Panic and Mourning: The Cultural Work of Trauma 9783110283143, 9783110283099

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I. Literary negotations
A Culture of Fear: Panic, Mourning, Testimony, and the Question of Representation
Mourning, Melancholia and Morality: W. G. Sebald's German-Jewish Narratives
Nostalgias and Mourning: The Nation in the Serbian Journal The Spring (1992-1996)
Negotiating Loss and Betrayal: Melancholic Ethics and Narrative Agency in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone and Steer Toward Rock
Melancholic Violence and the Spectre of Failed Ideals in Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers and Yasmina Khadra's Wolf Dreams
II. Visual resonances
Odysseus, Rowing
(Un-)Framing Triumph and Trauma: Visibility, Gender and Liberation through the Soviet Gaze
The Banality of Trauma: Globalization, Migrant Labor, and Nostalgia in Fruit Chan's Durian Durian
Evocations of the Unspeakable: Trauma, Silence and Mourning in Contemporary Chinese Art
Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought: Ritualistic Artefacts and Mourning Mediation in Imperial China
III. (Re-)mediated affects and performances
Affective Spaces
Catastrophes in Sight and Sound
From Panic to Mourning: 9/11 and the Need for Spectacle
Stage, Performance, Media Event: the National Commemoration of the Second World War in the Netherlands
No Fun: Mourning the Loss of Tragedy in Contemporary Performance Art
Notes on the Editors
Notes on Contributors

Citation preview

Panic and Mourning

Culture & Conflict

Edited by Isabel Capeloa Gil and Catherine Nesci

Volume 1

Panic and Mourning

The Cultural Work of Trauma

Edited by Daniela Agostinho, Elisa Antz & Cátia Ferreira

ISBN 978-3-11-028309-9 e-ISBN 978-3-11-028303-7 ISSN 2194–7104 © 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Eleven Blowups #5 (detail), 2006 © Sophie Ristelhueber/adagp Paris Typesetting: fidus Publikations-Service GmbH, Nördlingen Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements This volume is the outcome of the First Graduate Conference in Culture Studies hosted by the Research Centre for Communication and Culture at the Catholic University of Portugal, which took place on 28–29 October 2010 in Lisbon. It was organized by a group of Graduate students who had the honour and responsibility of inaugurating what is becoming a solid but always refreshing practice. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Professor Isabel Capeloa Gil, Dean of the Faculty of Human Sciences and Head of the doctoral program in Culture Studies, for encouraging with enthusiasm both the organization of the conference and the publication of this book. We also wish to thank Tânia Ganito, Elisabetta Colla and Kevin Rose for their valuable editorial assistance; and De Gruyter for taking this adventurous project on board. We are also truly grateful to the artist Sophie Ristelhueber for allowing the reproduction of one of her many magnificent photographs on the book cover. And finally but foremost, we are grateful to all the authors of this volume for their dedication to the project and their generosity in presenting their research in this admittedly diversified volume. It was a rewarding experience to collaborate with so many brilliant authors from different fields of study. We truly hope the result is as gratifying for them as it is to us. Lisbon and Gießen, May 2012

Contents Acknowledgements  Introduction 

 V

 1  25

I. Literary negotations 

António Sousa Ribeiro A Culture of Fear: Panic, Mourning, Testimony, and the Question of Representation   27 Luisa Banki Mourning, Melancholia and Morality: W. G. Sebald’s German-Jewish Narratives   37 Milan Miljković Nostalgias and Mourning: The Nation in the Serbian Journal The Spring (1992–1996)   49 Anna Pehkoranta Negotiating Loss and Betrayal: Melancholic Ethics and Narrative Agency in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone and Steer Toward Rock   69 Lucy Brisley Melancholic Violence and the Spectre of Failed Ideals in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Yasmina Khadra’s Wolf Dreams   85 II. Visual resonances  Liliane Weissberg Odysseus, Rowing 

 101

 103

Daniela Agostinho (Un-)Framing Triumph and Trauma: Visibility, Gender and Liberation through the Soviet Gaze   121

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 Contents

Ban Wang The Banality of Trauma: Globalization, Migrant Labor, and Nostalgia in Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian   145 Tânia Ganito Evocations of the Unspeakable: Trauma, Silence and Mourning in Contemporary Chinese Art   161 Elisabetta Colla “Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought”: Ritualistic Artefacts and Mourning Mediation in Imperial China   181 III. (Re-)mediated affects and performances Frederik Tygstrup Affective Spaces 

 195

Eduardo Cintra Torres Catastrophes in Sight and Sound 

 211

Diana Gonçalves From Panic to Mourning: 9/11 and the Need for Spectacle 

 233

David Duindam Stage, Performance, Media Event: the National Commemoration of the Second World War in the Netherlands   247 Frauke Surmann No Fun: Mourning the Loss of Tragedy in Contemporary Performance Art  Notes on the Editors  Notes on Contributors 

 279  281

 263

Introduction ‘Panic’ and ‘mourning’ are two pivotal constructs that often emerge and interplay under circumstances of conflict, violence, crisis, and catastrophe, both natural and man-made. Whereas panic tends to crop up during the experience of violent events, mourning, on the other hand, relates to the aftermath of a brutal disruption and to the way humans try to make sense of it retrospectively. Conversely, violent events can leave a thread of panic in their aftermath, while mourning can be unsettled, interrupted or even refuelled by another catastrophic incident. In the present times of worldwide upheavals, ‘panic’ has become an inescapable keyword to convey the state of insecurity and anxiety regarding a possible global collapse. Brian Massumi has described the modern experience of organised everyday fear as a “kind of background radiation saturating existence” (Massumi 1993: 24). This politically induced state of anxiety has acquired the form of sharp panic in recent years due to several historical developments, especially the turning point of 9/11 and the ensuing geopolitical reconfigurations and largescale threats, but also the increase in disaster perception. The saturation of social spaces by this induced state of panic and the resulting production of vulnerability has to be questioned and critically addressed. Is panic a personal emotion, a rhetorical device, or a “structure of feeling” (Williams 1961), a culturally constructed ground that constitutes social experience and shapes the formation of subjectivity? Where does it come from, what are its historical configurations, and through which mechanisms is it imagined, reproduced, instrumentalised and regulated? How does it affect cultural practices, and how may it be contested and resisted? And just how does such a pulverised formation relate to mourning? Both panic and mourning can be regarded as responses to the threat of or actual loss. Indeed, the violent events that shattered the twentieth century and the turn of the twenty-first century, from the World Wars, genocides, colonialism, to globalisation, terrorism and natural disasters, have shaped the foundations of modernity and fostered academic interest in how humans respond, work through and come to terms with loss and traumatic occurrences. The resurgence of the concept of mourning in recent years is much indebted to Holocaust studies, which rehabilitated Freud’s essay on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) to grasp a traumatic event that disrupted any sense of continuity with the world as known before. As the “founding trauma” (LaCapra 2001: 161) of the twentieth century, the Holocaust has challenged the possibility of mourning in its Freudian conception as “the painful, but ultimately healthy, process of severing the libidinal ties binding the mourner to the deceased” (Rae 2007: 13). Successful mourning, in Freud’s reasoning, implies “working through” grief and liberating the subject from the lost object in order for it to find a new object of attachment. When

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 Introduction

mourning is not successful, when the subject hangs onto the lost object, melancholia emerges as a pathological and unhealthy condition. However, contemporary critics have come to question the ethical and political desirability of mourning, in that it promotes forgetting, normative conciliation, and an abdication of responsibility. Melancholia, in turn, could emerge as resistance to the normative work of mourning, keeping the memory of the deceased alive and encouraging a critical and unsettling remembrance that does not comply with the conventionalised acceptation of loss and the containment of anxiety or the suppression of problematic memories in society. The refusal to mourn, re-claimed by authors such as Jacques Derrida (2006), who equates conventionalised mourning with an unethical and politically troublesome forgetting of that lost, is but one example of the many critical engagements with Freudian terminology that will be addressed and questioned throughout this volume. Post-structuralist trauma theory, which became dominant in the 1990s, is one of the most influential strands in contemporary thought that revisits Freud’s studies. One of its most contested arguments is that trauma is ontologically at odds with representation. Trauma, within this framework, would be by definition an event that one could not cognitively grasp and apprehend thus remaining inaccessible to understanding and representation. Cathy Caruth, drawing on Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit, defined it as “the unwitting re-enactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind” (Caruth 1996: 2). This inability to process the traumatic event, to comprehend it under a narrative, determines its unrepresentability. In this sense, according to Griselda Pollock, “trauma ceases to be trauma with the advent of the structuring of representation” (2009: 43). This perspective was strongly shaped by the experience of the Holocaust, which has defied the limits of human comprehension and hence the possibilities of representation, be it verbal or visual. This strand of trauma theory has been adopted by contemporary critics who have raised new questions and expanded them to the study of other traumatic geographies and events such as colonialism, terrorism and political violence. On the other hand, the discourse of post-structuralist trauma theory has not been exempt from criticism and often charged with ‘trauma fetishism’, aestheticism, an excessive emphasis on victimisation, elision of history and the obliteration of social and political agency. The texts in this volume will therefore engage, discuss and recast trauma theory’s contributions to the study of historical violence in its relationship to representational practices, building on its merits and rethinking its perils. The porosity and complex interchanges between psychoanalytical concepts in cultural theory is proven by the notion of nostalgia, which, in the nineteenth century, was considered a form of melancholia, a pathological form of attachment to the past, rising as a recurrent diagnosis during American Civil War. It

Introduction 

 3

is therefore unsurprising that it has also experienced a revival in recent years, emerging, as remarked by Susannah Radstone, as a response to anxiety and panic towards the future and a mechanism to face the threats to identity posed by brisk social changes (Radstone 2007: 113). As a form of ‘invented tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992), a longing for a past whose image is refashioned and fabricated in the present, nostalgia has been condemned by many critics for being an instrumental mobilisation of the past to provide an easy, familiar and comforting solution for the troubles of the present. Alessa Ricciardi (2003), for example, regards nostalgia as a symptom of a society where mourning has ceased to be possible, thus equating it with melancholic behaviour unable to overcome the past. However, as Radstone also points out, these criticisms often run the risk of failing to acknowledge the real or felt losses for which nostalgia may act in response. In line with more nuanced interpretations of mourning and melancholia, nostalgia can also be regarded as social and political resistance to the oppressions of the present, and produce a positive impact on the rehabilitation of forgotten losses and the improvement of social conditions, where not clinging to the past in order to avoid facing the present. As Michel Foucault once argued, “it’s a good thing to have nostalgia towards some periods on the condition that it’s a way to have a thoughtful and positive relation to your own present” (1988: 12). As the texts in this volume attest, nostalgic representations of the past have become one of the most significant mechanisms for dealing with problematic legacies, the contingent demands of the present and the challenges of an uncertain future. Indeed, the possibility of representing and making sense of traumatic events is one of the most pressing concerns of this volume. In response to the limits of the notion of ‘representation’, largely pointed out by critical theory, concepts such as affectivity, mediality and performance have emerged to make sense of a new set of practices that wish to approach panic and mourning through new conceptualisations and materialities. These terms provide alternative models for thinking about symbolic exchanges beyond the limits of the representational paradigm, encharged with its lack of reciprocality and its connotation with symbolic violence, fixed identities, hegemonic and disempowering constructions and the naturalization of social norms and conventions. As Lawrence Grossberg has importantly argued, “signification and representation are merely two modes  – and not necessarily the most important ones – in the regime of mediation” (1998: 7–8). As such, the texts gathered in this book will probe the strengths and pitfalls of the representational paradigm and engage with new models of symbolic transaction. From an international and inter-disciplinary outlook, this volume wishes to address questions at the interface of panic and mourning and their impact on practices in literature, media, and the arts. Since violent events take place within

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 Introduction

cultures that will draw from their traditions, memories and systems of beliefs in order to process them, the authors of this book aim precisely at discussing the effects of calamity upon the cultural structure and the way literary, artistic and media practices not only reproduce individual and collective anxieties but also generate knowledge and reshape the cultural formation within which they emerge. The book is structured around three sections that explore the cultural productivity of panic and mourning across different media. The first section is entitled Literary Negotiations and investigates the manifold ways in which literature enables us to make sense of the world. The different chapters address the sombre implications of the concepts in question by treating texts from the twentieth century dealing with some of its most problematic legacies. They do so by making out different strategies to experience and articulate panic and mourning. As Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning point out, expanding Nelson Goodman’s notion of “ways of worldmaking”: Literature can couple coherent representations of the world, of objects, moral messages, and human agency with a self-conscious reflection of ways of world-making. Through this paradoxical structure it exposes the normativity of the construed worlds and engages in an open process of negotiation of our own strategies of worldmaking (Nünning and Nünning 2010: 7).

Hence, literature seems particularly suited to offering a forum for negotiating panic and mourning which, especially in the face of tragedy or trauma, seem to disrupt, destroy or even defy common-sense and continuity. Consequentially, within the literary “paradoxical structure” as a space for negotiating panic and mourning, the capacity to narrate – telling, writing, shaping stories – is of primal concern. The idea of narrativity not only links novels to other media and genres, as exemplified by Lucy Brisley’s and Milan Miljković’s texts in this section. It also relates individual stories to collective narratives, as sometimes conformant, sometimes conflicting but always interrelated processes of making sense of the surrounding world. It is thus hardly surprising that one of the texts that emerges as one of the most important references in this section is Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, as it offers a seminal definition of how mourning accounts for regaining a sense of normalcy. For Freud, mourning is a painful but temporal process that allows the ego to overcome its loss and re-establish its sense of reality. Melancholia, on the other hand, appears as an on-going and pathological condition (Freud 1917: 237 ff). One might easily relate these twofold processes of overcoming a loss, a successful and a pathologically unsuccessful one, to the notion of narrativity. In this analogy, a coherent story of the self serves to cope with daily life and allows

Introduction 

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for a healthy measure of forgetting. The melancholic counter-part would present a story that falls back upon and cannot overcome tragic loss in any coherent way. Yet, drawing on various literary examples, the chapters of this section do not solely contend with this rather polar distinction between mourning and melancholy. Quite the contrary: they investigate the nuances with which individuals experience their fear and grief and the varieties in which they might relate to communities, the (im-)possibilities of communicating and the necessity of remembering. Rather than asking for mourning as a conclusive means of settling the past, they might be considered as post-Freudians in the sense outlined by Lucy Brisley in this section, according to which “the stoic preservation of the lost object” may serve as “a basis for the ethical remembrance of the other and […] to the widespread depathologising of melancholia within theory.” In Brisley’s view, however, this “theoretical revival” of melancholia and its almost too well-received equation with political reform run the risk of “operating as a totalizing frame of reference that overlooks the poststructuralist concern with the singular”. Yet, it is exactly the awareness of the particular – the personal tales that also relate to, but are never identical to collective histories – that characterizes this section. António Sousa Ribeiro in ‘A Culture of Fear. Panic, Mourning, Testimony, and the Question of Representation’ investigates the interplay between fear and mourning within the experience of the Holocaust and the (in)capacity of ‘worldmaking’ when subjected to extreme violence. Ribeiro examines the mechanisms of exercising power through violent disciplination and instauration of fear, concentrating on the dehumanized condition of the subject in the Nazi concentration camps. By drawing on a variety of testimonial literature and focusing particularly on Jean Améry’s work, Ribeiro surveys panic and vulnerability as the outcomes of “organized violence, in particular state violence, [which] is directed in important aspects towards the production of a culture of fear as an essential control mechanism”. Taking as a case in point Primo Levi’s “primal scene”, in which the concentration camp prisoner asks the guard “Why?”, but is rebuked with a categorical “Hier ist kein Warum” (Here there is no Why), Ribeiro argues that the “condition of the prisoner is […] defined as one of total disorientation”. How could one narrate a coherent story of the self if that self is reduced to an object of arbitrary and uncontrollable violence, confined to a concentrationary structure that “scorns the possibilities of language”? And how can one pay testimony if, as Giorgio Agamben (1999) has famously pointed out, the ultimate witness is precisely the one that is definitely incapable of bearing testimony, because he or she did not survive to tell? The exercise of power through inhuman treatment  – exactly the denial of “any meaningful pattern” to the prisoner’s existence – creates a control mechanism that remains effective, even after its material threat might have long van-

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 Introduction

ished. Ribeiro debates the challenges of overcoming such internalization of fear by setting into dialogue two apparently conflicting positions. On the one hand, he picks up on Butler’s notion of mourning as “the condition of vulnerability of every human being [that] provides the foundation for a potentially transformative ethics of recognition”. This theory of ethics which takes the experience of loss and the awareness of one’s ability to feel and fear pain as its starting point, however, contrasts sharply with Améry’s text on ‘Torture’. Rather than envisioning a universal ethics based on empathic vulnerability, Améry resents the infliction of violence, making such resentment the foundation of his moral stance. Améry’s refusal of any form of reconciliation and forgiveness precludes the work of mourning as outlined by Butler, indeed standing in the way of “the logics of hope inherent to that possibility”. Nonetheless, Ribeiro notes, Améry’s uncompromising resentment can actually be regarded as an “imperative moral duty”, as he is not looking for revenge, but for justice, a kind of justice that requires that “crime [may] become a moral reality for the criminal”. His position of unyielding resentment strives for the recognition of criminal responsibility that the work of mourning often evades. Ribeiro suggests that testimony, due to its shared public and dialogical dimension, even if insisting on resentment, might open up the possibility of transcending the limits of personal trauma in favour of “the creation of a community of memory”. However, Ribeiro does not aim at discharging the tension that might exist between individual experiences of fear and the ethical demands of collective memory. Panic or mourning might be raised and incentivised in certain political systems; yet their effects will be experienced in differentiated ways by individuals. As Ribeiro points out: “There is no violence in general, as there is no suffering in general – violence and suffering have always to do with particular persons” and that differentiality of experience has to be taken into account. It is to this individuality that literature might correspond, for which it might offer a medium; a space for ethics to gain aesthetic shape. Ribeiro thus concludes “mourning […] is the never ending transgenerational work of a coming community built upon fundamental values of justice”. Luisa Banki, Anna Pehkoranta and Lucy Brisley also share a concern in transgenerational aspects. More precisely, they focus on what might be considered “transgenerational traumatization” (Anastasiadis 2012: 1), that is as the “lasting effects on the descendants of the victims or the perpetrators who have no experiential connection to the traumatic events” (ibid.). Arguably the most influential approach concerning such transgenerational effects is Marianne Hirsch’s conceptualisation of ‘postmemory’ as “the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth” (Hirsch 1996: 659). One should note, however, that Hirsch’s concept of postmemory derives from the assumption

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 7

that parents and/or forefathers pass down memories from which later generations might develop a particular creative impulse. Such a narrative ‘domination’ however, is not necessarily the precondition for the problems of later generations in facing traumatic or  – to not unnecessarily overuse the term  – tragic events in family histories. The texts in this section rather concentrate on difficulties of communication and on conflicting or tenuous ways of relating to the past. In this manner, they demonstrate how literature not only represents, but rather (re-) negotiates ways of remembering and interpreting violent events. In her investigation of ‘Mourning, Melancholia and Morality: W. G. Sebald’s German-Jewish Narratives’, Luisa Banki also focuses on the (im)possibility of representation and the transgenerational effects of the Shoah. Luisa Banki contends with Sebald in that “aesthetics is ultimately always concerned with ethics.” In his works, Banki attempts to show, this ethics primarily concerns “remembrances of past lives” as “both an appropriation and an invention”. While Ribeiro focuses on the testimonies of former prisoners of concentration camps and victims of extreme violence that stress the impossibility of narrating their experience in the camps, “the Sebaldian narrator”, as a member of a later generation, “is not only collector and archivist of the life stories he tells, but also the power that grasps them, seizes them and, in a way, only thereby creates them”. While Améry lacks the capacity to communicate the inflictions of torture he went through, choosing resentment as his stance towards the past, Sebald, on the other hand, in his condition of Nachgeborene, elects prose fiction as a space to negotiate past and present, establishing an active, even resistant melancholia as his relationship with the Shoah. “What is crucial, however”, as Banki points out, “is that Sebald’s preoccupation is not the actual past events, but rather their effects, what is remembered and passed on.” Hence, despite their apparent incompatibility, both positions reveal the same fundamental concern: the refusal to forsake and forget the past. In fact, Banki draws on Sebald’s essay on Améry and Levi to highlight his position towards literary representations of the past as “’disturbance in favour of communication’” (Sebald 1990: 122, quoted by Banki) that is only “possible at the price of ‘a betrayal that breaks faith to the dead’” (ibid.). For Banki, Sebald succeeds in articulating in his fiction the “central conflict in the representation of trauma” that is: “The wish for a stabilising representation of the traumatic loss thus stands in opposition to the fear of letting memories disappear by pronouncing/renouncing them, leading to a tension-charged, painful situation”. Stressing this central aporia, Banki rearticulates and consequentially discharges the Freudian distinction between ‘mourning’ and ‘melancholia’. By analysing Sebald’s works and drawing on Lyotard, Benjamin and Foucault, she comes to contest Freud’s rather dichotomic distinction in favour of a “proverbial

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 Introduction

Sebaldian melancholia, which is to say, of the refusal to abandon or relinquish that which is lost or past.” Such a resistant “Sebaldian melancholia” is for Banki a dialectic one that moves between and intersects “German-Jewish” identities, emerging as a shared and profoundly ethical effort of both subjects who together attempt – despite “their radically different mnemonic imperatives and difficulties” – to conjoin, but not merge, particular experiences in order to create something new. The result of this dialogue only comes to existence through narration. Anna Pehkoranta’s text also centres on melancholia and narration as the means for later generations to negotiate forgetting and remembering. She draws attention to a cultural interface of politics, narration, mourning, and what she, very much in line with Brisley’s observation of a “theoretical revival” of melancholia, calls a “melancholic ethics”. By investigating two novels by the ChineseAmerican writer Fae Myenne Ng, Bone and Steer toward Rock, paying special attention as to how the immigrant protagonists cope with loss in a conservative American society, Pehkoranta comes to the conclusion that “despite its pathological origins, melancholia also holds potential for agency”. Hence, similar to the arguments raised by Ribeiro and Banki, Pehkoranta reads the novels not as stories that may reveal the truth about past events, tragic events in family histories such as one member’s suicide (Bone) or the loss of both love and citizenship (Steer toward Rock), in a chronological and causal order. They rather interweave the different ways of family members negotiating the loss and thereby “fabricating […] a story of displaced individuals balancing between racial abjection and a quest for cultural agency.” In the light of the anti-Asian American racial discourses addressed in Fae Myenne Ng’s novels, Pehkoranta recasts Freud’s terminology and draws attention to melancholia’s “lack of closure” as holding potential for resistance. Traditionally, it is this incapacity to overcome and settle the process of grieving, the inability to progress that signifies the pathological aspect of the melancholic. For Pehkoranta, on the contrary, it is exactly this “openness to new meanings” that “allows for an unfixed view of the world” and thereby leaves opportunities for transgenerational re-negotiations of Asian-American belonging and “forms of resistance to the dominant conceptions of the past”. While Banki and Pehkoranta put forward optimistic accounts of narrative engagements with the past that might attest to active or even resistant forms of melancholia, Milan Miljković’s ‘Nostalgias and Mourning: The Nation in the Serbian Journal The Spring (1992–1996)’ adds another dimension to this discussion as he shifts the focus from personal narrators to discursive constructions of collective memory through nostalgic representations. He does so by questioning the role of the Serbian journal The Spring at the end of the twentieth century, when the former Yugoslav republics were striving to revive old representations of

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 9

ethnic identities in the service of the new-found nations. He examines the possible instrumentalisation of tropes of remembrance in nationalist discourse and is especially concerned with the specific role that periodicals played in this discursive formation. Drawing from Svetlana Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia, Miljković acknowledges that The Spring “did participate in the overall public discourse of restorative nostalgia that articulated the pre-modern notion of the nation”. Clearly, such a kind of ‘restorative nostalgia’, defined by Boym as a narrative of collective identity fashioned as transhistorical and natural truth, contrasts sharply with any of the personal and experiential negations of the past that have been treated in the preceding chapters. Thus, Miljković identifies the combination of the “Kosovo myth with the themes of the Great Serbian Migration of 1690 and the Serbian Uprisings of the 19th century” as attempts to “articulate a new sense of unity”. In this way, the author enlightens how effectively the retrospective operationalisation of such highly emotionally charged responses to wars and their losses might serve current interests in re-enacting old myths of ethnic unity. However, analysing a number of prose texts and poems, Miljković is also able to make out instances of a more nuanced kind of “reflective nostalgia”. This notion, again drawn from Svetlana Boym, shares the orientation towards the past with ‘restorative nostalgia’ whilst not claiming to represent an absolute truth. This more self-reflexive and critical type of nostalgia, concerned rather with “individual stories, fragmented memories and counter-memories”, is found in some of the more experimental poems and travel writings. Interestingly, Miljković also picks up on Freud’s notion of ‘mourning’ but clarifies an important distinction between the psychoanalytic theory and the context of Serbia’s 1990s discourse on ethnic identity and community, namely the impossibility of testing reality when “the object of national memory is usually represented as an image of collective and nameless martyrdom with whom the ‘mourners’ had never been really and personally connected”. One might claim a similar precondition for the effects of transgenerational traumatisation and the connected modes of diasporic nostalgia. Nevertheless, Miljković’ observation draws attention to the difference between common usage of the term ‘mourning’ as a political means to create the sense of a holistic entity, and the psychological process laid out by Freud. While the latter stresses the temporal closure of a distancing of the ego from a loved object, the former attempts to instigate and strengthen the attachment to a never actually experienced, loved or lost past. Miljković concludes that the different texts in The Spring, despite contributing to the overall fixation with a lost past, in some cases opened up the

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possibility of initiating “the processes of […] rethinking ethnic differences” and of laying down a common ground for mutual understanding in the Balkans. To close the section on Literary Negotiations, Lucy Brisley’s text provides a comprehensive overview of theoretical appropriations of Freudian melancholia in a largely positive sense and as a notion enabling the kind of dynamic and resistant dealings with the past that we have encountered throughout this section. While Brisley does not deny the benefits of such a theoretical revival of melancholia, she does point out that “the very proliferation of such theories means they are at risk of operating as a totalizing frame of reference.” Consequentially, rather than adding another perspective to this “poststructuralist turn towards an ethics of memory”, she rather takes it as her investigative departure point to consider ‘Melancholic Violence and the Spectre of Failed ideals in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Yasmina Khadra’s Wolf Dreams’. Brisley’s main point of critique addresses the risks that melancholia in the case of Algerian history might pose to mourning in the sense of an actual coming to terms with the events of the war of independence, more exactly the role played by the National Liberation Front (hereafter referred to by its French acronym FLN) within that conflict. By reading Khadra’s novel Wolf Dreams as a parody of Pontecorvo’s film, Brisley investigates how the film propagates a certain historical narrative, specifically one where FLN members and activists star as the promising founding fathers of a young democratic nation. The problem with this “propaganda”, in Brisley’s view, is not only that it has largely been read as an authentic depiction of historical truth. Even more disturbing would seem the way in which the ideology and violence of the Islamic Salvation Front (hereafter referred to by its French acronym FIS), which came to power in 1992, adopted and exploited the myths and rhetoric of the very party, the FLN, that was the target of the FIS’s “ongoing bloody attacks”. Through its numerous intertextual references to The Battle of Algiers, Brisley shows how Wolf Dreams brings to the fore the FIS’s “almost mimetic relationship to that of the FLN of the anti-colonial movement”. It is in this function as a discursive pool from which political actors may draw their legitimising references, a formation that in the case of the FIS appears almost mimetic, that Brisley perceives the risks of melancholia: “The easy manner in which the FIS could appropriate putative myths of lost Islamic origins and then reframe them as the failed ideals of the independence movement is indicative of the ongoing fabrication of history that has shrouded Algeria for decades”. It is melancholia in such a sense of politically motivated “fabrication of history” that Brisley argues against, because it might advocate a one-sided, fundamental and even violent perspective. However, while Brisley therefore warns of the theoretical pitfalls of embracing melancholia in a postcolonial context, it should be noted that her final plea to “insist upon a sustained critique of the

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 11

past that consciously works through the multivalent layers of secrecy and ideology” does not differ substantially from the dynamic engagements with history that have been called for by the other authors in this section. Moreover, her comparative investigation of Yasmina Khadra’s novel and Gillo Pontecorvo’s film also points towards the next section of this book, which explores in greater detail how visual media explore, question and transfigure issues of panic and mourning. Entitled Visual Resonances, the second section foregrounds the visual articulation of panic and mourning across different cultural and geographical spaces. Borrowing from Aleida Assmann’s notion of “resonance”, which she defines as “the evoking or suggesting of images, memories, emotions, and meaning”, or the interaction between an experience and a “cultural frame” (Assmann 2010), this section wishes to gauge the enduring reverberations of traumatic events on visuality, the means through which past images bear on the present. The fundamental question the texts in this section seek to tackle is how a visual object can mediate the experience or the legacy of the historical past “to which the object in some sense bears witness but for which it can only account imperfectly” (Saltzman and Rosenberg 2006: ix). This question harks back to the debate around the representability of the Holocaust that surfaced in the first section of this volume but which bears particular implications on the field of visual representation. Should trauma resist representation, as authors including Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman (1992) have claimed, then do all representations in the modern media have to be considered “inadequate, inappropriate or even obscene?” (Meek 2010: 29). While some critics regard popular representations of historical trauma as improper and distorting, others argue that today there is no event that is not influenced and transformed by their representations, which have to be critically examined in order to understand the dynamics of remembrance and forgetting of traumatic histories. This is the question still permeating the discussion around Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985), which Liliane Weissberg addresses in the section’s first text, ‘Odysseus, Rowing’. Lanzmann’s dispute with Jean Luc-Godard upon the release of Shoah illustrates the issues at stake in this debate. Godard claimed that given the Nazi’s compulsive tendency to document everything, it is thus possible that a reel of film recording the gas chambers in action actually exists. For Godard, the discovery of such footage would make up for what he considers the failure of cinema  – not having been there to record the exterminations. Lanzmann’s reaction to Godard’s wishful finding was that were he to come into possession of such ‘an accursed reel of film’, not only would he not show it, but he would actually destroy it. Indeed, in his programmatic movie Shoah, Lanzmann rejected the use of archival images, which he considers not only inadequate to accounting for the traumatic experience of the Holocaust, but also complicit with

12 

 Introduction

the Nazi extermination, choosing instead to focus on the testimonies of survivors, perpetrators and bystanders performed in the present. For Lanzmann, according to Weissberg, the impossibility of representing the Shoah is not only a matter of aesthetic possibilities, or of the human capacity to grasp the event. It is also a problem of ethics. Rendering the events in the form of images would involve an effort to understand the Shoah that “borders on the obscene”. In fact, Dominick LaCapra has described Lanzmann’s position as a Bilderverbot, a ban on images, which many critics in turn see as actually complying with the Nazi regulation of visibility. However, Lanzmann insists on the correspondence between representing and understanding – his exclusion of images is a refusal to understand what should remain non-understandable, because understanding is acknowledging and legitimising what is actually beyond reason. Yet, how can one reject visual representation, re-enactment of events and any kind of explanation and still make a movie about the Shoah? Concentrating on Shoah’s opening sequence, in which Lanzmann brings a Holocaust survivor back to the invisible remnants of Chelmno, formerly a concentration camp, Weissberg discusses the aporias of Lanzmann’s stance. On the one hand, the filmmaker firmly rejects the use of historical images and of re-enactments, which he considers incapable of adequately testifying to the brutality of the event. On the other hand, Lanzmann does create images and makes Srebnik, the character in the opening sequence, re-enact scenes from the past on the site where they had actually taken place, thus allowing past images to resonate in the present. According to Weissberg, in its internal contradictions, Shoah is a film that both offers and resists representation, a film that builds a testimony on the ultimate and ethical impossibility to pay testimony. Lanzmann’s repudiation of historical images renders a tense and problematic relationship with the visual materials inherited from the past. This tension was exemplarily addressed by Georges Didi-Huberman’s in his influential and much debated Images malgré Tout (2003), where he claims, much in line with Godard’s stance, that a critical engagement with images, regardless of their provenance, is necessary, responsible and politically enlightening. Instead of rejected, Didi-Huberman claims, our relationship to images has to be rethought. Indeed, many studies over the last two decades have shown an effort to confront and engage with images of historical trauma in order to understand how the memory of traumatic events is influenced by the images bequeathed by history or produced in the present as an answer to their legacy. As Allan Meek has argued, “[a]ny understanding of historical trauma today needs to attend to the roles that discourses about, and representations of, trauma play in struggles over identity and the meanings of the past” (Meek 2010: 39). Remaining with the field of Holocaust studies, many authors have tried to make sense of the ideological, political and social repercussions of the images generated during the war and

Introduction 

 13

to explain the formation of visual canons, sets of selected images that circulate in public memory and shape the remembrance of traumatic events within different communities and national cultures. Daniela Agostinho, in ‘(Un-)Framing Triumph and Trauma: Visibility, Gender and Liberation through the Soviet Gaze’, translates this concern by focusing on the visual memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of “frame”, operations of power that determine the visibility of conflicts, she argues that the Soviet framing of the Holocaust subsumes the Nazi targeting of Jews into the conduct of the ‘Great Patriotic War’, the Soviet Union’s struggle against Nazism. In her view, this not only relegates the Holocaust to “blind spots of representation” but also gives rise to a unified and ‘sovietised’ memory of WWII. Concentrating on the photographic representation of women, she also contends that sexual difference is a powerful but ambivalent instrument within the visual canon of the Soviet Union. Not contending with short-sighted critiques of the notion of representation, which is often charged for its normalization of hegemonic positions and for precluding agency, she argues that resistance to hegemonic representation can emerge from within representation itself. Through interpretative analysis of photographs taken upon the liberation of areas of Eastern Europe and of the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück, she argues that while sexual difference is clearly instrumentalised and regulated, it simultaneously holds the potential to undermine the ‘Soviet gaze’ and the official narrative of war by leaving traces or cues to visually suppressed experiences on the surface of representation. As such, in Agostinho’s claim, the frames of war, while concealing traumatic events and exerting control over the subjects they depict, can also be “unframed” by the unsettling presence of sexual difference in the visual field. With the rise of new forms of traumatic experiences as a consequence of capitalist globalisation, post-structuralist trauma theory has been increasingly subjected to criticism by several scholars and charged with particularising trauma and endowing it with an almost obscure and mystic quality by stressing its ultimate unrepresentability. According to Ban Wang, trauma studies have failed to conceptualise identity and agency within the scope of new forms of oppression and exclusion that characterise contemporary political and economic powers. Critical of the “depoliticised turn” he claims trauma studies have taken, Wang pleas for a study of everyday trauma that can work as a “critical theory of society” (Meek 2010: 28). Trauma theory, in his view, needs to move away from the obscure psychic world of the victim and take into account the ongoing political and economic violence. In ‘The Banality of Trauma: Globalisation, Migrant Labour, and Nostalgia in Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian’, Wang claims that “migration, uprooting, and dislocation in global capital flows have become a common traumatic experience for millions” that trauma theory has neglected to grapple with. Focus-

14 

 Introduction

ing on the “banality of everyday trauma”, Wang wishes to shift attention from the private psychic world to the historical and violent consequences of globalisation on the labouring body that destroys any sense of belonging in community life. Taking the Chinese film Durian Durian as a case, he demonstrates how the human body, under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, becomes habituated to the ‘banality of trauma’ and turns into a labouring, alienated machine. Unsurprisingly, in the face of traumatic everyday life in capitalist Hong Kong, the film turns toward mainland China and the idea of a communal fold, gesturing with nostalgia towards the residual socialist past that, in reality, is also on the verge of extinction due to China’s growing fascination with Western culture. The film depicts both the trauma at home as the erosion of the communal belonging of Socialism, and the trauma of the labouring body in the global market. Nostalgia emerges according to Wang as resistance to the uprooting and estrangement spawned by capitalist globalization, whereby the return to tradition and community – or the illusion thereof – enables the transcendence of everyday trauma. Wang adopts a strongly critical stance towards what he considers a lack of historical perspective in trauma theory, arguing that studying trauma “often elides its long-term socio-historical consequences and significance”, sometimes even evading history. The idiom of trauma studies, he contends, tends to slither into “a fashionable language of visuality”, in which terms like ‘image’, ‘witnessing’, and ‘testimony’ render an emphasis on symptoms rather than deeper social and political implications. However, in ‘Evocations of the Unspeakable: Trauma, Silence and Mourning in Contemporary Chinese Art’, Tânia Ganito demonstrates how the language of visuality can prove fundamental to grasping the profound and long-term impact of traumatic events in China. Focussing on contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang, Ganito argues that his works contain the ability to fill the discursive gaps that subsist in the interstices of official narratives of the past. By inscribing into the present mnemonic fragments that have been silenced by history, Zhang Xiaogang’s works contribute to a more complete image of a traumatic past in order to ensure that emotional and factual memories are properly registered for the generations to come. As such, visual imagery, by resonating past impressions, can actually retrieve and bring to light “traces of the past that were blurred but not completely buried by history”, drawing awareness to a problematic historical past that is at risk of being suppressed and forgotten. Similar to Ban Wang, Ganito also focuses on the bodies depicted in Zhang Xiaogang’s works, but instead of regarding them as passive victims of a violent past, she contends that the body is capable of storing and inscribing unspeakable records related to traumatic experiences into present times. Zhang Xiaogang’s bodies, according to Ganito, evoke silences and records registered in the interstices of official memory, as “pieces of evidence”, and thereby challenge the “con-

Introduction 

 15

spiracies of silence” surrounding this traumatic past. As such, silence is not seen as a mere symptom of trauma but rather as a mechanism of resistance endowed with agency. Ganito also surveys the process of nostalgia that, following the end of the Cultural Revolution, China embraced as a solution for both reconstructing identity consciousness and recreating cultural memory. In this context, as Wang’s text also demonstrates, nostalgia surfaced as a strategy of embellishing the past and solacing the present. Zhang Xiaogang’s artworks, however, reveal an alternative nostalgic concern that she terms “critical memory” as they incorporate nostalgia’s complicating reverse, carving up a space for negotiation between the negative and the positive aspects of the past, the normativity of official versions of past events and the counter-narratives to those conventionalised accounts. While Ganito concentrates on the role of contemporary Chinese art as a symbolic and cathartic space for the mediation of past and present experiences, Elisabetta Colla, in ‘Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought: Ritualistic Artefacts and Mourning Mediation in Imperial China’, turns once more to Freud to tackle the crucial question of mourning and creativity, centring her analysis on the “ways and mechanisms with which man creates so as to be able to retain what death makes him lose” (Fiorini, Bokanowski and Lewkowicz 2007: 110, quoted by Colla). While Freud avoided exploring the relationship between creativity and mourning in his essay on mourning and melancholia, Elisabetta Colla resorts to his text on ‘Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought’ (1914) to argue for the cathartic dimension of mingqi, ritualistic artefacts placed in burial chambers in ancient China as part of the funerary agenda that prepared the deceased for the afterlife. In her view, both symbolic and physical loss lead to a survival anxiety that tries to compensate for loss through rituals and objects that, like mingqi, are perceivable as the materialisation of the power of thought, animism and magic due to their function of mediating between life and afterlife. Colla regards both the burial chamber and the museum as “ritualistic spaces”, the former being a sacred place created to worship ancestors and the latter a modern and secular reinvented space for cultural pilgrimage within the framework of which the artistic past is mourned. This similarity works as the background for her analysis of a sample of mingqi exhibited at the Museum of the Macau Scientific and Cultural Centre in Lisbon. In Colla’s view, mourning is the process through which grief is shifted to a symbolic order as a way to recover from loss, and artefacts like mingqi, alongside other forms of visual representations, may be regarded as culturally contingent mourning practices to signify loss, to overcome melancholia for the departed and to foster a process of potentially healing remembrance. Sharing emotional constructs such as panic and mourning is essential for conjuring up individual and collective identities. The representation of traumatic

16 

 Introduction

events and their diffusion through traditional and new media channels is contributing to the emergence of remediated affects and performances, and audiences are playing a major role in this remediation process, as well as in the logics of performance, thereby questioning and displacing the paradigm of representation. ‘Remediation’ was proposed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) as a key factor in any understanding of the essence of new media. They argue that new media do not substitute older media forms rather they refashion them through the incorporation and combination of some of their main characteristics. The notion of performance, on the other hand, articulates three different meanings throughout this section: firstly, as a framed event that requires an audience and that often incites participation; secondly, and in line with the performative turn in the humanities, as a concern with the social construction of reality as well as the way cultural practices are influenced by the context in which they occur; and thirdly, as ‘performativity’, the social agency of discourse, defined by Judith Butler as “that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains” (Butler 1993: 2). As the authors in this section demonstrate, more than representing loss and grief, the different media are (re-)mediating them and during the remediation process they deeply involve the audience that feels part of the events they witness as if they are live. Nevertheless, to be able to assume a participatory role, it is necessary to feel affectively involved with the situation given that, as Frederik Tygstrup suggests, “affects not only derive from, but also inform and guide cultural agency and the formation of ideas and beliefs that will eventually be socially institutionalized”. As such, the third section, (Re-)Mediated Affects and Performances, investigates, through different but complementary approaches, how panic and mourning representations are transformed into remediated performances that are shaped through affectivity, a primary disposition for sharing ‘states of mind’. Affects are thereby understood by different researchers as an important alternative perspective to ‘traditional’ representation models, and according to Richard Grusin: one of the attractions of affect theory is that it provides an alternative model of the human subject and its motivations to the post-structuralist psychoanalytic models favoured by most contemporary cultural and media theorists. Affectivity helps shift the focus from representation to mediation, deploying an ontological model that refuses the dualism built into the concept of representation (Grusin 2010: 7).

