation 4, 6re-vision 72 see also feminist

re-visionreader, role of 111–12


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Index 239

reconstruction 5recontextualization 118–19redemption 27–8Rednerposen

circulation and use of images 158description 156exhibition and context 155–7historical contextualization 164–5integrating into the present 153in The New Yorker 161–2possible interpretations 150–1presentation of Hitler 150as propaganda 150re-representation 158–9reappropriation 161–2recontextualization 152–3, 155–60recycling 151–5in Underexposed 155–60

Reflecting Absence (Arad) 33–4, 46contemplation room 48–9memorial room 38as minimalist 39–40original design 36–9, 37, 50responses to 39sense of loss 48

rememberingand identity 1and location 89

remembrance, spatial practice 138remythologizing, and

demythologizing 109renarrativization, of historical

documents 161Renk, Kathleen 91repetition, of narrative 29, 31representation 52response to events, kitsch as 26Restrepo, José Alejandro 212, 214retelling

myths 107, 108, 109, 112stories 5in work of Jeanette Winterson 107,

108as world making 113

Retratos (Echavarría) see Portraitsrewriting 12, 73

as remythologizing 109as technology of cultural memory

100, 107, 103

in documentary films 199–200from marginal perspective 102–3novels 5

Rhys, Jean 90Rich, Adrienne 100, 102, 103Rigney, Ann 3Robinson Crusoe (Stevenson) 108,

110–11Rochberg-Halton, Eugene

122, 126Rosenbaum, Ron 161Routeau, Luc 75–6, 78Rushdie, Salman 81

Salcedo, Doris 210–12, 214Sandusky, Sharon 184Sarah’s painting 123satire 153scale

Reflecting Absence (Arad) 46size and sense of place

44–5science fiction films

ambiguity 60–1digital memory in 52effects of digital technology 54endings 61flashbacks 57mediation of individual memory

53representation of time 66

sculpturesize and response 45and viewer participation 44

Second World War, redefining199–200

self, memorizing 136–40self-narration

as act of memory 86, 88–91and context 88–9revising cultural memory 97–8

Seltzer, Mark 132–3sense memory 144–5sense of place

Minimal art 43size and scale 44–5

September 11, 2001 32, 36settlers 91–2Shoah 9


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240 Index

Shohat, Ella 81size, scale and sense of place

44–5Slovenia see also documentary films

creation of new cultural memory188

cultural memory 190debates over meaning of the past

191–2foundational myth 193, 200presentation of history 198

Smelik, Anneke 6, 52, 58, 138Smith, Tony 40–1, 44–5, 48Smoke Screen (Tan) 172–4, 174, 184,

185Sobchack, Vivian 15–16, 58social amnesia 200social forgetting 89social memory 3social practices, shared 5Sontag, Susan 193S.O.S. Météores (Jacobs) 77soundtrack, in documentary films

197–8space

in body 143and corporeality 139representation of in science fiction

66time and beholder 48–50transformative power 92

space and time, collapse 58spaces, as focus of experience 51spatial context 50spatialization 9‘Specific Objects’ (Judd) 42–3spectacle, frenzy of 57–62spectators 183, 184, 184–5Stacey, Jackie 144staging, of art 47–8Stam, Robert 81Stamelman, Richard 36Steedman, Caroline 72, 170Stimpson, Catharine 102stories

alternative versions 105as construing the real 104

Strange Days (Bigelow) 56Sturken, Marita 4, 7, 169, 170

subjectivitiesof colonialism 86of tourists 22

Suleiman, Susan 104supplements, to narratives 81suppression, of stories 105Sutton Smith, Brian 122Szapocznikow, Alina 134

depiction of illness 135temporal structure of pain 140–1temporality of body 143

Tan, Fiona 172–4, 176Tangled Memories (Sturken) 4taste, class base of 18technological frameworks 3technologies of memory 3–6teddy bears 21, 24, 27temporal distance, collapsing

15–16Tenebrae Noviembre 7 1985 (Salcedo)

211teratologies 144Terdiman, Richard 7The 39 Steps (Hitchcock) 80The Broken Column (Kahlo) 140The Butterfly Effect (Bress) 58, 61‘The Cultural Logic of the Late

Capitalist Museums’ (Krauss) 51The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft et al)

86The History of Sexuality (Foucault)

3–4The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert

and Gubar) 88The New Yorker, Rednerposen in

161–2The Stone Gods (Winterson) 107–11

retelling 112role of reader 111–12stories 109–10

The Two Fridas (Kahlo) 134, 136–40,137

The Witness (Echavarría) 207theatrical memory 50–1theatricality 48–9THINK project 30Three Smoking Toddlers on the Island of

Bali 173


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Index 241

timeand corporeality 139loss of linearity 113representation of in science fiction

66space and beholder 48–50as split 65

time and space, collapse 58, 67totalitarianism, and kitsch 26tourism, of history 8–9, 22–3tourists, of history 21–3toys 120, 122, 128–30

cultural values, and toys 120transformative power, cinematic affect

66–8transitional objects 130trauma culture 132trauma, recycled through art 5Trinh T. Minh-ha 95Tropisch Nederland (newsreel), re-use of

images 179trust 160‘twice removed aesthetic’ 25Twin Towers, re-imagining 29–30

Underexposed (exhibition) 154,155–60, 163

images of political violence 156Urabà, Colombia, perceptions of

213–14Uribe, María Victoria 208

viewers see also beholdersdistancing 47as participants 44

violence 141archaeology of 212–14Colombia 203, 207–8identity and memory 214

virtual time 65–7virtualizing 55visibility, and existence 61visual arts

and cultural memory in Colombia205

as technologies of memory 214–15Vitruvian man (Leonardo) 45voices, in documentary films 197

Warburg, Aby 176–8, 185Weight (Winterson) 108, 112Weijers, Wouter 5, 36When War Knocks at the Door (Mrovlje)

193, 194, 196, 198, 199, 201Whitlock, Gillian 89, 94Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys)

Antoinette as Creole 92Caribbean as transformative space

92characters as archetypes 88Christophine’s perception of

Antoinette 96colonial identities 91–7control of memory 96–7effect of 100–1forgetting and remembering 89intersubjectivity 94leakage of discourse 95narrative strategies 90as ‘prequel’ to Jane Eyre 86–8revising cultural memory 97–8Rochester as settler 92role of Victorian family 93–4self-narration and memory 88–91story 88

Williams, Linda 61Winterson, Jeanette 105, 107,

110–11women artists, representations of pain

134–5women’s history 103Wood, Elizabeth 118World Trade Center

Memorial Site Competition 36snow globe 19, 19–22

‘wound culture’ 133‘writing back’ 86wtinessing 209–10

Xanadu 55

Young, James 155

Zamolcani – moc Preživeti (Možina) seeConcealed – the Power of Survival

Zarzycka, Marta 118Žižek, Slavoj 6, 55


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Liedeke Plate, Anneke Smelik Technologies of Memory in the Arts 2009

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Transcript of Liedeke Plate, Anneke Smelik Technologies of Memory in the Arts 2009