The centrality of affects is addressed by Frederik Tygstrup in ‘Affective Spaces’, a chapter that frames the analysis of Torres, Gonçalves, Duindam, and Surmann on (re)mediated panic and mourning performances within the contextualizing dimension of affectivity. Drawing on Robert Musil’s distinction between “psy-

Introduction 

 17

chological doctrines to whom the ‘I’ is an indisputable core piece, detectable in every movement of the spirit and particularly in the emotion” and “doctrines that completely disregard the ‘I’ and only consider the relations between expressions” (Musil 1978: 1160, quoted by Tygstrup), Tygstrup maps the different approaches to understanding emotions. He begins by analysing how the history of emotions, the phenomenology of emotions and the psychology of emotions address the first alternative suggested by Musil, and concludes that emotions are seen only as something we carry with us, and not as something in which we may find ourselves. To understand the difference between emotions as something we have as opposed to something we are in, we need to acknowledge the distinction between emotion and affect. According to Tygstrup, “subjects have emotions, but affects produce subjectivity”. Nonetheless, this distinction is not always easily perceived and depends on the object of analysis. Three main approaches to understanding collective affective experiences are proposed: the first is based on Gilles Deleuze’s theorization of affectivity as something relational; the second, on the situational nature of affects; and the third, on the corporeal dimension of affects. Tygstrup contends “that affects cannot be pinned down to one specific realm or layer of reality but seem to persist as a material/immaterial halo or sphere hovering indistinctly but none less insistently above and within any field of human agency and interaction”. This understanding emphasises the spatial dimension of affects as something we are in, and acknowledges the existence of affective spaces. The spatial nature of affects is examined through the analysis of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and J. G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdome Come (2006). His main goals are to show how analysis of the spatial being of social existence may be drawn, and how these two literary works interpret historical spaces – New York City in the aftermath of 9/11 and the “new European urban designed landscapes of the thriving middle classes”, and their affective infrastructures. Despite differences between the works examined, Tygstrup concludes that both DeLillo and Ballard experiment with techniques of mapping affective spaces, and may be considered “cartographers of affect”, given “they contribute to the understanding of the contemporary micro-politics of affects and the changing relational geographies underpinning them and thus eventually also to understanding how affective spaces mould our lives and the selves we come to embody”. Catastrophic events may be perceived as both emotional and affective, depending on the perspective and contextualised object of our analysis, since, as Cintra Torres points out, “[a]s sensorial experiences, catastrophes have to be ‘felt’ to be fully apprehended through senses”. In ‘Catastrophes in Sight and Sound’, Eduardo Cintra Torres offers a historical survey of catastrophe representation,

18 

 Introduction

claiming that “[f]rom late antiquity onwards, catastrophes have been put into words but, given their enormity, remain beyond the human capacity of verbal expression.” The development of visual forms of communication like painting, photography, film, television, or other user-generated means of representation such as those offered by mobile phones contributed to a shift in the way catastrophes are represented, but Torres proposes that the definite turning point was the emergence of mass media because from that moment on catastrophes could be mediated through “sight and sound”. The central elements of his investigation are the representational techniques and their adequacy to the different media contexts. From the first Classical antiquity representations of catastrophes in historical texts and theatre, to highly mediated contemporary events, throughout this chapter different events and their representation are examined: the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the sinking of the Titanic and the Hindenburg disaster constitute some of the case studies discussed. Torres argues that the way catastrophes are portrayed has changed throughout the ages and that the development of different forms of mediation contributed to the transformation of catastrophes into collective events: “[t]hey become part of the daily life and of the daily expectations of viewers until the next catastrophic event occurs, and the process of humanizing the unthinkable rewinds an old story anew.” The next two chapters expand Torres’ argument by discussing and engaging with the concept of “media event” proposed by media theorists Dayan and Katz: events that interrupt routine and “intervene in the normal flow of broadcasting and our lives” (Dayan and Katz 1992: 5). In ‘From Panic to Mourning: 9/11 and the Need for Spectacle’, Diana Gonçalves focuses on the television coverage of the September 11 attacks and their transformation into a media event. The mediated exploitation of panic and fear led to the transformation of the event into a spectacle, with regular programming schedules being cancelled, and the terrorist attacks turning into the main subject of all TV programs. The aftermath of the catastrophe was also appropriated through media strategies, this time centred on the mediatisation of mourning. Public commemorations and benefit events were organised and broadcast, becoming part of what Gonçalves terms mournitainment, the public spectacle of mourning and loss through a performance or show. In the media coverage of 9/11 then, catastrophe, spectacle and reality overlapped, transforming the experience of disaster and unravelling the tendency of the media apparatus to reproduce an aesthetic of spectacle. According to Gonçalves, the remediation of catastrophe into spectacle followed the same logic traditionally used by cinematographic industry: “[t]he images were so spectacular, so absurdly (un)real, that most people thought they could have only been produced by the Hollywood machine”. The transformation of catastrophe into a remediated

Introduction 

 19

media event, where the juxtaposition of reality and fiction with previous representations became evident, was achieved through the appropriation and massive dissemination of the events: “[f]irst evoking the big blockbuster plots and special effects, 9/11 later stimulated the organization of megaspectacles, exploiting people’s emotions and the event’s social, cultural, historical, political and economic impact.” Gonçalves’ proposal of understanding 9/11 attacks as media events results from a reformulated approach to the concept proposed by Dayan and Katz (1992). Gonçalves argues that due to the impact of the terrorist attacks we should not classify them as news events (Dayan and Katz 1992) but as media events, despite not being a ritual and scheduled event. In deploying the term media event instead of news event, Gonçalves’ goal “is to recover the main features attributed to this kind of events and apply them to 9/11, an event characterised by the blurring of the notions of news and spectacle”. David Duindam, on the other hand, in ‘Stage, Performance, Media Event: The National Commemoration of the Second World War in the Netherlands’, resorts to Dayan and Katz’ original understanding of media event, stressing its ritualistic dimension through an analysis of the Dutch Remembrance Day ceremony. In this chapter, Duindam examines the development of the national Remembrance Day within the cultural memory of war and the process of nationbuilding in the Netherlands. The conceptualization of the event is drawn against the notion of the dynamics of cultural memory (Erll and Rigney 2009) and the importance of remembrance rituals as performances of ‘nationalized memories’. In the last part of the chapter, Duindam presents the case study of the 2010 commemoration, which was disrupted by an incident that caused mass panic, and explores how the combination of three particular elements are employed in the construction of what he claims to be a ‘nationalized community’: stage, performance and media event. Duindam regards the National Monument as an important location for official and unofficial collective practices and as displaying two main features: “[a]s a sculpture, it embodies a specific and restricted memory of the war. As a symbolic site, it offers a ceremonial stage for performances that endorse the nation”. The National Monument is the stage for a collective performance of remembrance, the Dodenherdenking – an annual Dutch ceremony to remember national war victims, with a special emphasis on World War II. According to Duindam, the meaning of this shared performance has also evolved; at first, its main goal was to remember the historical events of World War II, but since being televised it became a media event offering its audience the possibility of experiencing it without being physically present at the ceremony’s location. This proves the ritual nature of media events, which “hang a halo over the television set and transform the viewing

20 

 Introduction

experience”, whereby “passive spectatorship gives way to ceremonial participation” (Dayan and Katz 1992, quoted by Duindam). The transformation of this ceremony from a ‘localised’ collective performance into a ‘traditional’ media event resulted in the greater involvement of ‘non-present’ audiences invited to take part in the ceremony from their own houses. Through detailed analysis of the 2010 ceremony, Duindam deconstructs the paradoxal logic of the ceremony, arguing that the feeling of communion conceals the social inequality in the Netherlands, where tolerance and integration are only possible within the framework of the nation-state. The 2010 edition of this ceremony also evidenced the fragility of mediated participation that was easily disrupted by the transformation of a scheduled media event into a news event: “Great news events speak of accidents, of disruption; great ceremonial events celebrate order and its restoration” (Dayan and Katz 1992: 9). While Gonçalves’ analysis of 9/11’s transformation into a media event emphasized the importance of news being transformed into spectacle, this more ‘traditional’ approach proposed by Duindam focuses on the ‘novelty’ of the disruption of the annual ceremony. In this case, the ritualistic event was transformed into a news event due to a disruption that took only a few minutes, altering the planned broadcast agenda but not changing the collective meaning of the ceremony. Finally, Duindam’s case study also underlines the role played by affects in sharing ‘collective states of mind’, and expands Tygstrup’s considerations on the spatial dimension of affects to a mediated realm, showing that “the performance of memory is inscribed by affect: the semblance of being there allows the viewing experience to take on such an affective charge” (Winter 2010, quoted by Duindam). This affective charge of the viewing experience becomes crucial in the final chapter of this volume, ‘No Fun: Mourning the Loss of Tragedy in Contemporary Performance Art’, where Frauke Surmann also examines the articulation of (re)mediation, performance and spectatorship, in which the creative potential of performance art intersects with new media, collapsing the mimetic paradigm and the tragic apparatus. In No Fun, one of the most recent online performances by the Italian artist collective Eva and Franco Mattes alias 0100101110101101.ORG, a suicide is simulated on Chatroulette (http://chatroulette.com), a chat platform that pairs users randomly for video conversations. During this online performance, which went on for several hours, thousands of users were exposed to the performer’s body hanging from the ceiling. Surmann interprets this online performance in light of Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of “loss of tragedy” (2008) – a liminal state where tragedy seems to be lost whilst simultaneously still present. According to Nancy, the loss of an adequate model to expressing the inevitable human mortality, once embodied by Aristotelian tragedy and its purposeful staging of a catastrophic event, displaces any notion of a social order and its

Introduction 

 21

political and ethical implications into a state of liminality, a “transitional state between tragedy as an abandoned frame of reference and its pending replacement”. To confront the loss of this symbolic order, two possible attitudes stand out: nostalgia for the lost, and longing “for the eruption of an absolute coming”. Both nostalgia and longing wish to overcome the liminal state by either restoring or inventing its replacement. However, in Surmann’s view, what is so striking about No Fun is precisely that it proclaims and perpetuates the loss of tragedy, the radical absence of a joint frame of reference, precluding both nostalgia and longing. In contrast, Surmann contends, No Fun sustains this liminality within what she terms an ‘aesthetics of the after’, calling for mourning as a third attitude towards the after, a mourning that “does not mourn the loss of something but rather the very state of loss itself” in the moment of the after. Despite its “unstable equilibrium of irresolvable aesthetic and moral ambiguity”, Surmann recognises creative potential to this “aesthetics of the after”, claiming it might be perceived as a productive model for dealing with the loss of tragedy as it appeals to an active and creative approach to mourning loss. This active engagement is enabled by the possibility of reciprocal interaction on chatroulette, which guarantees the dialogical structure of the performance. Due to this medial interaction, the state of liminality cannot be reduced to a static and anomic condition, rather becoming a zone of reciprocal activity. Facing the absence of any consensus-building frame of reference, No Fun calls for an essentially different ethics, no longer anchored in a predetermined symbolic order, but rather deriving from a “communitas of mourning” that arises and crafts itself from the instant and shared experience of loss. Coming back to the opening of this volume, and recalling Ribeiro’s plea for a “dialogical community of memory”, this last chapter appeals to an active communitas of mourning that is forced to continuously generate its own symbolic frame of reference as a dynamic and dialogical response to loss whilst still able to forge its own ethics as a shared but negotiated responsibility. Should, on the one hand, the essays in this volume recast and interrogate the problematic legacies of our historical past, on the other hand, they open up a space for a sustained and dynamic critique of both past and present that radiates from a “coming community” (Agamben 1993). This community is not built upon any sense of universalism, continuity and homogenous identities, but one that disrupts undifferentiated conceptions of belonging, fostering a common ground where tensions, contradictions and singularities come into dialogue without obliterating differences or demanding closure. A community insubordinate to normative and unified claims, capable of conjuring networks of fluid relationships in order to negotiate the legacies of the past and face the challenges of the future to come.

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 Introduction

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio (1993) The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Agamben, Giorgio (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books). Anastasiadis, Athanasios (2012) ‘Transgenerational Communication of Traumatic Experiences. Narrating the Past from a Postmemorial Position’, Journal of Literary Theory/Zeitschrift für Literaturtheorie, 6.1, 1–24. Assmann, Aleida (2010) ‘Impact and resonance. A culturalist approach to the emotional deep structure of memory’ URL: http://www.liv.ac.uk/soclas/conferences/Theorizing/ Kurzfassungok2.pdf (accessed 26 January 2012). Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press). Boym, Svetlana (2002) The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books). Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge). Caruth, Cathy (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Dayan, Daniel and Elihu Katz (1992) Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Derrida, Jacques (2006) Specters of Marx: The state of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London: Routledge). Didi-Huberman, Georges (2003) Images Malgré Tout (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit). Erll, Astrid, and Ann Rigney (eds) (2009) Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter). Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge). Fiorini, Leticia Glocer, Thierry Bokanowski, and Sergio Lewkowicz (2007) On Freud’s “Mourning and melancholia” (London: International Psychoanalytical Association). Foucault, Michel (1988) ‘Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault’ in Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H. Martin et al. (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press). Freud, Sigmund (1917) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 237–258. Grossberg, Lawrence (1998) ‘The Victory of Culture, Part I: Against the logic of mediation’, Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 3.3, 3–29. Grusin, Richard (2010) Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (London: Palgrave MacMillan). Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger (eds.) (1991) The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). LaCapra, Dominick (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Massumi, Brian (ed.) (1993) The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Meek, Allan (2010) Trauma and Media. Histories, Theories, Debates (London: Routledge).

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Nancy, Jean-Luc (2008) Nach der Tragödie, trans. Jörn Etzold and Helga Finter (Stuttgart: Legueil). Nünning, Ansgar and Vera Nüning (2010) ‘Ways of Worldmaking as a Model for the Study of Culture: Theoretical Frameworks, Epistemological Underpinnings, New Horizons’ in Cultural Ways of Worldmaking. Media and Narratives, eds. Birgit Neumann, Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter). Pollock, Griselda (2009) ‘Art/Trauma/Representation’, Parallax, 15.1, 40–54. Radstone, Susannah (2007) The Sexual Politics of Time. Confession, Nostalgia, Memory (London: Routledge). Rae, Patricia (ed.) (2007) Modernism and Mourning (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont Publishing). Ricciardi, Alessia (2003) The Ends of Mourning (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Saltzman, Lisa and Eric Rosenberg (eds.) (2006) Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (New Haven: University Press of New England). Williams, Raymond (2001 [1961]) The Long Revolution (Ontario: Encore editions).

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I. Literary negotiations

António Sousa Ribeiro

A Culture of Fear: Panic, Mourning, Testimony, and the Question of Representation Organized violence, in particular state violence, is directed in important aspects towards the production of a culture of fear as an essential control mechanism. This is part of a conscious strategy: the seemingly arbitrary and, from the point of view of the victims, unpredictable exercise of power through collective violence leads forcibly to an anomic situation in the context of which any sense of identity and belonging is bound to be profoundly destabilized, thus providing the dominant apparatuses with an efficient means of disciplination. An apt illustration for such a disciplination through fear is provided by one central scene in Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo. In the second chapter of the book, Levi narrates how, upon arrival in Auschwitz, his attempt to appease the terrible thirst he is experiencing after four days of total deprivation by breaking a piece of an ice icicle hanging outside the window of the barrack is prevented by an SS guard, “uno grande e grosso”, a big and brutal man. “Why?” the prisoner asks. “Hier ist kein Warum”, here there is no why, is the short and categorical answer (Levi 1993: 25). This well-known and much quoted passage¹ can well be understood as almost a primal scene. It contains in a nutshell all determinants that define the structure of the extermination camps: the cancelling of the natural sequence of question and answer signifies the absence of any meaningful structure of communication that defines the position of the prisoner as entirely vulnerable. It is not just that the reality of the camps scorns the possibilities of language, in the sense that, as Levi writes, immediately upon arrival the prisoners “become aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man [‘la demolizione di un uomo’]” (Levi 1993: 23).² Indeed, as Levi writes later in the book, the conventional meanings of words like “hunger”, “fear” or “pain” turn out to be completely inadequate in the new context of absolute violence  – “if the Lager had lasted longer, a new, harsh language would have been born” (Levi 1993: 110). But more than that: any stable code of reference has disappeared and the condition of the prisoner is, thus, defined as one of total disorientation. The

1 See e.g. LaCapra (1998: 102–103). 2 Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine.

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fully exposed condition of bare life as analysed by Giorgio Agamben (1998) is here completely materialized. As a result, the strategies of survival developed by the victims will have to face the essential inscrutability of the living conditions in the camp and the unpredictability of the decisions and actions of their torturers, as is regularly and consistently pointed out in testimonial literature. Such unpredictability is the foundation for the culture of fear that is the key for total domination and control in the camps. Not just fear of death, of torture and physical pain, or of deportation to a death camp (in the case of inmates of camps like Theresienstadt or Buchenwald that were not extermination camps in the proper sense), but also constant fear of the unpredictable or totally arbitrary character of events that could decide over one’s fate and that did not follow any meaningful pattern. This is why – as analysed in a masterful recent book by Lina N. Insana (2009) – the skills of translation became an essential tool for survival. Translation not just in the strict sense of the word, but as the ability to read and understand those everyday signs in the camp whose main characteristic was their floating and unstable character. Of course, this is not the whole story. Everyday life in the camps was also governed by regularities and routines, and, over time, some prisoners would have accumulated enough experience so as to be in possession of a reasonable command of expectations and of some oversight over the general conditions of survival. But these were a minority. At the other end of the scale, there would be those who were no longer able to experience fear. They were the broken ones, following the typology established by H. G. Adler in his remarkable book on Theresienstadt (Adler 1955), a pioneer attempt at a sociological analysis of concentration camps. The broken ones, die Gebrochenen, are beyond hope, they are the ones who “had already finished with their lives” (Adler 1955: 664), those Muselmänner in which Agamben (1999) sees the materialization of the deepest truth of the camps. Closest to “the broken ones” in Adler’s typology is the large group of die Ängstlichen, “the fearful ones”, the decisive difference being that these were still capable of experiencing fear – “they were prey to every panic, to any bad rumour” (ibid.: 664). Thus, fear, paradoxically, is the dividing line that separates the still living from the living dead. But, in the end, as Adler points out, fear is precisely the essential mechanism of control that renders the prisoners all the more powerless and ensures their compliance with what is perceived as an inevitable fate. What I have been describing is simply the culmination of a process that would have started long before arrival at the camps, a process of gradual deprivation and disempowerment, ending up in total exclusion. Countless testimonies give witness to such a process, in the course of which the conscience of one’s own vulnerability quickly emerges as a central figure. In the novel Eine Reise [A

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Journey], by H. G. Adler, a little known text that is to my view a central piece of Holocaust literature, the crucial figure for such an exposure of the self to totally discretionary forces is the figure of the journey as a condition of nightmare. In the novel, the journey, i.e. the progression towards that complete exposure, is not something that is undertaken by the characters, it is something that has got hold of them: “Now we are nothing but the instruments of a never-ending journey” (Adler 1999: 51). The radical inversion of the subject’s position in the dystopian context of perpetual displacement is an apt figure for their powerlessness and total vulnerability in the context of absolute violence.³ The Holocaust and the experience of the Nazi death camps are just extreme examples of political and social processes where the everyday experience of extreme violence becomes an essential disciplining mechanism, with permanent fear as an essential instrument. One could of course refer to several other cases. The growing literature on Latin American dictatorships between the 1970s and the 1990s, for example, focuses quite prominently on the production of what Guillermo O’Donnell (1983) has named a ‘culture of fear’, something that is in many ways strikingly similar to the processes of exclusion in Nazi Germany, in that the everyday experience of human-rights abuse and systematic repression leads to the internalization of control mechanisms characterized by traumatic anxiety.⁴ In her book Precarious Life, writing in the aftermath of 9/11, Judith Butler extends this perception to an almost universal condition of vulnerability, which becomes particularly evident under the impact of violence: Violence is surely a touch of the worst order, a way a primary human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in its most terrifying way […]. This vulnerability […] becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions, especially those in which violence is a way of life and the means to secure self-defense are limited (Butler 2004: 28–29).

Judith Butler’s reflections are of special interest in the framework of a reflection on panic and mourning because of the connection she establishes between violence and mourning and of the role she attributes to mourning as a transformative practice capable of “expanding the very conception of the human”. Butler’s critique of violence in the context of the United States after 9/11 sees in the recognition of vulnerability the possibility of the realization of the human; this is the

3 On Adler’s novel and the topos of the journey in Holocaust literature, see Ribeiro (2011). 4 On the ‘culture of fear’ in the case of Latin American dictatorships, see Corradi (1992) and Kaiser (2006), for example.

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foundation upon which an ethics of non-violence can be developed and that is why Butler’s emphasis is on the utopian dimensions of mourning: Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance. There is losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned (Butler 2004: 21).

With the notion of an “egalitarian mourning” she develops in the chapter ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’ of her book, Butler is clearly conjuring up the utopia of an ideal community where the mutual acknowledgement of the condition of vulnerability of every human being provides the foundation for a potentially transformative ethics of recognition. Notwithstanding, as she herself emphasizes, the obvious fact remains that “lives, under current political conditions, are differentially grieved” (Butler 2003: 9). It is precisely this differentiality that has to be taken into account if one wishes to shed some light on the complexities of panic and mourning, since, as is easily apparent, it does indeed make a big difference to have just experienced fear in the form of some vague anxiety or to have been subjected to acute bodily suffering, say, under a situation of torture. Not all victims are victims in exactly the same sense. Particularly where traumatic experiences are concerned, it has to be borne in mind that “the subjective experience of fear does not disappear as soon as the causes that provoked it have ceased to exist” (Salimovich et al. 1992: 73), since it lies in the very nature of trauma that the traumatic situation be reactivated over and over again. There is no violence in general, as there is no suffering in general – violence and suffering have always to do with particular persons and, more specifically, with particular bodies. This is why I would like in the following to provide some contextual analysis by turning again to Holocaust literature and, in particular, to Holocaust testimony. Here, the experience of fear is frequently and explicitly thematized, although one can find a large scale of different ways of dealing with this question. In the Buchenwald memoirs of Jorge Semprun (1994) for example, we certainly find the representation of suffering, but, since the perspective which is repeatedly vindicated is not that of the victim but of the combatant, the thematization of fear appears consistently underplayed. Elsewhere, however, it builds a consistent thread in the memory of the experience of the camps. In the following, I will concentrate on what seems a most telling example, that of Jean Améry. Born in Austria in 1912 as an assimilated Jew, Hans Maier, who would adopt the name of Jean Améry in the 1950s, was forced into exile following the Nazi takeover and, having engaged in underground resistance activities in Belgium, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. After having been brutally tortured, he was

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deported to Auschwitz, and, after the evacuation of Auschwitz, to other camps, ending up in Bergen-Belsen, where he survived to see the liberation of the camp by the British army on April 15 1945. In the post-war years, Améry worked as a rather obscure journalist and essayist, finally achieving a major breakthrough with the broadcasting and publication in 1966 of a collection of five essays under the title Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne [Beyond Guilt and Atonement]. Henceforth and until his suicide in 1978, he would be a major actor on the German-language intellectual scene. He was able to combine with success his lifelong commitment to bearing witness to his personal experience under Nazism with the stance of the cosmopolitan European intellectual, although his allegiance to enlightened universalism was permanently overshadowed by his own experience of alienation and exclusion. The aporetic problematics of testimony have been a frequent object of discussion in the context of the never-ending reflection on the question of the possibility or impossibility of the representation of extreme violence. A central piece in that discussion is a much quoted passage in Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved: At a distance of years one can today definitively affirm that the history of the Lagers has been written almost exclusively by those who, like myself, never fathomed them to the bottom. Those who did so did not return, or their capacity for observation was paralysed by suffering and incomprehension (Levi 1989: 6).

The real witness, the one that has “fathomed the camps to the bottom” can no longer speak and, even if this were possible, the voice of the witness would find no one who would be willing to listen. The same paradox of the witness is expressed in the wake of Levi by Giorgio Agamben (1999) in his choice of the figure of the Muselmann – the concentration camp inmate that is beyond hope and, as such, in practice no longer among the living – as the paradigmatic figure of l’univers concentrationnaire: the ultimate witness is, at the same time, the one that is definitely incapable of bearing testimony. Thus, the true experience of the camps cannot really be communicated; the history of Holocaust literature can be seen as a long and painful search for discursive strategies that would be able to approach that experience without falsifying it, since, in the end, the question, as formulated by Semprun in L’écriture et la vie, is not really that the experience of the camps is unsayable, but that it is unliveable (Semprun 1994: 23). In the five autobiographical essays that make up the volume Beyond Guilt and Atonement, Améry tries – to my view, successfully – to deal with the most difficult of issues, the representation of his own suffering. Particularly impressive, and

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often the object of analysis, is his attempt to come to terms with and to narrate the experience of being tortured in the chapter ‘Die Tortur’ [‘Torture’]. Torture, as the total objectification of the body of the other and a form of absolute control which is experienced by the victim as the most extreme condition of vulnerability, is characterized by Améry not as an additional feature, but as the defining essence of the Third Reich. In this chapter, in a remarkable tour de force, he merges two temporalities, that of the present of his writing and of the present of traumatic memory, by combining analysis with the attempt at the verbalization of the most personal of experiences, the experience of himself as being “completely turned into flesh” and being “just a body and nothing else”. This is where the limits of language are reached. There is no language that can possibly communicate an experience which is beyond language because it is beyond what used to be conceived of as the human: It would make no sense at all to try to describe the pain that was inflicted to me. Was it “like a burning iron in my shoulders” and was this “like a dull-edged wooden stick pushed into the back of my head”? – one image of comparison would only be in the place of the other and, in the end, we would all be duped in turn in the hopeless merry-go-round of comparisons. The pain was what it was. There is nothing more to be said (Améry 1988: 50).

And, a few lines further on: The one who has been tortured, remains under torture. Torture has been burned in him in an indelible way even when no objective clinical traces can be detected (ibid.: 51).

A few pages later, in the final paragraph of the chapter, the reader is confronted with the appalling conclusion: The one who has succumbed to torture will never again be at home in the world. The shame of annihilation cannot be erased. Confidence in the world, which collapsed in part already with the first blow and then entirely collapsed under torture, is not to be recovered. The experience of the fellow human being as the enemy of your own humanity remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. There is no perspective from here to a world governed by the principle of hope. The one who has been racked surrenders unarmed to fear (ibid.: 58).

How does one get from here, from this total surrender to fear, to a process of mourning as a transformative power in the terms of Judith Butler? There must be a very long way to go, with a most uncertain outcome, from the inscription of death in one’s own living body to the possibility of accommodating such an experience within a framework of meaning. This is a way Améry quite consciously decided not to tread. In his book, the chapter on torture has its logical sequel

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in the fourth chapter, simply entitled ‘Resentiments’ [‘Resentments’]. In this chapter, Améry explicitly assumes the perspective of the victim and states as his goal “the description of the subjective condition of the victim” (Améry 1988: 83). This condition is one of principled refusal of any form of reconciliation and forgiveness. As a matter of fact, resentment is defended by Améry as the foundation of a moral attitude, as an essential component of memory and the legitimate defence of the victim vis-à-vis the perpetrators: The one who lets his individuality merge into society and who understands himself simply as a function of the social, i.e. the apathetic and indifferent, may indeed forgive (ibid.: 90).

The tragic situation of the victim, following Améry’s account, lies in the fact that his or her identity is dependent upon the preservation of that same traumatic memory which lies in the way of the possibility of mourning and precludes the logics of hope inherent to that possibility. Nevertheless, resentment, in Améry’s eyes, is nothing short of an imperative moral duty: My resentments, however, are there in order for the crime to become a moral reality for the criminal, so that he be plunged into the truth of his wrongdoings (ibid.: 90).

Améry’s position has been the object of much criticism, notably by Tzvetan Todorov, who in his book Face à l’extrême (1990) equates it with a simple wish for revenge and, thus, as a position that despite Améry’s moral arguments is in the end ethically unacceptable. On another level, the issue had already been tackled by Primo Levi in the chapter ‘The Intellectual at Auschwitz’ of The Drowned and the Saved. The polemics is not about forgiveness. Levi, like Améry, is not willing to forgive and is as uncompromising in this regard as his counterpart. However, he criticizes Améry for having been led to “positions of such severity and intransigence as to make him incapable of finding joy in life, indeed of living” (Levi 1989: 110), although he readily admits that, had he been in the same position, had he undergone Améry’s ordeal under torture, he might have been led to develop the same resentments that had become such a vital component of Améry’s ethos. Indeed, Levi’s own way of coming to terms with his experience in Auschwitz is no less problematic. Writing about the final years before Levi’s suicide, Todorov is led to a conclusion that implicitly puts into perspective his criticism of Améry’s notion of resentment: One regrets – for his sake, not for ours, we that are his readers – that Levi has taken to heart to such an extent his project of understanding the enemy. The project is admirable, but the former victim may not be the most suitable person to carry it out (Todorov 1990: 294).

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Putting Améry into perspective implies a more careful contextualization of his theory of resentment than is more often the case.⁵ In a famous book published in 1967, one year after the appearance of Beyond Guilt and Atonement, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich coined the phrase Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern [The Inability to Mourn] to account for the moral condition of post-war German society (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1990). Written from a psychoanalytical point of view, the book is a scathing critique of the inability of German society to come to terms with its past. In his essays, Améry repeatedly confronts this inability. As a matter of fact, his essay on resentment is quite explicit concerning the reasons of his uncompromising stance. Mourning is not an individual decision or an individual choice offered to the subject, it is fully dependent on conditions that are of a collective character. And, in post-war German society, these conditions are simply not given. Améry’s demand is that there may be a time in which Germany would no longer “suppress and silence the memory of the twelve years that for us were really one thousand, but, instead, would consider these years […] as his own negative property” (Améry 1988: 98) Such a process, he writes a bit further, would be “the negation of the negation: a highly positive, a redemptive act. Only through such an act would resentment have become subjectively satisfied and objectively useless” (ibid.: 99). Such demands emphasize to what extent Améry’s situation vis-à-vis German society is understood by himself as one of loneliness and exposure. “I want to be redeemed of this ongoing feeling of abandonment”, he writes poignantly in this chapter (ibid.: 90). However, that is something that does not lie in his power. True, he is not looking for revenge, but for justice and a kind of justice that, as already mentioned, has as an essential precondition that “crime [may] become a moral reality for the criminal”. Such recognition is a vital goal of transitional justice – for example, it was precisely what the South African “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” was all about, as a new paradigm of how a whole society can, with some success, deal with the history and memory of violence. Nevertheless, in the Germany of the 1950s and the 1960s, such a context was virtually non-existent, leaving Améry with no other solution than his entrenched refusal which, in the end, and as we have seen, simultaneously precludes the work of mourning. Such a conclusion touches upon a vital issue that lies at the core of the question of testimony. As Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, among others, have repeatedly argued, the emergence of testimony is inseparable from the role of the

5 For a full, sophisticated treatment of the question of resentment in Améry, see Brudholm (2008). See also Assmann (2003).

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listener.⁶ As an act of authorship – also in the vital sense that testimony allows the victim to transcend his or her status as a victim, to recover agency and thus to project a new sense of identity for him or herself – testimony is not simply monological, it rests instead on the constitutive presence of a sympathetic listener that allows it to resonate beyond the limited space of personal memory. As a dialogical relationship, testimony is thus profoundly implicated in the creation of a community of memory, in the production of public memory and post-memory.⁷ In the framework of such a community, the individual core of an experience of suffering may well remain inscrutable and essentially non-communicable; but the subject position has been dislocated to a shared public dimension where the memory of loss and trauma can provide a space for the work of mourning and maybe even of that egalitarian mourning conjured up by Judith Butler as a utopian prospect. The space of the camps is the most dramatic illustration of that shrinking of the space of experience analysed by Benjamin as a consequence of the violence of the modern condition, as epitomized in those soldiers who, coming home from the battlefields of World War I, could find no way to articulate their sufferings: “they were not richer, but poorer in regard to a sharable experience”, Benjamin writes in a central passage of his essay (Benjamin, 1980: 214). Panic and fear are the marks of the situation of a subject whom absolute violence has exposed to full vulnerability. Mourning, so drastically and tragically denied to Jean Améry, is the never ending transgenerational work of a coming community built upon fundamental values of justice.

Works Cited Adler, H. G. (1955) Theresienstadt. 1941–1945. Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr). Adler, H. G. (1999) Eine Reise (Vienna: Zsolnay). Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Agamben, Giorgio (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books). Améry, Jean (1988) Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (Munich: dtv). Assmann, Aleida (2003) ‘Two Forms of Resentment: Jean Améry, Martin Walser and German Memorial Culture’, New German Critique, 90, 123–133.

6 See Felman and Laub (1992); Felman (2001). 7 On the concept of postmemory, see Hirsch (1997; 2008).

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Benjamin, Walter (1980) ‘Erfahrung und Armut’, Gesammelte Schrifte IV, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 213–219. Brudholm, Thomas (2008) Resentment’s Virtue. Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). Butler, Judith (2003) ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4.1, 9–37. Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso). Corradi, Juan E. et al. (eds) (1992) Fear at the Edge. State Terror and Resistance in Latin America (Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford: University of California Press). Felman, Shoshana (2001) ‘Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust’, Critical Inquiry, 27.2, 201–238. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge). Hirsch, Marianne (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Hirsch, Marianne (2008) ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29.1, 103–128. Insana, Lina M. (2009) Arduous Tasks. Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Kaiser, Susana (2006) Postmemories of Terror: A New Generation Copes with the Legacy of the ‘Dirty War’ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). LaCapra, Dominick (1998) ‘Lanzmann’s Shoah: ‘Here There Is No Why’’, in History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 95–138. Levi, Primo (1989) The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus). Levi, Primo (1993) Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi). Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich (1990) Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (Leipzig: Reclam). O’Donnell, Guillermo (1983) ‘La cosecha del miedo’, Nexus, 6.6, 51–60. Ribeiro, António Sousa (2011) ‘Cartographies of Non-Space: Journeys to the End of the World in Holocaust Literature’, Journal of Romance Studies, 11.1, 76–86. Salimovich, Sofia et al. (1992) ‘Victims of Fear. The Social Psychology of Repression’, in Fear at the Edge. State Terror and Resistance in Latin America, ed. Corradi, Juan E. et al. (Berkeley/ Los Angeles/Oxford: University of California Press), 72–89. Semprun, Jorge (1994) L’écriture et la vie (Paris: Gallimard). Todorov, Tzvetan (1990) Face à l’extrême (Paris: Seuil).

Luisa Banki

Mourning, Melancholia and Morality: W. G. Sebald’s German-Jewish Narratives ‘To make history out of the very detritus of history’ – that is and remains commendable. (Benjamin 1991: 218 [my translation])

That all things German and all things Jewish, or rather all things German-Jewish are of primary concern in W. G. Sebald’s work can go unquestioned. As a scholar of German literature, he famously criticised German post-war literature for its insufficient willingness to deal with and general lack of knowledge of the Shoah, while he himself returned time and again to the study of German-Jewish authors, attempting to trace the origins and course of catastrophe. As a writer of prose fiction, he attempted to produce such knowledge by describing characters whose lives were touched and ultimately destroyed by it. The relationships between Sebald’s first person German narrator and his frequently Jewish protagonists almost always begin as incidental encounters in the present and develop into complex networks of biographical connections in the past. These connections are not without their paradoxes and contradictions, which are time and again referred to by means of, or rather developed around, the signifiers “German” and “Jewish”. When, for instance, the narrator tries to guess at the reason Austerlitz, the protagonist of Sebald’s last finished work, did not reply to his early letters and fears that their acquaintance, which had only just begun, was over, he recalls: I wrote to Austerlitz from Munich a couple of times, but I never had any reply to my letters, either because, as I thought at the time, Austerlitz was away somewhere, or as I now think because he did not like writing to Germany (Sebald 2002a: 46).

Whether Austerlitz really is avoiding writing to Germany (presumably because he wants nothing to do with the country from which Nazism came) or whether the narrator imagines this (because, in a way, he himself does not) is peripheral – the fact remains that a tension-charged atmosphere is created that is based on the fact and remembrance of the Shoah. What is crucial, however, is that Sebald’s preoccupation is not the Shoah itself, that is: not the actual past events, but rather their effects, what is remembered and passed on. This is why assessments like Stuart Taberner’s, who claims that “[t]he narrative […] always ends at Auschwitz. There it is blocked: there can be no development” (Taberner 2004: 184),

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have to be specified. Sebald’s narratives do not end at Auschwitz; instead they are constructions of a present, in which a past is present, remains, insists, precisely before the background of the factuality of the Shoah. Decisive is thus not an ‘authentic’ rendering of ‘how things really were’, but rather the presence, the actuality, of remembering. This is also the point where Sebald is closest to Walter Benjamin who similarly does not want to use his view and understanding of the past as a means to give a sort of positivistic account of it, but rather to render present, to give a present to that which is historically unredeemed and persists into the present day. Sebald’s narratives present this remembering as a shared effort of a German narrator and a protagonist, who most often is Jewish, and who together attempt – although they are confronted with radically different mnemonic imperatives and difficulties – to converse and conjoin. It is for this reason that I want to suggest a reading of Sebald’s works as German-Jewish  – an expression in which the hyphen, signifying a rupture, a silence, an impossibility, is as important as either word and by which I mean the conjoining, but not merging, of particularities and thus the dialectical creation of something new: of text. German-Jewish, as I use the term here, thus refers less to an empirical and more to a literary, poetical constellation and it is the conditions and implications of this definition that I would like to trace in my reading of Sebald by reference to different psychoanalytic and philosophical theorisations.

1 Trauma, Temporality, Transmission That which in Benjamin is described as historically unredeemed and insists in the present can also be understood as a definition of trauma. In the field of literary studies, trauma has been associated with the limits of representation, with an unspeakable that is present but unreachable, as it were, withdrawn from consciousness, because it could not be integrated into the organisation of the ego. Drawing on Freud’s concept of repression that is, of course, not a form of forgetting but, on the contrary, an especially persistent form of conservation, JeanFrançois Lyotard described trauma as a “state of death in the life of the spirit” (Lyotard 1990: 26). For this death to enter into the life of the spirit, however, the past has to enter into the present, or rather the other way round: the present has to retroactively alter and give meaning to the past. Trauma, that is to say, is an extending re-interpretation of memory, in which remembering is the subjective act of interpreting the past. Owing to the impossibility to localise traumatic moments in time, trauma and memory follow a psychic causality that is distin-

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guished by a particular temporality pointing to both the past and the future, a temporality that Freud theorised in the concept of deferred action (Nachträglichkeit). What is meant by this is the fact that a present state can psycho-causally effectuate another past state to become traumatic: a memory can become actualised, as it were, by a re-interpretation of subjective history, thereby inscribing into it a retroactive causality. It can thus happen that an occurrence in the present pathogenically endows an earlier one, causing non-effective impressions to become traumatically effective memories: “We invariably find that a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action [nachträglich]” (Freud 1950: 356). It is thus possible to say, as Freud famously does, that neurotics “suffer mainly from reminiscences” (Freud 1955: 7). When Ambros Adelwarth in Sebald’s The Emigrants, for instance, subjects himself to torturous shocktherapies, “longing for an extinction as total and irreversible as possible of his capacity to think and remember” (Sebald 2002b: 114), this can then be read as the (unsuccessful) attempt to protect himself against such deferred action that traumatises by remembrance. Max Ferber, the fourth emigrant, also seems to point to this persecuting timelessness of (unconscious) memories when he remarks that time […] is an unreliable way of gauging these things, indeed it is nothing but a disquiet of the soul. There is neither a past nor a future. At least, not for me. The fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories, are obsessive in character (Sebald 2002b: 181).

In terms of their narrative structure, the four stories of The Emigrants are characterised by a “poetics of suspension” that subverts or suspends established conceptions of chronology, succession and closure, and ultimately creates its own, other, literary time (cf. Eshel 2003: 74). Sebald’s prose, in other words, is suspended between the progression of time (chronos) and the (traumatic) moment disrupting it with an event that can (retroactively) generate meaning (kairos). However, Sebald’s kairoi never reach any form of transcendence – their ‘meaning’ always remains deferred. The fates of the four emigrants  – isolation, illness, suicide – can thus be understood as late consequences of traumatisations that have become effective by deferred action and remembrance and whose causality can likewise only be discerned in retrospect through the narration of their life stories. Sebald’s interest in trauma, we may thus infer, is a literary one, which is to say, it is of the order of an investigation into the possibility of transmitting traumatic experiences. By referring to discourses of trauma while at the same time detaching them from individual pathologies, he transforms traumatic symptoms and their treatment into a poetics of history that consists not in the elaboration of individual psychological portraits but rather in the transposition of intrapsychic

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processes of traumatic experience into the interaction between narrator and protagonists. Herein also lies an answer to the frequently asked question about the legitimacy of a narrator who combines Jewish storyteller and German chronicler (cf. e.g. Ceuppens 2006, Garloff 2006): Sebald’s narrator is at the same time a literary figure and a narrative means. As the former, he does indeed act like a therapist allowing for and encouraging the reconstruction of the protagonist-subjects’ stories. In this, he has a certain interpretative power over history, although he cannot control the reconstructive processes. As a narrative means, however, he creates distance since his presence emphasises a mediating agency or level in the reconstruction of the past. The narrative technique of oscillating between direct and indirect speech further points to the (inter)space of fabrication and deformation that opens up in the transmission of reminiscences. Instead of creating or emphasising authenticity, Sebald’s works thus shed light on the conditions for the transmission of biographies – and pose the question what gives whom the right to tell another’s story.

2 Mourning vs. Melancholia The possibilities of remembering and representing trauma also point to the more general question of remembering the dead. In The Emigrants, all four main protagonists have lost loved ones who perished in, or in connection to, the Shoah and to whom they remain (unconsciously) riveted in such a way that they ultimately cannot survive having survived. From a psychoanalytic point of view, remaining thus riveted to a lost object equals a regression from object-cathexis to a narcissistic identification with the object. In his seminal essay on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Freud differentiated between two reactive modes to loss: mourning, where the ego gradually de-cathects or detaches itself from the object so that “when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (Freud 1957: 245); and melancholia that is characterised by the fact that the object-cathexis is not withdrawn from the object and transferred to a new one, but instead the still invested object is withdrawn into the ego. The object is incorporated, establishing an identification of the ego with the lost object, thus preserving it from extinction and itself from losing it. The so incorporated object all but overwhelms the ego from within: the shadow of the object fell upon the ego […]. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification (Freud 1957: 249).

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This melancholic ‘union’ with the lost object is necessary for the stabilisation of (unconscious) remembering. But it is also this unconscious identification that constitutes the “state of death in the life of the spirit” since the subject remains riveted to, united and, in a way, melded with the dead object. As becomes clear from this perspective, there is also another, central conflict in the representation of trauma and loss because representing also means telling, speaking, pronouncing, renouncing, letting out and letting go. The wish for a stabilising representation of the traumatic loss thus stands in opposition to the fear of letting memories disappear by pronouncing/renouncing them, leading to a tension-charged, painful situation. What I want to suggest is that the position from which Sebald is writing is structurally comparable to this strained position not only between pronouncing and renouncing but also between mourning and melancholia and that this is the case essentially due to the remembrance of the Shoah. With a narrator whose German background and past are thematised and emphasised time and again, and who makes himself the archivist and chronicler of mostly Jewish life stories while also recounting his own impressions and experiences, a duality is introduced into the texts: the dual wager of Sebald’s works lies in the intertwined challenges of representing not only Jewish fates in the aftermath of the Shoah but also the pronouncedly, yet ambivalent German perspective from which this is done, while at the same time also reflecting on both these positions of experience and utterance. There seems, in a word, to be a certain ambivalence – or rather, as we will see, a dialectic – between the pervasive ‘mood’ of Sebald’s writings and their effects. On the one hand, it is melancholia, the refusal to let go of what has been lost, that determines the Sebaldian narratives, whose narrator was born when “the cold planet Saturn ruled this hour’s / constellation” (Sebald 2003: 86). On the other hand, his literary practice of recounting story after story about that which is now lost (lives, cultures, landscapes…) seems to belong to the register of mourning, of remembering and working through, and thus not of melancholia and its cleaving to what has been lost. What can perhaps help to understand this better is to take a closer look at both Sebald’s definitions of memory and reminiscence and of the function of literature, of writing. In an essay on Jean Améry and Primo Levi, Sebald, following Theodor Reik’s definition, conceives of memory [Gedächtnis] as a sort of unconscious reservoir of impressions and experiences, while he understands reminiscence [Erinnerung] as the isolation and conversion of certain memories that thereby become bits of conscious thought that can be communicated and passed on (Sebald 1990: 121). This means that memory functions as a sort of archive of past impressions that are preserved ‘truthfully’ but cannot be communicated, while reminiscences can be passed on but only at the cost of distorting or even destroying the ‘unspeakable truth’ of memory. As Reik writes, “[t]he function of

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memory is to protect our impressions; reminiscence aims at their dissolution. Essentially memory is conservative; reminiscence, destructive” (Reik 1936: 131). It is in keeping with this understanding that Sebald’s protagonists are characterised. Ambros Adelwarth, for instance, is said to have an infallible memory [Gedächtnis] but that, at the same time, he scarcely allowed himself access to it [keine Erinnerungsfähigkeit]. For that reason, telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself (Sebald 2002b: 100).

In his essay on Améry and Levi, Sebald further adds that, in terms of writing about what is past, a representation that “abandons memory in favour of reminiscence, disturbance in favour of communication” is only possible at the price of “a betrayal that breaks faith to the dead” (Sebald 1990: 122 [my translation]). This is why he concludes: “Perhaps one could say that memory has a higher moral value and reminiscence a higher social value” (ibid. [my translation]). What is perhaps most interesting and significant in this definition and assessment is that writing, the symbolic formation and articulation of experiences, can thus be called a reworking of memory with the means and methods of reminiscence. This again seems to put Sebald closer to a practice of mourning – of recalling and articulating and thus (potentially) of working through – than of melancholia. However, the answer to the question of Sebald’s relation to mourning and melancholia, or more precisely to the different forms and practices of literature they entail, lies, I suggest, in his manner of writing. The way in which Sebald writes – namely in a highly intertextual manner, forging his texts out of fragments and quotes from other texts and using a technique of montage that he himself, following Claude Lévi-Strauss, called bricolage – is one that lets reminiscences appear increasingly like an archive, for instance of quotes, and this means: like the symbolic form of memory. Sebald thus uses both melancholia and his literary technique of montage – retelling the stories someone else has told him, relying heavily on intertextual references, juxtaposing text and image, fact and fiction – as a means to break up a picture of the past, to break up the imaginary unity constructed by reminiscences that are, as seen above, themselves necessary distortions of the truth as it is preserved but inaccessible in memory. It is in this spirit that I understand Sebald’s definition of melancholia as “a form of resistance” (Sebald 1994: 12 [my translation]). What this means, I think, is that melancholia can – quite in keeping with Freud’s definition – be understood as the cleaving to a lost past, to loss itself perhaps. As such it is a form of resistance against the (all too smooth) integration of catastrophe into progress, into some imperative of ‘moving on’ that is, of course, only the other side of the coin of

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the official attitude of commemoration, a coin that is forged, as it were, by mainstream power and discourse. This mainstream attitude might, especially when it comes to contemporary Germany, be the instance when Sebald  – or rather: his narrator – is most adverse to his own Germanness and when he sides most emphatically with those who have traditionally and fatally been the Germans’ ‘other’. When Sebald describes “remembrance as a skandalon”, that is as a stumbling block or even a nuisance, and says that “anyone who did remember would, like Hamlet, be admonished by the new men in power” (Sebald 2006: 104 [translation modified]), it should be understood in this light: “remembrance as skandalon” means that both the task and the effect of keeping the past present, of not letting go of it and thus of, in a certain sense, being a melancholic is a critique of progress at the expense of the past. Cleaving to the lost object disrupts the smooth run of things because it stops time, which, as Austerlitz puts it, is “by far the most artificial of all our inventions” (Sebald 2002a: 141).

3 Collections – Writings Austerlitz’ own perception of time is rather different: I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like (Sebald 2002a: 185).

What this image entails is the threatening dissolution of all order into chaos – a threat that is, of course, analogous or even in a way identical with the danger of being overwhelmed by (actualised) traumatic memories. It is the narrator who fulfils the central function of working with – of working through – not only his own impressions and experiences but also those of the protagonists. His task is thus not only to record their stories but first and foremost to collect them: he is indeed a collector  – of relicts, traces, stories, lives  – who is constantly confronted with new findings and thus also with the task of working through them, of working them into his narratives. The figure of the collector also plays a central role in Walter Benjamin’s thought, and he, too, emphasises his role in working against the threat of disorder and chaos: “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories” (Benjamin 1969: 60). Just as Sebald conceives of memory as an unconscious archive of experiences and of reminiscences as their conscious expressions, so Benjamin views the collectable as that which has escaped or been separated from the chaos of memories. In the collection of

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objects, relicts and, in a certain sense, also of biographies, the past enters into the present and is preserved there: In this collective and historical process of fixation, collecting plays a certain role. Collecting is a form of practical remembering, and of all the profane manifestations of the penetration of ‘what has been’ (of all the profane manifestation of ‘nearness’) it is the most binding (Benjamin 2002: 883 [my emphasis; translation modified]).

It is thus between the chaos of memories and their fixation in reminiscences that Benjamin situates the collector’s task and it is in this sense that Sebald’s narrator is a collector. Collecting thereby carries within itself a certain polyvalence or tension, a certain dialectic between chaos and rescue: These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness. […] Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order (Benjamin 1969: 60).

Disorder and order, chaos of memory and articulate reminiscence thus point to the dangerous and tension-filled relation between life and its textualisation, between bios and graphein, and thus to that which dialectically collects the former in the latter: writing. Herein lies, I suggest, the central aspect of Sebald’s narrative setup which not only establishes German and Jewish encounters on the diegetic level represented by the German narrator and his Jewish interlocutors; rather, it also traces the transferral from experience to oral transmission to written reflection. This is not to say that this process is unidirectional; to the contrary, the actual encounter and experience takes place and, as it were, only becomes phenomenal in writing, in literature. From this perspective it becomes clear that Sebald’s narratives are, quite literally, German-Jewish: they present conversations between a German and a Jew and, more significantly, they combine German and Jewish experiences in their different demands and attempts to deal with the common – and precisely in this commonness so radically different  – past. This might indeed be called German-Jewish, with an emphasis on the hyphen, since here, too, pronouncing includes renouncing: the consistency and particularity of the names “German” and “Jewish” is subverted and sublated in the creation of something other, of text, of literature. The creation of literature is what I now want to focus on in a last step and with reference to another author and literary-biographical project that – perhaps surprisingly – shares some significant similarities with Sebald’s: Michel Foucault’s ‘Lives of Infamous Men’. In this short text, Foucault traces a discursive development, namely the administrative compilation of biographies. He was plan-

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ning an “anthology of existences” (Foucault 2001: 157) that he wanted to bring to light, out of the archival darkness – just as they had once been torn from the darkness of history by the administrative capture. Foucault’s planned anthology was neither supposed to “answer the purpose of historians” nor to be a “purely subjective book” but rather “a rule- and game-based book, the book of a little obsession that found its system” (ibid., 2001: 159). This obsession is the eye and attention for detail, for what is small, unremarkable and nameless, and it is an obsession that is undoubtedly shared by Sebald, whose books are filled not only with the biographies of obscure and private persons but are also endowed with a wealth of details in all descriptions. What is decisive in both Foucault’s and Sebald’s projects is that these lives that had been “destined to pass away without a trace” (ibid., 2001: 161) owe their textualisation and thus their preservation to an intervention of an other: “in order for some part of them to reach us, a beam of light had to illuminate them, for a moment at least. A light coming from elsewhere” (ibid., 2001: 161). Sebald’s literary-biographical effort can be understood as such a light, as a bringing to light of forgotten, lost life stories that are, in a way, only brought into being by this light. The narrative strategy thereby equals the production and articulation of such a “beam of light”: a narrator tells what others have told him, he researches  – like Foucault  – in archives, collects and reproduces documents that give an account of those lives. What is, however, crucial is that the agency that snatched them from the darkness in which they could, perhaps should, have remained was the encounter with power; without that collision it’s very unlikely that any word would be there to recall their fleeting trajectory. The power that watched these lives, that pursued them, that lent its attention, if only for a moment, to their complaints and their little racket, and marked them with its claw was what gave rise to the few words about them that remain for us (ibid., 2001: 161).

This act of power, this always usurpatory capture of another’s story, that transforms life into writing, also stands at the centre of Sebald’s texts; the Sebaldian narrator is not only collector and archivist of the life stories he tells but also the power that grasps them, seizes them and, in a way, only thereby creates them. The discovery, preservation and remembrance of past lives is thus always also both an appropriation and an invention. As becomes clear before the background of Foucault’s power and discourse analysis, even commemorative literature defies an immediate translation into an ethical imperative like the obligation to remember the lives of those killed or exiled. Reading Sebald together with Foucault thus brings into focus the complicated question of the relation between ethics and aesthetics.

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While Foucault bases his argument on the metaphor of the “light from elsewhere”, Sebald offers a very similar trope that is, however, rather the inversion of Foucault’s. Foucault’s “beam of light” pierces through the night, thus evoking the sun and, through its traditional imagery, power; Sebald, in a similar play with orbs and their semantic-metaphoric fields, refers to the “cold planet Saturn” that is closely connected to melancholia (cf. Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl 1964). But there is also another level on which the two orbs and their usage in metaphors can be brought to bear on a reading of Sebald’s works: while the sunlight in Foucault’s metaphor figures as a “beam”, that is as a bundled and focused ray, a united, uniform form, Saturn appears in Sebald’s usage to have adverse, multiplying and dispersing effects. The Rings of Saturn not only takes its title from the planet but also begin with an epigraph taken from the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie that ends with the following description of the rings: “In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect” (Sebald 2002c: 2 [my emphasis]). While the sun thus effectuates unity and consistency, Saturn is said to have fragmenting, multiplying effects. In both cases, however, a natural phenomenon (beams of sunlight and the rings of Saturn) becomes, by means of a tertium comparationis (penetrating force and fragments), a metaphor for a literarily worked topos (power and life). In the case of Sebald’s rings of Saturn, one can even make a further observation since the fragments not only point to his literary technique of montage and bricolage of vestiges and remnants (fragments of documents, quotes, images, buildings, landscapes etc.) but also to the mechanisms of destruction and dispersion that permeate his works as central motifs. Furthermore and most importantly, however, Saturn and its rings stand for the almost proverbial Sebaldian melancholia, which is to say, for the refusal to abandon or relinquish that which is lost or past. Saturn who refuses to let go of its fragments and preserves them formed as rings thus becomes not only an emblem of melancholia but also of Sebald’s poetics – a poetics that unites ethics and aesthetics. Foucault’s short study on the development of discourse, on the “immense possibility for discourse” (Foucault 2001: 169), likewise opens into a reflection on the connection of ethics and literature: An art of language was born whose task was no longer to tell of the improbable but to bring into view that which doesn’t, which can’t and mustn’t, appear – to tell the last and most tenuous degrees of the real. Just as a dispositive was being installed for forcing people to tell the ‘insignificant’ [‘l’infime’] – that which isn’t told, which doesn’t merit any glory, therefore the ‘infamous’ [‘l’infâme’] – a new imperative was forming that would constitute what could be called the ‘immanent ethic’ of Western literary discourse (ibid., 2001: 173 [translation modified]).

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Neither Foucault nor Sebald envision “a book of history” but rather an “anthology of existences”, of “[b]rief lives, encountered by chance in books and documents” (ibid. 2001: 157). Essential for the reading I have suggested of Sebald’s works is the encounter in and with writings; and when Sebald notes that “aesthetics is ultimately always concerned with questions of ethics” (Sebald 2004: 115) this can be read as the point where all these considerations come together: taking seriously Sebald’s assessment in his essay on Améry and Levi that the truth of historic events is preserved in memory and can only become an articulate reminiscence by deviating from that truth, by “betraying the dead”, the achievement of his biographic poetics becomes clear: Sebald transforms the biographies he tells into “legends” in the Foucauldian sense, which is to say that “there is a certain ambiguity between the fictional and the real”, whereby, however, “[w] hatever its kernel of reality, the legendary is nothing else, finally, but the sum of what is said about it” (Foucault 2001: 162). What is at stake in Sebald’s writings is thus not the capture of a pre-existing real in speech and writing, but essentially a real that only comes into existence through narration.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter (1991) Gesammelte Schriften III. Kritiken und Rezensionen 1912–1931, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp). Benjamin, Walter (1969) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken). Benjamin, Walter (2002) The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (New York: Belknap Press). Ceuppens, Jan (2006) ‘Transcripts: An Ethics of Representation in The Emigrants’, in W. G. Sebald. History – Memory – Trauma, ed. Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter), 251–263. Eshel, Amir (2003) ‘Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W. G. Sebald’s ‘Austerlitz”, New German Critique 88, 71–96. Foucault, Michel (2001) ‘Lives of Infamous Men’, in Power (Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, III) ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley a. o. (New York: New Press, 2001), 157–175. Freud, Sigmund and Joseph Breuer (1995) ‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, II, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press), 1–17. Freud, Sigmund (1950) ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, I, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press), 281–391. Freud, Sigmund (1957) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIV, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press), 243–258.

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Garloff, Katja (2006) ‘The Task of the Narrator. Moments of Symbolic Investiture in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz’ in W. G. Sebald. History – Memory – Trauma, ed. Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter), 157–169. Klibansky, Raymond, Erwain Panofsky and Fritz Saxl (1964) Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson). Lyotard, Jean-François (1990) Heidegger and “the jews”, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Reik, Theodor (1936) Surprise and the Psycho-Analyst: On the Conjecture and Comprehension of Unconscious Process, trans. Margaret M. Green (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.). Sebald, W. G. (1990) ‘Jean Améry und Primo Levi’ in Über Jean Améry, ed. Irene HeidelbergerLeonard (Heidelberg: Carl Winter), 115–123. Sebald, W. G. (1994) Die Beschreibung des Unglücks. Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer). Sebald, W. G. (2002a) Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin). Sebald, W. G. (2002b) The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage). Sebald, W. G. (2002c) The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage). Sebald, W. G. (2003) After Nature, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin). Sebald, W. G. (2004) Unheimliche Heimat. Essays zur österreichischen Literatur (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer). Sebald, W. G. (2006), Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library). Taberner, Stuart (2004) ‘German Nostalgia? Remembering German-Jewish Life in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz’, The Germanic Review 79, 3, Special Issue on W. G. Sebald, 181–202.

Milan Miljković

Nostalgias and Mourning: The Nation in the Serbian Journal The Spring (1992–1996) At the end of the 20th century, marked by dramatic changes in the sociopolitical and cultural landscape of Central and Eastern Europe, the violent ending of Yugoslavia was accompanied by processes involving reimagining national identities (see Kolstø 2009). Within the former Yugoslav republics, a sense of communal ethnic identity was not built through opposition towards the ideology of communism/socialism (as was the case of Eastern European countries such as Ukraine, Estonia and Lithuania). Rather, it was constructed through various symbolic cultural and political gestures that enforced a new reading of the past, thus connecting newly formed states with images, myths and narratives sourced from their historical periods before World War II. The emergence of myth-like images, idyllic rural settings and the patriarchal values of church, family and marriage were thoroughly expressed in different literary and journalistic genres, published across all print media: daily newspapers, literary supplements and magazines. It was a time of “reestablished ethnonationalist political mythologies”*¹ (Čolović 1997: 13) and “massive abuse of historic discourse, launched from a position of power but soon sweeping the country as an epidemic” (Aleksić 2006: 66). “Difficult economic situations and power struggles among different nationalist lobbies” (ibid.) created an atmosphere of anxiety amongst citizens of Yugoslavia, thus forming a suitable arena for the work of restorative nostalgia which attempted “to transhistorically reconstruct the lost home” (Boym 2005: 22) of different ethnic communities. As a discourse frequently appropriated by a nationalist anti-modern matrix of historical narrative, restorative nostalgia articulates a model of national memory that is based on the notion of homogenous national identity (ibid.) and the idea that there is a strong metaphysical relationship between the present and the past – “between the descendants and the forefathers” (Čolović 1997: 21). Combining the Kosovo myth with the themes of the Great Serbian Migration of 1690 and the Serbian Uprisings of the 19th century, Serbian periodicals succeeded in effectively articu-

*  This paper is part of a wider research on Serbian literary periodicals in the 1990s which is being developed within the research project The Role of Serbian Periodicals in the Formation of Literary, Cultural and National Models, based at the Institute for Literature and Art in Belgrade. 1 Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine.

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lating a new sense of unity since they had also introduced powerful symbols of collectiveness from the oral tradition. The Spring with its highly academic readership and Politika’s Cultural Supplement also cherished those discourses that strongly reinforced images of forgotten national symbols and “golden age” myths (Žirarde 2000). Representing images of a perfect past, the discourses of The Spring intended to transform the present sociopolitical reality and to facilitate the overcoming of dramatic changes that occurred during the process of economic, political and cultural transition in the 1990s. Unlike restorative nostalgia, which does not recognize itself as nostalgia but only as the ultimate natural truth (Boym 2005: 23), the counter-discourses in The Spring, calling for an open debate on identity issues and the reconstruction of national identity without nationalistic traits, could be grouped within Svetlana Boym’s concept of reflective nostalgia. Although oriented towards the irretrievable past and fascinated by the ruins of history, reflective nostalgia was, due to its emphasis on individual and fragmented acts of memory (Boym 2005: 99) often present in the modernist poetry or prose in The Spring journal. Those literary works, articulating utopian images of a personal spiritual reconnection with the collective archetypal memory, represent an alternative tendency in the Serbian literary tradition during the last decade of the 20th century  – the one that promoted literary experiment and artistic escapism in order not to recuperate but transform and emancipate various models of national literary tradition (Brajović 2009: 14). Standing between restorative and reflective nostalgia, the third term  – mourning  – refers to the complex, individually and collectively performed processes of separation between the subject and the lost object of love, affection or respect. Followed by symbolic gestures and rituals, the act of mourning should help the mourner to “relinquish emotional ties to the lost object” (Clewell 2004: 44). According to Freud, this detachment of libido takes place through the interaction of “reality testing” (ibid.) and mourner’s labour of hyperremembering. At the beginning of this obsessive recollection, the subject “replaces the actual absence with an imaginary presence” (ibid.) but, eventually, he/she comes to an “objective determination that the lost object no longer exists” (ibid.). However, if Freud’s model of mourning is contextualized within the frame of cultural memory and the work of restorative nostalgia, then the detachment of libido will be suspended, or even reversed in some cases. Placed between the national martyrology complex, especially emphasized at the time of national conflicts (see Kuljić 2006), and the nostalgic idea of transhistorical time, the process of mourning is no longer an act of distancing from the lost object but an act of restoring it. Since the object of national memory is usually

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represented as an image of collective and nameless martyrdom with whom the ‘mourners’ had never been really and personally connected, there is no possibility for Freud’s reality testing to enhance the subject’s distancing from its lost object. In addition to that, a whole variety of public ceremonies is conducted not in order to keep memory fragments alive but to create a sense or holistic body of collective memory, according to the current political, cultural and ideological needs and values. Unlike the empirical reality of the object in Freud’s theory, Serbian literary periodicals (Politika’ Cultural Supplement, Literary Newspapers and Literary Word) during the 1990s re-created highly discursive and evasive objects of mourning by constantly invoking the images of war atrocities, committed by Croatian ustashe forces in the World War II, and inflating the media space with different representations of national suffering. Although these were the representations of past experiences, it was restorative nostalgia that imprinted on them an aura of ahistorical and universal authority, transforming them into an object of continuous collective mourning that took place in the public sphere. Yet, this mourning could not be resolved due to the repetitive nature of the martyrology discourse and the fact that, unlike Freud’s model, reality-testing offered to the community in mourning not an actual absence but actual presence of the images of objects that were tragically lost during the long period of the nation’s history. The readership was implicitly ‘invited’ to recognize the similarity between themselves and the victims of World War II as the nationalist elites in Serbia aimed to initiate collective feelings of anxiety towards the surrounding nations. It might be said that this ‘restorative mourning’ was an especially effective means of both commemorating the past and using victim figures as a key factor for preparing Serbian society for the conflicts yet to come. Yet, in some other cases, when media started to report and consider the victims of the wars in Croatia or Bosnia and Herzegovina, the work of mourning, collective or individual, could be performed more successfully because the lost objects (material or abstract) were much closer to their mourners. In addition to that, reflective nostalgia proved to be an important tool for affirming mourning as a process of possible national and regional reconciliation because, unlike the restorative model, “reflective nostalgia is much more interested in individual stories, fragmented memories and counter-memories” (Boym 2005: 99). The objective of this paper is to present an overview of literary texts, published in the Serbian journal Istočnik (The Spring), in order to explain to what extent literary periodicals were able to play a significant role as both mirrors

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and generators of national memory.² Through detailed literary and discourse analyses of several exemplary prose texts and poems, the nature of the relationship between the aesthetic aspects of literary texts and the dominant ideological discourses in the first half of the 90s is portrayed. This paper also contends that The Spring published texts that were expressing various modes of nostalgically viewing the national past while simultaneously presenting its dramatic and violent moments. As restorative nostalgia sought to intensify symbolic and imagined bonds within Serbian society, the poetry and travel literature in The Spring enforced the reflective nostalgia whose ironic stance and individualistic discourse partially deconstructed the ethnocentric model of the nation. In the end, the ‘restorative mourning’ for the nation’s Second World War martyrdom participated in the overall public necrophylic obsession with the dead, but in some other rare cases the process of mourning was represented as the process able to provide the basic ground for mutual understanding in the Balkans.

1 Serbian Periodicals and the case of Istočnik (The Spring) The role of periodicals was of profound importance at the time of the Yugoslav crisis. There were no independent television stations and the Internet was not widely used and hence the print media was the main source of information, together with one television station broadcasting nationally. Furthermore, Serbian newspapers and journals represented the main media space where the clash between two cultural and ideological models took place. These models “could be, with all the necessary generalization and certain simplification, defined as national-traditionalist and civil-cosmopolitan” (Barać 2011: 3).³ In addition, the importance of periodicals for the articulation of nostalgia and the creation of the national identity is strongly related to the “daily ceremony of the simultaneous consumption of the newspaper” (Culler 1999: 21–22).⁴

2 Since the research did not include quantitative media or sociological research providing statistics on the journal’s readership profile, this study focuses on literary and discourse analysis. 3 “sukobila su se dva kulturna odnosno ideološka modela koja se, uz izvesno uopštavanje i pojednostavljivanje, mogu nazvati nacionalističko-tradicionalističkim i građanskokosmopolitskim” (Barać 2011). 4 Despite the usefulness of Anderson’s theory of nation as an imagined community (see Anderson 2006), one should be careful in regards to its interpretative value because, as Dallas

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Taking into consideration that literary periodicals are published on a regular basis (weekly, daily, and monthly), it could be argued that they become directly or indirectly engaged in the continuous dialogue with their readers; therefore, they are crucial instruments in (re)constructing the nation and its cultural memory. On the other hand, due to the journal’s open structure, the dialogue between the text, its discourses and the reader becomes dispersed: readers are not expected to read in a strictly linear, chronological way. Therefore, the periodical is a form which offers readers the chance to create their own texts since it is unusual, or even impossible to imagine a “reader who reads every word ‘from cover to cover’ let alone in the order in which the periodical is printed” (Beetham 1989: 98). Readers could ‘wander’ forwards and backwards, performing a ‘nomadic’ type of reading which allows for various patterns of meaning to occur, and opens up a suitable space for other mutually confronting discourses; thus, the images of the suffering community or collective feelings of panic and fear could be interpreted as foundational elements of the nation’s memory as well as factors deconstructing the ideas of ethnicity and the enemy. The Spring was founded in 1992 by a circle of contemporary writers, university professors and academic researchers. Even though the journal contains no introductory articles transparently expressing the editorial policy, motivation and intentions that led to the journal’s publication, there is an important, visually framed text printed on the journal’s back cover. The text is an extract from the official International PEN society document and praises humanistic values and ideas of tolerance towards difference, be it religious, national, social or cultural in nature. Including the editor-in-chief’s poetic text and its almost prayerful tone at the beginning of the first volume, this excerpt may be taken as representing a discursive model in opposition to and questioning the overwhelming war rhetoric and politics in 1992: “I placed two men on both sides of the scales: I wanted to measure them and then make a decision. […] I would lose the close relationship with both of them no matter what I decided at the end. Instead, I should keep them both”⁵ (Petrović 1992: 5). In this metaphorical quote, the editor emphasizes his attempt to stand in the middle, or aside from any one-dimensional ideological pattern, to introduce

Liddle points out, Anderson’s theory “does not use – or, on some level, even permit – simple close reading, because it was made to explain behaviour, not to interpret words on pages” (2009: 146). 5 “Postavio sam dva coveka na dve strane vage; hteo sam da ih “izmerim” pa da donesem odluku. Znao sam da tako gubim blizak odnos i s jednim i s drugim (bez obzira na odluku). Umesto da zadrzim obojicu. Vrata pokajanja?”

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dialectics of understanding, tolerance and acceptance. Even though the journal promoted the traditionalist model of modernity and was ideologically conservative, the claim demonstrates how the editor wanted this journal to become a standpoint between two conflicting cultural models: the national-traditionalistic and the civil-cosmopolitan. The journal Spring seeks neither to explicitly deconstruct the imagery of the nation and the enemy nor to actively participate in the dominant, official stereotypical patterns of the national brotherhood or sense of collective being. Its overall discourse is not that of nationalism but of the nation because it uses the nation or national as more neutral or positively defined signifiers; this type of tone is introduced at the end of the editor’s text: “Let this journal be for us – as the poet once said in his prophetic manner – a kind of a constant prayer of gratitude and forgiveness”⁶ (ibid.). The prevailing religious context of the journal is anticipated by the subtitle itself: the journal of faith and culture; it superimposes the experience of the sacred as the foundational framework for the overall understanding of culture, politics, individual identities, collectivity and societies. The choice of mainly Eastern European authors, the emphasis placed on, sometimes obscure and highly theological, Greek and Byzantine Orthodox writings (ranging from early Christianity to the 14th century), various texts of Russian religious intellectuals or writers (Šestov 1992: 21–29; Borisov 1992: 33–37), and the handful of titles on revelation, epiphanies or mystic experiences, all this reveals the journal’s dominant preoccupation and strong affinity for non-western religious and spiritual traditions that stress the importance of intuitive and subjective realities. Issues of personal revelations, spontaneous conversions, feelings of existential fear or lack of faith were represented, within the variety of non-fictional texts (essays, personal sketches, philosophical excerpts), in such a manner that it seemed as if contemporary authors/writers were constantly trying to trace the middle road between conflicting systems of religious belief and rational scientific knowledge. In the short autobiographical sketch ‘On Faith’ (Komadina 1992: 116–118), the narrator chronologically retraces his own spiritual and religious life narrative, starting from his early childhood memories of his beloved grandmother, a modest and contrite Christian, and finishing with the fragment on the dream that the narrator had when he was much older. In and through that dream, the narrator finally realizes that, although he felt deeply frightened, it was the light and the faith that saved him. The narrator’s personal path from the rational and pragmatic mind to the spiritually enlightened subject is also very effectively empha-

6 “Neka bi nam ovaj časopis – kako, proročki reče pesnik – bio molitva, ustrajna, zahvalnosti i praštanja”.

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sized by the choice of narrative techniques in the text, and the change of topics (from his grandmother’s character to the dream motif). At the beginning, those short stories, depicting the narrator’s childhood and his youth, are delivered in the manner of realistic and objective storytelling while the final story, the one about the dream, is presented as an intimate meditative comment on the human position in the world, and the importance of faith. In light of this, it could be said that The Spring represented an interesting discursive arena not just for the restorative nostalgia texts but also for those that expressed the model of reflective nostalgia by recollecting the old Orthodox traditions in order to imprint humanistic values. In addition to the revival of more profound layers of cultural tradition, the title of the journal represents the prevailing tendencies in the 1990s which sought to reactivate archaic imagery of the nation’s past. The word ‘istočnik’ contains a rich complexity of connotations: aside from the basic meaning of spring, it also refers to the East and, as a word distinctive to the Serbо-Slavic language of medieval times, it points to the notion of the source, the primary source of human, social and spiritual identity. Therefore, by reaching back to Byzantine, Russian and Greek religious traditions, and including some of the religious repertoire from the Far East and Hindu traditions as well, the journal’s editors and contributors constructed the textual site of a nostalgic stance towards the ‘forgotten’ past. In their symbolic, restorative type of nostalgia for the lost tradition of metaphysical thought or the ‘lost innocence’ of the national early ‘childhood’, they actually rediscovered and reintegrated another strand of continuity in Serbian culture. This continuity, unlike the prevailing leitmotifs of the dominant, rather militant official discourses propagated by the Serbian governing elites, was not rooted in the oral, folklore epic tradition of the heroic historical past of the 19th century and its liberation movements. This intense and powerful reemergence of religious discourses was usually explained by the fact that the period of Socialism and Communism explicitly forbade any kind of religious or spiritual expression. Therefore, this symbolic return or leap into the medieval past was employed in the process of reimagining the present that had to be precisely defined and organized because of the unsettling Yugoslav secession tragedy. If the “truth is universally found only in conditions of the general loosening of structure” (Aleksić 2006: 64), The Spring was thus a representative journal for the restorative nostalgic narratives of Christian spirituality that would offer the ultimate, transcendental truth which is ontologically superior to the truth of socialist or communist materialism.

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2 Prose and the Subject of Nostalgia The concept of nostalgia, commonly defined as the “sentimental yearning for a period of the past or regretful or wistful memory of an earlier time” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary 1995: 930), might be regarded as an important strategy for national glorification at the beginning of the 1990s. Unlike the primary meaning of the word nostalgia – referring to the lost homeland – the discourse of nostalgia in The Spring’s prose texts does not predominantly represent ‘memory minus suffering’, because it is placed in the socio-political context of the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia. Representations of the Serbian political and cultural past as the “lost, forgotten and glorious unappreciated tradition” (Žirarde 2000: 112) show how the restorative effect of nostalgia redefines one of the functions of counter-memory narratives. While liberating the suppressed myths, the discourse of these narratives imports the idea that the rediscovered history attributes Serbian elites with the right to remodel the present in order to achieve a lost ethnic unity in spite of the current political circumstances. This illustrates Svetlana Boym’s conclusion that a restorative nostalgic never sees himself as nostalgic, since the ‘lost home’ is not a fiction for him but the true reality that should be restored (Boym 2005: 86). In accordance with the prevailing tendencies in the philosophical, theological and cultural articles in The Spring, literary prose texts establish the model of subjectivity, which is always actively engaged in a dialogue with his surroundings or God (or unnamed deities), emphasizing core images of a traditionally patriarchal society: family, church, marriage and men as soldiers and defenders of society. The artificiality of these discourses becomes clearer when the literary texts are compared to the sociopolitical reality and economic crisis in the 1990s, and to the newspaper articles that were openly engaged in reproducing myths of ethnic unity and restored power and national pride. Mainly short, poetically descriptive sketches or travel writings that depict sites sacred to national memory (churches, holy places, mythical events), these texts, in spite of their modernist literary features and techniques, conform to the discourse of national authenticity, purity and innocence. The poetical extract ‘Holy Communion’ (1992: 98–99) by Milovan Danojlić,⁷ taken from his integral literary work The Year Passes through the Yard, depicts an idyllic-like picturesque environment, representing a trans-historical vision of “the People” (ibid.: 99) that are slowly gathering at the church’s gate for the

7 Milovan Danojlić is a contemporary Serbian writer, novelist and poet, who has been living in Paris, France since 1984. In 1997, he received the NIN award, a prominent literary prize for his novel Liberators and Traitors.

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Easter celebration. Archaic vocabulary, the use of words that are idiosyncratic to the oral literary tradition, together with literary images of people gathering silently in queues towards the church, with an almost pantheistic atmosphere and birds singing, express the idea of the collective ritual that transcends its Christian foundations. Also, it powerfully, yet subtly, invokes the patriarchal imagery of the remote and authentic countryside where the “peasants, representing the highest values of moral and physical health, live in harmony with nature and themselves” (Čolović 1997: 27). A sort of a ritual cleansing at the church’s gate provides the sense of respect, truthfulness that is emphasized by the narrative point-of-view of the unknown boy, one of the many anonymous characters of the extract. However, the boy’s point of view is not the only narrative point in the text: the extract oscillates between exterior and interior points of view (Culler 1996: 23), thus creating at the same time a sense of objectivity and intimacy. Furthermore, frequent use of the exclamation mark and the second person present tense, accompanied by effective deictic references (here, there), emphasize the overall tone of familiarity not just between the narrator and the narrated events but also, and this has a greater ideological significance, between the narrator and the reader. Everybody has grown in their own and other people’s eyes, grown to historic seriousness of which the Boy knows a little bit from textbooks and poetry anthologies, though it has long since been exiled from real life. Observing them, all cleanly shaved and sparkly-eyed, the Boy thinks: those men who were once conspiring with Black George and Milos to insurrect, must have looked like this, fully conscious of the venture they were embarking upon (98–99).⁸

The heroic past dimension is underlined in this quote by introducing several important motifs: the history textbooks, poetry books (in Serbian, the word ‘pesmarica’ refers to the collection of primarily oral and widely known epic and lyric poems) and the memory of two Serbian Uprisings from the first half of the 19th century that led to the constitution of the modern Serbian state. The idea of historical seriousness and the image of epic bravery are effectively exemplified in the characters of two historically significant political leaders from the Serbian past (Karađorđe and Miloš). Moreover, while the author articulates an ideologi-

8 “Svako se podigao u svojim i u tuđim ocima, uzdigao se do istorijske ozbiljnosti o kojoj Dečak ponešto zna iz čitanki i pesmarica a koja je, ko zna kad, iz stvarnog života prognana. Gledajući ih onako izbrijane i bistrooke, misli [dečak]: mora da su ovako izgledali oni koji su se, sa Crnim Ðorđem i Milošem, dogovarali o dizanju ustanka; uspravni, svesni važnosti poduhvata kojeg se poduhvataju.”

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cally powerful connection between the spiritual and military or war-like experience, thus advocating the concept of the metaphysical vocation of the soldier, the use of leaders’ personal names, instead of their official ones, establishes a strong sense of familiarity and brotherhood. Furthermore, in the context of the archetypal image of people gathering in front of the church, the use of personal names significantly disturbs the time distance in the narrative, causing the time frames to intersect more vividly. Therefore, the mentioned Uprising that took place in the 19th century could be interpreted as a subtle ideological allusion for those readers who read the journal in the 1990s, at the time when the “discourse of the ethnic nationalism placed the contemporary events not only outside the present and the future, but also outside the past, and even beyond historical time coordinates” (Čolović, 1997: 19).⁹ They stand as if drawn on posters in calendars, circumspect and proud, self-aware, deserving of the name they carry. The People! In the markets, in cafes, local council offices and court corridors they are most often sorrowful, slouched and burdened with worry, yet today they have stood upright: children of the Lord, Serbs, Men! (ibid.: 99)¹⁰

The historical authority of the people, represented in the calendar motif, is enhanced by the process of their complete, both physical and spiritual, transformation, which is symbolically initiated at the time of the religious and traditional celebration of Easter, Christian holyday that celebrates the resurrection of Christ. The phrase dozvani k sebi, emphasized by italic letters, affirms the idea that authentic and primary sources of national or collective identity do exist, but were, like that historical seriousness, ‘banished from the real life’. “If the novel functions as the symbolic form of the nation-state” (Moretti quoted by Culler 1996: 25), then Danojlić’s novel represents a culturally specific case. Its fragmentary nature, the rural imagery characteristic for the era of romanticism and the sentence structures which reenact the traditional discourse of epic storytelling, represent key novelistic elements that reveal the pre-modern concept of the nation that is yet to acquire its stable state borders. Moreover, bearing in mind the context of the 1990s and their return to ‘origins’, the novel’s variety of local and regional idioms, different archaisms and historicisms, actually represents a modernist technique which complies with the wider ideological context

9 “smešta savremene događaje izvan sadašnjosti i budućnosti, ali i izvan prošlosti, izvan koordinata istorijskog vremena” 10 “Stoje kao na crtežima u kalendaru, smerni i ponositi, dozvani k sebi, dostojni imena koje nose. Narod! Na pijaci, kafanama, nadleštvima i hodnicima sudova najčešće su žalosni, pogureni i brižni a jutros su se, evo, uspravili: Božji sinovi, Srbi, ljudi!”

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of the Serbian nationalistic expansion politics. Its ideological value is especially emphasized by the fact that the extract is inserted into the journal, which then becomes the superior code system for understanding the extract. Restorative nostalgia and the romanticist notion of national identity were deployed to justify the Serbian effort to create a state that would include the majority of Serbs living in other Yugoslav republics. The above mentioned integral literary work The Year Passes through the Yard represents a mélange of poetic and narrative genres, and is delivered by an authorial voice deeply involved in ‘archaeology of the language’. The text narrates the memories of family and childhood, expressing the trans-historic concepts of community. Composed of 141 lyrically tuned chapters and narrated within an obscure space/time setting, this novel gained a lot of praise, mainly for its linguistic and stylistic features. Nevertheless, taking into account the context of the 1990s, the language, the vivid imagery simultaneously reflected through innocent boy’s eyes and the authorial exterior point of view, effectively colours these chapters, thus surrounding them with an emotional aura which might trigger in readers the process of producing a new anti-communist national identity. However, it is important to note that the performative value and the intensity of the sociopolitical impact of this type of texts¹¹ are questionable due to the journal’s limited audience and its highly academic and philosophical use of language. As far as the issue of linguistic origins and authenticity is concerned, it is important to mention that nationalist discourses were always counterpointed by opposing voices. In his essay-like vignette ‘The Word’ (1992: 69), Miodrag Pavlović, a contemporary Serbian poet, discusses the importance of the poetic word; used as metonymy, the word represents the language itself and also its relationship with one’s identity. In the author’s opinion, it is impossible to divide words into new and old, because everything that can be spoken is never old. In this way, the use of archaic vocabulary is not represented as a means of constructing nation’s identity and regaining authenticity, but rather as a modernist tech-

11 The question that deals with the text’s particular, individual or mass influence in the public sphere becomes more obvious and of greater importance when the research is aimed at mass media. Currently a work in progress, the study of the Cultural Supplement of the daily newspaper Politika shows how writers’ choices of poetic imagery and changes of poetical vocabulary participate in and enforce dominant political discourses of the nation, victimization and the enemy, in Serbia at the beginning of the 1990s. Most of the poems, published on the cover pages of Politika’s Cultural Addition, represent ideas of national revival or the importance of the Kosovo myth and medieval Christian heritage. Churches and ancient monasteries become the collective memory sites of simultaneous mourning and glorification, invoking the feelings of togetherness and newly established ethnic brotherhood.

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nique that corresponds to T. S. Eliot’s views on the relationship between tradition and individual talent. The mixture of reflective nostalgia and the prevailing sense of subtle mourning for the forgotten history and heritage that was suppressed by the hitherto dominant sociopolitical and ideological values of Socialism or Communism could also be seen in the few texts that belong to the genre of travel writing or travel literature. In his accounts of the writers conference ‘Signs near Pushkin’ (1992a: 138–144; 1992b: 83–88), held in Moscow at the end of the 1980s, Slobodan Zubanović focuses his narrative, ideological and cultural point of view on the aspects of Russian history, urban life and societal values that precede the era of the Soviet Union. Pushkin thus becomes an important figure as a literary predecessor and canonical writer; his character delivers the liberatory potential of the non-communist counter-memories. Some other travel writings retell spiritual experiences in the Holy Lands (Israel, Palestine), representing a modern reiteration of the medieval pilgrimage. Even though these writings could be contextualized within the widely practiced return to Orthodox Christianity, their emphasis on individual spirituality also makes them part of the counter-memory of the past that was suppressed by the ideological apparatus of Communist countries in the second half of the 20th century (especially the USSR and SFRJ – Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia).

3 Poetry – the Voices that Grieve While the prose texts place more emphasis on the issue of nostalgic mourning for the national past and its forgotten patriarchal values and patterns, the poetry published in the journal during the 1990s could be divided into three major groups or poetic strands: A. Introspective, confessional poems in highly obscure metaphorical language, written by poets like Momčilo Nastasijević (1992: 38–48), Ivan V. Lalić (1992: 83–85), Zlata Kocić (1992: 101–105; 1996: 110–119) and Radmila Lazić (1992: 74–77). The lyrical voices of these poems are often deeply involved in a personal, individual and meditative dialogue with God, referring usually to themes like prayer, intimate suffering and existential pain, doubts, sins and virtues. These poets belong to one of the dominant literary tendencies in Serbian contemporary poetry, the one that could be described as “poetics of innovation and emancipation” since it strives to create a poetry profoundly independent of all social and political conditions or influences (Brajović 2009: 29).

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B. Longer, narrative poems that combine various religious traditions, beliefs and practices (Aurobindo 1993: 178–186). These poems, whose main representative is the poet Vesna Krmpotić (1992a: 100–108; 1992b: 214–217), contain imagery that embodies mystical experience, personal pilgrimage and a rather pantheistic view of the world of human culture and nature. Together with poems from the first group, these narrative poems establish a discourse of reflective nostalgia with its suspension of historical progression alongside a general admiration for the dispersed fragments of the past. C. Poems apocalyptic in tone, presenting collective feelings of fear and panic. The voices in these texts construct the image of God who becomes weak and tired, deprived of all his attributes of power and authority. According to this imagery, some of these poems represent the theme of collective ethnic tragedy that is hovering above the nation (Brkić 1993: 111–113). The motif of the enemy is also an important one; represented either as an ethnically defined community or as a metaphysical concept of Evil. Therefore, the notion of sorrow and suffering is emphasized in a very distinctive way because, in comparison to those prose texts expressing the nostalgic view of the glorious nation’s past, these poems incorporate the tone of melancholic mourning into the concept of the nation – the victim of history (Danojlić 1993: 129). Both concepts – nation as victim and nation as heroic subject – are present in the journal but their frequency and significance vary in accordance with the literary genres, forms and techniques used. In this third group of poems, as previously mentioned, the enemy is represented as an ever-present, metaphysical threat with its various historical and social forms and manifestations, but only a smaller number of poems assign ethnic names to those thereby recognized as the enemy. As the journal addresses the literary, religious and philosophical tradition of Christianity, it is to be expected that poems will be written in the tone and atmosphere of the Old Testament and its psalms. The voices in these poems are the voices of those who suffer, and while humble and unworthy of God’s mercy, these voices constantly remind their creator of the crimes committed against their nation. In the poem ‘On Good Friday’ (1993: 111–113), written by contemporary Serbian poet Svetozar Brkić, the title introduces the idea of suffering that is revealed and developed in detail throughout the poem, while at the same time, close to the end of the poem, subtle intertextual references invoke the imagery of martyrdom. When the poetic voice mentions and aligns three memory sites of martyrdom (Holocaust, Jasenovac and Goli Otok), the use of gradation marks establishes the hierarchy of the crimes committed. While praying and glorifying the Lord, divine nature and mysterious connections to the world, the voice in the poem expresses

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its own vulnerability and intellectual weakness since it cannot understand the destruction that led to all the screams, moans and the longings of its nation. The theme of ethnic Serbian suffering, specifically stressed through the motifs of Jasenovac¹² and Goli Otok,¹³ and the use of memory sites as elements of further national victimization, are also developed and represented in the poem ‘Psalm’ by Milovan Danojlić (1993: 129). In the poem, notions of the enemy and the suffering nation are additionally emphasized by the genre context of biblical psalms. Originating from the Bible as a poem addressed to God by king David, the psalm incorporates into Milovan Danojlić’s poem a much stronger, metaphysical sense of failure and threat that is embodied in the image of “earthly robbers” (ibid.). These robbers are simultaneously those who belong to the principle of the earth as the lower state of existence and those who rob the nation’s land, culture and values. The subject of the poem is seeking consolation in the apocalyptic times of destruction, announced by the images of church candles whose flames are slowly put out as darkness rapidly fills the church. The tone of almost biblical confession and sorrow is also present in the poem ‘About the Spirits of the Trees’ by Ljubomir Simović (1993: 170). Once more, the representation of the world’s end is given at the beginning of the poem through the allegorical description of trees and forests that will soon become the instruments of violence, destruction and terror. These conflicts and wars have their geographically precise setting: “These deep, impenetrable forests / forests reaching the river Drina and beyond/ forests reaching the skies / will transform into mauls, into guns / into wood-beams, coffins and crutches” (ibid.).¹⁴ Taking into consideration the context of the wars both in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the poetical details from the quote could be seen as traces of the general, widely spread idea of the total failure of the human condition. Since the divine aspects of human nature are degraded, depreciated and humiliated, the voice is left to bemoan and lament over the world, which is torn between metaphors of light and darkness; or, as the second part of the poem depicts, to

12 Jasenovac was the major concentration camp during WWII in the Independent State of Croatia, where the majority of victims were Serbs, Jews and Roma. 13 Goli Otok is an island in the Adriatic Sea, used in the period of 1949–1956 as a prison site for political opponents of the state regime in SFRJ, accused of leaning towards Soviet Union. From 1956 onwards many others – anti-communists, dissidents and nationalists – were also imprisoned. During the 1990s, Goli Otok became a fruitful political myth that was instrumentalised in ex-Yugoslav republics to enforce the idea of the anti-communist and national political traditions of one’s own society. 14 “Ove duboke nepregledne šume / šume do Drine, šume preko Drine / šume koje se prostiru sve do oblaka / pretvoriće se u maljeve, u kundake / u stupe, u mrtvačke sanduke i štake”.

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flee and seek exile in the remote villages on the Russian-Chinese border, turning his back to the wooden wall, and trying to sleep “in the sea of the wormwood darkness / with an inner peace of Russian and Chinese peasants” (ibid.). The poem ‘My Psalm: the Paraphrase of the Psalm 90’ (1996: 100–109) by Stevan Tontić introduces a profoundly personal and more intimate view of the post-Yugoslav war conflicts. It is, maybe, the most distinctive poetic text explicitly referring to the devastation of Sarajevo and Mostar – cities that, up to a certain point, symbolized the most culturally diverse urban communities of the former Yugoslavia. The poem was commissioned by the German pastor Bringfried Naumann of the Evangelist Church Berlin-Brandenburg for the occasion of an artistically designed church service that took place on May 17 1995, at Berlin’s Hohenzollernplatz. Even though the text of the poem was published in the journal at a later date, the whole artistic event in Berlin (that consisted of several speeches and performances) impresses specific semantic traces into the poem. The modes of reading and interpretation are significantly determined by the fact that the poetic text was performed in a public space of ritual. Symbolically similar to the figures of biblical kings and prophets, the poetic voice in the poem presents itself as an active witness to the destruction that happened to its nation and all the nations in the Balkans. This close parallel between the biblical ‘I’ and Stevan Tontić’s ‘I’ is also emphasized at the graphical and visual level of the poem. The author’s speech, whether it is in verse or in prose, is constantly intertwined with the biblical psalm no. 90. Verses from the psalm are divided into several fragments and printed in the upper right corner of the page so they would resemble an epigram or motto for the author’s following verses or biographical notes. This technique of collage with various ‘gaps’ creates a dynamic rhythm and establishes a transparently dialogic structure of the text, framing new historical events and their tragic outcomes within the biblical idea of God’s providence and metaphysical necessity. As the poem’s title itself asserts, the author’s or the poet’s voice is deeply involved in the silent dialogue with God who is divinely speechless; the poem’s lyrical ‘I’ or ‘We’ poses rhetorical questions, accepts his littleness and insignificance while using dramatic floral imagery that symbolizes human destruction and hatred. The man is compared to grass, seed and grapes; his place in the world is threatened because of his own destructive urges, and the voice of the poem, referring to the Old Testament, transforms into the voice of universal and collective mourning and confessional prayer. In this poem, unlike other previously mentioned texts, multidimensional motifs of guilt, sin and despair are not convoked to amplify the idea of the nation’s suffering, victimization and mourning and, thus, to confront different narratives of ethnicity and sharpen the conflict,

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but rather in order to articulate the notion of universal human nature and brotherhood. At one point in the poem, after the destruction of Sarajevo is implicitly invoked, the author’s poetic voice introduces the biblical figures of Cain and Abel, and by giving what appears to be a symbolic list of all of Cain’s deeds, it presents historical conflicts in light of the repetition of the biblical fratricide archetype. However, this catalogue of men’s atrocities leads further to the transformation of the poetic ‘I’ into the communal ‘We’, which has a very significant semantic and performative value: “Our cities are being obliterated, /Our homes are burnt, barns robbed, / We are being killed or exiled / Hungry, cold and in terror” (1996: 104).¹⁵ The collective ‘we’ is not a monologic voice because it gathers, connects and frames all those anonymous characters whose ethnic identity is of no importance at all; as much as it represents the victims of the unknown and inexplicable anger and power of destruction, this ‘we’ is also the voice of those who induced and provoked these same conflicts and battles and it is their responsibility that is stressed in the following image: “brotherly blood rises, cries to the Heavens / crashes against Your throne, Our Lord” (ibid.).¹⁶ In order to fully understand the ideological and communicational scope of this poem, it is relevant to note again that it was performed in Berlin in 1995, six or seven months before the war in Bosnia would come to an end. In 1996, after the conflicts in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina had ended, the journal published this poem and indirectly participated in the public sphere with a new type of discourse – that of promoting mourning as a means of forgiveness and oblivion. Tontić’s poem also represents an excellent example of the performative speech act that deals with the problem of narrating and legitimizing traumatizing events or traumatic memory. According to Mieke Bal, genres like drama are more suitable for the transposition of traumatic memories because the traumatized memorizing subject still cannot master the narrative discourse of remembering (Bal 1999: viii). The interpolation of documentary discourse, biblical psalm and the lyrical voice, placed within the image of the church service, which resembles both theatre performance and ritual gathering in the act of mourning, shows how performing the act of memory could be “potentially healing, as it calls for political and cultural solidarity in recognizing the traumatic events” (ibid.: x).

15 “Naši se gradovi sa zemljom sravnjuju / domovi su sprženi, ambari poharani / ubijeni smo il prognani / gladni, promrzli, prestravljeni”. 16 “krv bratska penje se, do neba viče / zapljuskuje prijestolje, Gospode, Tvoje”.

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While prose texts and poems published in the 1992–1995 period dealt with topics of national martyrdom, presenting the ethnic collectivity in an idyllic and pastoral manner, these later texts represent the discourse of mourning under the light of more universal, humanistic values, which also affirms the fact that different models of nation, collective identity and memory could be mutually contested on the pages of this journal.

4 Conclusion By introducing a wide scope of themes around the national sacrifice, reactivating biblical genres (psalms and confessions) and relating them to events in the Serbian historical past, literary periodicals provided their readership with new marking points upon which the ethnically defined nation could be re-invented and re-imagined: language, religion, ethnic community, heroic past (see Čolović 1997). When looking at the variety of discourses on nostalgia, mourning and national identity present in The Spring, it may be argued that the journal represents an academically oriented periodical that strove to address the traditional, patriarchal and ethnic issues in a more subtle and moderate way. However, at the end of the 20th century and at the time of the dramatic ‘awakening’ of violent and militant nationalisms in the Balkans, The Spring did participate in the overall public discourse of restorative nostalgia that articulated the pre-modern notion of the nation. This notion was founded on the romanticist view on the importance of the national language, on the communal feeling of martyrdom and on the recreation of the enemy. The organic concept of the nation or the people as the main subject of historical change was characteristic for the public discourse of the 1990s (Stojanović 2010: 60–61) when Serbian daily newspapers and literary magazines endeavoured a symbolic or metaphoric, imagined unification of all Serbian citizens living in different Yugoslav republics. This notion of nation’s unity reemerged both at the level of literary genres and techniques and the changes in the poetic or prose vocabulary that revived ‘forgotten’ archaic layers of literary Serbian language. On the other hand, modernist poems and fragmented travel writings introduced and emphasized another type of nostalgia, the reflective one, which carried an important facet of individualism and self-reflection, thereby remodelling the patriarchal narrative of the Nation, making it appear less chauvinistic and nationalistic. This deconstruction of the nationalistic master narratives was

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also performed within poems whose complex genre profile made it possible to invoke images of collective and individual mourning that would lead towards national reconciliation in the Balkans. Unlike those potentially healing texts that aimed at the authentic human experience, The Spring published poems that represented the theme of national martyrdom in the manner of ‘restorative mourning’: the subject of this mourning was never ready to leave the past behind and thus provide an opportunity for the rupture between past and present to occur. Nonetheless, the multilayered dynamics between all these discourses of nostalgia and mourning once again justifies the editor’s intention to “place two men on both sides of the scale”, while the journal as a whole provides us with different strategies that could initiate the processes of transgressing the national borders and rethinking ethnic differences in the Balkans.

Works Cited Aleksić, Tatjana (2006) ‘Extricating the Self from History: David Albahari’s ‘Bait”, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 39, 2, 54–70. Anderson, Benedict (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books). Aurobindo, Sri (1993) ’Savitri’ trans. Mirjana Brković, Istočnik 7/8, 178–186. Bal, Mieke (1999) ‘Introduction’ in The Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Bal, Mieke, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer (Hanover/ London: University Press of New England), vii–xvii. Barać, Stanislava [February 11, 2011] ‘Jedan mogući pogled na srpsku prozu 90-ih godina 20.veka: časopis Reč’’ This manuscript is the result of the bilateral research project Serbian prose and Postsocialist transformations, funded by DAAD in 2009–2010 and carried out by the Institute for Literature and Arts in Belgrade and Martin-LutherUniversität Halle-Wittenberg. Beetham, Margaret (1989) ‘Open and Closed: The Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, Victorian Periodicals Review 22.3, 96–100. Borisov, Vadim (1992) ‘Nova Evropa’, Istočnik 1, 33–37. Boym, Svetlana (2005) Budućnost nostalgije, trans. Zia Gluhbegović and Srđan Simonović (Belgrade: Geopoetika). Brkić, Svetozar (1993) ’Na Veliki petak’, Istočnik 5, 111–113. Clewell, Tammy (2004) ‘Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52.1, 43–67. Culler, Jonathan (1999) ‘Anderson and the Novel’, Diacritics 29.4, 19–39. Čolović, Ivan (1997) Politika simbola (Belgrade: Radio B92). Danojlić, Milovan (1992) ’Pričest’, Istočnik 2, 98–99. Danojlić, Milovan (1993) ’Psalam’, Istočnik 5, 129. Kocić, Zlata (1992) ’Zvezdarska česnica’, Istočnik 3/4, 101–105. Kocić, Zlata (1996) ’Rub’, Istočnik 19/20, 110–119.

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Kolstø, Pål (ed.) (2009) Media Discourse and the Yugoslav Conflicts: Representations of Self and Other (Surrey: Ashgate). Komadina, Мiloš (1992) ’O veri’, Istočnik 2, 116–118. Krmpotić, Vesna (1992a) ’Stotinu i osam’, Istočnik 2, 100–108. Krmpotić, Vesna (1992b) ’Oče naš nebeski’, Istočnik 3/4, 214–217. Kuljić, Todor (2006) Kultura sećanja: teorijska objašnjenja upotrebe prošlosti (Belgrade: Čigoja štampa). Lalić, Ivan V. (1992) ’Kao Molitva’, Istočnik 1, 83–85. Lazić, Radmila (1992) ’Zemno štivo (izbor pesama)’, Istočnik 2, 74–77. Liddle, Dallas (2009) The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press). Nastasijević, Momčilo (1992) ’Molitva (izbor pesama)’, Istočnik 1, 38–48. Pavlović, Miodrag (1992) ‘Reč’, Istočnik 3, 69. Petrović, Milutin (1992) ‘O saznavanju i pokajanju’ Istočnik 1, 5. Simović, Ljubomir (1993) ‘Petrolejka (izbor pesama)’, Istočnik 7/8, 170–172. Stojanović, Dubravka (2010) Ulje na vodi: ogledi iz istorije sadašnjosti Srbije (Belgrade: Peščanik). Šestov, Lav (1992) ‘Smeonosti i pokornosti’, Istočnik 1, 21–29. Tontić, Stevan (1996) ‘Moj psalam: parafraze psalma 90’, Istočnik 17/18, 100–109. Zubanović, Slobodan (1992a) ’Znaci kraj Puškina’, Istočnik 1, 138–144. Zubanović, Slobodan (1992b) ’Znaci kraj Puškina’, Istočnik 2, 83–88. Žirarde, Raul (2000) Politički mitovi i mitologije, trans. Ana A. Jovanović (Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek: Plato).

Anna Pehkoranta

Negotiating Loss and Betrayal: Melancholic Ethics and Narrative Agency in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone and Steer Toward Rock We know so little of the old country. We repeat the names of grandfathers and uncles, but they have always been strangers to us. Family exists only because somebody has a story, and knowing the story connects us to a history. To us, the deformed man is oddly compelling, the forgotten man is a good story, and a beautiful woman suffers (Ng 2008a: 33–34).

In An Ethics of Betrayal, Crystal Parikh contends that “betrayals […] can perform a cultural critique of the social conditions by which the minority subject comes into being and of the possibilities for agency and transformation available to that subject once it has come into being” (Parikh 2009: 1–2). She further argues that betrayals “channel these questions of being, agency, and change through constitutive, if contingent, relations of responsibility” and that it is “only through such relations of responsibility that the emergence of minority subjectivity is actually possible” (ibid.: 2). But it is also only through these “relations of responsibility” that an ethics of any kind can come into being, and writing offers one way of forming such relations. With a similar approach, Leslie Bow suggests that betrayal, specifically in Asian American women’s writing, “can constitute […] a subversion of repressive authority that depends on upholding strict borders between groups and individuals” (Bow 2001: 3). Asian American women’s narratives are particularly susceptible of revealing acts of betrayal, as they often address the social, political, and emotional ramifications of existing at an intersection of several marginalized positions, determined by one’s ethnicity, class, and gender and frequently complicated by generational conflict. Accordingly, betrayal can be conceptualized as taking a necessary choice between the conflicting demands arising from different loyalties produced by ethnic, class, and gender identification, as Bow has suggested. Chinese American author Fae Myenne Ng’s novels Bone (2008a, org. published in 1993) and Steer Toward Rock (2008b) provide fertile ground for an analysis drawing from the notion of betrayal. Both novels call for a reading that emphasizes their deeply melancholic undercurrent and investigates the myriad ways they express and negotiate loss and betrayal. While the temporal setting and the narrative structure of the two novels are anything but similar, they share crucial thematic concerns. First, Bone and Steer Toward Rock are both narratives of loss,

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that is, their narrative content is organized around a story of a harrowing personal loss as experienced by individual members of an immigrant family. Second, in both novels, these personal stories become emblematic of a more far-reaching national narrative of loss which, to a large degree, can be conceived of in terms of betrayal. As I attempt to demonstrate, this larger national narrative is deeply rooted in the history of Chinese immigration to the United States: the disillusionment experienced by many Chinese immigrants who left their native land and their families, often permanently, to pursue the dream of the “Gold Mountain”¹ that America – California, in particular – represented; the highly restrictive legislation enacted in the United States from the late nineteenth century onward in order to control Chinese immigration to the country; and personal histories that were lost in exchange for paper identities that would make entry to the country possible.² This essay examines Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone and Steer Toward Rock as narratives of loss, situating them in the above historical context. By reading Ng’s two novels against the notion of betrayal and, more specifically, two historically influential narratives of racial abjection – the so-called yellow peril and model minority discourses –, it seeks to demonstrate that Bone and Steer Toward Rock both exemplify what may be termed a melancholic ethics. Despite its melancholic tendency, this ethics does not signify the undoing of either individual or communal agency, as the abundant examples of active agency present in the narratives clearly demonstrate. Counterbalancing the language of loss and melancholia, the novels display another vein of narration characterized by self-reflection, active ethical agency, and a resilient quest for emancipation. Drawing from both narrative tendencies, this essay proposes that the melancholic response to loss and abjection calls for an understanding of grief and mourning as important aspects of agency in certain diasporic conditions. Finally, it suggests that despite its pathological origins, melancholia also holds potential for agency, as becomes evident from the melancholic ethics present in Bone and Steer Toward Rock.

1 The first Chinese laborers arriving to the United States from the 1840s onward called California “Gam Saan,” a Chinese expression signifying “Gold Mountain” (Takaki 1998: 31). 2 The history of Chinese immigration to America and the anti-Chinese legislation set in force in the United States during the late nineteenth century have been discussed extensively by a number of Asian American scholars. For further reference, see for instance Chan (1991), Takaki (1998: esp. 31–42 and 79–131), and Chang (2004).

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1 Stories Without an End: Narratives of Loss and Abjection The most prominent loss haunting Bone’s characters is the self-inflicted death of Ona, the middle daughter of the Leong family, who jumps off the roof of Nam Ping Yuen, a Chinatown housing project, disillusioned by the bitter feud between the Leong and Ong families: after the laundry business shared by the two families goes wrong, she is forced to leave Osvaldo, Rosa and Luciano Ong’s son, who she desperately loves. Leila Fu, the novel’s narrator and the Leong family’s oldest daughter from her mother’s previous marriage, describes the family’s remaining members’ various attempts to come to terms with Ona’s suicide. The narrative structure of the novel reflects the difficulty each of them encounters trying to understand and eventually accept Ona’s choice. Just as the members of the Leong family continuously return to the past in their minds, hoping to find some acceptable explanation to why Ona decides to jump to her death, the novel takes the reader back in time chapter by chapter and unfolds the story with a reversed chronological order. Each chapter takes a step back in time in comparison to the preceding chapters, yet moves forward toward the end of that individual chapter. Seymour Chatman calls this kind of temporal organization “sustained episodic reversal,” in which each episode – or, as in Bone, each chapter – is narrated “from its own earliest moment to its latest, but with the constraint that each succeeding episode must occur earlier in the discourse” (Chatman 2009: 34). The novel ends roughly where the story – as a chronological chain of events – begins; as there is no return to the narrative present at the end of the novel, it leaves the future of its characters open and displaced. The end of the first chapter is where the chronologically organized story concludes. Having just disclosed to her mother that she and Mason were secretly married at the City Hall while visiting Nina, the youngest of the three sisters, in New York, Leila comments on her mother’s resentful response: “What could I say? Using Chinese was my undoing. She had a world of words that were beyond me” (Ng 2008a: 20). On one hand, Leila’s inability to respond effectively to her mother’s use of Chinese language reflects her sense of emotional stagnation and the melancholic response to loss that seems to afflict the entire family. On the other hand, her words betray a lack of closure, an openness to ambivalent if not conflicting meanings, which destabilizes any notion of final or unambiguous truth. If the novel’s organization around a reverse chronology builds up readerly expectations of a climactic unveiling of the fundamental cause for Ona’s suicide, such expectations are never met; instead, the reader finds “not a singular cause, but rather the diffuse unfolding of hardship, sorrow, and endurance” (Chang

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2005: 114). The chapter ends on a similar note, as two sewing ladies from Mah’s workplace overhear the ensuing argument between mother and daughter. Witnessing the two women leaving the family store where the scene takes place, Leila concludes: They were going to Portsmouth Square, and I knew they were talking up everything they heard, […] not stopping until they found their sewing-lady friends […]. And that’s when they’d tell, tell their long-stitched version of the story, from beginning to end. Let them make it up, I thought. Let them talk (Ng 2008a: 21).

Leila’s laconic remark “let them make it up” points to the difficulty, if not impossibility, of getting the story right and reaching the final truth to what has happened. The true story does not open itself for chronological narration proceeding “from beginning to end” (ibid.), but necessitates another kind of chronology that never forgets “to look back, to remember” (Ng 2008a: 191). But while it may seem that by revealing a pessimistic submission to an assumed inevitability of unfavorable events, Leila’s words betray an all but archetypal melancholic response. There is also a more hopeful element to the possible unfolding of the story in such a haphazard way as letting the women tell their “long-stitched version of the story” (Ng 2008a: 21) suggests. All the dismantling, reassembling, and fixing conducted by Mason at the garage and by Leon in his unlikely projects involving buying discarded appliances with a half-thought intention to recycle them, and all the stitching and sewing done by Mah both at the factory and at home on Salmon Alley, can be read as attempts to negotiate, and finally accept, the tragedy of Ona’s suicide. On another level, however, we can read these functions as representing a narrative endeavor that seeks to understand the diasporic experience and the emotional displacement facing the novel’s characters in terms of continuous undoing, or unstitching, and fabricating the story of a neglected and partly silenced communal history, a story of displaced individuals balancing between racial abjection and a quest for cultural agency. Questions of abjection and agency in Asian American literature cannot be discussed without considering two major discourses that have largely characterized the American racial rhetoric on Asian Americans from the second half of the nineteenth century onward: these are the much debated yellow peril and model minority discourses. Despite all the political and scholarly contestation they have raised, particularly among Asian American scholars, these discourses continue to resonate in discussions about the Asian American experience as an

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inseparable part of the history of Asian immigration to the United States.³ The yellow peril myth can be traced back to the anti-Asian rhetoric of the nineteenth century, which culminated in the enactment of a series of anti-Asian immigration laws in order to restrict the number of Asian immigrants to the United States. One example of such legislation was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which together with three follow-up exclusion acts set in force by the end of the same decade suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers and prohibited the reentry of those who had left and not returned to the U.S. before the enactment of the law (Lowe 1996: 180, n14). The Chinese Exclusion Act remained in force until 1943, but it was not until 1965 that race quotas in legislation gave way to nationality criteria and the immigration quotas for Asian countries were placed on an equal footing with those of others (Lim 1993: 575–576; Lye 2005: 6). These are the harsh historical conditions that in part set the stage for the losses suffered by Ng’s characters. In Steer Toward Rock, the presence of the racist history of anti-Chinese immigration laws is perhaps even more pronounced than in Bone. Ng’s second novel explores the social, cultural, and emotional ramifications of the restrictive legislation – the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, in particular – through the kaleidoscope of one man’s life in 1960s San Francisco. Jack Moon Szeto, bought into the family of Yi-Tung Szeto when he was five years old, lives his life under a false identity and enters the United States as the son of his paper father, who has also bought his name to enter the country as “the legal son of a gold miner” (Ng 2008b: 3). But the price Jack eventually has to pay for his life in America by far exceeds the four thousand dollars he owes Yi-Tung Szeto for his papers and passage to the United States. The first lines of the novel disclose the real price for his American life, as narrated by Jack: The woman I loved wasn’t in love with me; the woman I married wasn’t a wife to me. Ilin Cheung was my wife on paper. In deed, she belonged to Yi-Tung Szeto. In debt, I also belonged to him. He was my father, paper, too (Ng 2008b: 3).

Yi-Tung Szeto has reported his paper son to the immigration officials as a married man, so that he can later use the “immigration slot” (Ng 2008b: 4) provided by Jack’s alleged wife to bring to the United States a mistress for himself. Ilin Cheung is the woman Jack must now claim as his wife, but it is the San Francisco born

3 For an extensive discussion of the genealogy of the yellow peril rhetoric and its literary manifestations from the late nineteenth century onward, see Lye (2005: 12–46), and for an elaboration on the yellow peril rhetoric in the context of contemporary Asian American women’s writing, see Chiu (2004: 5–18). For an extended discussion of the model minority discourse and its repercussions for the Asian American subjectivity, see Palumbo-Liu (1999: 395–416).

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Joice Qwan whom he truly loves. To prove his love for Joice Qwan, Jack enters the Chinese Confession Program, instituted in 1956, officially to “encourage and assist all aliens […] who illegally entered the U.S. to adjust their status to that of an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence” (Ng 2008b: 244). Less poetically, the program offered the United States government an effective way to monitor certain residents of the Chinese community with the intention of investigating and deporting anyone who was considered pro-Communist (Takaki 1998: 416). Jack gambles his citizenship for Joice’s love, and loses them both. Betrayed by state officials and by love, he learns “the reach of passion, the grip of rancor and the profundity of regret” (Ng 2008b: 5). Finally, it is Veda, the daughter he shares with Joice Qwan, who sees Jack for who he truly is; it is Veda who acknowledges how identities are made, how paper becomes blood. Fittingly, the novel ends with her words: “I chose Jack Moon Szeto. I chose his fake name, the name he lived half his life with, the name he made with his own sweat, the name he surrendered for love, the name that made him true” (Ng 2008b: 255). The discriminatory legislation, the corollaries of which Ng explores in both of her novels, relied largely on the yellow peril rhetoric. As a systematic form of racial abjection, the yellow peril discourse rests upon the relationship it has forged between race and dirt (Chiu 2004: 5). Fictional yellow peril narratives that described Chinese immigrants as dirty and harboring diseases were frequent in the American rhetoric on race relations by the late nineteenth century (ibid.). Despite the initial fictional character of such narratives, the yellow peril rhetoric soon led to a “symbolic institutionalization” of Asian Americans within the “perilyzing” (as opposed to paralyzing) paradigm of racial abjection, as Monica Chiu has noted (Chiu 2004: 7). The effect of racial abjection is indeed paralyzing, as Chiu’s wording suggests: officially classified as illegal aliens ineligible to citizenship, both Leon Leong and Jack Moon Szeto are trapped in a life in which survival equals forgetting one’s true ancestry and paper identities are worth more than blood. The irony of the condition is apparent in Leon Leong’s inability to survive the grief over his daughter’s death because of an ancestral debt and a promise made to his paper father – a trick once performed to fool the American officials – to bring Grandpa Leong’s bones back to China after his death. While the yellow peril image present in the American racial rhetoric since the nineteenth century can be regarded as a particularly systematic form of racial abjection (see Chiu 2004: 5–8), the so-called model minority myth invites questions associated with agency. The model minority myth relies largely on the alleged economic efficiency and upward mobility of Asian Americans as socioeconomic agents in American society (Lye 2005: 2). In the post-1960s racial rhetoric, Asian Americans have often been considered either as non-minorities or as minorities that do not suffer from oppression (ibid.). What the seemingly optimis-

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tic model minority rhetoric conveniently forgets, besides the obvious heterogeneity of Asian American minorities, is that the model minority myth is in fact the other side of the coin that is the openly racist yellow peril rhetoric. As Colleen Lye notes, “yellow peril and model minority are best understood as two aspects of the same, long-running racial form, a form whose most salient feature, whether it has been made the basis for exclusion or assimilation, is the trope of economic efficiency” (ibid.: 5). According to several Asian American critics (Cheng 2001; Eng 2001; Eng and Han 2003; see also Shiu 2006), this contradictory legacy has resulted in a chronically melancholic condition for the Asian American subject. This is the rhetorical axis that has dominated the discourse on Chinese immigration to the United States for more than a century. It also plays a significant role in the Chinese American immigrant experience portrayed in Ng’s Bone and Steer Toward Rock. In reference to the notable change in the production, marketing, and reception of Asian American literature that has taken place since the 1970s, David Palumbo-Liu notes that the birth of the model minority myth was made possible by a systematic disregard of differences in the “material histories and contemporary realities” (Palumbo-Liu 1999: 396) between different Asian groups in the United States, and attributes the recent success of certain Chinese American narratives precisely to this development, in which material and sociopolitical differences between the numerous Asian American ethnic groups are suppressed to give way to an “ideology of depoliticized self-healing primarily concerned with the psychological adjustments of ethnic subjects and enabled by a presumption of a particularly constructed ethnic malaise” (ibid.). Rather than reading such narratives as direct manifestations of the model minority myth, he considers the myth as an ideological construct that functions as “a mode of apprehending, decoding, recoding, and producing Asian American narratives” (ibid.). Fae Myenne Ng’s two novels are an interesting exception to this trajectory, as they portray a different image of the Chinese American immigrant experience: one in which loss, grief, and emotional displacement are not easily consolidated into a consistent process of psychological self-healing. This is reflected, for instance, in the lack of closure that characterizes Bone and Steer Toward Rock both structurally and thematically. It also becomes particularly evident from Ng’s discussion of the betrayal inherent in the dominant historical narrative.

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2 The Lost Bones of History: Betrayal in Historical Narrative In his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), Freud presents melancholia as the pathological counterpart to “the normal affect of mourning” (Freud 1955: 243). Mourning, states Freud, is the common reaction to “the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (ibid.). What sets melancholia apart from this normal and healthy response to loss is that, unlike mourning, melancholia does not accept substitution of what is lost and is therefore indefinite in character (Cheng 2001: 8). According to Freud, the melancholic response may be more likely to occur if the lost object lacks clear definition: if what is lost is something rather abstract, or if some part of the loss remains unconscious (Freud 1955: 245). Another distinguishing factor between mourning and melancholia has to do with the subject’s sense of self-worth which, in the case of melancholia, suffers serious damage. Freud captures the difference by stating: “in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (ibid.: 246). Building on Freud’s discussion of melancholia, Anne Anlin Cheng begins her analysis of what she calls “racial melancholia” (Cheng 2001: xi) by drawing a distinction between ‘melancholy’ as an affect and ‘melancholia’ as a structural and identificatory formation (ibid.: 20). She further argues that racial melancholia exists for racialized subjects “both as a sign of rejection and a psychic strategy in response to that rejection” (ibid.; emphasis original). The dynamic of racial melancholia as an identificatory formation is inextricably linked to racial abjection. As David Li formulates, rearticulating Julia Kristeva’s theory on abjection and the genesis of human subjectivity, the abject is simultaneously necessary for the formation of the self and what is rejected in the process, or, “the part of ourselves that we willfully discard” (Li 1998: 6). Thus, the birth of the self necessitates the constitution of what is considered as the “not-self” but what cannot be simply deemed the object or the alienated Other.⁴ Karen Shimakawa defines

4 David Li uses the concept of Asian abjection to signify the discursive processes through which certain forms of Asian American articulation are denied, sanctioned, and substituted with dominant authorities who are to speak for the Asian American (Li 1998: 8). Underlining the conceptual split between the object or the Other and the abject, Li suggests that the history of Asians in the United States can be roughly divided into two separate periods both characterized by distinct forms of representation, political culture, and modes of production. The period of “Oriental alienation” falls between the years 1854 and 1943 or 1965, depending on which one of the two landmark years in reforming U.S. immigration legislation is given

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abjection as “an attempt to circumscribe and radically differentiate something that, although deemed repulsively other is, paradoxically, at some fundamental level, an undifferentiable part of the whole” (Shimakawa 2002: 2, emphasis original). To the extent that “Asian American,” as both Li and Shimakawa suggest, functions as abject in relation to “American,” some degree of racial melancholia can be regarded as a necessary result of such cultural dynamics. As Cheng notes, however, melancholia is not only predicated on the metaphorical loss of self, but is also an “active negotiation of it” (Cheng 2001: 20). Both melancholia and abjection are by definition interminable, indefinite, and incomplete; while abjection does not signal total and unambiguous exclusion, melancholia, in all its infiniteness, also lacks final answers. This lack of closure is where melancholia, despite its pathological characteristics, also holds potential for agency. Questions of agency are often too easily left out from discussions addressing loss and melancholia in minoritized literatures. This is hardly surprising since, on the surface, melancholia seems to represent the antithesis of agency, indeed the antithesis of any activity. Pathological or not, melancholia can nonetheless provide a much needed opportunity for active self-reflecting in the face of a traumatic loss. Longing and remembrance, the movement that goes “forward and forward and then back, back” (Ng 2008a: 142, italics original), form an essential part of this self-reflective process. It thus becomes evident that time is not the only modality being reversed and transgressed in Bone. In fact, time and temporality in the novel are deeply enmeshed with motion – or the lack of it. Juliana Chang points out that in the Freudian dichotomy between mourning and melancholia, mourning “exemplifies progress,” whereas melancholia, in accordance with its pathological origins, remains improperly attached to the past and therefore holds the subject hostage, unable to move forward (Chang 2005: 115). Unable to let go of what is lost, the melancholic cannot achieve closure and remains caught in what once was. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely in the act of defying closure that melancholia retains an openness to new meanings and allows for an unfixed view of the world, as the reversal of both temporal and spatial movement in Bone suggests.

priority. The second period named “Asian abjection” begins respectively in 1943 or 1965, and continues until the present. What differentiates the second period from the first, according to Li, is precisely the logic of abjection, which simultaneously excludes or rejects and includes or necessitates “the abject” (Li 1998: 5–6). Karen Shimakawa argues, however, that it is this “vacillation between extremes […] rather than a developmental progression from excludable alien to tolerated abject” that has defined the representation of Asian Americanness from its inception (Shimakawa 2002: 166–167, n14).

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Although the most acute loss haunting the members of the Leong family – Ona’s suicide  – is very matter-of-factly given to the reader no later than the first page of Bone, it gradually becomes apparent that Ona’s death is only the latest chapter in a long succession of losses in the family’s life. Leila’s laconic comment on the reasons that once led to her mother’s love affair with Tommie Hom bespeaks of a life structured by loss: “It wasn’t just death that upset Mah, it was life, too” (Ng 2008a: 79). For Leon, especially, loss has become a steady element in life: he has lost his birth parents and his biological past by becoming Grandpa Leong’s paper son upon immigration to the United States; he has suffered from a continuous flow of lost jobs; he has lost his wife to her affair with another man; and in the event of Ona’s death, he is faced with the prospect of losing his paternal authority with regard to his rebelling daughters (Lowe 1996: 123). In one significant episode, Mason accompanies Leon to the Chinese cemetery to look for Grandpa Leong’s lost bones – in Leon’s mind, a broken promise and thus the cause of so much misfortune. The incident functions simultaneously as the culmination of Leon’s personal history of losses and as an allegory of all the lost histories hidden inside the homes and alleys of the world’s so-called Chinatowns. After initial difficulties in locating the cemetery, the two men maneuver themselves in through a hole in the fence surrounding the burial ground. Soon enough, a security guard drives over, announcing that the graveyard is closed and that, in any case, the men need a paper confirming that they have relatives buried in the ground of the cemetery. Later, Leila takes up the task of approaching the Benevolent Association in order to hunt down the requested paper. What she finds out, to her astonishment, is that after “a list of abandoned dead” (Ng 2008a: 74) had been posted in local newspapers to inform the relatives, Grandpa Leong’s remains were disintered and reburied elsewhere together with remains of other people sharing the same surname. The incident draws a parallel between human remains that become debris – misplaced matter stripped of any personal meaning  – when there is no one to claim them, and identities and personal histories becoming disposable. Both novels portray a character who has given up his birth identity and family ties for a paper identity and a life in America; these are the stories of Bone’s Leon Leong and Steer Toward Rock’s Jack Moon Szeto. In the above episode from Bone, the exhumation of bodies to make room for new ones and the fact that the bones are subsequently anonymously reburied to an unknown location are analogous to the building of historical debris as a sideproduct of the dominant historical narrative, constructed by and for those who are victorious in life, that Walter Benjamin discusses in his essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Drawing from Lisa Lowe’s reading of Bone against Benjamin’s understanding of historical narrative, Chang calls Bone’s backward-looking temporal structure “a temporality

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of the remainder” (Chang 2005: 116; Lowe 1996: 126–127). This alternative temporality offers a competing perspective for the dominant historical narrative by acknowledging “that which is left behind by history, that which is covered over by history’s transformation of catastrophe into progress” (Chang 2005: 116). Leon Leong is in fact a Benjaminian “angel of history,” who sees “one single catastrophe […] piling wreckage upon wreckage” where most people merely see a simple “chain of events” (Benjamin 2007: 257). His relentless search for the lost bones of his paper father in order to fulfill his promise and return them to China allegorically represents the “material memory of the unvictorious,” which “dialectically returns” to challenge the dominant historical narrative (Lowe 1996: 126). The melancholic lack of closure thus signifies both individual and collective ethicopolitical agency in the form of symbolic resistance to the dominant conceptions of the past. The betrayal inherent in historical narrative does not annihilate the possibility for agency for the minority subject because, as Crystal Parikh maintains, “if there is no recovering oneself from the trauma of betrayal, there is nonetheless an “after” to the act, a new world of meanings and relations, brought into existence by betrayal, into which the subject is thrown” (Parikh 2009: 2). Abjection, on the other hand, is a betrayal of its own kind: a betrayal of oneself. As something that we “willfully discard,” to use David Li’s (1998: 6) wording, the abject can be perceived as emotional debris of a sort. It is what we lose or give away willingly as a reaction to something that we value being taken away from us, or when confronted with a threat of losing something integral to our identity or subjectivity. To put it differently, abjection  – and indeed melancholia  – signals turning away from something as a response to being turned away. The backward-quality of abjection lies precisely herein: the mind’s defense against loss and rejection is, paradoxically, self-abasement and self-rejection. In this sense, melancholia and its unfortunate ramifications, depression and suicide, are expressions of being caught in the abyss of abjection, of being haunted by the past, as happens to the characters of Bone and Steer Toward Rock. Moreover, abjection is always a contradiction in itself, as it necessitates turning into the self and stripping down the excess, reaching to the bare bones of existence, and finally being left with the void after having destructed what one knows.

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3 “Re-membering” the Past: Melancholic Ethics and Narrative Agency The melancholic ethics exemplified by Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone and Steer Toward Rock is essentially about stillness, staying quietly alert to hear the forgotten (hi) stories that no one bothers to tell. Leila’s words from Bone testify to this agenda: “I believe in holding still. I believe that the secrets we hold in our hearts are our anchors, that even the unspoken between us is a measure of our every promise to the living and to the dead” (Ng 2008a: 190). In this particular ethics, “holding still” (ibid.) implicates embracing the state of not knowing, the state of existing between places where meanings are produced, in a way that resembles May Friedman and Silvia Schultermandl’s (2011: 5) notion of a “transnational sensibility,” which “sees a lack of fixity as simultaneously inevitable and rich in possibility” and is “both a methodology and a mode of enquiry: a way of seeing and deliberately not-knowing, a way of inhabiting the spaces between questions and answers” (ibid.: emphasis original). The lack of closure and the absence of fixed meanings is also reflected in Veda’s coming to a realization regarding her father’s way of “holding still” (Ng 2008a: 190) in Steer Toward Rock: “The heart never travels. This was my father’s most elusive phrase. He used it whenever a question was too large. Now I understood, he was referring to the infinite possibilities of the unanswerable” (Ng 2008b: 216, italics original). Leila, Veda, and Jack each communicate a transnational sensibility of “not-knowing” (Friedman and Schultermandl 2011: 5), as a result of which the melancholic ethics of “holding still” (Ng 2008a: 190) becomes “rich in possibility” (Friedman and Schultermandl 2011: 5) and even betrayal can act as a catalyst for agency and subversion. In Bone, ambivalence, contradiction, and lack of closure sometimes manifest as a pronounced polarity between motion and immobility. This polarity unfolds, for example, in Leila’s comments about Ona being “the middle girl and […] stuck in the middle of all the trouble” (Ng 2008a: 136), even though she “had always been the forward-looking one” (Ng 2008a: 85). Although the novel betrays any readerly expectations of providing final answers to the question of why Ona chooses to die, the reverse chronology seems to suggest that what finally pushes her over the edge and into her death is not that she fails to look forward, but rather that she forgets how to look back. For as Terry DeHay writes, “the minority woman must look to her history, both to preserve it and to find out who she is. She needs to have a clear vision of her past, in order to re-vision her present” (DeHay 1994: 31). Tragically, Ona is unsuccessful in this “process of re-membering” (ibid.) and is left unable to re-vision her future after a loss too overwhelming – being forced to choose between her love for her parents and that for Osvaldo. Perhaps,

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for Ona, the decisive loss is not having to give up Osvaldo’s love, however, but the betrayal committed by her father; even though she eventually bends to Leon’s will, her relationship to her father will never be the same because Leon no longer has her trust. Unable to connect with her father’s past and her own cultural heritage, she resorts to the final act of agency that she, in her mind, has left in her life: taking her own life. Along with the reversed temporal organization of Bone, the titles of Ng’s two novels – Bone and Steer Toward Rock – also direct attention toward the process of stripping down the excess and unveiling the lost corpses of historical narrative, the material memory of those whose stories remain forgotten in the grand narrative of history. Upon returning from her personal odyssey to her father’s native land, a journey she had embarked upon hoping to find resolution to his Chinese past, Veda finally concludes: “My father’s story was never complete in America, that’s why I could never let it go. But in China, his story was so common it wasn’t even worth telling” (Ng 2008b: 214). The melancholic content of racial abjection lies, to a great extent, in the tragedy of being excluded from the national histories that are told, repeated, and thus kept alive. For Jack Moon Szeto, the name of the woman he loves – ‘Joice’ – is a reminder of the choice he has to make: to tell his story, or to keep quiet. The weight of this decision rests heavily upon his shoulders: “This is a story I’m afraid to tell and afraid to keep” (Ng 2008b: 188). But unlike Leon, Jack chooses to tell his story by entering the Chinese Confession Program. Choosing not to stay quiet has irretrievable consequences, but it does not bring him closure, as Jack is soon to realize: “Telling can be a detour. Telling does not necessarily invite completion” (Ng 2008b: 190). What eventually frees him from the hold of his past is letting his daughter tell the rest, letting his story take root and grow in the memory of future generations of Chinese Americans: “My story is native to our history but it need not be our root. A naturalized plant is new life. So I hand over my story. Let her tell. Let her not. Let her find her way through the story so that it frees her” (Ng 2008b: 191). The “relations of responsibility,” which, according to Crystal Parikh (2009: 2), enable the emergence of minority subjectivity, are at the heart of Ng’s both novels. This makes Bone and Steer Toward Rock literary works characterized by a strong sense of ethical agency as well as a pervasive ethical sensibility rooted in a deeply empathetic understanding of the political, cultural, and historical injustice that Chinese immigrants to the United States have had to endure. Steer Toward Rock, specifically, is structured around the complex and fragile balance in social relationships; the novel is divided into five segments each of which takes a different perspective to the social consequences of Jack’s predicament and eventual confession. More importantly, the novel is organized around a negotiation between betrayal and trust. True to Ng’s melancholic ethics motivated by loss and

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betrayal, Veda describes her father as “a man who trusted too much” (Ng 2008b: 216). Jack himself, on the other hand, concludes his own story by passing the role of narrator to his daughter with the words “trust yourself” (Ng 2008b: 191). What Veda inherits from her father is in fact more than a lost biological past or a forgotten cultural heritage: the real legacy is narrative agency – the freedom and responsibility of telling her own story and writing her own history as a second generation Chinese American. It is largely through the notions of betrayal and trust that the relationship between racial abjection and cultural and narrative agency is negotiated in Ng’s two novels. Bone and Steer Toward Rock both testify to the notion that while there is reason to maintain that agency necessitates a certain amount of trust, betrayal, too, may hold significant critical and transformative power, thereby indicating new possibilities for ethical and political agency available to the minority subject.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter (2007) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books). Bow, Leslie (2001) Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press). Chang, Iris (2004) The Chinese in America: A Narrative History (New York: Penguin Books). Chang, Juliana (2005) ’Melancholic Remains: Domestic and National Secrets in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone’, Modern Fiction Studies 1, 110–133. Chan, Sucheng (1991) Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (New York: Twayne Publishers). Chatman, Seymour (2009) ‘Backwards’, Narrative 1, 31–55. Cheng, Anne Anlin (2001) The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Chiu, Monica (2004) Filthy Fictions: Asian American Literature by Women (Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press). DeHay, Terry, (1994) ’Narrating Memory’, in Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures, ed. Amritjit Singh & al. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), 26–44. Eng, David L. (2001) Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham & London: Duke University Press). Eng, David L. and Shinhee Han (2003) ‘A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia’, in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press) 343–371. Freud, Sigmund (1955 [1917]) ’Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press), 239–260.

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Friedman, May and Silvia Schultermandl (2011) ‘Introduction’, in Growing Up Transnational: Identity and Kinship in a Global Era, ed. May Friedman and Silvia Schultermandl (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 3–18. Li, David Leiwei (1998) Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Lim, Shirley Geok-lin (1993) ‘Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories in Asian American Literature’, Feminist Studies 3, 570–595. Lowe, Lisa (1996) Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham & London: Duke University Press). Lye, Colleen (2005) America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press). Ng, Fae Myenne (2008a [1993]) Bone (New York: Hyperion). Ng, Fae Myenne (2008b) Steer Toward Rock (New York: Hyperion). Palumbo-Liu, David (1999) Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Parikh, Crystal, (2009) An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture (New York: Fordham University Press). Shimakawa, Karen (2002) National Abjection: the Asian American Body Onstage (Durham & London: Duke University Press). Shiu, Anthony Sze-Fai (2006) ‘On Loss: Anticipating a Future for Asian American Studies’, MELUS 1, 3–33. Takaki, Ronald (1998) Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York & Boston: Little, Brown and Company).

Lucy Brisley

Melancholic Violence and the Spectre of Failed Ideals in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Yasmina Khadra’s Wolf Dreams 1 From Mourning to Melancholia: Recent Developments in Theory Freudian melancholia has experienced a theoretical revival in recent years. Championed by critics in fields as diverse as sociology, literary theory and philosophy, it is today affiliated with the poststructuralist turn toward an ethics of memory and a concern for the politics of the subaltern. This investment in what might be termed ‘strategic melancholia’ has its origins in the concomitant rejection of Freudian mourning, which is increasingly framed as a public mode of grief that marks some losses while disregarding others (Butler 2009: 38). Described by Freud in his seminal essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ as a teleological, finite process that enables the grieving ego to renounce its libidinal ties to the lost object (Freud 1957: 255), mourning has been condemned both for engendering amnesia (Derrida 2003: 74) and for enacting the second, figurative death of the object (Eng and Han 2003: 365). In the wake of the once unimaginable horrors of the twentieth century, mourning is thus considered ethically untenable as it can lead to the double negation of what has been lost; this is particularly pertinent in the case of minority or marginalised victims. In melancholia, conversely, the ego cannot accept that such a loss has occurred and instead the grieving subject incorporates or resurrects the lost object within the self. This stoic preservation of the lost object is regarded by many post-Freudian theorists as a basis for the ethical remembrance of the other and has led to the widespread depathologizing of melancholia within theory. Melancholia has also morphed into a vehicle of political protest and is increasingly formulated as a framework through which to engender justice and political reform, particularly in the case of marginal communities and identities. It has been described as “a dynamic process with […] transformative potentials for political imagination,” (Cheng 2001: xi) while David Eng and David Kazanjian also argue that “a better understanding of melancholic attachments to loss might depathologize those attachments, making visible not only their social bases but

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also their creative, unpredictable, political aspects” (2003: 3). Patricia Rae similarly ventures that “resistant mourning may be the basis for progressive political reform” (2007: 20), while the postcolonial theorist Ranjana Khanna asserts that “Melancholia becomes the basis for an ethico-political understanding of colonial pasts, postcolonial presents, and utopian futures” (2003: 30). Khanna’s perspective is indebted to both Freudian and Derridean theory, and certainly Jacques Derrida’s text Spectres de Marx (1993) has also inspired a generation of academics who are drawn to its basic premise that haunting engenders justice (Gordon 1997: 36; López 2001: 66; Spivak 1995: 70). Contextualising her analysis of melancholia within the context of postcolonial Algeria, Khanna argues that “Critical melancholia, formulated through the ghosts with ideals, is the only way for democracy to come” (2008: 27), contending that: Algeria […] becomes exemplary because a certain form of sovereignty was played out which systematically engendered a melancholic remainder. It is within the affect initiated by this remainder that one could, perhaps, find a specter calling for justice (Khanna 2006: para. 20).

Khanna in particular calls upon us to heed the lost or failed democratic ideals of the independence movement, reading in Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 film The Battle of Algiers a gendered melancholic remainder that acts upon the present. “These melancholic specters, available to us only through listening to the often unspoken demands of a text, point the way toward a different future and are profoundly material,” she argues in her expansive introduction to Algeria Cuts (2008: 12). It is by refusing to renounce the lost ideals of female emancipation at stake within the film, in other words by maintaining a melancholic attachment to them, she suggests, that justice will ensue. The correlation between melancholia and political reform is thus prevalent throughout academia, yet the very proliferation of such theories means they are at risk of operating as a totalising frame of reference that overlooks the poststructuralist concern with the singular and the particular that inspired them in the first place. With this in mind my aim is to examine the melancholic relationship between the Algerian war of independence of 1954–62 and the Algerian civil war of the 1990s in order to explore the possibility that melancholia may in fact hinder the potential for political reform. In particular, by addressing the intertextual connections between Gillo Pontecorvo’s neo-realist film The Battle of Algiers

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and Yasmina Khadra’s¹ 1999 meditation on the recent civil war, Wolf Dreams,² I wish to demonstrate how the melancholic preservation of putative ideals from the Algerian independence movement was a factor in the ensuing panic of the 1990s. It is only by working through or mourning these failed ideals, I suggest, that political reform in Algeria can begin.

2 Melancholia and the Failed Ideals of Independence In its mimetic relationship with The Battle of Algiers, Wolf Dreams locates the origins of the violent civil war in the failure of the National Liberation Front (FLN) to inaugurate the revolutionary ideals espoused in The Battle of Algiers. In doing so, it figures the panic of the 1990s as a violent melancholic response to the lost or failed ideals of the anti-colonial movement. Building upon Freud’s assertion in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ that melancholia may arise in relation to the loss of an ideal (1957: 245), the postcolonial critic Khanna conceives “political revolutionary violence [in Algeria as] a form of melancholia in unconscious response, perhaps, to the loss of an ideal” (2003: 23). Here Khanna figures the war of independence as the corollary of France’s inability to extend its Enlightenment ideals to its French-Algerian subjects; yet this critical framework is also germane to the recent Algerian war, and can be extended to suggest, as does Khadra, that the civil war be read as a debilitating form of melancholia in response to a set of revolutionary ideals that have yet to be publically mourned. This melancholic relationship between the war of independence and the civil war is most apparent through Wolf Dream’s mimetic relationship to the concluding scene of The Battle of Algiers, in which the dialectic of the film reaches its logical conclusion: Algerian independence. Temporally removed from the flashback that narrates the events of the ‘Battle of Algiers’, it appears as a coda to the main narrative and features a crowd of Algerians, many of them women, cheering and ululating victoriously in front of the French military; one woman in particular holds the Algerian flag and dances ecstatically as a voiceover informs the viewer

1 Yasmina Khadra is the female nom de plume of the Algerian author Mohammed Moulessehoul. 2 The 1999 novel is originally in French and entitled À quoi rêvent les loups. English language quotations are taken from Linda Black’s 2007 translation Wolf Dreams.

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that in 1962 “the Algerian nation was born”. In a discussion of this scene, Khanna attests to the historical disjuncture enacted by Pontecorvo, articulating that the: story of birth is posited in the future, but also in the reportage of the past […]. Birth and death come together in a temporality that at once proposes women’s reproductive labor (literally pregnancy) as hope (Khanna 2006: para. 24).

In this way, the final scene of Pontecorvo’s film enacts the gender conventions of nationalist discourse in which “[w]omen are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation” (McClintock 1997: 90). Undeniably The Battle of Algiers figures the birth of the Algerian nation as a symbol of optimism. The unity of the protestors is conceived by Pontecorvo as a natural extension of the FLN, which appears to enact the democratic will of the entire Algerian people. The opening scene of Khadra’s central narrative section entitled “The Casbah” problematises the democratic birth of the postcolonial nation expounded in The Battle of Algiers. Returning to the space of the Casbah, that is, to the very locus of Pontecorvo’s film, Wolf Dreams reads as a grotesque parody of the scène finale of The Battle of Algiers as Khadra figures the brutal Islamist violence of the 1990s as a violent birth. Subverting the etymological origin of the term ‘nation’, which derives from the latin verb ‘nasci’, to be born or spring forth, Wolf Dreams figures Algiers as a gendered and violated entity whose labour gives rise to an illegitimate child: Algiers was aglow with the orgasm of the ‘enlightened’ who had raped her. Pregnant from their hatred, she made an exhibition of herself in the place where she had been violated, in the middle of her bay, forever cursed. […]. Amid pain and nausea, Algiers was giving birth. […]. She clung to her hillsides, her skirts hitched up above her swollen genitals […]. With bated breath, the people watched her bring the incestuous monster into the world. And she gave birth without restraint, but with the rage of a mother who realizes too late that the father of her child is her own son (Khadra 2007: 81).

The easy correlation between women, birth and nationalism, which has figured prominently within the narratives of newly independent postcolonial nations, is problematised by the carnivalesque, overtly sexual imagery of rape and violation. The political naissance figured here is violent, enforced, and extremist: Algiers has given birth to a brutal form of Islamic fundamentalism. The roots of this fundamentalism, moreover, are to be located in the birth of the newly independent Algerian nation since Algiers has been raped by her own offspring. In other words, the ostensibly democratic nation that was born at the end of Pontecorvo’s film in 1962, the “son” of the motherland, is guilty of violating Algiers and producing the bastardised fundamentalism of the 1990s. By figuring the recent panic in Algeria

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as the incestuous legacy of the FLN’s failed ideals, Khadra’s novel establishes a melancholic genealogy of violence that begins with the independence movement and continues into the 1990s.

3 Violent Parallels: from the Anticolonial Revolution to the Islamic Revolution Several academics have of course already noted the parallels between the anticolonial war of independence and the civil war of recent years, the horror of which appeared to many to brandish the spectre of the violent atrocities of the revolutionary war (Evans and Phillips 2007: 58; Hiddleston 2006: 130). Writing in the midst of the latest bloody conflict, for instance, the Algerian historian Benjamin Stora was compelled to remark that a “strange sensation has developed that this is a remake of the war of independence: an impression of déjà vu or ‘déjà entendu’” (Stora 2001: 232). This is not to suggest, however, that the conflicts are interchangeable; indeed the socio-historical contexts that gave rise to both wars are entirely distinct. The war of independence, won by the FLN, arose out of a demand for autonomy and the desire of many native Algerians to put an end to more than 120 years of French colonial rule. The civil war, conversely, developed after the cancellation, in 1992, of the first democratic elections in Algeria since the FLN came to power in 1962. The extremist Islamic group known as Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which had won by a landslide, vented its rage through a series of ongoing bloody attacks aimed at the FLN and, more widely, anyone who was against its extremist principles. Despite their differing socio-political milieus, however, a critical analysis of the language and ideology employed by actors in both wars suggests that the civil war was enacted through the latent framework of the war of independence (Stora 2001: 233). Wolf Dreams develops upon this rationale by figuring the recent terror in Algeria as a form of Freudian unheimlich or return of the repressed in which the ideology of the FIS has an almost mimetic relationship to that of the FLN of the anti-colonial movement. Indeed, the critique of the FLN that is implicit throughout Wolf Dreams arises out of the novel’s continued foregrounding of the connections between the FIS of the 1990s and the FLN of Pontecorvo’s film, connections which are established most immediately at the level of narratology. In a rare article on Khadra’s novel, one critic remarks upon the way in which, by beginning with the conclusion of its narrative, Wolf Dreams enacts a common cinematic motif (Chossat 2008: 145). Indeed, the novel often reads like a cinematic text, interspersing discourse with its own dramatic ‘cine-scapes’ and anyone familiar

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with The Battle of Algiers might immediately note the way in which it echoes the structure of Pontecorvo’s film. The Battle of Algiers famously begins with a violent scene of French torture before cutting to the film’s penultimate scene in which the FLN leader Ali la Pointe and three other activists are trapped within the Casbah. Ali can hear the voice of a French officer demanding that he surrender or die, and it is from this futile position that Pontecorvo’s film recounts the events of the conflict in the form of a flashback. Similarly, Wolf Dreams begins with its own denouement, describing how the protagonist Nafa Walid and his Islamist “brothers” (at this later stage now members of the violent Armed Islamic Group (GIA)) are holed up in an apartment within the Casbah. Encircled by the military, they are urged to surrender. Like Ali, Nafa refuses to capitulate and the narrative then also resumes as a flashback that tracks the origins of its protagonist’s violent trajectory. The narrative focuses on the activities of Nafa, whose dreams of becoming a film star are gradually eroded by the FLN’s neglect of the arts and then later by the Islamists’ denunciation of western culture. Politically disenfranchised and increasingly disillusioned, Nafa is eventually recruited by the FIS whose rhetoric of brotherhood provides him with the self-belief he was otherwise denied. Similarly, in Pontecorvo’s film, Ali is portrayed as a disenfranchised subject, illiterate and dabbling in petty crime until his imprisonment by the French. It is during this period of internment that Ali is recruited by the FLN and on his release he is charged with various tasks on behalf of the movement, in much the same way that Nafa is called upon by the FIS to transport weaponry, money and party members throughout Algiers and beyond. Following the flashbacks, both novel and film portray the death of their protagonist; Pontecorvo’s addendum signals toward a politically just future but this is a gesture that Wolf Dreams cannot emulate. As this brief description intimates, Wolf Dreams establishes immediate parallels between the FIS of the 1990s and the FLN of Pontecorvo’s film that are then developed at the level of semantics. The rhetorical analogies between the two factions are expounded in Khadra’s novel in a scene which hauntingly recalls the moment in The Battle of Algiers in which the FLN organises a general strike in the Casbah in order to demonstrate to the UN, and hence to the world, that the FLN and its followers are united in their desire for independence. In this scene “le petit Omar” famously obtains the loudspeaker that the French have been using to solicit the inhabitants of the Casbah. Appealing to his people, he evocatively proclaims, “Brothers […], Algeria will be free!” Pontecorvo depicts the Algerian crowd cheering and ululating in direct opposition to the colonising force. In a parody of this scene in Wolf Dreams, the FIS organises a similar strike within the Casbah in which an imam appeals to the unity of the crowd with a

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megaphone. Employing an analogous mode of discourse, he evokes the Hegelian logic of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial rhetoric that permeates Pontecorvo’s film: As long as Algerians are deprived of their right of full citizenship, as long as they treat us as mere onlookers, as long as they continue to shout “Move on, there’s nothing to see,” […] we won’t budge from here. […]. They can surround us with their damned riot police, threaten us with their guns and their ridiculous Armada, we won’t budge from here. […]. We won’t go back to our jobs until they realize, once and for all, that we don’t want them any more, that we’re tough enough to take our fate into our own hands. […]. Their place is no longer among us (Khadra 2007: 82).

Visually speaking, the reference to the military might recalls the moment in The Battle of Algiers when the French employ tanks in order to force the Algerians back to work. On an ideological level, the revolutionary concept of the Algerian subject constructing his own destiny and fighting for political recognition and autonomy, predicated as it is on a Manichean binary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, is strikingly reminiscent of Pontecorvo’s portrayal of the anti-colonial struggle. Certainly, the realisation that Algerian subjects could never fully be recognised as equals in the eyes of the French colonists or pieds-noirs, what Homi Bhabha calls “almost the same, but not quite” (2004: 122), was a prime factor in the call for decolonisation. Pro-independence groups demanded that the French leave Algeria, and this is hauntingly recalled by the imam’s claim that “Their place is no longer among us,” a phrase which evokes the more material concerns of land appropriation inherent to the nationalist movement. Divested as it is of its socio-historical specificity, the discourse could indeed be attributed to a FLN leader. As one historian argues, the anti-French (read: anti-western) discourse of the FIS was reminiscent of the views disseminated by the nationalist FLN (Heristchi 2004: 127). By employing a series of indeterminate pronouns, Khadra deconstructs the rhetoric of the FIS and the referents of the signifiers remain sufficiently ambiguous so that the text adopts a momentarily palimpsestic quality, recalling two very different historical moments simultaneously. Indeed, despite their obvious differences, the civil war of the 1990s saw the haunting return of key terms and rhetorical markers from the war of independence: “The mimicry is striking. The memory of the war of independence operates as a factor in the assignment of the roles to be played. The contemporary actors dress in theoretical garments borrowed from the past” (Stora 2001: 233). It was not simply that the media discussed the war in antiquated terms, then, but that the actors themselves constructed the civil war through the prism of the war of independence, brandishing the spectre of a mimetic, almost parodic form of revolutionary violence. In this sense, the panic of the 1990s corresponds to the notion of melancholia as a form of “acting-out” in which “one has a mimetic relation-

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ship to the past which is regenerated or relived as if it were fully present […]. In psychoanalytical terms, the acted-out past […] returns as the repressed” (LaCapra 1998: 54). Hence in Wolf Dreams the members of the FIS, and later the GIA, refer to themselves as “the maquis” and the “brothers,” (Khadra 2007: 140, 210) calling to mind the ostensible unity of the independence movement put forth in The Battle of Algiers. “There are thousands of us in the maquis, millions in the city; we are already the nation of tomorrow,” (Khadra 2007: 210) argues a sheikh in Khadra’s novel, thus employing the language of the original revolution in order to posit the Islamist movement as the bearer of a new nation. Writing during the civil war of recent years, Stora articulates the manner in which the FIS appropriated the fraternal discourse of the revolutionary struggle, contending that “the FIS is turning to advantage the theme of ‘the unity of the nation,’ perceived as an indissociable, united, and unanimous figure” (2001: 207).

4 Mythologising the Past: Against a Politics of Melancholia As Khadra and Stora duly demonstrate, the FIS did not necessarily posit any new ideals of its own; instead its rhetoric was inherited from the FLN. Thus while the civil war of the 1990s is sometimes misconstrued as a battle of secularists versus religious fanatics, some commentators have stressed the fact that the FLN was never divorced from Islam (Roberts 2003: 82). A FLN communiqué in The Battle of Algiers underlines how the Islamic faith represented a key tenet of the anti-colonial struggle, and certainly Islam has been the state religion since independence. It is precisely the FLN’s continued proximity to the Islamic faith that enabled the extremists to appropriate what they deemed to be the lost or failed ideals of the independence movement: the establishment of an Islamic state. Feeding upon the general discontent of the population, the FIS accused the FLN of betraying its revolutionary ideals; the FLN became increasingly associated with the failures of post-independence and the young were instinctively drawn to the FIS (Evans and Phillips 2007: 154). The FIS thus ensured its followers were “Fighting for the same ideal: the Islamic revolution” (Khadra 2007: 171). This was achieved in part through the translation of absence into loss, which marks the basis of all fundamentalisms and foundational philosophies (LaCapra 1997: 702). Indeed, despite the FLN’s affiliation with Islam, the creation of an Islamic state was notably absent from its anti-colonial agenda. Nevertheless, the FLN’s continued manipulation of history, especially since independence, went some way toward facilitating the FIS’s claim

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that the ‘lost’ ideals of independence were Islam-based; its revolutionary rhetoric of brotherhood and its anti-colonial myth of a lost, unified past sullied by French colonialism was melancholically invoked by the Islamists who postulated an “increasingly lost ‘paradise’ of origins” (Stora 2001: 66) that needed to be restored. By advocating a return to a unified, wholesome paradise, free of the degradation of colonialism, the FIS was merely reiterating the hegemonic myths propounded by the FLN as a counter-response to French colonial culture. The easy manner in which the FIS could appropriate putative myths of lost Islamic origins and then reframe them as the failed ideals of the independence movement is indicative of the ongoing fabrication of history that has shrouded Algeria for decades. Several theorists, as I have already discussed, would advocate melancholia as a route to political reform, yet within this particular context of silence and concealment, melancholia can be seen to feed into the mythologising of the past that ultimately became a factor in the ensuing panic of the 1990s. Indeed, what many proponents of resistant mourning tend to overlook is the way in which, in melancholia, the nature of the loss often remains concealed from view. Freud, for instance, contends that melancholia relates “to the loss of an object that is withdrawn from consciousness” (1957: 245). The consequence of this, as Julia Kristeva explains, is that one form of loss can conceal another, and the nature of an original loss is frequently obscured from view (1987: 14). The structure of melancholia can thus assist in the falsification of the past and the positing of putative lost origins, and it is thus shown to have an uneasy relationship to the violence of the 1990s. Viewed from this angle, Khanna’s plea that we melancholically invoke the revolutionary ideals at stake in The Battle of Algiers is rendered increasingly problematic. If Wolf Dreams tells us anything, it is that the melancholic violence of the 1990s is due, in part, to the uncertainty surrounding the aims of the independence movement. As the narrator of Khadra’s novel suggests, “[t]he specter of the war of ’54 was back […]. The young were heedless. They had not known the Revolution. They demanded their share in the horror” (2007: 134). Given the historical ambiguities endorsed and maintained by the FLN since independence, as well as the rhetorical analogies between the FLN and the extremist FIS, how can we be certain that the democratic ideals evinced within Pontecorvo’s film ever formed the basis of FLN praxis? Rather than advocating the melancholic preservation of the failed or “lost” ideals of independence, it is instead germane to insist upon a sustained critique of the past that consciously works through the multivalent layers of secrecy and ideology in order to inaugurate a “new history of the Algerian War, multidimensional and open to previously silent voices” (Alexander, Evans, and Keiger 2002: 32). One critic attests to the need for a nuanced investigation of Algerian history, con-

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tending that “[t]oday, as one witnesses the present political disarray of Algeria, a country laid waste by factionalism and a bloody civil war, the importance of correctly remembering ‘lost’ history seems even more pressing” (Orlando 2000: 262). Surprisingly, however, she credits The Battle of Algiers with providing us with an accurate vision of this “lost” past, claiming that “Pontecorvo’s efforts to rework this moment in history remain a testament of truth” (Orlando 2000: 262).

5 Pontecorvo and the Myth of Female Emancipation Such an unwavering belief in the inherent authenticity of The Battle of Algiers might appear paradoxical given the fact that the film is, after all, an aesthetic exploration of the war of independence. Nonetheless, while it is not an entirely truthful depiction of events, it is, however, often presented as such. As Nicholas Harrison has recently argued, “the division between original ‘event’ and history of representations is remarkably blurred in this case” (2007a: 402). Pontecorvo himself insisted upon the veracity of his cinematic vision, and his self-proclaimed “passion for historical truth” (Srivastava and Young 2005: 109) is shored up by the film’s producer and former FLN activist Saadi Yacef who advocates that “the story was true”³ (Harrison 2007b: 412). This emphasis on the film’s close relationship to truth has been echoed by many critics over the years and is due in part to its oft-cited documentary realism and the way in which its grainy scenes could be taken for newsreel (Harrison 2007a: 390; Harries 2007: 214; Wayne 2001: 17). As one former female activist put it, the “period construction is so convincing that it is tempting even for viewers who have themselves lived through the events to think they are watching archive footage” (Minne 2007: 342). A further reason for which the film is seen to represent the truth of the war of independence is its purported objectivity in portraying the atrocities wrought by both French and Algerian forces (Stam and Spence 1983: 13; Roberts 2002: 153); it was even condemned at the 1966 Venice Film Festival for refusing to convey a clear message to its spectators (Caillé 2007: 375). The film’s continued success as a marker of truth has contributed to what has been described as the “heroic myth” at the heart of the FLN’s anti-colonial revolution (MacMaster 2009: 13). Both the writings of Fanon, whose ideas can be traced throughout The Battle of Algiers, and the work of Pontecorvo have been particu-

3 The film is based upon Saadi Yacef’s own account of the Battle of Algiers.

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larly adept at perpetuating the notion of the FLN as a democratic body; several critics have pointed to the way in which Pontecorvo posits the FLN as an egalitarian organisation constituted of and for the people (Harries 2007: 216; Stam and Spence 1983: 14). Yet, as one historian reminds us, this image owes much more to FLN propaganda, to which The Battle of Algiers contributes, than it does to historical fact (MacMaster 2009: 395). Indeed, rather than confirm the film’s objectivity, Saadi Yacef’s position as the film’s producer surely raises questions surrounding its production and potential as a propaganda piece. In establishing a mimetic relationship to the The Battle of Algiers, Khadra’s Wolf Dreams underscores the aesthetic components of the film and thus acts as a timely reminder that the film is a site of ideological production rather than the bearer of historical truth it portends. In doing so, it problematises the melancholic recuperation or preservation of the seemingly lost or failed ideals expounded in The Battle of Algiers, inevitably calling into question the very existence of a democratically inspired revolution. It is this issue, I venture, that lies at the heart of Khadra’s intertextual engagement with The Battle of Algiers. One issue that often gives rise to discussion is Pontecorvo’s depiction of gendered resistance. Despite the critique of several commentators that women do not figure sufficiently within The Battle of Algiers and that the film systematically avoids the issue of gender (Minne 2007: 347; Wayne 2000: 21), it nonetheless remains that Pontecorvo’s film has been paramount in foregrounding the relationship between the revolutionary FLN and the idealised emancipation of Algerian women. As one historian argues, “[t]he universally held image of women during the Algerian War is that, made famous by Frantz Fanon and Pontecorvo’s classic film La Bataille d’Alger, of Muslim women as heroic resistance fighters” (MacMaster 2009: 315). Katherine Roberts thus asserts that while the female characters might lack depth, they operate symbolically as courageous figures of female militancy (2007: 389). Khanna too reads the women’s position in the film at the level of the symbolic and has written at length of the way in which, in the process of unveiling themselves, the female resistance fighters call for a different form of politics that must be melancholically invoked (2006). Indeed, the much celebrated scene in The Battle of Algiers in which the women dress as Europeans in order to pass the checkpoints of the Casbah and plant their bombs is often read as a marker of the changing role of women within the newly emergent society. By figuring the women as active members of the FLN, and by concluding the film with the jubilant ululations and dancing of female protestors, the underlying message of Pontecorvo’s film is that the ideal of female emancipation forms part of the FLN’s agenda. In Wolf Dreams, however, Khadra depicts a postcolonial society in which women’s liberties are being increasingly eroded. In one scene, for instance, a

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young woman protesting against the revocation of women’s rights is brutally murdered in the street by her own brother. The novel does not suggest, however, that we return to the revolutionary ideals evoked in The Battle of Algiers, but instead it engages mimetically with the unveiling of women in the film to intimate that the liberation of women was perhaps never on the FLN’s political agenda. In opposition to the sympathetic portrayal of female activists in Pontecorvo’s film, Khadra’s novel figures Hind, a female FIS activist, as “a frosty, sour theopath with a complexion the colour of marble,” who “Nobody dared look […] in the eyes” (Khadra 2007: 173). In a parody of female resistance during the anticolonial movement, Hind unveils herself in order to aid the Islamists and eradicate those who are against the implementation of an Islamic state: It was she who drove the car when they went out on a mission. On those days she dressed Western-style, wore make-up, and let her long black hair fall over her shoulders. She negotiated the police roadblocks better than an ambulance (Khadra 2007: 173).

As in Pontecorvo’s film, Hind unveils herself in order to engage in acts of violence, but her unveiling is not a marker of female resistance; in fact she is repulsed by the western guise she adopts and immediately reverts back to the hijab and immerses herself in religious readings. Passing as a European in the 1990s is thus a strategic act devoid of any liberatory symbolism; in terms of gender it merely highlights the perpetuation of conservative ideology rather than destabilising it. Given the repeated parallels between the FIS and the FLN in Khadra’s novel, this scene inevitably raises questions over the unveiling of women in The Battle of Algiers, suggesting that it was perhaps a form of instrumentalism on the part of the FLN rather than a genuine marker of female emancipation or autonomy. Considered in this way, the liberatory ideals evoked in Pontecorvo’s film could not have been ‘lost’, because they perhaps never existed to begin with. This perspective was put forward by historian Neil MacMaster, who argues that the: enduring symbol of the “Third World” women confronting the might of colonial armies reflects more the propaganda success of the FLN in manipulating the representation of Algerian women than any real or enduring transformation of their position or rights (2009: 315).

For MacMaster, the overriding perception of women in the process of emancipation, as seen in Fanon and Pontecorvo, is nothing more than a myth (2009: 395). In its parodic engagement with The Battle of Algiers, Khadra’s novel thus problematises the iconic image, propounded in Pontecorvo’s film, of the FLN as a democratic organisation that enacts the will of the Algerian people. By foregrounding the ideological analogies between the FIS and the FLN, Wolf Dreams

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suggests that the FLN did not necessarily fail to inaugurate revolutionary ideals such as the emancipation of women, because these ideals perhaps never existed in the first place. Such an observation inevitably calls into question the perfunctory, almost unconscious, melancholic preservation of such putative ideals and points toward the need to mourn a past that never was. This task is rendered all the more urgent if we consider the panic and violence of the 1990s as a melancholic response to the failures of the independence movement. In perpetuating the myths of independence, Pontecorvo’s 1966 film anticipates the fabrication of the past that would come to mar postcolonial Algeria and which reached its apex in the recent fabrication of history by the FIS. The very structure of melancholia feeds into the mythologising narratives which were ultimately a factor in the violence of the civil war and thus, in this particular context, what is imperative is an engagement with history that moves beyond the binds of melancholia in order to consciously work through the complexities of the past. Perhaps by relinquishing the ‘lost’ ideals of independence, Algeria can begin to formulate new aspirations fit for the twenty-first century.

Works Cited Alexander, Martin, Martin Evans, and JFV Keiger (2002) ‘The War Without a Name’, The Algerian War and the French Army, 1954–62: Experiences, Images, Testimonies, ed. Martin Alexander, Martin Evans and JFV Keiger (Basingstoke: Palgrave), 1–39. Bhabha, Homi K. (2004 [1994]) The Location of Culture (Abingdon: Routledge). Butler, Judith (2009) Frames of War: when is life grievable? (London: Verso). Caillé, Patricia (2007) ‘The Illegitimate Legitimacy of The Battle of Algiers in French Film Culture’, Interventions, 9, 317–388. Cheng, Anne Anlin (2001) The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Chossat, Michèle (2008) ‘À quoi rêvent les loups? De l’animal et de l’humain selon Khadra’, French Literary Series, 35, 143–151. Derrida, Jacques (2003) Béliers: le dialogue ininterrompu entre deux infinis, le poème (Paris: Galilée). Derrida, Jacques (1993) Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Galilée). Eng, David. L., and David Kazanjian (2003) ‘Introduction: Mourning Remains’, in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 1–25. Eng, David. L., and Shinhee Han (2003) ‘A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia’, in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 343–371. Evans, Martin, and John Phillips (2007) Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).

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Freud, Sigmund (1957) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, trans. Joan Riviere, in Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud: volume XIV, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press), 239–260. Gordon, Avery (1997) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Harries, Patrick (2007) ‘The Battle of Algiers: between fiction, memory and history’, in Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen, ed. Vivian Bickford Smith and Richard Mendelsohn (Oxford: James Curry), 203–222. Harrison, Nicholas (2007a) ‘Pontecorvo’s ‘Documentary’ Aesthetics: The Battle of Algiers and the Battle of Algiers’, Interventions, 9, 389–404. Harrison, Nicholas (2007b) ‘An Interview with Saadi Yacef’, Interventions, 9, 405–413. Heristchi, Claire (2004) ‘The Islamist Discourse of the FIS and the Democratic Experiment in Algeria’, Democratization, 11, 111–132. Hiddleston, Jane (2006) Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Khadra, Yasmina (2007) Wolf Dreams, trans. Linda Black (London: Toby Press). Khanna, Ranjana (2003) Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Khanna, Ranjana (2006) ‘Post-palliative: Coloniality’s affective dissonance’, Postcolonial Text, 2, n. pag., http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/385/815 (accessed 9 December 2011). Khanna, Ranjana (2008) Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Kristeva, Julia (1987) Soleil noir: dépression et mélancolie (Paris: Gallimard). LaCapra, Dominick (1997) ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’, Critical Inquiry, 25, 696–727. LaCapra, Dominick (1998) History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). López, Alfred J. (2001) Posts and Pasts: a Theory of Postcolonialism (Albany: State University of New York Press). MacMaster, Neil (2009) Burning the Veil: the Algerian war and the ‘emancipation’ of Muslim women, 1954–62 (Manchester: Manchester University Press). McClintock, Anne (1997) ‘’No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race and Nationalism’, in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 89–112. Minne, Danièle and Djamila Amrane (2007) ‘Women at War’, trans. Alistair Clarke, Interventions, 9, 340–349. Orlando, Valérie (2000) ‘Historiographic Metafiction in Gillo Pontecorvo’s La bataille d’Alger: Remembering the ‘forgotten war”, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 17, 261–271. Pontecorvo, Gillo (1996) The Battle of Algiers (Casbah Films). Rae, Patricia (2007) ‘Introduction: Modernist Mourning’, in Modernism and Mourning, ed. Patricia Rae (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press), 13–49. Roberts, Hugh (2002) ‘The Image of the French Army in the Cinematic Representation of the Algerian War: the Revolutionary Politics of The Battle of Algiers’, in The Algerian War and the French Army, 1954–62: Experiences, Images, Testimonies, ed. Martin S. Alexander, Martin Evans and JFV Keiger (Basingstoke: Palgrave), 152–163. Roberts, Hugh (2003) The Battlefield: Algeria 1988–2002: studies in a broken polity (London: Verso).

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Roberts, Katharine (2007) ‘Constrained Militants: Algerian Women ‘in-between’ in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Bourlem Guerdjou’s Living in Paradise’, The Journal of North African Studies, 12, 381–393. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1995) ‘Ghostwriting’, Diacritics, 2, 65–84. Srivastava, Neelam and Robert Young (2005) ‘Interview with the Italian film director Gillo Pontecorvo, Rome, Italy, 1 July 2003’, Interventions, 7, 107–117. Stam, Robert, and Louise Spence (1983) ‘Colonialism, Racism and Representation: an Introduction’, Screen, 24, 2–20. Stora, Benjamin (2001) Algeria, 1830–2000: a Short History, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Wayne, Mike (2000) Political Film: the Dialectics of Third Cinema (London: Pluto).

II. Visual resonances

Liliane Weissberg

Odysseus, Rowing … The song of Ulysses. Who knows how and why it has entered my mind. Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (1958)

The town of Chelmno is located in Northern Poland, in the “middle of Europe”,¹ and its tourist office describes it as “The City of Monuments and the Enamored” or simply as “The City of Lovers.”² This designation is not simply due to its picturesque location near the banks of the Vistula, over which it rules like a “helmet” or “hill” as its name, Chelmno, implies. “City of Lovers” also does not refer to its storied, ancient brick architecture, typical of the Baltic towns of the former Hanseatic League. Instead, it points to a centuries-old treasure housed in one of its many churches, the relics of St. Valentine. Chelmno seems made for those who would like to celebrate their love and love’s protector. It is a Romantic place, and the home of Romance itself. For European historians, however, it is another Chelmno that has achieved significance, a small village outside Lodz that shares with its Northern neighbor a hilltop position atop a river bank of the Ner, but does not share any of its architectural treasures. The filmmaker Claude Lanzmann has turned into such a historian. He reflects on such historical meaning in his opening sequence of Shoah, his documentary work completed in 1985 (Lanzmann 1995a).³ Lanzmann wants to find a place there that differs starkly from that other Chelmno, and the resting place of St. Valentine’s relics. In the first minutes of his film, he offers no images and no sound, only text scrolls down the screen, white on black. Thus, spectators of Lanzmann’s film resemble those of a silent movie, or rather, they view a film that seems older than it is and that they are now reencountering. The spectators are first readers, who learn about the recent history of Chelmno, and view it as a chapter in some larger narrative. They will have to integrate this information into a larger picture, and place the town into a wider geographical context as well. Focusing on Chelmno first, Lanzmann marks a place from which his story will move forward, a place of origin perhaps, one that designates the beginning of his tale – and that of the Shoah. At the same time, however, just as the film wants to

1 http://www.chelmno.info/ [my translation]. 2 http://www.chelmno.pl/index_en.php?cid=396. 3 Film edition used: Claude Lanzmann, Shoah. 4 parts, VHS. Languages: English, French, German, Hebrew, Polish, Yiddish; subtitles German. Arthaus/ Kinowelt Home Entertainment, 1995

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“show”, to mark this place of origin and begin at the very beginning of the story, it proceeds by a denial of images, an absence of color, and merely with written text. The viewer has to become a reader. In the beginning of this film, there is the word; but this creation does not commence with spoken word, but rather with a written signature. In establishing this “origin” with this text and in the following scenes, Lanzmann does not offer historic images; he does not present archival material such as old photographs or film footage, and insists instead that one has to begin with the present day. Any history – and perhaps the history of the Shoah in particular – cannot begin otherwise but in the contemporary realm of experience, from which any knowledge of the past has to unfold: The story begins in the present at Chelmno, on the Narew River, in Poland. Fifty miles northwest of Lodz, in the heart of a region that once had a large Jewish population; Chelmno was the place in Poland where Jews were first exterminated by gas. Extermination began on December 7, 1941. At Chelmno four hundred thousand Jews were murdered in two separate periods: December 1941 to spring 1943 and June 1944 to January 1945. But the way in which death was administered remained the same throughout: the gas vans. Of the four hundred thousand men, women and children who went there, only two came out alive: Mordechaï Podchelbnik and Simon Srebnik. Srebnik, survivor of the last period, was a boy of thirteen when he was sent to Chelmno. His father had been killed before his eyes in the ghetto in Lodz; his mother died in a gas van at Chelmno. The SS placed him in one of the “Jewish work details,” assigned to maintaining the extermination camps and slated in turn for death. With his ankles in chains, like all his companions, the boy shuffled through the village of Chelmno each day. That he was kept alive longer than the others he owed to his extreme agility, which made him the winner of jumping contests and speed races that the SS organized for their chained prisoners. And also to his melodious voice: several times a week, when the rabbits kept in hutches by the SS needed fodder, young Srebnik rowed up the Narew, under guard, in a flat bottomed boat, to the alfalfa fields at the edge of the village. He sang Polish folk tunes, and in return the guard taught him Prussian military songs. Everyone in Chelmno knew him: the Polish farm folk and German civilians as well, since this Polish province was annexed to the Reich after the fall of Warsaw, Germanized and renamed Wartheland. […] During the night of January 18, 1945, two days before Soviet troops arrived, the Nazis killed all the remaining Jews in the “work details” with a bullet in the head. Simon Srebnik was among those executed. But the bullet missed his vital brain centers. When he came to, he crawled into a pigsty. A Polish farmer found him there. The boy was treated and healed by a Soviet Army doctor. A few months later Simon left for Tel Aviv along with other survivors of the death camps. I found him in Israel and persuaded that one-time boy singer to return with me to Chelmno. He was then forty-seven years old.

Only after learning about the significance of this specific location for the events of the Shoah, only after learning about the two Jewish survivors of Chelmno,

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and only after learning about one survivor in particular, Simon Srebnik, do we encounter the film director’s personal voice: “I found him in Israel.” It is he, Lanzmann, who now writes in the first person singular. He has found Srebnik, and he returned with him to Chelmno and to Poland, having persuaded – not convinced – him to undertake this journey. And only after offering this explanatory text does Lanzmann’s film commence with images.

1 First Images Srebnik’s journey to Chelmno is a peculiar kind of travel. The “I” of the director has agency, Lanzmann is able and willing to act. Srebnik, on the other hand, the formerly young boy who was forced to act once – to travel in the boat, to sing – is now urged to once again act. Paradoxically, Lanzmann puts himself in the position of the Nazis by bringing Srebnik back to Chelmno. 34 years after Srebnik left this town, he has again to encounter the place where he was a prisoner, where he nearly lost his life, but from where he was also able to escape. In bringing Srebnik back to this place, Lanzmann does not simply act like a filmmaker seeking to document Srebnik’s renewed encounter with the place. He occupies the position of a psychoanalyst who sets out to confront the victim with the locus of his war experiences – even if this encounter may traumatize Srebnik anew. As we, the spectators, are made to view Chelmno and its surroundings with Srebnik, and perhaps through his eyes, we are returning to this place as well. We have already experienced a déjà vu via Lanzmann’s use of the medium silent film. Here, however, repetition and recognition can only be limited and not complete. Just as Lanzmann will continue to introduce images and the sounds of present-day Chelmno after the relating a story of the town’s past, the gas trucks and the architecture of the camp mentioned in his text will remain invisible to spectators. Such are not part of Chelmno today. What has been the most important part of this landscape and Lanzmann’s tale is simply absent. We had been prepared to see it by the text but once the pictures commence, we learn that we can see nothing. We view a landscape that is unpopulated, that does not offer any trace of the events of those past years. We only hear the German conversation of Lanzmann and Srebnik. We see that we cannot see; we see what Gertrud Koch, in her discussion of the film Shoah, has simply called “the absence” (Koch 1989, 1992). A film made from the standpoint of the present has to make this absence visible.

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But how is one to show the absence, the invisible, turn it into images and into a film? Interestingly, this is not just the director’s problem. Even in the 1940s, there was little visible of that which gave the place its significance. There is a peculiar absence of evidence that reaches far back into the past. Many of Chelmno inhabitants refused to testify after the war and did not seem to know what had happened in this place, in their own town. There were hardly any witnesses who came forward. Was everything invisible then as well or did they simply insist on having seen nothing after the war’s end? These are not the only questions resulting. If one follows Srebnik, this “absence” of traces was intimately bound to the place itself. Very often, nothing was seen and nothing was heard, and whatever was seen or heard could hardly be understood. Srebnik describes it in the following way, while Lanzmann’s camera focuses on his face, and moves only later to a clearing in the landscape:⁴ The gas vans came in here … There were two huge ovens, and afterwards the bodies were thrown into these ovens, and the flames reached to the sky. It was terrible. No one can describe it. No one can recreate what happened here. Impossible? And no one can understand it. Even I, here, now. … I can’t believe I’m here. No, I just can’t believe it. It was always this peaceful here. Always. When they burned two thousand people – Jews – every day, it was just as peaceful. No one shouted. Everyone went about his work. It was silent. Peaceful. Just as it is now.

In her study of Shoah, Shoshana Felman distinguishes between three instances of invisibility, blindness, or not-seeing that do not only mark Lanzmann’s film but the task of witnessing the Holocaust itself. First, there is the impossibility of the victim seeing what happens and what happened; secondly, there is the impossibility of the perpetrator seeing what he (or she) does or did; and finally, there is the impossibility of bystanders seeing or recalling that which he or she saw. Those positions may be different from one another, but in each the witness is unable to register, to see or finally understand what really happened. Felman writes: Thus, the diversity of the testimonial stances of the victims, the bystanders and the perpetrators have in common, paradoxically, the incommensurability of their different and particular positions of not seeing, the radical divergence of their topographical, emotional and epistemological positions not simply as witnesses, but as witness who do not witness, who let the Holocaust occur as an event essentially unwitnessed (Felman 1991: 45).

4 For Aline Alterman, Lanzmann’s concentration on faces is especially remarkable, as these faces carry the story in themselves; see Alterman (2006: 14).

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Felman thus agrees with Lanzmann who in turn seems to take Srebnik’s notseeing as emblematic, as he views the Shoah himself as an event that cannot be witnessed because of its enormity and its uniqueness. Nevertheless, how would it then be possible to make a film about the Shoah, and especially one that also purports to be a testimony of sorts? Can Lanzmann’s film be anything else but the refusal to bear witness, or rather, a film about the impossibility of testimony? Srebnik’s statement that “no one can describe it,” that no one “can recreate what happened here” thus does not only reflect his point of view but Lanzmann’s view as well; his statement stands at the core of Lanzmann’s undertaking. According to the filmmaker, the events of the Holocaust – and he prefers the designation Shoah – have thrown the notion of representation itself into question, and have done so in a dual sense. On the one hand, there is the impossibility of finding an image for what has happened as the enormity of the crimes inherently exceeds the limits of any image. On the other hand, the events of the Shoah point at the limits of human understanding itself; the Shoah was and is, quite simply, inexplicable. For Lanzmann, the impossibility of representing the Shoah is thus not only a question of aesthetic possibilities, or of the technical options of making films, or of the human capacity to grasp the event. It is, quite simply, a problem of ethics as well. To render the events as images involves an understanding of the Shoah that borders on the obscene: It is enough to formulate the question in simplistic terms – Why have the Jews been killed? – for the question to reveal right away its obscenity. There is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding. Not to understand was my iron law during all the eleven years of the production of Shoah. I clung to this refusal to understand as the only possible ethical and at the same time the only possible operative attitude. This blindness was for me the vital condition of creation. Blindness has to be understood here as the purest mode of looking, of the gaze, the only way to not turn away from a reality which is literally blinding (Lanzmann 1995b: 204).

By posing a relationship between reason and blindness, rather than sight, Lanzmann turns away from the common metaphors of the “Enlightenment” that promise visibility. Moreover, Lanzmann’s statement suggests an interesting parallel between this notion of understanding and the psychoanalytic technique. Psychoanalysis presupposes that the unconscious rejects Darstellbarkeit or (visual) representation. Images reach the realm of consciousness, but only in turning unconscious thoughts conscious, and it is the analyst’s task to reject them and delve deeper. Thus, the rejection of representation lies at the core of analysis as well. Jacques Lacan writes, for example, that “it is on the basis of a certain refusal to understand that we open the door onto psychoanalytic understanding” (Lanzmann 1995b: 204). Lanzmann insists on such a refusal to understand, on such a

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prohibition of images. If the Shoah is not representable, it is also because it is, at its core, a traumatic event. Lanzmann’s understanding also agrees with that of some historians, for example Dan Diner, who described the Shoah as a “black hole,” a “no man’s land of understanding,” as a “tear” or “rupture” in history as well as time (Diner 1996, 2007). However, Lanzmann also refers to the responsibility of the filmmaker and attributes him/her the position of agency. The filmmaker has to take decisions and reject options that would lead to representative images and explanations of the event. In his comments on other films about the Shoah, Lanzmann has again and again returned to the questions of the limits of representability, as well as to the responsibility of the film maker. Two examples may suffice. Invited to speak at a film screening of a documentary about the Nazi doctor Eduard Wirth, Lanzmann decided to ask the organizers not to show the film at all and he spoke instead about his refusal to comment on it – which of course also served to review the film (Lanzmann 1995b: 200–201). Lanzmann’s article about Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, furthermore, was one of the most negative reviews the movie received (Lanzmann 1994).⁵ Lanzmann minded Spielberg’s re-enactment of events, and the implicit voyeurism in which the public had to engage. What cannot be represented, cannot be re-enacted or repeated, Lanzmann argued. Which options are then available for a film rejecting visual representation, the re-enactment of events, and any explanation?

2 The Voice Would the voice present an alternative to the image? Where images fail, voices may become audible. In terms of those who would like to give testimony, the audience does not face a deficit, but a surplus of voices. They are audible in a wide range of languages. People in the film speak Polish, Yiddish, German, Hebrew; the language in which the film has been primarily made is French, but the language of the film’s main distributor is English. A translator accompanies Lanzmann during his interviews, and while she does not always appear on screen, she is often audible and her voice and translations compete with Lanzmann’s, the witnesses, and finally the film’s subtitles (cf. Felman 1991: 45–47). The surplus of

5 See also Hansen (2001) and Spielberg’s movie and Lanzmann’s film in his autobiography (Lanzmann 2009).

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languages invokes a Babel of different tongues, and the constant task of translation moves into the foreground. The translator herself becomes a witness. In the case of Lanzmann’s interview with Srebnik, it is interesting to note the choice of language they made; it is conducted in neither Srebnik’s, nor Lanzmann’s mother tongues. As Lanzmann travels with Srebnik to Chelmno, the German language returns to this place as well. But this time, it is Lanzmann and Srebnik who speak German. “Two Jews in Chelmno speaking German, that makes sense,”⁶ Lanzmann remarks in a scene that was cut from the final version of the film. Lanzmann also begins his film with translation, by translating Er-fahrung or experience into travel or fahren. In regard to this renewed encounter of Srebnik with Chelmno, the victim and the place, the camera offers hazy pictures, and the film tries to integrate Srebnik into a general topography. Thus, his figure appears small at first, somewhere far away, but his voice is already audible, even from a distance. “Mimesis” can be understood as imitation, as a direct re-presentation of the image thereby calling it into question, but the spectator may encounter another meaning of mimesis here. It is an earlier one, as defined by Plato, “mimesis” can only mean “as if” here.⁷ The voice may want to bridge time, to unite the sound of the boy of the past with the man of the present, but in its brittleness, the voice documents another story as well. Time has passed between the Then and Now, nothing is the same. Srebnik no longer owns the soprano voice of his youth even if still mentioned in Lanzmann’s text. With his song, he offers a difference between the past with the present as well, just as the German language would not only unite victim and perpetrator, but also subject and film director, German and Jew, while also separating them. And while Lanzmann’s self first appears in writing, as his text’s prominent “I,” Srebnik first appears singing.

3 The Singer Lanzmann’s first so-called witness – the first human witness –, his first interview partner does not answer questions first, does not describe events, but begins his testimony by singing. In song, he offers information before Lanzmann would

6 Spielberg Film and Video Archive, Story RG-60.5024, Tape 3278–3292; here tape 3281. 7 Compare to Nussbaum (2001).

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pose any questions. The first song that he sings is a Polish folk song, a popular drinking song, in existence long before the Shoah. Srebnik was no first-time witness in Lanzmann’s film. Indeed, it may have been easier for Lanzmann to find Srebnik, as he had already assumed the role of the witness. He had offered testimony about the events in Chelmno several times in court. As a fifteen-year old boy, a few weeks after the end of WWII, he was interrogated in Poland. In the minutes of his deposition taken by a Polish judge, Władysław Bednarz, in Koło, Szymon Srebrnik, as he was then called, told of his experiences with the Haus- and Waldkommando in Chelmno, and of his imprisonment in shackles (Srebnik 2004: 125–139). He described the crematorium, gave the names of Jewish fellow-prisoners he remembered, and identified Nazi officers and workers at the camp. In the Koło documents, Srebnik is recorded as one of three (not two) survivors of the camp. In addition to Michał Podchlebnik, Mordecai Zurawski survived, but only Srebnik and Podchlebnik were interviewed in Koło.⁸ Annette Wievorka points to the thousands of witness reports taken in such interrogations shortly after the war, not only in court proceedings, but also by historical commissions set up in its immediate aftermath (Wieviorka 2006: ix-x).⁹ Srebnik served as a witness for a second time as well, during a German trial against Chelmno prison wardens. This trial led to minor prison terms for the former soldiers, but Srebnik’s deposition and court interview were documented.¹⁰ He was probably also a witness in 1961 at yet another trial where his testimony was recorded. It was the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem (cf. von Lang et al. 1991). Eichmann had been caught by Israelis in Argentina and abducted to Israel to stand trial; he was accused of being responsible for the final solution. Eichmann, too, had spent some time in Chelmno. During the trial in Jerusalem, Srebnik did not only tell the court about his experiences in Chelmno, he offered his body as evidence. The minutes state that he had shown “the judges the scars of his bullet wounds, on the back of his neck and in his mouth” (Gouri 2004: 127).

8 See also The Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom in Warsaw, the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, and The District Museum in Konin (2004). In regard to survivors, see Krakowski (2001: 43). On the night of January 17, 1945, the last prisoners of Chelmno were shot as the Red Army approached the town and camp. Zurawski and Srebnik were able to flee at that time; Podchlebnik had already escaped the camp in 1942. 9 The historical commission of the Central Committee of Polish Jews collected ca. 7,300 witness reports between 1944 (thus beginning during the course of WWII) and 1948 (Wieviorka 2006: ix). Moshe Feigenbaum and Israel Kaplan of the Central Historical Commission in Munich collected ca. 2,500 witness accounts and over 1,000 photographs in 1945. This material has barely been studied. 10 See also Srebnik’s testimony in the Yad Vashem archives and Etgar Lefkovits (2006).

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Thus, Srebnik had already been a witness thrice, in Poland, Germany, and Israel, before Lanzmann would “find” him in Israel and ask him about Chelmno once again. The comparison between the records of the Eichmann trial and Lanzmann’s film is particularly interesting. During the trial, Eichmann spoke about Chelmno as well. His description of the gas trucks differs, however, from Srebnik’s view of a peaceful, quiet landscape that was unable to reveal its horror. “The whole time I was there, I couldn’t look inside. The screaming and … I was much too shaken and so on,” Eichmann stated (quoted by Cesarini 2004: 100). For Eichmann, there may have been another impossibility of seeing than for Srebnik but his glance made screams audible that pierced the silence “heard” by Srebnik. In no other interview was Srebnik ever asked to return to Chelmno again, to once more see the place where he had been a victim, where he was shot and where he nearly died. In none of the depositions did he speak about his boat trips on the River Ner, moreover, of his experience as a singing boy in the boat that he would tell Lanzmann now, and that he would repeat at the film director’s urging, and in the absence of any traces of past events. Here, curiously enough at the very beginning of Lanzmann’s film, Srebnik is asked to do precisely what the filmmaker took umbrage at in other films. Srebnik is asked to pose for the image, to reenact a past journey. Only a few critics have wondered about Lanzmann’s own violation of his ethical standards, or wondered about his guidelines. Dominick LaCapra is one of the few, and he offers cautious criticism: There is in Lanzmann a fascination with the victim (in the older sense of fascinatio) and almost the desire to identify with the experience of the victim because Lanzmann himself was not a victim of the Shoah yet somehow feels that he should have been a victim, that he should have been part of this process. On one level, this is very moving, but it can also lead to a very intrusive kind of questioning in the actual encounter with the victim. It may even lead to an identification with the aggressor or perpetrator that manifests itself in aggressive, at times inquisitorial, questioning and in the ability flagrantly to transgress norms, as when Lanzmann says in an interview that he lied to Suchomel – a guard at Treblinka […] – with “absolute arrogance” (LaCapra 2001: 146–147).

It is curious to speak about “norms” in this context, even though much of this first scene does appear as transgression in many ways. Witnessing turns into a theatrical production, a literal acting out that does not only change the story of a young boy into that of an older man who would implicitly comment on rediscovered images and his rediscovered voice. Nevertheless, images and voice have to be recognized in difference. It is only the ghostly simulacrum of the once beautiful voice, the ghostly simulacrum of the former boy that we hear and see.

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Srebnik’s public changes as well. Instead of Nazi officers and camp workers, a film crew (and later, the spectators of this film) will now listen to the songs. They become witnesses of the past as well, although they only now hear Srebnik for the first time. And the film crew is not Srebnik’s only audience. For the Poles who have lived and worked in the vicinity of the river, Srebnik’s singing becomes a memorial of sorts. They remember his songs better than the Germans’ crimes. Screbnik’s voice is, as Lanzmann’s interviewees state, something that they remember still today, that has carried into the present. Not the screams, but the song had pierced the silence for them. The memory of Srebnik’s singing has been a topic of conversation at the dinner table for many years after the events of the Shoah, and in interviews with the film crew, it appears as something about which they can talk. “It was public,” one interviewee would claim, “so everyone knew about it.” Song that was visible. And a Polish witness added that this “was true German irony: People were being killed and he had to sing. That’s what I thought.”

Figure 1: Simon Srebnik in Shoah (Claude Lanzmann 1985)

Thus, Srebnik’s singing can stand for what is officially known, what can be remembered – not in the court proceedings involving the trials of war criminals,

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but in the town people’s official consciousness. After all, they had somehow to explain the presence of all those strangers at the river, and integrate them into Chelmno’s history. And the beautiful voice of a boy who interprets folk and love songs did not only insist on the presence of German irony (as well as that of the German language) – his Polish love songs were a fitting addition to the lore of St. Valentine.

4 Rescue Thus, somewhere in Poland, Lanzmann finds an example of “true German irony,” and encapsulated in the newly embodied human voice. However, this voice is not allowed to stand alone. After all, despite his rejection of representational images, Lanzmann chooses moving pictures as his medium. Lanzmann’s first images are – quite literally – those of a travelling minstrel who is journeying through a foggy, pastoral landscape that bears painterly properties.¹¹ More concretely put, these are the properties of a Romantic painting, just as the story about a young boy who sings folk tunes, and offers food to rabbits, can be framed in pastoral, idyllic terms. Lanzmann shows a wooded landscape reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm, those collectors of folk tales who were, at the same time, responsible for establishing a dictionary of the German language and who founded the discipline of Germanistik as a national project. Indeed, Lanzmann is, of course, not the first person who would refer to those masters of the fairy tale at the beginning of his work. Ernst Bloch, for example, commences his study of Prinzip Hoffnung (1954), The Principle of Hope, with a reference to one of Grimm’s tales, the story of the boy who ventures out to learn fear.¹² In Lanzmann’s visual narrative, the boy has grown to be an older man, held by invisible shackles, and the question of whose folk songs he now sings remains unanswered. At first, we hear a Polish tune, later, a German soldier’s song. We hear the voice of an older man, but we have to imagine the beautiful voice of a young boy. It is the beauty of this voice that purportedly saved his life – secured him easier work, delayed his assured death – just as did the bullet that missed its goal. Such a bullet appears in German fairy tales as well, as a devil’s bullet in Romantic operas such as Der Freischütz, a musical drama with a happy ending. Furthermore, to bring home the fact that it is beauty, the beauty of Srebnik’s voice alone that delayed his death

11 In regard to the question of aesthetics and the Holocaust, see also Weissberg (2001). 12 See the initial pages of Bloch (1986) and (1954), and also Weissberg (1992).

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sentence and saved his life, Lanzmann not only insists on the story of the singing boy in the boat. He even cuts out all other sections of his interview with Srebnik that would deflect from this tale for the final version of his film. Because here and in earlier interviews, Srebnik tells of Walter Burmeister, an SS man, the driver of one of those gas trucks in Chelmno, and a person who, as Srebnik himself insists, had saved the boy’s life.¹³ According to Srebnik, Burmeister did not only save him – had warned him regularly of death commandos and tried to find safe places for him – he promised to adopt the boy after the war, and to provide him with the family that he had lost. In his various interviews, Srebnik talked with great gratitude of Burmeister and even tried to find him after the war, traveling in vain to Germany in search of him. This, too, appears to be perhaps a “true German irony,” the driver of a gas truck that delivered death to thousands wanted to save the life of one Jewish boy and promises to be his father. Lanzmann does not tell the story of Burmeister, he concentrates on Srebnik’s voice instead and it is Srebnik’s voice that can rescue him here, and no SS man. Would the beautiful voice be better for his film? Because Lanzmann does not only ask Srebnik to sing, but to sing a Polish song from those days that is, curiously enough, a song about a return. It is the song of return not to the place of a prisoner’s camp but to the dreamy “City of Lovers.” “You, girl, don’t you cry, don’t be so sad, for the dear summer is nearing,” Srebnik sings, “and I’ll return with it.” On his boat, Srebnik is a ghostly revenant. Thus, it is obvious that Srebnik’s boating trip at the beginning of the film is consciously set into scene, that this event had been selected over others, that despite Lanzmann’s criticism of reenactments and views on representation, this boating trip has not only been narrated, but also shown and staged. Why are we, as the audience, to become witnesses of this scene at the beginning of the film, why is it so important for Lanzmann that we hear Srebnik’s singing voice this early in his work?

5 Myth In her essay on Lanzmann’s Shoah, Margaret Olin writes about the mythic quality of the scene of the singer in his boat, of its “orphic” properties (Olin 1997). In fact, it is easy to view the Ner as the Styx, the River of Death. And it would have become such a River of Death quite literally. In Lanzmann’s film, we see the Ner again for

13 Spielberg Film and Video Archive, Story RG-60.5024, Tape 3282.

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a second time; Lanzmann returns to it later in his film to have witnesses tell how the ashes of the crematoria were brought to the river. Thus, Srebnik did not simply journey on any water. He travelled and sang on a river that carried the remains of his fellow prisoners. In this sense, he did not only travel to the world of the dead, he is an Orpheus figure who moves along a river that already contains the world of the dead. However, it is not only the story of Orpheus to which this scene alludes. The “true German irony” that brings together murder and admiration for beauty right in the first scenes of his film may refer to another story as well. Lanzmann’s images run parallel to another story that offers a different illustration of this “German irony.” Shortly before the end of WWII, in 1944, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer published a thin, mimeographed volume of essays entitled Philosophische Fragmente [Philosophical Fragments] in summary of their work at the Institute for Social Studies in New York. Adorno, Horkheimer, and their colleagues set out to study the problem of anti-Semitism, its rise in Germany, and its history that extended from discrimination to mass murder. In 1947, shortly after the war’s end, the collection appeared in print in Amsterdam and very soon, it became a central text of Critical Theory. The book was now called Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment].¹⁴ The book included an “excursion” that told of the adventures of Odysseus with the sirens that was to offer a parable for the relationship of reason and myth. Horkheimer and Adorno, who was trained as a composer and wrote both music and about musicians, turned this “excursion” into a discussion of the relationship between nature and music, and a reflection on the role of reason in the Enlightenment and beyond.¹⁵ The hero of Homer’s epic The Odyssey becomes the example of a modern dilemma here. On his return from the Trojan War, Odysseus’ ship sails past the rocks that are home to the sirens. The sirens, strange creatures, sit on those rocks like the German Loreley would, and they try to seduce men with their beautiful voices. They tempt sailors to change their course, follow their voices, land, and once there, the sirens lead them to death. Beauty and Death are intimately linked in this tale, and Odysseus wants to separate what seems bound

14 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) Philosophische Fragmente, hektografiertes Manuskript aus Anlass des 50. Geburtstags von Friedrich Pollok (New York: Institute of Social Research); Adorno and Horkheimer (1947) Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam: Querido) (expanded version). 15 Alterman also refers to the particular role of ‘nature’ in Lanzmann’s film. See Alterman (2006: 151–174).

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together. He would like to experience the beauty of the sirens’ song but stay alive. Thus, he has to use one of his many ruses. He asks his sailors to bind him to the ship’s mast, but fill their own ears with wax. Only then, would they be able to resist the sirens’ song and prove deaf to Odysseus’s cries for help, his attempts to free himself from the mast and follow the seductive voices. Odysseus’s ruse succeeds. He is able to sail past the sirens rocks, hear their song, and remain on the ship. Adorno and Horkheimer view this story as exemplary of the relationship between reason and myth. The sirens remind the sailors of the past, of an origin to return to and of the sirens’ song. Odysseus knows of two ways to escape the consequences of this seduction to memory. One is the solution for his crew, who survive without hearing. It is the path of workers or slaves who have to labor. The other is the path of the master. Bound to the mast, Odysseus remains imprisoned and in place, but as a consequence the song loses its power. The workers know about the danger of the song, but do not experience its beauty. Odysseus hears the song’s beauty, but this beauty is neutralized to an inconsequential art. For Adorno and Horkheimer, this scene is part of the very process of civilization itself: Whoever would survive must not hear the temptation of that which is unrepeatable, and he is able to survive only by being unable to hear it. Society has always made provision for that. The laborers must be fresh and concentrate as they look ahead, and must ignore whatever lies to one side. They must doggedly sublimate in additional effort the drive that impels to diversion. And so they become practical – the other possibility Odysseus, the seigneur who allows the others to labor for themselves, reserves to himself. He listens, but while bound impotently to the mast; the greater the temptation the more has his bonds tightened – just as the bourgeois would deny themselves happiness all the more doggedly as it drew closer to them with the growth of their own power. What Odysseus hears is without consequence for him; he is able only to nod his head as a sign to be set free from his bonds; but it is too late; his men, who do not listen, know only the song’s danger but nothing of its beauty, and leave him at the mast in order to save him and themselves. They reproduce the oppressor’s life together with their own, and the oppressor is no longer able to escape his social role. The bonds with which he has irremediably tied himself to practice, also keep the Sirens away from practice: their temptation is neutralized and becomes a mere object of contemplation – becomes art (Adorno and Horkheimer 1971: 34).

For the former philosophy student Lanzmann, the Dialectics of Enlightenment must have been well known, as was Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, or the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales. After all, Lanzmann had also studied at the Free University in Berlin just after the war, and experienced a country in which WWII’s destruction was still present, and he encountered a student body who did not only want to learn, but also to forget. Nevertheless, Lanzmann’s film also puts forward a different version of Odysseus’s story, another contemplation about the relationship

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between Enlightenment and myth, now no longer understood as a general dialectic movement but as a specific, concrete instance, called “the true German irony.” That this moment would be unrepeatable, and not to be represented, does not hinder Lanzmann from placing Srebnik in the boat once again. Now, however, the chained Odysseus himself is the singer, the people of the town then, or the film crew now, are placed at the water’s edge. Srebnik, even in old age, is a child who has to work as well as sing. Who is being seduced and who is the seducer, if the recipients of this song are also teaching the tune and able to offer death? Who is the master, who the slave? Srebnik’s experience, placed and restaged at the beginning of Lanzmann’s film, becomes a parable about art as well, and a parable about a film that does not want to offer art without consequence, beauty without danger – even if Srebnik’s own story of survival would finally not depend on Srebnik’s voice or Walter Burmeister’s aid, but simply on chance. His ultimate rescue would arrive in the shape of a bullet that missed its target. How consciously did Lanzmann want to place his film within the framework of a dialectic of enlightenment, how consciously did he shape a scene that is both a narrative and a visual citation; offers, and resists, repetition; presents, and wants to resist, representation as a philosophical thesis and a reference to critical theory? Quite clearly, the singer on the River Ner is not only a figure who would ask the audience to rethink the relationship between the Enlightenment and myth. The scene points ahead to what will follow, to the project of the film as a whole, and stands as a complex visual sign for the Shoah itself. It helps place the Shoah as the inexplicable center of the history of the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, it is impossible for Lanzmann to reject mimesis completely, or any discourse of beauty. Moreover, mimesis and beauty finally offer some hope just as a life is saved in the presence of death. While the scene would have been impossible without the return of a survivor to Chelmno, it calls for Lanzmann’s travel as well. Thus, one may also want to add another observation. Before Lanzmann filmed Shoah, he completed another film in 1972 that returned to movie theaters after Shoah’s success. The film is called Pourquoi Israel? [Why Israel?]. In this earlier film, Lanzmann also interviews survivors, Jews who had emigrated to Israel after WWII, just as Srebnik did. In Hamburg, Pourquoi Israel? recently elicited protests by a group who wanted to view it as a comment about the conflict in the Middle East; the film was not screened (cf. Hammelehle 2009). However, is this film not a prequel to Shoah? “I found him in Israel and persuaded that one-time boy singer to return with me to Chelmno,” Lanzmann wrote about Srebnik at the beginning of his film. And in an interview for his film he would also comment on the “singing child,” (Frodon 2007: 119 [my translation]). Lanzmann describes his own work perhaps not as a seductive song,

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but as a musical composition, his work as a search for a form of harmony, for a symphonic form that would also develop, and reuse, a “musical theme” (ibid, 112–113). Perhaps, Lanzmann’s Shoah only became possible after his own trip to Israel, after his film about the country’s present situation. Perhaps, Lanzmann could also only have reached Poland after a journey to Israel. The film and scene may thus document a glimpse of hope from which to cast a glance towards an indescribable history, a rare moment on firm ground, a point of origin or at least of departure for a return that could never fully succeed but at least proposes one response to the question: “Why Israel?”

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W and Max Horkheimer (1971) Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Schocken). Alterman, Aline (2006) Visages de Shoah, le film de Claude Lanzmann (Paris: Editions du Cerf). Bloch, Ernst (1986) The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Bloch, Ernst (1954) Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag). Cesarani, David (2004) Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (London: William Heinemann). Diner, Dan (2007) Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse. Über Geltung und Wirkung des Holocaust (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht). Diner, Dan (ed) (1996) Zivilisationsbruch. Denken nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag). Felman, Shoshana (1991) ‘In an Era of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, Yale French Studies 79, Literature and the Ethical Question, 39–81. Frodon, Jean-Michel (2007) ’Entretien avec Claude Lanzmann: Le travail du cinéaste’, Le Cinéma et al Shoah: Un art à l’épreuve de la tragédie du 20e siècle (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma), 111–125. Gouri, Haim (2004) Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann, trans. Michael Swirsky, preface Alan Mintz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press). Hammelehle, Sebastian (2009) ‘Antisemitismus in Hamburg. Regisseur Lanzmann ‚schockiert‘ über Krawalle bei Israel-Film‘, Spiegel online, 19 November, http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/ gesellschaft/0,1518,661980,00.html (accessed 24 November 2011). Hansen, Miriam Bratu (2001) ’Schindler’s List is Not Shoah. The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory’, The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, ed. Marcia Landy (London: Athlone), 201–217. Koch, Gertrud (1989) ‘The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimagineable: Notes on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, October 48, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel and Miriam Bratu Hansen, 15–24. Koch, Gertrud (1992) ‘Film und Faktizität: Zur filmischen Repräsentation der Judenvernichtung‘, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung: Visuelle Konstruktionen des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 127–184.

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Krakowski, Shmuel (2001) ‘Die Geschichte des Vernichtungslagers in Chelmno/Kulmhof am Ner‘, Chelmno/Kulmhof. Ein vergessener Ort des Holocaust?, ed. Manfred Struck (Bonn/ Berlin: Gegen Vergessen – für Demokratie), 33–44. Lanzmann, Claude (1994) ‘Holocauste, la réprésentation impossible’, Le Monde, 3rd March. Lanzmann, Claude (1995a) Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film, preface Simone de Bouvoir (New York: DaCapo Press). Lanzmann, Claude (1995b) ’The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann’, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkings University Press), 200–220. Lanzmann, Claude (2009) Le lieèvre de Patagonie (Paris: Gallimard). Lefkovits, Etgar (2006) ’The Last Survivor’, The Jerusalem Post, obituaries, September 18. Nussbaum, Martha (2001) The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press). Olin, Margaret (1997) ’Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film’, Representations, 57, 1–23. Srebrnik, Szymon [Testimony by Szymon Srebrnik] (2004) The Chełmno Witnesses Speak, ed. The Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom in Warsaw, trans. Juliet D. Golden and Arkadiusz Kamiński (Konin/Łódź: Oficyna Bibliofilów), 125–129. The Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom in Warsaw, the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem and The District Museum in Konin (eds) (2004) The Extermination Center for Jews in Chełmno-on-Ner in the Light of the Latest Research, Symposium Proceedings September 6–7 (Konin/Łódź: Oficyna Bibliofilów). Von Lang, Jochen, Sibyl Claus and Avner W. Less (eds) (1991) Das Eichmann-Protokoll: Tonbandaufzeichnungen der israelischen Verhöre (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay). Weissberg, Liliane (1992) ’Philosophy and the Fairy Tale: Ernst Bloch as Narrator’, New German Critique, 55, 21–44. Weissberg, Liliane (2001) ’In Plain Sight’, in The Holocaust and Visual Culture, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 13–27. Wieviorka, Annette (2006) The Era of the Witness, tr. Jared Stark (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

Daniela Agostinho

(Un-)Framing Triumph and Trauma: Visibility, Gender and Liberation through the Soviet Gaze By our doors Great Victory stays … But how we’ll glory her advent? Let women lift higher the children! They blessed With life amidst a thousand thousands deaths Thus will be the dearest answered. Anna Akhmatova, ‘The Victory’ (1943–1945) There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Adrienne Rich, ‘Diving into the Wreck’ (1973)

It is difficult to envision the Holocaust without vestiges of familiar images springing to mind. In Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), the protagonist, a U.S. Marshal played by Leonardo DiCaprio, experiences several flashbacks of the liberation of Dachau, in which he took part as a soldier in 1945. These flashbacks employ highly stylized Holocaust iconography: prisoners wearing striped uniforms, standing with their hands touching the barbed wired fences; carefully staged piles of bodies covered with snow and sheathed in ice; a sign that reads ‘Arbeit macht frei’, resembling the gate to Auschwitz instead of the real Dachau entranceway. Shutter Island engenders and refashions this recognizable set of visual imprints to prompt an immediate recognition of the context depicted, thereby shedding light on the constructedness of visual memories about the Holocaust. By detaching well-known pictures from their original time-bound context, reshaping them into an aesthetic form, and placing them in a fictional setting, the film epitomizes the process through which the visual memory of this historical event has been constructed by strong and identifiable images that, through con-

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tinuous appropriations, have become “secular icons” (Goldberg 1991)¹: abstract and timeless images that condense qualities and ideas beyond their original referentiality. Indeed, in the broad category of Holocaust imagery, the pictures of the liberation of concentration camps occupy a pivotal and enduring position. Ever since the end of World War II (WWII), a range of different pictures have been imprinted and later disappeared from the visual memory of the Holocaust only to later resurface within different frames of reference and discursive regimes. Nonetheless, the most persistent visual memories of Nazi terror have mostly been configured through images taken by American and British Allied forces upon liberating Western camps such as Buchenwald, Dachau or Bergen-Belsen. These so-called images of atrocity, or “icons of extermination” (Brink 2001), saturated by an aesthetic of grief and suffering, have come to define what has been termed a “visual canon” (Knoch 2001) of the Holocaust, which shaped a hegemonic, western visual memory of this historical period. This visual canon is a discursive formation defined both by what it includes and what it excludes from its scope. It is a selective system that determines what is visible and what remains unseen, what is remembered and what is forgotten. As Raymond Williams proposes for the concept of tradition, in a way that is equally applicable here, this is “[a]n intentionally shaping version of a past and a preshaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of cultural and social definition and identification” (Williams 1977: 115). The victory of the Allies over the National Socialist regime and the legitimacy of their intervention in Germany was the underlying discourse that underpinned the visuality² of liberations, which became, in William’s terms, the dominant “shaping version” of the Holocaust and WWII in the Western consciousness.³ As Bernd Hüppauf argues:

1 Vicky Goldberg defines “secular icons” as “representations that inspire some degree of awe […] and stand for an epoch or a system of beliefs” (Goldberg 1991: 145). On Holocaust pictures as “secular icons” see Brink (2000). 2 By visuality I refer to the cultural construction of the visual under conditions of society and discourse. This encapsulates the structures of representation through which cultures are visualized and where “the visual is contested, debated and transformed as a constant challenging place of social interaction and definition in terms of class, gender, sexual and racialized identities” (Mirzoeff 2009: 4). It is to be distinguished from “visibility”, which does not refer to the visual dimension of objects or events but rather to the underlying social, political, or ideological power structures that determine what is socially seen and not seen within visual regimes. 3 On Western coverage of the camps see Zelizer (1998) and Struk (2004). On the German perspective on this coverage see Brink (2001) and Knoch (2001).

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“A popular image of the war had survived that was based upon a highly selective memory” (Hüppauf 1997: 6).⁴ However, as recent scholarship has begun to point out, the Holocaust must be regarded as a transcultural event with diverse implications across national and regional cultures (Rothberg 2009; Erll 2011; Crownshaw 2011). Each cultural space gives rise to its own representational regime that negotiates and competes with others for the defining visual memory of the event. The German visual memory of the Holocaust is certainly different from the Israeli and the Soviet ones, each one containing specific mnemonic imperatives for the configuration of national identities. As such, it is more accurate to speak of visual canons in the plural with such visual systems endorsing and shaping competing versions of the past within the contested terrain of memory. Visual canons are therefore representational regimes built upon what Judith Butler calls frames of war, “operations of power” that “organize visual experience” and whereby the material reality of war operates and rationalizes its own conduct (Butler 2009: 3). These frames can assume different shapes: the frame of the photograph, the framing of an ideological position, the framing of sexual difference. Frames do not simply reflect the conditions of war; they carve and uphold both the visual structure that determines what should be visible and what should be unseen, and the conduct of war itself. Images are configured by the “pre-constituted field of discourse” (Burgin 2010: 136), but they also construct the social and cultural texture in which they will be received. As W. J. T. Mitchell puts it, we have to take into account both the social construction of the visual and the visual construction of the social (Mitchell 2005: 343). As such, the photograph is not only the surface where ideology and power are made manifest; it is also the medium through which ideology and power are erected, sedimented, as well as contested and resisted. As Gertrud Koch contends, “die Einstellung ist die Einstellung”,⁵ the frame is the framework: the frame of the photograph also entails the framing, the standpoint towards reality that defines how it should be visually represented and received. In line with Susan Sontag’s claim, photography

4 Writing about the polemic exhibition Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (“Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944”), organized by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, which resorted to photographs that depicted the German Army as complicit in the Nazi extermination program, Hüppauf argues that Germany was not prepared to face this version of the past, which defied the national narrative of a country that perceived itself as a victim of the Nazi regime and remembered its soldiers as combatants in a grim war. The exhibition clearly showed that in each country involved in the conflict the atrocity pictures were received against a different mindset or regime of truth that framed their interpretation. See also Heer (1995). 5 The German word ‘Einstellung’ designates an image shot, a frame, and a position, a stance towards a particular theme. Cf. Koch (1992).

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is an opinion,⁶ as there is always a prior stance that conditions the photographic act. In framing reality, Butler further argues, “the photograph has already determined what will count within the frame – and this act of delimitation is surely interpretive” (Butler 2009: 67). The framings of war that underlie visual canons regulate what shall be mourned, whose loss we should acknowledge, what should be commemorated, and what should remain unrepresentable to the viewer’s perception of conflict. As Butler contends, the “mandating of what can be seen”, the concern with regulating content, is complemented by control over the perspective through which things are seen (Butler 2009: 65). The frames of war thus operate through what I understand as a double logic of visibility by, on the one hand, allowing the suffering of certain figures to be brought into view and effacing undesirable grief from the field of representation and, on the other, in determining the perspective, the framing through which things are seen or not seen, thus guiding the viewer towards a certain interpretation of events. Drawing from visual culture theory and gender studies, this article wishes to inquire into the Soviet framing of WWII and the Holocaust, and explore two intertwined questions within this particular visual canon: the negotiation between visibility and invisibility on the one hand, and the semiotic construction of gender on the other. This shall be tackled through the discussion of two moments of liberation. The first concentrates on the liberation of occupied territories on the Eastern front, with a special focus on Kerch and the Majdanek concentration camp; the second addresses the visual coverage of the liberation of Ravensbrück, the first purpose-built Nazi camp for women, reached by the Red Army just before the end of the war. By focusing on the visual framing of both moments of liberation, I wish to convey two points: first, that the Soviet frames of war are grounded on a negotiation between visibility and invisibility of the Holocaust that subsumes the Nazi targeting of Jews into the conduct of the so called Great Patriotic War, the Soviet struggle against Nazism. Secondly, that sexual difference, as a category produced within representation, is strongly regulated within the double logic of visibility, often appropriated to convey a dominant ideological standpoint. However, while its appearance as difference is cautiously measured,

6 Cf. Sontag (2001). Sontag argued throughout her works that photography, due to its indexical nature, cannot be regarded as interpretation, but rather as an emanation of the real: “While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency” (Sontag 2001b: 6). However, in her later writings, namely in the introduction to Annie Leibovitz’ book Women, she began reconsidering her position and granting that some level of interpretation is at play in the act of photographing.

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sometimes it manages to ‘frame the frame’ and counter the ideological script within which it emerged in the first place. This text suggests that the frames of war, despite exerting control over the subjects they depict, also contain within them the potential to unsettle hegemonic discourses and unearth traumas buried under layers of representation.

1 Mourning and the Holocaust through the Soviet Gaze Soviet coverage of Nazi atrocities dates back to the early days of the German army’s incursion into the expanded Russian territory in 1941 and fluctuates between celebrating Soviet heroism and disclosing the violence of German invasion. Nazi atrocities were turned into a fundamental trope to represent the German war against ‘innocent Soviet citizens’, whose resistance and bravery were in turn praised. Indeed, soviet representation of WWII has often been described as negotiating triumph and trauma (cf. Jahn 2005). In articulating these two motives, Soviet power attempted to rally the population, without demoralizing it, against German occupation. As David Shneer has argued, “this dual narrative […] visually defined the war for the Soviet population” (Shneer 2010: 96). The first Holocaust liberation photographs produced by Soviets were taken in Kerch, in Ukraine, a region where the Gestapo registered seventy-five hundred Jews, who were then taken to a trench on the outskirts of town and shot. On 31 December 1941, the city was one of the first areas with a significant pre-war Jewish population to be liberated from German occupation, providing the first opportunity for Soviet soldiers, reporters, and photographers to witness and frame the Nazi violence against Jews on Soviet territory. Despite the fact that the majority of photographers at the scene were Jewish,⁷ the event was framed through a universalizing perspective. Pictures showing an immense landscape of undifferentiated bodies spread along a trench alternated with close-up shots of dead women and children. In some, Red Army soldiers examine the scene and residents watch or search for relatives. Press captions

7 Evgenii Khaldei, Dmitrii Baltermants and Mark Redkin were some of the Jewish photographers among the first to witness the Kerch massacre. On Jewish photographers working for the Soviet Union during the Holocaust see Shneer (2010).

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refer to “Hitlerite atrocities in Kerch”⁸ or explain that “Hitler ordered his bandits to annihilate the peaceful Soviet population”, further universalizing, or rather ‘sovietising’, the visual narrative instead of providing a differentiated account of the violence depicted. These photographs frame the suffering of an integral population at the hands of the German enemy, establishing a “hierarchy of grief” (Butler 2006) that normalizes whose lives are supposed to be mourned. Jewish victims, however, were not effaced from the field of vision or openly excluded from mourning; instead, they were framed within a rhetoric that subsumed them into a broader narrative of grievability, shaping the event as a Soviet calamity. Therefore, invisibility does not necessarily demand an exclusion from the frame – symbolic invisibility can be produced inside the field of vision itself. Within this strategy, the presence of Kerch residents mourning for their relatives constitutes a pivotal feature. Picturing the mourning of others constitutes a strategy that helps viewers identifying which lives should be mourned. It configures visual experience through a certain perspective that conditions the interpretation of the event depicted. The figure of the mourner, in numerous visual cultures, is often female. While in war photography the combat experience is dominated by male figures, when it comes to depicting the grief-stricken aftermath of violence, women immediately jump into the forefront of representational practices. The Soviet visual regime is certainly no exception. As gaze theory has demonstrated, subject positions, male and female, are constructed by the gaze that inscribes them in the field of vision.⁹ The identity

8 Soviets often used the terms ‘Hitlerite’ or ‘Fascist’ instead of ‘Nazi’ since the term ‘NationalSocialism’ posited a problem for their own political discourse due to the reference to a Socialist vision. In the Soviet Union, Nazism was seen as a form of Western capitalism and hence the Socialist designation was avoided to hinder any parallels to Soviet Socialism. 9 Gaze theory as developed by feminist film scholars, such as Laura Mulvey first and later by Mary Ann Doane and Kaja Silverman, builds upon Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, where he states that the gaze “is the function that is found at the heart of the institution of the subject in the visible. What determines me [the subject of representation], at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects” (Lacan 1998: 106). Lacan then brings in the concept of screen, a structure of mediation between the gaze and the subject of representation that introduces a level of opacity to the field of vision. Although Lacan does not argue so, feminist film theorists expand his thought to insist upon the ideological status of the screen and to contend that it is through “culturally generated images” that subjects, male or female, “are not only constituted, but differentiated in relation to class, race, sexuality, age, and nationality” (Silverman 1992: 150). Contemporary gaze theory works outside (or even against) the strict conditions early Feminist film theory set out (namely the predominance of the male gaze over women as objects, as theorized in the early works of Mulvey), but keeps

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of depicted subjects relies, on the one hand, “upon the repertoire of culturally available images” (Silverman 1992: 150), and upon an exterior gaze endowed with agency that subordinates them to a certain representation, on the other. Although the gaze points towards a regulating position of control that is located outside the frame, it does not conflate with an individual viewer or group of viewers, referring rather to an apparatus, a system of power relations that regulates subjectivities by projecting them in the field of vision. The subject captured inside the frame thus seemingly has no choice but to assume the shape predetermined by the “screen”, the level of mediated representation that introduces a dimension of opacity into the field of vision.

Figure 1: S. Afansyeva from Kerch mourns the death of her 18-year-old son, who was shot by Germans as they retreated from the city in February 1942. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park. Courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

its attention to visual relations of unequal power that construct the subjects in the field of representation. Kaja Silverman’s reading of Fassbinder (1992) constitutes a seminal example of a new, critical gaze theory that draws on earlier work to rethink relations of power through the field of vision.

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In figure 1, a woman with a Russian name mourns the death of a relative, supposedly her son, in what constitutes a common trope of atrocity representation. The image frames two instances of victimhood: the victims who perished under Nazi violence, and the survivors who suffer those losses. With bodies spilling out of the frame, the picture suggests a larger devastation than that captured, thus representing a broader dimension of victimhood. The Soviet gaze shapes the female figure as the suffering mother that mourns the loss of her son, making it representative of a wider, national grief: Mother Russia’s grief. In deploying the motherhood trope and identifying the woman’s body with the body politic of the Soviet nation, the female subject is framed as a representation of the collective mourning for a ravaged land. However, as Anne McClintock pointed out, “women are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation, but are denied any direct relation to national agency” (McClintock 1996: 261). The trope of women’s fragility is visually convoked to raise empathy towards the target of her mourning. Yet, an image of reassurance and stability is required to counter the threatening excess of difference that the female presence generates in the field of representation. In order to balance this vulnerability, a Soviet male is inscribed into the frame, preventing the female body from collapsing and guaranteeing safety upon liberation from the German enemy. To uphold the legitimization of Soviet intervention in this territory, mourning is visually codified as a gendered practice of female fragility that calls for a male agency capable of restoring the lost order. Liberation photographs, as said before, sought to negotiate between the representation of Nazi violence and Soviet superiority. By configuring two gendered subject positions, one of female vulnerability and another of male heroism, this image manages to frame both narratives within the same frame. Photos from Kerch soon became formulaic and contributed towards shaping the so called Nazi atrocity essay, which generally includes some form of trench, anonymous bodies with researchers investigating, residents witnessing, and close shots of women and children. The ravine, until the unearthing of the concentration camps on Polish soil, was the main visual narrative of atrocity in Soviet liberation photography. However, with the discovery of Majdanek, the first extermination camp encountered by the Red Army, in July 1944, the visuality of liberation had to face new challenges. SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, overseer of the concentration camps, had designated Majdanek as a camp for Soviet prisoners of war (POW) soon after the German invasion in 1941. The camp was initially called Kriegsgefangenenlager der Waffen SS Lublin – a camp for prisoners of war –, and in February 1943 was renamed Konzentrationslager Lublin. The official functions of a POW camp and concentration camp did not exhaust the tasks assigned to Majdanek by the German authorities – Konzentrationslager Lublin was definitely one of the cogs

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of the Final Solution. The State Museum at Majdanek sets the number of dead at about eighty thousand, sixty thousand of whom were Jews. However, only around 500 inmates, mostly weak Soviet prisoners of war and a few Poles, survived to witness liberation. This certainly defined the visual framing of the discovery of the camp, which, once again, downplayed the Nazi targeting of Jews in order this time to focus on Polish victimhood. Representations articulate and create meaning as well as re-present an already meaningful world. In this case, the depiction of the newly discovered industrial dimension to Nazi violence required new representational formulae to account for an unknown level of destruction. The main novelty introduced consisted in framing the camp’s territory and the several accoutrements of atrocity. This strategy, however, resulted in uncomprehensible images since the unearthed complex did not have a prior referent for the viewer to identify and understand. As such, the older formulae had to be redeployed and reconfigured to foster a more immediate identification. In figure 2, the tropes of the ravine, the bewildered witnesses and the woman in mourning as the main focus of the composition are reframed in a new set of circumstances. The bodies of the victims are now invisible because the photographs of Kerch and other trenches, especially Babi Yar,¹⁰ created a common frame of reference that is strongly present in collective conscience. With the trench images still in mind, imprinted in society’s “working memory”,¹¹ the viewer is capable of reconstituting the absent bodies so that the off-frame is still visible within this frame, which thereby evokes or resonates with that preceding.

10 Babi Yar, near Kiev, in Ukraine, an immense ravine into which about a hundred thousand bodies were dumped, became the biggest and most lasting symbol of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, overshadowing the discovery of the six main extermination camps located on Polish soil. 11 “Working memory” (Funktionsgedächtnis), as opposed to “archival memory” (Speichergedächtnis), is a concept coined by Aleida Assmann to refer to selective acts of recollection that circulate in a society and provide a common frame of reference for its members. Cf. Assmann (1999).

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Figure 2: Majdanek, Poland. Local population by a mass grave, after the camp’s liberation. Photographer: Michail Trachman. Courtesy of Photo Archive, Yad Vashem.

This production of visibility, even in invisibility, goes hand in hand with the production of invisibility through the visible, in downplaying the Nazi targeting of Jews by framing the mourners as Polish citizens. While there are many people surrounding the mass grave, the shot displays a group of women that is represented through the single woman who raises her hands in despair. By electing this woman as the main focus of the composition, the Soviet gaze produces a larger subject in the frame, a collective group of witnessing women whose differentiated reactions are unified by this woman’s individual desperation, since ‘woman’, in signifying systems, tends to represent ‘womanhood’ at large. On the other hand, the Soviet gaze generates the look towards the mass grave, directing the viewer’s attention to the invisible picture within the picture, the visually absent but implicit victims of Nazi violence who are being mourned by the group of women.¹² The Soviet gaze thus produces a chain of looks: the viewer’s look is directed to the look of the woman who, in turn, activates the look at the partially

12 Lacan distinguishes gaze, to which he attributes the faculty of showing, from look, stating that the gaze precedes any individual act of looking and constitutes that out of which the look emerges (Lacan 1998).

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framed grave. It is this chain of looks that produces the Polishness and elides the Jewishness of the event. By focusing first on the Polish griever, the viewer presumes the identity of the victims at the dead angle of representation. The history of the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union remains a much debated question. For many years, the thesis that the Soviet Union tried to silence or conceal the Nazi targeting of Jews prevailed to a greater or lesser extent. Yeshoshua Gilboa, for example, argued that references to massacres of Jews were rare, “the dominant line adopted being not to single out such massacres from among the ‘criminal plans aimed at annihilating the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and other peoples of the Soviet Union’” (Gilboa 1971: 7–8). More recently, studies such as Karel Berkhoff’s have revealed that even though Soviet media often attempted to conceal that the Nazis were deliberately murdering Jews, in order to universalize the German threat to the entire Soviet population, this never became a policy. According to Berkhoff: “It was nothing but a tendency that never became entirely consistent” (2009: 62).¹³ Images produced during this period suggest this ambivalence, by simultaneously showing and not showing the specific targeting of Nazi violence. In subsuming the annihilation of Jews into the conduct of the Great Patriotic war, the Soviet gaze produces and at the same time elides both a subject and an interpretation of the events in a double logic of visibility. Even if the concealment of the Jewish extermination was a tendency that never became consistent, this hierarchy of grief generated a symbolic invisibility in favour of a sovietised narrative.

2 Ravensbrück: Framing Liberation and Trauma By the time the Red Army reached the Ravensbrück concentration camp, on 30 April 1945, the battle for Berlin was finally coming to an end. Unlike the British and American forces, which had just recently started to unearth the camps in Germany, the Soviets already had a long experience with Nazi crimes. They had endured a three-year war with Germany and covered extensive atrocities throughout the territory of Soviet Union, particularly in Ukraine and Poland. Therefore, the discovery of Ravensbrück, close to Berlin, where the end of the conflict was about to be decided, represented a major shift in the visualization of the camps. While the prior coverage of atrocities, like Kerch, Babi Yar, and Majdanek, fostered a narrative of devastation and wide-ranging Soviet suffering, the libera-

13 On the memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union see Al’tmann (2005).

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tion of Ravensbrück was framed to render a narrative of survival, resistance, and freedom. Janina Struk, in her book Photographing the Holocaust, asks whether Britain or the USA would have released photographs of the Western camps with the “enthusiasm” they did, had the camps been full of their own nationals (Struk 2005: 143). This policy of (in)visibility might have been determinant to the Soviet record of survival and victory. The majority of the Ravensbrück population was not composed of Jewish women, who barely accounted for about ten percent of inmates, but political prisoners from several Eastern countries under Soviet influence.¹⁴ The conditions were thus established to, once again, obliterate the Jewish victimhood from the frame and focus on the Soviet population. The Red Army had to let their comrades know that the war against fascism had been won and that their prisoners were now safe, free and on their way home. On the other hand, they had to depict themselves as saviours to prove the legitimacy of the occupation of Eastern territories. But what happens at the level of representation when the subjects are exclusively female? As Jane Caplan has argued, the concentration camp remains gendered as male by default in most discourses, with gender difference being largely obliterated in favour of an unmarked masculine (Caplan 2010: 85).¹⁵And yet, as Penny Summerfield has shown, WWII transfigured the ‘wartime gender contract’, “under which men fought for the protection of women, who, in return, maintained hearth and home as the cornerstone of the nation” (Summerfield 1997: 6). Indeed, all the regimes involved in the conflict envisioned new social roles for women, mobilizing the female population towards the war effort.¹⁶ The Soviet Union in particular, after calling up women into the ‘labour front’ and other support tasks, challenged the figure of the woman as a non-combatant through a militarizing action that allowed women to fight side by side with men on the war front. Despite the

14 On the diversified composition and evolution of the Ravensbrück population throughout the war, see Leo (2006). Furthermore, shortly before liberation, the Swedish Red Cross had conducted a major rescue operation, known as Operation Bernadotte, and authorized by Himmler himself, which managed to rescue several Jewish inmates. The death marches were also responsible for sending a large part of the remaining camp population away so that upon liberation, the Red Army encountered only those inmates who were too physically feeble to leave. 15 For further approaches on the gendered visuality of concentration camps, see Zelizer (2001) and, for a discussion of Zelizer’s conclusions, Weckel (2005). These studies are certainly a result of a wider attention granted to gender as a category of historical analysis in the field of Holocaust studies. See, for instance, Schwarz (2002), Baer and Goldenberg (2003), Bock (2005), Amsberger (2007), and Frietsch and Herkommer (2009). 16 On gender differentiations in social roles in Nazi Germany, see Frietsch and Herkommer (2009).

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different degree of women’s involvement within the competing political forces¹⁷, ranging from American and German promotion of women as supporters of men’s war efforts, to the Soviet rhetoric of gender equality, the boundaries between home front and war front, between the realm of the private and the sphere of public action, were definitely unsettled and in every case. This change in social roles carved a representational shift in the visual structure of war, thus destabilizing the domestic figuration in which women had hitherto been constrained. However, even though the mobilisation of women for the cause of ‘Total War’ was quite unprecedented, especially for Soviet women, who were allowed into the violence kernel of warfare, this new gender accomplishment was highly ambivalent for all the parties in conflict. As Maubach and Satjukow (2009) have shown, this social shift was extremely limited both in participation and duration, oscillating between inclusion and exclusion. On the one hand, women’s involvement in the war effort was highly regulated in terms of the tasks performed and considered as an exception in times of need; after the conflict, their previous social roles would have to be restored.¹⁸ On the other hand, their involvement was constantly confronted with men’s scepticism and contempt, both within and between competing forces. German men referred to female Red Army soldiers scornfully as Flintenweiber [shotgunwomen], while their Soviet comrades, who often felt their own position as exclusive protectors threatened, referred to them as ‘Officer mattresses’ in an attempt to confine them to sexual roles. Representational practices throughout the war mirror this inconsistency towards women’s wartime subject positions, vacillating between an emancipatory and conservative depiction. The experience of imprisonment in a women’s concentration camp is also culturally ambivalent: while, on the one hand, it challenges the association of women with the home front, placing them within a new sphere of war experiences defying various archetypes of femininity, on the other, it resituates them in a condition of vulnerability and in an exclusively feminine domain, superiorly controlled by a male dominated system that reinstates gendered practices of living and organization. The portrayal of women who endured and survived

17 For a comparison between American, German and Soviet women’s involvement in the war effort see Franka Maubach and Silke Satjukow (2009). 18 In America, the demand put on industry by the war machine was massive. With about ten million men at war and the rest of the male population at work, it became clear the only way America would be able to win the war was if it enlisted large numbers of women for employment in the industry sector. After the war, however, ‘Rosie the Riveter’, as women working in industry were called, was often required to return to her previous domestic occupations and to ‘give Joe back his job’. See Honey (1984) and Gil (2009).

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the hardships of warfare and of a concentration camp also represents a shift in the Soviet visual grammar of war, which alongside the propaganda images of a robust and resistant Mother Russia had oscillated between depicting women as victims or as grieving witnesses of Nazi violence. Nevertheless, the photos taken at Ravensbrück resorted to the same articulation of tropes of motherhood and nationhood seen before. In figure 3, for example, Ukrainian mothers hold their children, who were born in the camp shortly before liberation. Even if it is possible that the barrack depicted housed only Ukrainians, it is far from innocent that the picture frames a group of mothers that share the same nationality.

Figure 3: Ukrainian mothers with their babies, who were born in the camp shortly before liberation, May 1945. Photographer: Jirka Voleijnik (presumedly). Courtesy Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätte.

While the depiction of surviving women defies the trope of fragility that had thus far pervaded the coverage of atrocities, at the same time it reinstates the reverse stereotype of women’s resilience and nurturing vocation to support a narrative of birth and survival, proving that the appropriation of the very same trope of motherhood can serve differing scripts. In this case, the normative usage of the symbolical role of women as breeders wishes to send out an encouraging message to a country like Ukraine that had been one of the most devastated during the

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course of the Great Patriotic War, but which now, under the protection of Soviet power, was able to return to safety.¹⁹ Their liberation by male Red Army soldiers could thus be seen as a reinstatement of the wartime gender contract, whereby women’s vulnerability and the protective male role are re-established. On a different level, this image may be considered an attempt to counter-frame the previous frames of war, whereby a new discursive regime is striven for, one that prefigures the approaching Cold War and its territorial reconfiguration. Women’s bodies are thus symbolically constructed by the Soviet gaze as a medium through which victory over fascism is conveyed and Soviet control over Ukraine is legitimized. However, this picture hides a terrible event that undermines its meaning. According to Hanka Housková, a former Czech Communist inmate who witnessed the liberation, one of the Ukrainian women was raped by a Soviet soldier.²⁰ Under this traumatic revelation, the depiction of the reproductive female body shifts to an image of gendered vulnerability and destabilizes the surface of representation, deconstructing the image of the liberator and problematising the concept of ‘liberation’ itself. As Elisabeth Bronfen observed, “[r] epresentations are symptoms that visualise even as they conceal what is too dangerous to articulate openly but too fascinating to repress successfully” (Bronfen 1992: xi). The excessive female body, which was carefully stabilised under a narrative of motherhood, is unveiled in its full and dangerous ambivalence upon this disclosure. Hannah Arendt once claimed that all photos of concentration camps are misleading as they try to reproduce a reality that was no longer to be seen.²¹ The Soviet framing of Ravensbrück is “misleading” in many directions: not only does it opt to leave the level of destruction and degradation outside the frame in order to put forward a narrative of survival and resistance, but it also prevents the disclosure of the ambivalent circumstances in which the liberation was carried out. However, the traumatic off-frame of this picture, once revealed, ends up bearing a trap to the assigned meaning, thereby framing the frame and challenging the scopic subordination to the Soviet gaze.

19 On the ambivalence of the Ukrainian memory of World War II, see Scherrer (2004). 20 The history of Ravensbrück regarding the question of rape is still in the making. See, for instance, Jolande Withuis (2002). 21 “All pictures of concentration camps are misleading insofar as they show the camps in their last stages, at the moment the Allied troops marched in. […] what provoked the outrage of the Allies most – namely, the sight of the human skeletons – was not at all typical for the German concentration camps; extermination was handled systematically by gas, not by starvation. The condition of the camps was a result of the war events during the final months” (Baehr 2003: 142).

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Shortly after liberation, the Red Army installed a repatriation facility for political prisoners and civilians at Ravensbrück to help inmates return to their countries.²² Figure 3, which portrays a group of women before their homecoming, presumably a month after their liberation, is paradigmatic of the Soviet framing of this camp. On the one hand, it is a collective shot of undifferentiated Soviet women set against a background that is completely devoid of any atrocity connotation. The context of violence and degradation is kept out of the frame and substituted by an idyllic summer scenario that prefigures the desirable aftermath of the conflict for all Soviet citizens. This image attempts to configure a return both to the idyllic homeland, from where Soviet people had been involuntarily expelled and longed to return to, and to a social and political normalcy that circumscribes women into a contained realm of action. Nevertheless, this picture also reverses the domestic trope and, once again, defies submission to the Soviet

Figure 4: Soviet women before their homecoming, May/June 1945. Courtesy Mahn-und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätte.

22 After the war, many concentration camps in the Soviet occupation zone were turned into Soviet secret service (NKVD) special camps, internment camps for political prisoners set up by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany and run by the NKVD. In August 1948, the camps were made subordinate to the Gulag. Because no contacts between camp internees and the outside world were permitted, the special camps were also known as silence camps. This is not the case with Ravensbrück but might explain the necessity to register the aftermath of its liberation as a repatriation facility to becloud the internment camps to be installed in nearby Sachsenhausen or even in Buchenwald. Cf. Haustein (2006).

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gaze by inscribing an entirely new figure into the representation of war: the homecoming woman. Indeed, as Christina Twomey (2009) has pointed out, WWII brought a social change by destabilizing the gender of homecoming, since women also returned, either from their work place, where they had secured continuity on the home front, but especially in their quality of victims of war displacement, challenging the gulf between the gendered domains of military front and the home front that sustained the wartime gender contract. War is a time when notions of belonging are unsettled and gender conventions are simultaneously undermined – with women entering new spheres of experience – and restored – with the threat to gender boundaries being constantly contained. The return from imprisonment exposes once again this ambiguity, as it becomes a return both from a new and defying experience and to the original and contained realm of existence that, in fact, cannot be retrieved. Homecoming is often a traumatic moment as much as the war itself is as it carries with it the struggle to adapt to post-war normalisation and to cope with awful memories. The trauma of imprisonment, violence, rape, hunger, death, and, in some cases, killing is often manifested belatedly after the homecoming, resurfacing to haunt the aftermath of a painful experience. The photo also clouds this trauma of return and, in picturing a natural landscape in the background, reinforces women’s stereotypical relation to nature, thrusting her away from the cultural domain of war. In fact, the women are depicted within an attempt to normalize refeminisation, appearing healthy, fed and nicely dressed, and in a setting that recalls a big family portrait, prefiguring women’s return to their breeding and nurturing functions. The photograph thus frames the narrative of return in a dual way: while it can be visually controlled and subsumed by the Soviet narrative into a return to social normalcy, it can also be interpreted against the grain as a figuration of a traumatic experience that had been invisible up till then, thus disrupting the contained subjectivity inscribed by the Soviet gaze. In spite of the multiple roles women performed during wartime, the photographic record of the liberation of Ravensbrück does not provide a differentiated account of the experiences of its inmates, focusing instead on large groups in which individual identities are diluted. One of the few exceptions is a portrait of Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier (fig. 5), a French member of the Resistance and widow of Paul Vaillant-Couturier, co-founder of the French Communist Party and chief editor of L’Humanité. Marie-Claude was a photographic reporter, at the time when the business was almost uniquely male, which earned her the nickname of ‘the lady in Rolleiflex’. She was part of the photo service of L’Humanité, which she later edited. Attached to the magazine Vu, she participated in an investigation into the rise of National Socialism in Germany, where she took clandestine pic-

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Figure 5: Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier in Ravensbrück before her homecoming, June 1945. Not exempt from third party rights. Courtesy of Mahn-und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätte.

tures of the concentration camps in Oranienburg (Sachsenhausen) and Dachau, published upon her return to France. Within the Resistance, she partook in clandestine publications and anti-German propaganda and also worked as a liaison between the civil and military Resistance, which got her arrested and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where together with Charlotte Delbo, she was a member of the clandestine international Resistance committee. She was transported to Ravensbrück in August 1944 but would only return to France in June 1945, staying on in the camp after liberation to provide assistance to the remaining sick inmates.

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Unlike the other pictures, which resort to rather normative tropes of representation that over-gender and circumscribe the subjects depicted within a contained realm of action, this portrait allows the person depicted to figure as autonomous and assume a heroic status, even if within the larger narrative that underlies the entire photographic operation. Her expression of triumph and relief is framed as an homage to those who contributed to the defeat of fascism, not only on the battle front, but also through the international resistance groups established in captivity. Once again, nothing in this portrait translates the pained experience of a concentration camp, except the exhilarating sense of freedom that comes with liberation, bringing it closer to the victory pictures taken in Berlin upon the German surrender. Nevertheless, in framing the ‘lady in Rolleiflex’, who once photographed the rise of National Socialism and its first concentration camps, the picture appropriates the subject of a resistant gaze to self-reflect on the victory of the Soviet gaze over the Nazi image-world. This interdependency of gazes – the woman depends on the Soviet gaze to exist in the field of vision, but the Soviet gaze depends on her gaze to convey a certain meaning – destabilises the power relation of vision, opening up a potential for visual agency from within the picture that challenges the gaze outside the picture. As Kaja Silverman has argued in her positive reading of Lacan, “some limited power is available to the subject who recognizes her necessary subordination to the gaze but finds potentially transgressive ways of ‘performing’ before it” (Silverman 1992: 128). As such, this picture exposes a fundamental contradiction: it praises the gaze as resistance by assuming control over someone else’s resistant gaze, hence disclosing the structural tension between visual regulation and subversion within the frames of war.

3 The Visible, the Unseen, and the Dead Angles of Representation Frames of war are structurally governed by a double logic of visibility. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, the photos taken by the Allies constituted an attempt to make visible what was no longer to be seen. The Nazi camp system itself was built upon a logic of invisibility, of erasing all remains of extermination and keeping them out of sight. The Soviet canon of liberation also lies on a negotiation between visibility and invisibility. While, in a first moment, the Soviet gaze showed and did not show the targets of Nazi violence, diluting the extermination of Jews into a larger Soviet narrative of victimhood, in a second moment it effaced trauma from the visual surface to allow a narrative of Soviet triumph to simmer through.

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However, as Foucault argued: “Transgression is an action that involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses” (Foucault 2000: 73). Indeed, it is precisely in this liminality between visible and invisible, at the dead angles of representation, that room for subversion may be carved out to dispute the convention according to which the gaze is impossible to seize or get hold of. Sexual difference is also a category entangled in this double logic of visibility. As potential validation and simultaneous disruption of a visual order that excludes her, as a source of threatening ambivalence, its appearance in the field of vision is cautiously restrained. At other times, however, it manages to irrupt through the regulated surface of representation in its fullest and most unsettling shape. Susan Sontag once claimed a photograph represents a means of acquiring, of gaining control over a subject (Sontag 2001b: 155). Indeed, in capturing reality, the photograph constructs and attributes an identity to the subject fixed inside the frame, determining the perspective through which the visual event will be interpreted. Yet, the subjects produced through this gaze are not condemned to remain trapped inside the picture – the threshold of liberation is there to be crossed. The dead angles on the visual surface, like Adrienne Rich’s “ladders hanging innocently”, can “open a zone to existence for the first time” (Foucault 2000: 74), and not only frame the frame, but indeed unframe subjects from the visual grids that seize them.

Works Cited Altmann, Il’ya (2005) ‘The ban on commemorating the Shoah: the long journey from Soviet taboo to remembrance’, in Kluften der Erinnerung. Rußland und Deutschland 60 Jahre nach dem Krieg, ed. Manfred Sapper and Volker Weichsel (Berlin: BWV), 149–164. Amsberger, Helga et al. (eds) (2007) Sexualisierte Gewalt: Weibliche Erfahrungen in NS-Konzentrationslagern (Vienna: Mandelbaum). Assmann, Aleida (1999) Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: Beck). Baehr, Peter (ed) (2003) The Portable Hannah Arendt (London: Penguin). Baer, Elizabeth R. and Myrna Goldenberg (eds) (2003) Experience and Expression. Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press). Berkhoff, Karel (2009) “Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population’. The Holocaust in Soviet Media, 1941–1945’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 10.1, 61–105. Bock, Gisela (ed) (2005) Genozid und Geschlecht. Jüdische Frauen im nationalsozialistischen Lagersystem (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus).

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Brink, Cornelia (1998) Ikonen der Vernichtung. Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945 (Berlin: Akademie). Brink, Cornelia (2000) ‘Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps’, History & Memory, 12.1, 135–150. Bronfen, Elisabeth (1992) Over Her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Butler, Judith (2006) Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso). Butler, Judith (2009) Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso). Caplan, Jane (2010) ‘Gender and the Concentration Camps’, in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany. The New Histories, ed. Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann (London: Routledge), 82–107. Crownshaw, Richard (2011) ‘Introduction’, Parallax, Special Issue on Transcultural Memory, 17.4, 1–3. Erll, Astrid (2011) ‘Traumatic pasts, literary afterlives, and transcultural memory: new directions of literary and media memory studies’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 3. Eschebach, Insa, Sigrid Jacobeit and Silke Wenk (eds) (2002) Gedächtnis und Geschlecht. Deutungsmuster in Darstellungen des Nationalsozilistischen Genozids (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus). Flacke, Monika (ed) (2004) Mythen der Nationen. 1945 – Arena der Erinnerung (Mainz: Philipp von ZabernVerlag). Foucault, Michel (2000) ‘A Preface to Transgression’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, II, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin Books), 69–87. Frietsch, Elke and Christina Herkommer (eds) (2009) Nationalsozialismus und Geschlecht. Zur Politisierung und Ästhetisierung von Körper, “Rasse” und Sexualität im “Dritten Reich” und nach 1945 (Bielefeld: Transcript). Gil, Isabel Capeloa (2009) ‘When the Woman Returns. Gendering Homecoming in Postwar American Film’, in Stephanie Moore Glaser (ed) Media inter Media. Studies in Honor of Claus Clüver (Amsterdam: Rodopi), 111–135. Goldberg, Vicky (1991) The Power of Photography. How Photographs Changed Our Lives (New York: Abbeville Press). Haustein, Petra et al. (eds) (2006) Instrumentalisierung, Verdrängung, Aufarbeitung: die sowjetischen Speziallager in der gesellschaftlichen Wahrnehmung 1945 bis heute (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag). Heer, Hannes (ed) (1995) Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944 (War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht) (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition HIS Verlag). Honey, Maureen (1984) Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press). Hüppauf, Bernd (1997) ‘Emptying the Gaze: Framing violence through the Viewfinder’, in New German Critique, 72, 3–44. Jacobeit, Sigrid (2002) ‘Vorwort’, in Gedächtnis und Geschlecht. Deutungsmuster in Darstellungen des Nationalsozialistischen Genozids, ed. Insa Eschebach, Sigrid Jacobeit and Silke Wenk (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus), 9–12. Jahn, Peter (ed.) (2005) Triumph und Trauma. Sowjetische und Postsowjetische Erinnerung an den Krieg (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag). Knoch, Habbo (2001) Die Tat als Bild. Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition).

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Koch, Gertrud (1992) Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung. Visuelle Konstruktionen des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Lacan, Jacques (1998) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Alan Sheridan (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company). Leo, Annette (2006) ‘Ravensbrück – Stammlager’, in Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Vol. 4: Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, ed. Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel (Munich: Beck), 473–520. Maubach, Franka, and Silke Satjukow (2009) ‘Soldatinnen? Militärische Integration von Frauen im Zweiten Weltkrieg und ihre Nachwirkungen. Deutschland, Sowjetunion, USA im Vergleich’, Historische Zeitschrift 288, 347–384. McClintock, Anne (1996) ‘No Longer in Future Heaven: Nationalism, Gender, and Race’, in Becoming National. A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Gringor Suny (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 260–284. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2009) An Introduction to Visual Culture (London: Routledge). Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005) What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press). Mulvey, Laura (1989) Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Palgrave MacMillan). Rothberg, Michael (2009) Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (California: Stanford University Press). Scherrer, Jutta (2004) ‘Ukraine. Konkurrirende Erinnerungen’, in Mythen der Nationen. 1945 – Arena der Erinnerung, ed. Monika Flacke (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern Verlag), 719–735. Schwarz, Gudrun (2002) ‘During Total War, We Girls Want to be Where We Can Really Accomplish Something. What Women Do in Wartime’, in Crimes of War. Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century, ed. Omer Bartov et al. (New York: New Press), 121–137. Shneer, David (2011) Through Soviet Jewish Eyes. Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press). Silverman, Kaja (1992) ‘Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look, and Image’, in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge), 125–156. Silverman, Kaja (1996) The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge). Sontag, Susan (2001a) ‘A Photograph is not an Opinion. Or is it?’, in Where the Stress Falls (New York: Picador), 238–253. Sontag, Susan (2001b) On Photography (New York: Picador). Sontag, Susan (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin). Strebel, Bernhard (2008) ‘Feindbild „Flintenweib“. Weibliche Kriegsgefangene der Roten Armee im KZ Ravensbrück’, in Einvernehmliche Zusammenarbeit? Wehrmacht, Gestapo, SS und Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene, ed. Johannes Ibel (Berlin: Metropol), 159–180. Struk, Janina (2005) Photographing the Holocaust. Interpretations of the Evidence (London: I. B. Tauris). Weckel, Ulrike (2005) ‘Does Gender Matter? Filmic Representations of the Liberated Nazi Concentration Camps, 1945–1946’, Gender & History, 17.3, 538–566. Withius, Jolande (2002) ‘Die verlorene Unschuld des Gedächtnisses. Soziale Amnesie in Holland und sexuelle Gewalt im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in Gedächtnis und Geschlecht, ed. Insa Eschebach et al. (Frankfurt: Campus), 77–96. Yuval-Davies, Nira (1997) Gender and Nation (London: Sage). Yuval-Davies, Nira and Florya Anthias (eds) (1989) Woman-Nation-State (London: Macmillan).

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Zelizer, Barbie (1998) Remembering to Forget. Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press). Zelizer, Barbie (2001) ‘Gender and Atrocity. Women in Holocaust Photographs’, Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (London: Athlone Press), 247–269.

Ban Wang

The Banality of Trauma: Globalisation, Migrant Labor, and Nostalgia in Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian Academic and clinical inquiries of trauma have focused on healing and survival in the wake of a horrendous event. However, little attention has been paid to traumatic daily experiences of ordinary people in their economic and social survival, apparently an uneventful treadmill without traumas and shocks. Yet migration, uprooting, and dislocation in global capital flows have become a common traumatic experience for millions. For all its free-floating sense of mobility, globalisation has deracinated millions and put populations onto the roads. People have to patch up makeshift homes in places unsuited for homes. The journey from local to global, from home to universal homelessness is painful and traumatic. But the imperative of economic development and global capital, while ruining the landscape and brutalising the mind, has legitimised a form of institutionalised trauma and violence. The touted benefits of migration, trade, flows of labour, and travel are cloaked in the inspirational terms of prosperity, law, freedom, lifestyle and opportunities. These ‘goods’ are packaged aesthetically in the myth of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and instant flows of information. Trauma is hardly visible because the real, physical violence in the unequal distribution of resources, migration, and labour is shielded behind the scene or simply presented merely as a romantic journey. We may call this phenomenon the banality of everyday trauma in the conditions of global capitalism. Mass migration and labour flows in the global process are riddled with shocks and traumas. Transnational migration is frequently uprooting, and relocation has degenerated into a word of denial for dislocation and displacement. The experience is not at all a roller coaster pleasure ride. Human labour follows the circulation and drift of capital and people migrate to wherever jobs and opportunities are. Thus, migrants and transients suffer traumatic daily experiences, and are deprived of chances to seek refuge in places of memory and tradition. They are uprooted from anchors in ancestral homes and from attachments and meanings that connect the individual to the community. This text seeks to lift the mirage surrounding transnational labour migration by revealing its traumatic consequences on the labouring body on the move. I first redirect attention to an imperative of modern capitalism that requires the traumatic training of the productive body. Trauma theories tend to focus excessively on the psychical and clinical dimensions of the phenomenon. This

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narrow focus reflects the theoretical reflex of commodity fetishism in the guise of individualistic and positivistic research. And hence the focus on the horrendous event and its immediate aftermath rather than on its enduring impact on the psyche. The ‘banality’ of trauma draws attention away from the private psyche to the historical and enduring consequences of modern institutions and economic forces that destroy the entrenched, life-conditions of community on a daily basis. Taking the Chinese film Durian Durian (Liulianpiaopiao) as a case, I will illustrate images and narrative addressing the productive body under the duress of trauma. The film demonstrates the subtle ways in which the human body becomes accustomed to the alienating banality of trauma by becoming a labouring machine. The film also suggests an integrated, artistic conception of the body by evoking nostalgia, memory, and tradition. The possible recovery from trauma reveals a nostalgia that resists the ‘free’ cosmopolitan perception of deracination as glamorous migrant mobility. My argument strives to affirm Theodor Adorno’s insight into nostalgia as resistance: So long as progress, deformed by utilitarianism, does violence to the surface of the earth, it will be impossible – in spite all proof to the contrary – completely to counter the perception that what antedates the trend is in its backwardness better and more humane (Adorno 1997: 64).

For its promise of universal prosperity and freedom, globalisation has not transformed the human conditions into ‘living life.’ On the contrary, it is stripping large sectors of the population of their particular context, belonging, memory, and experience. As the continuation of modern industrialisation and urbanisation, globalisation has wrought havoc on the human body, psyche and the environment. It is a record of shock and catastrophe. Defying the economic pressure to pass on quickly to somewhere and something else, nostalgia “endows the traces of immediacy, however dubious and antiquated, with an element of justice” (Adorno 1997: 64).

1 Trauma as Symptom of Capitalist Modernity In 1989, the American Psychiatric Association acknowledged the psychic phenomenon entitled ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ (PTSD). Political pressure and activism in the aftermath of the Vietnam War have prompted the urgent interest in trauma that resulted in inquiry and the naming. Similarly, the events of September 11 also gave rise to a cottage industry in trauma studies. But holding trauma as an object of study, then as now, very often elides its long-term socio-

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historical consequences and significance. The study of trauma may confront as well as evade history. The history of trauma studies is, as Judith Herman puts it, one of “episodic amnesia” – periods of intense investigation alternating with periods of oblivion (Herman 1992: 7). The most recognizable feature of traumatic experience, as we have learned from Cathy Caruth (1995), lies in the “structure of its experience.” The victim cannot experience the traumatic event in the midst of it, but only belatedly. When he or she does obtain some “experience,” that experience is nothing like what Walter Benjamin, the philosopher of modern trauma, would have called experience. Genuine experience is endowed with an aura linked to images and symbols of culture, tradition, community, and history. The aesthetic aura brings lived life, everyday practice, and work together into an integrated whole. It is to this wholesome life world that a traumatic event deals a deadly blow. Psychically, the event crystallizes into a singular image that overwhelms and possesses the victim. “To be traumatized,” Caruth writes, “is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Caruth 1995: 4–5). Literal in its sheer, unabsorbed materiality, and in its mysterious affront to the intellect, the image cannot be explained or analysed. With symptoms of repeated possession by randomly intrusive images stemming from the unfathomable depth of an impossible history, the victim remains hostage to history, captive of an incomprehensible image. Although the category of trauma is deployed for its power to be deconstructive of received categories, it is important to take note of the depoliticised turn studies of trauma have taken in recent years. The language of trauma studies tends to slide into a fashionable language of visuality and phenomenology. ‘Image,’ ‘witnessing,’ ‘testimony,’ and ‘symptom’ highlight an immediately observed ‘fact’ beyond rational analysis and story-telling in terms of narrative and history. Traumatic phenomena have often been regarded as producing a salutary shakeup of our received disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences and the Humanities. However, isolating trauma as an enigmatic, disruptive image does not lead to a broadening of our inquiry and a systematic understanding of it as a socio-historical crisis. On the contrary, it may narrow down this widespread phenomenon into an abstract profile or workings of the psyche and mental pathology. The abstract quality of the traumatic image, though subversive of the received modes of knowing and feeling, can be linked to a mode of apprehension and understanding closely associated with commodity fetishism. The persistent staging of trauma as an enigmatic, ungraspable image may allude to the logic of commodity. The commodity, we learned from Marx, is a trivial thing and readily apprehensible by the senses. Although the commodity’s sensory immediacy seems very far removed from the sensory opacity of the traumatic image, the two qualities are two sides of one abstract coin if isolated from their economic and social causes. The com-

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modity’s sensory materiality, on the other hand, is also a “queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx 1976: 163). Like the commodity, the fetishised, self-contained traumatic image, elusive of meaning, discourse, and language, proceeds on the logic of ‘what you see is what you get or will never get.’ It is thus eminently perceptible yet incomprehensible, even in its belated, mystical retelling after the fact. Like the commodity form, its vast sociohistorical secrets are screened off. Romanticising irrationality and obscurantism, traumas are pronounced to be eminently imperceptible, impervious to human understanding. But trauma is not just a matter of the troubled mind. Cathy Caruth rightly remarks that if “PTSD must be understood as a symptom, it should be seen as a symptom of history” (Caruth 1995: 5). Possessed by historically derived images, the victims become the symptom of a history they cannot possess. What is this impossible history? Why impossible? What makes history impossible? We may turn to Walter Benjamin, the theorist of modern shock experience, to restore the large socio-historical context that accounts for trauma as a sign of an impossible history. In his analysis of urban, industrial modernity, Benjamin linked trauma to the history of capitalistic production, described its impact on consciousness and memory, and analysed new forms of visual experience and the arts derived from industrial and urban shocks. In the intensified tempo of industrial and urban modernity, Benjamin detected the shift from the catastrophic event to a new trauma embedded in the new life conditions riddled with constant shocks. Earlier, trauma in Freudian psychoanalysis had tended to focus on the way consciousness parries the impact of a specific traumatic event by providing sensational or horrific fodder for the newspaper headlines, such as shell shock, war, or railroad accidents. Departing from that analysis, Benjamin sought to appropriate the “fruitfulness of Freud’s hypothesis in situations far removed from those which Freud had in mind” (Benjamin 1969: 160). Broadly socio-historical and intrinsic to the life-form of the modern world, these traumatic situations include, among other things, the poet’s shock in the faceless crowd and the strenuous aesthetic crystallisation of shock as a hallmark of modernist shattered poetry, the shocks and collusions of urban traffic, the truncated and disjoint communication of the press, ritualised, desensitised human contact in the streets, the new information technology that fragments the integrity of traditional storytelling, and the mechanisation of images that dispel the traditional, romantic aura. The most important on this list, often neglected in studies of Benjamin, is the transformation of the worker into an appendage of the capitalist machine under conditions of shocks. Industrialisation ties the worker to a machine-like environment and the related behaviour pattern. As a cog in the machine, Benjamin quotes Marx, workers have to learn to “co-ordinate their own movements with the uniformly constant movements of an automaton” (Benjamin 1969: 175).

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The new physiognomy of the automaton is not only true of the worker on the assembly line, but is also true of the operatives of the machine and performers in an all other areas of commodity production. This retooling of the body not only alters the operative’s productive act, but also gives rise to mechanised behaviour, such as constantly contrived and strategic smiles, a blasé sensibility, numbed mentality, and nervous reflexes. The operative, whose fate mirrors the general condition of the modern individual, is likened to a gambler at the mercy of a whimsical dice throw. Both machine and gambling alienate the worker from the aura and integrity of wholesome experience, from the unity of his consciousness and body. Each operative’s gesticulation at the machine is just as cut off from the preceding operation as an abrupt coup in a game of chance. When technology subjects the human sensorium to a constant pounding and separation, the shocks that capture the headlines become, in Benjamin’s words, established as a “formal principle” (Benjamin 1969: 175). Shock is no longer something for surprise but is banalised and accepted as a normal 24/7 routine of modern life condition. Modern individuals need to be shocked on a daily, hourly basis in order to be desensitised and primed for further shocks. Michel Foucault’s analysis of the labouring body further characterizes this motif of traumatic shock in the normalised and institutionalised technology of control (Foucault 1994: 86–7). That trauma remains invisible in social and economic life stems from the subtle way in which modern power subjugates the body. Political power in the pre-modern society forced the individual to obey the authority of the social order. Its measure is one of coercion by a visible authoritarian will, with military and police force on full display. With this conception of hard power we tend to focus on the traumatic experience associated with political upheavals, torture, oppression, massacre and so on. But political power in modern times no longer works effectively in such blatantly coercive way, especially in societies that are becoming civil, middle-class, industrialised, and democratic, supposedly governed by rule of law. With a lopsided focus on societies ruled by an authoritarian state through its police mechanism of coercion, we tend to applaud social change in terms of liberation and individual freedom. Freedom is mostly manifest in the freedom of choice in the market for personal gains and the freedom to decide on one’s fate. But market-driven civil society, with its rule of law and business contracts, does not necessarily guarantee or promote freedom. The most difficult thing to see in the newfound freedom is the hidden ‘unfreedom’, or new form of subjugation that a free person undergoes in being subjugated to economic rules and social norms, however traumatic these may be. To be educated into these norms and to internalise them as the law of the heart and the body is an imperative for maintaining the modern order of production and consumption. By rallying consent of the subject this educational process marks

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the new profile of modern political power couched in terms of law and order. Modern political power tends to obey a higher faceless boss, who dictates market orders and imposes economic imperatives on a worldwide scale. Thus, where the Enlightenment might discover freedom in the revolutionary drives to break away from theocratic shackles, there arose a form of unfreedom tethering the body to civil society, to the market and the state that shaped economic life as well as the individual’s psyche. For what is the ego if not the mind’s adaptation strategy, constantly adapting to the reality principle of the social and economic realm? Economic life in the guise of new rules, norms, work ethic, and free migration form the conditions for the new traumas of everyday life. Becoming accustomed to the new life is the education trials to which the modern individual is subject. It calls for the dismantling of the rule, habit and mindset embedded in older lifeforms that are more community oriented, and not so single-mindedly economic and interest-driven. The rupture with the old ties and social relationships is a modern pedagogical process that produces uneven results in natives and immigrants aspiring to the dream of prosperity. For the Europeans and Americans, this education took two to three hundred years. But in China, we see this happening within two decades. This quest for ‘freedom’ and prosperity is a program of hegemony and reform. It is equipped with an elaborate set of political techniques, techniques of power, by which man was tied to something like labour  – a set of techniques by which people’s bodies and their time would become labour power and labour time so as to be effective used and thereby transformed into hyperprofit (Foucault 1994: 86).

The focal point of this educational process is the disciplining of the worker’s body into a robot-like body of the operative in the profit machine. In capitalistic production, the fullness, integrity, and multifaceted wellbeing of the worker’s body get abstracted into labour power or commodity, which is utilised for yielding surplus value. The process of turning the flesh-blood human body into an abstraction is riddled with injuries and shocks. Modern capitalist culture requires the steady development of a network of technique, disciplines, and norms that maintains and retrains the productive body, attaching individuals to the productive apparatus. Bodies become labour power and their time becomes empty labour time. It is on account of this wholesale colonisation of the body by the industrial, educational as well as entertainment apparatuses – down to the innermost recess of the physique, nerve system, and memory, that Foucault declares that “capitalism penetrates much more deeply into our existence” (Foucault 1994: 86). In Benjamin’s analysis of trauma and memory this penetration splits human consciousness into two disparate parts. Remembrance is separated from

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memory. Alert, waking consciousness for self-preservation is separated from forgotten memory traces of childhood, family, and community. Voluntary memory is severed from the involuntary. The traumatic intensity with which these two break apart creates a violent psychic, trauma-ridden defence. In order to ward off shocks the modern consciousness has to function like a protective shield as well as an adaptive medium, constantly responding and adjusting to a changeable situation at the cost of experience and memory of having lived (Benjamin 1969: 157–165). Against this genesis of trauma in capitalist modernity, we may see how the narrow psychic focus turns out to be an instance of abstraction. By locating trauma as an isolated image detached from the broader apprehension of sociohistorical forces, trauma studies may mirror an isolating, defensive consciousness. It zeros in on a passive image of mental trauma as something accidently falling out of the blue, without trying to understand why the modern consciousness, in its daily acceptance of pounding shocks, is simply unable to register memory and experience. Constantly on an emergency standby basis to deal with changeable and traumatic environs, the subject has no share in shaping history and taking control of its action. Since social action is no other than the conscious, collective shaping of the lifeworld and ordering of time, the inactive subject succumbs to an invisible hand, whether it is driven by apocalypse, evil, market, or terrorism. The recent reports of combat stress management by psychologists in the service of the Defense Department of the US administration confirm the parallel between the training of the productive body and that of the military, giving new urgency and symbolism to the radical modern condition of the ‘military-industrial complex.’ In order to avoid traumatic syndromes in the Iraq War, young soldiers were subject to a pre-war shock-and-awe drill, an exercise that simulates battle situations, “complete with loud noises, bright lights, bullets flying overhead and long hours without sleep” (Neighmond 2003). The motto for this procedure is ‘training, training, training,’ and the goal is to keep the soldiers mentally fit for combat. Similarly, the mass media, for Benjamin, function as a crushing boot-camp running roughshod over viewer sensibilities so that they are prepared to buffer modernity’s daily shocks, visual disturbances, and spiritual disorientations.

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2 Durian Durian in the Global and Cinematic Context In the last two decades, Chinese workers, migrant labourers, and peasants are also going through massive, excruciating trials and drilling at psychic and economic levels. The traumatic consequences of this process are noticed but need further analysis within the dual approaches of trauma and socio-economic analysis. Although Benjamin builds upon Marxist works on capitalist production and its consequences on the body, his insights into modern shock can be applied to the contemporary consequences of traumatic economic development in China. In the following, I would like to discuss a banalised traumatic condition, daily outrage, within a context of global economy and labour migration. The film Durian Durian, directed by Hong Kong director Fruit Chan, presents a case study. As a Hong Kong filmmaker, Fruit Chan exhibits a dual perspective on Hong Kong and mainland China. Chan’s work reflects on Hong Kong’s intimate relationship with China and on the tension between capitalist culture and the residues of noncapitalist, socialist culture. In representing traumatic experience, contemporary Chinese cinema in the 1980s engaged deeply with the traumas of political oppression and revolution. Tremendous efforts were made to narrate and heal traumatic cultural ruptures with the past in literature and film. The traumatic narrative, imbued with historical consciousness, is quite appropriate to the analysis, say, of the fourth and fifth generation filmmakers. Film critic Dai Jinhua’s work (1993) has admirably illustrated this point. But Dai also points to the new trauma stemming from the aggressive invasion of the global market, integration with the global economy, the influx of Western values and institutions, and the penetration of transnational culture industry into China. These trends are traumatic in that they are dismantling the basic fabric of society and ethical relations rooted in Chinese culture. I do not mean that there is an essential core of culture that is being destroyed; rather it is the self-conscious, self-fashioning way of creating culture that is at risk. Widespread commodification compels filmmakers to join mainstream commercial filmmaking and eschew artistic engagement with traumatic experience, resulting in the proliferation of entertainment, escapist films in recent decades. One is hard pressed to find serious exploration and articulation regarding critical, unresolved social problems on screen. Another attempt to evade trauma is to turn away from the global market and withdraw into a fanciful, rustic past. Zhang Yimo’s film Road Home (Wodefuqinmuqin) is a striking recent example of this retreat from politico-social engagement into a fairytale, nostalgic realm.

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Working in Hong Kong, Fruit Chan is more accustomed to living and working in the midst of commercial cinema and the culture industry. With an ability to address the problems of global capital right in the belly of the beast, his films delve into the texture, bodily performance and street scenes dominated by global glamour and simulacra. Chan does not try to stay away from alienation, exploitation, money, sex and power, but confronts them headlong and at the same time strives to find expressions of personal worth and resistance. On the other hand, when he critically engages alienation in his narratives, he launches criticism from a vantage point of community, home, and place. For endangered values, he frequently turns toward mainland China. He gestures with sympathy toward certain aspects of the traditional community and social fabric and toward the socialist past. It is in this context that we may look at how Durian Durian wavers between global capitalism in Hong Kong and residual socialist nostalgia in mainland China. Addressing trauma in migrant workers, Durian Durian focuses on the productive body as a metaphor of traumatic remoulding of the migrant sex worker Xiaoyan. Xiaoyan has received professional training as an actress in traditional opera. In the market reforms, however, she loses her job and comes down south to seek her fortune in the City of Shenzhen, only to get work in prostitution as an illegal immigrant in Hong Kong. She proves to be extremely productive in providing sex service and makes a bundle of money. Xiaoyan manages to retrain and remodel her body for the most humiliating and shocking experience in the world’s ‘oldest profession.’ Coming home to the city of Mudanjiang in Northeast China after earning all this money, she is fêted as a success story. Many young girls, dancers like her, take her to be a role model and attempt to go south to repeat her success. The film’s first part is a narrative of repressed traumatic pain in favour of single-minded productive work. Although it is excruciating for the viewer, the portrayal of the sex industry suppresses the pain of trauma in a series of episodes that emphasize the absolute urgency of working for money. Traumatic psychic symptoms appear, however, belatedly but still obliquely, in the second part, when the protagonist Xiaoyan returns home and starts to reflect on her personal fate and that of her friends. In Hong Kong, Xiaoyan works like a well-functioning, uncomplaining machine. Repressed trauma, however, appears to haunt her when she is back home, surrounded by her family and friends. She becomes alienated from her relatives and friends but slowly warms to the memory of her innocent childhood. After divorcing her husband, she tries to start a business with her hard-earned cash, but is unable to bring herself to do it. Her niece, also a dancer, despite Xiaoyan’s refusal to take her with her, runs away on her own to seek fortune in the south. Reminiscences of the past and the melancholic fore-

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boding of her niece’s fate set in motion her traumatic memory and anguish. The opportunity for working through the trauma comes when she receives a durian (liulian), an exotic fruit grown in South East Asia, from a girl in a Hong Kong ghetto. A symbol of human sympathy and intimacy, the durian binds two girls across a long distance, and linking their different dreams. The durian and the remembrance of the past enable Xiaoyan to turn a new page and to give meaning to her life. The ending witnesses a vehement leap out of traumatic distress into a highly valued traditional role. She takes up her old profession as an opera singer and dancer, and starts performing traditional Chinese opera in festivals and communal gatherings.

3 The Productive Body and Concealed Trauma The film poignantly depicts the way an actress of traditional opera becomes a highly performative, productive body in sex trade. Xiaoyan’s migration from a semi-industrial town in Northeast China to Hong Kong signifies drastic changes in the global capitalist production. Eric Hobsbawm considers the expansive economic order in the latter half of the twentieth century as a transformation in social relations and, indeed, as a cultural revolution. This change broke the “threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures” (Hobsbawm 1994: 334). Since social textures weave together “not only the actual relations between human beings and their forms of organization but also the general models of such relations and the expected pattern of people’s behavior towards each other” (ibid. 1994: 334), their breakdown results in what Hobsbawm describes as “traumatic insecurity” (ibid. 1994: 334). Cut loose from these social fabrics and enlisted in the market place as labour power, the individual’s body becomes, in David Harvey’s terms, an “accumulation strategy” in the deepest sense (Harvey 2000). In other words, the body is weaned from its nurturing ground in tradition, community, family, moral reciprocity and respect, interpersonal attachment, and affective structure. Floating in the current of labour migration, it is further disengaged from specific place and time to ‘freely’ enter into the orbit of capital. Yet being inserted into the circuit of production, the labouring body requires much retooling or retraining to become the appendage of the profit machine. Hence all the shocking, pounding, and drilling under the rubric of normality and success, to ensure “the production of variability, fluidity, and flexibility of labour powers able to respond to those rapid revolutions in production processes so typical of capitalist development” (Harvey 2000: 103).

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Durian Durian depicts how a female, artistically disciplined body becomes a productive vehicle, an embodiment of a twisted work ethic, and an instance of professional and economic success. Under the imperative of survival and money making, the narrative shows how traumatic shocks can be shielded off, repressed, and routinised in the context of sex labour. The film begins with a dislocating migration of labouring bodies, driven by transnational capital, from a marginal, ‘underdeveloped’ city in mainland China to the global metropolis of Hong Kong. In a voiceover, Xiaoyan compares the bay in Hong Kong with the Mudan River in her hometown. Overlapping the two rivers and collapsing them into an almost identical body of water, the film’s opening montages suggest the boundary-crossing fluidity of capital and its substitute – labour power as flowing commodity. No longer embedded in a particular place, town, or province, the body has become abstract labour, emptied out of its original local and traditional content, becoming a fluid particle for buying and selling. Abstract labour dissolves human value into the universal exchange value of commodity. In going south to seek success, young women do not have the skill and know-how to be an appropriate labour power. The bare bodies thus become the only commodity that girls like Xiaoyan possess and are able to sell. Like money, sex is also disengaged from any emotional connections, ritual, cultural differences and practices to become a sale item. The convergence of sex, money, and commodity in a wholesale abstract labour flow is dramatised until it takes on the sense of a tabooed trauma. In comparison with the film genre bent on displaying sex, crime and psychic perversion, the film is banal in its sex depiction. Traumatic pains thus come less from any debased sexuality than from the instantaneous, overnight transformation of the female, artistic body to a faceless sex labourer. The urgency to ‘produce’ is most poignant in a scene in which prostitutes get together in their rare day off to chat about their business. The girls start the conversation by looking at the glamorous calendar Xiaoyan has just purchased, admiring the scenery and landmarks of Hong Kong. Too busily occupied with moneymaking, these girls can only contemplate the pictures instead of visiting the well-known places. Then the conversation turns to how much each makes in their business. Some complain about the stinginess of Hong Kong customers, while Xiaoyan seems to be the one who does most business and receives more customers. The other two less fortunate girls attribute her success to her youth and beauty, recalling that younger girls in their local city in mainland China possess a similar edge. The quiet, matter-of-fact, tone of these girls gives the impression that all of this is inevitable and necessary, the way it was always supposed to be. It drives home a shocking point: they are talking about business and nothing else. Business, even the sex business, is business pure and simple, and can only be assessed in terms of money and selling points, such as beauty and

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youth. Completely disengaging from themselves as full human beings, they talk as if referring to somebody else, about somebody else’s body as the vehicle of moneymaking. The film depicts Xiaoyan’s productive action as machine-like operation, exacting, unsentimental, tough. She seems to display a ‘work ethic’ that is stoic and uncompromising. While waiting for a call to service a customer in a hotel, she frequently stops in the middle of a fast food meal, hits the street and marches through the dangerous traffic, getting down to business on arrival. Having provided sex as if it were fast food, she is back at her unfinished meal and dispatches it quickly so that she is ready to be called away to another customer. The jerky camera follows her steadfast footsteps and strides in close-ups as if she were driven by a firm resolve and compelled by an overwhelming necessity. Before she is about to leave Hong Kong, she serves thirty eight customers in a day and sleeps afterwards from day to night and night to day  – an episode that, in her blackhumour remark, enters the Guinness record and certainly makes the best record in the last six months in Hong Kong. Yet, before you know it, the phone rings and she is immediately on her way to another customer. The sheer “professionalism” and “efficiency” with which she approaches the job, the manufactured smiles she puts on, her persistent pursuit of tips and pennies, and her utter indifference to pain, suffering, and shame turn her into an extremely ‘productive’ body.

4 Trauma and Recovery: Socialist Nostalgia? If the hidden trauma is muffled by the necessity of making money and productivity, homecoming, in the second part of the film’s narrative, gives Xiaoyan room to reflect and decide, and hence for the manifestation of that trauma. In the dusty and semi-industrialised town of Mudangjiang, Xiaoyan becomes the envy of her family, friends and community. The discrepancy between sex trade in Hong Kong and her resounding ‘success’ in the eyes of the townspeople is jarring and fraught with irony. The ceremonious fanfare and celebration, the banquet, wining and dining, and endless acclaims showered on her can barely conceal Xiaoyan’s inability to return to the fold of family and community. Indeed, there is no longer any communal fold to return to. The whole town, quite metaphoric of China in rapid commercialisation, is plunged into the frenzy of business activity and worshipping everything from the West  – from lipsticks, TV programs and channels to fashions and the make-it-quick success like Xiaoyan. Young people are looking south and will jump on the first opportunity to make money elsewhere. There is no longer any basis for the community to stay put and for people to be together.

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The film depicts trauma at home as that of the steady erosion of the communal fabric and interpersonal attachment, but this trauma is derived from its hidden link with the shameful but never voiced trauma of Xiaoyan as a sex slave in Hong Kong. With two traumas mingling and colliding, Xiaoyan is going through a series of breakups and estrangement. She can hardly talk to her parents. At the divorce office, when asked to think carefully about this momentous decision, she replies that the decision has long been made. Communication and connection with her friends and family are wearing thin. In a class reunion, her former classmates hold her up as the most successful among them. Admiring her as their role model, they are at a loss over what to do with their lives at home, feeling homeless at home. While satirising and dismantling the already discredited ideology of socialism when they perform as local pop singers and entertainers, they have no way out except reminiscing about their innocent past. Reminiscing about the past is a poignant way of simultaneously concealing and revealing traumatic shocks. Xiaoyan’s perceived success only convinces her former classmates that their real home is somewhere else  – in the south, in the booming town of Shenzhen or in capitalist Hong Kong. On a New Year’s Day, when they return to the dance studio in their old school, the friends look in from the sealed window at the bare interior of the room. The remaining benches, mats, and furnishings conjure up the memory of disciplinary, artistic training, the naughty pleasure and pains of school days and childhood. These throwbacks are suffused with a sense of connection, attachment, and fun. The episode begins with a darkened room, but as the classmates look in and let their memory spin away, we see their resurrected images in the dance mirror. They are dancing with artistic discipline and grace in a class session. Accompanied by a lively music, the image lifts the young people temporally from the depressive uncertainty of the present. Memory touched with fantasy recurs a few times in the film, in Hong Kong slums where Xiaoyan takes a day off to exercise her dancer’s limbs in the sun, and in the end when the camera focuses on children playing on a basketball court, as if recalling those impoverished but innocent, happy days of the socialist past. As trauma survivor, Xiaoyan is depicted with excruciating poignancy. Throughout the film, she appears to be keeping a stoic front, keeping a stiff upper lip in her sex service with customers. In her interaction with her family and friends, she still remains expressionless and emotionless. Her inscrutable face entails at least two meanings. One is the performance-oriented mask suited for sex work and the other is the repressive mask concealing the traumatic pain and unspeakable anguish that must have come with being a superb operative of Hong Kong’s sex chains. And no one will believe her if she reveals her real experience as a prostitute. In homecoming, the film’s many frontal close-ups of her face

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always show a psyche straining to hide something unabsorbed and unspeakable. However, all her failures to connect, to return to the community, and to start a business as everyone expects, are giving the hidden trauma away. The ending of the film crystallises trauma, repression, and memory into a poignant drama in its own right. The central issue Xiaoyan confronts and tries to evade is the irresistible desire of local dancing girls to go south and to “be like her.” Her niece had this plan long before she meets Xiaoyan in a welcome-back banquet– to the dismay of the latter. Xiaoyan intends to dissuade her niece from that plan, but cannot find a proper way to begin. She receives a durian and a letter from A Fen, a girl she has befriended in Hong Kong’s back alleys. A Fen’s family of illegal immigrants was sent back to Shenzhen, yet, A Fen feels at home in her native town. Her gift to Xiaoyan, the durian, is a symbol of friendship, intimacy and homecoming. Xiaoyan tries to get her friends and family to have a taste of this exotic fruit, but its bad smell for the uninitiated puts them off. At this conjuncture, she is edging toward a decision to settle back in her hometown and take up traditional opera. She goes to the new dance studio where young girls are training and looks for her niece, obviously in the hope of dissuading her. But her niece has left for Shenzhen without warning a minute ago. The camera first cuts to the niece, looking out the train window on the receding bare and desolate landscape, confident and proud for taking the initiative to depart. The soundtrack plays the song about Red Army soldiers longing for Chairman Mao during the darkest time in the Long March, collapsing revolutionary myth with new global fantasy. Quickly the camera cuts to the dancing school. In a medium to long shot, we see Xiaoyan walking out of the building, lost, anguished, and sadden. The snow is falling thick and fast on her, but she seems entirely unaware and then looks up to the sky, wondering. An unutterable melancholy weighs down on her figure in a desolate, snow-covered landscape. A small figure in the vast landscape of an extreme long shot, a recurrent motif in the film, epitomizes a social environment that is rundown, empty, and unsure of its future. The soundtrack plays melancholic music, pondering, and sobbing almost, accompanying the loss and bewilderment, hinting at the thought that another victim is going to plunge into the unspeakable world of money and sex. This melancholic strain continues into the next scenario in which Xiaoyan eats the durian alone, which smells bad and is edible only to eaters who know its great taste. This act signals further withdrawal and estrangement through psychic investment in a single object. In the next episode, all Xiaoyan’s classmates are taking the train to leave for somewhere. Crushed by sadness and loss, Xiaoyan can barely utter parting words. The film has the images of the receding train and figures blurred and washed out as if by tears of uncertainty.

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The film’s ending suddenly lifts up from the accumulated melancholy to a high pitch performance filled with energy, art and hope. Melancholy is overcome by Xiaoyan’s decision to go back to her original role as traditional opera dancer. In a colourful costume and setting, she dances in brilliant and sweeping gestures in public to entertain her viewers on a Chinese New Year’s day. The switch from a productive sex business operative to the Goddess of Buddha is striking and abrupt. Overcoming trauma via some traditional route is unmistakable. The mask is down and she reveals her true feelings and intention. She sings: The Goddesses lifts her veil and reveals her countenance. Two benevolent children at her sides. Her willow branch sprinkles thousand saintly drops. As I sprinkle these petals on the ground. My vision is filled with light and benevolence. I ride on the clouds, On the rainbow, To the Heavens.

The road back to the artistic and communal tradition is open for recovery from the trauma of production and sex labour. Xiaoyan is enacting the beauty, grace and art of some alternative life-form as she dances as Goddess on stage. In the last image, reversion to tradition consists in uncertain pondering and reflection on the socialist past. In it, children are playing in the stark schoolyard. Through this whole series of images and scenarios building up toward this meditation, Fruit Chan gestures towards the possibilities for understanding and working through traumas of migration and globalisation.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor (1997) Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Benjamin, Walter (1969) Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books). Caruth, Cathy (ed.) (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Dai, Jinhua (1993) 㓃枵◝ Dianyinlilunyupipingshouce 䟄㈀䚕幉₝㔈幓㓚␛ (Handbook to film theory and criticism) (Beijing: Science and Technology Document Press). Foucault, Michel (1994) Power, Vol. III, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press). Harvey, David (2000) Spaces of Hope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Herman, Judith (1992) Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books). Hobsbawm, Eric (1994) The Age of Extremes (New York: Vintage Books). Marx, Karl (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy I (New York: Vintage).

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Neighmond, Patricia (2003) ‘Post Traumatic Stress Prevention’ in All Things Considered, National Public Radio, April 25.

Tânia Ganito

Evocations of the Unspeakable: Trauma, Silence and Mourning in Contemporary Chinese Art In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ Walter Benjamin argued that “every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Benjamin 1968: 255). In contexts such as contemporary China, visual arts have become deeply engaged in retrieving these concealed past images in order to fill the void caused by traumatic experiences. They have thereby been intervening, through a work of “imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch 1997: 22), in the process of evoking personal and collective records that, although unable of being recreated, continue to bear on the present (ibid.: 22). Electing silence and absence as their main focus, visual languages became important agents in the cultural production of memory (Saltzman 2006: 6), focusing on alternative narratives that lie beneath the dominant discourse and its historical representations. Contemporary art draws our attention towards what is apparently missing and reflects upon what seemed irrecoverable, allowing memory traces to resonate by outlining the importance of the interaction between private and public senses of the past. Overall, this realizes the need to intervene in a “culture of silence, a culture, more broadly, of historical amnesia” (ibid.: 45), in order to capture mnemonic fragments that would otherwise remain perhaps unspoken. Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958) falls within the scope of Chinese contemporary artists reflecting upon the lethargic, fragmented and blurred contemporaneity and its intimate yet tense relationship with times past, namely with the Maoist legacy. His works reveal a profound concern with shadows, spectral presences, corporeal absences, subtle projections of light and echoes of silence, recognizing them as crucial and structural elements in the pursuit of questions of cultural trauma and collective loss. The images depicted in several series of his works engage with these forms as a means to address the pervasiveness of traumatic events and brutal past experiences in the present. As such, his works result in a peculiar logic, defined by Lisa Saltzman as a “logic of spectrality” (ibid.: 53), given how, through a specific engagement with the aforementioned forms, the artworks mark “precisely what cannot be represented, yet making it, somehow, legible” (ibid.: 53).

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Focusing on the intersection of trauma, silence and mourning, I examine here the significant role of art as a symbolic space used to evoke and shape unspeakable records related to traumatic experiences that still pervade the individual and collective imaginary in contemporary China. Zhang Xiaogang’s artworks quietly unfold these “hidden deposits” (Winter 2010: 3) or “blind spots” (Brink 2000: 37) that have been shunned by official narratives. These “strange traces” (Smelser 2004: 33) were strategically placed between processes of remembering and forgetting, leading to a state of induced latency or simulated amnesia, but, in spite of all, resisted both political pressures and the passage of time. Therefore, I will argue that in contexts where traumatic traces of the past are strategically stored in a state of induced latency, giving way to discursive absences, silence simultaneously becomes an alternative mechanism through which concealed memories and experiences of loss are recalled and re-envisioned. Through analysis of some of the artworks comprising Zhang Xiaogang’s 2009 solo exhibition The Records, I also intend to demonstrate the testimonial role of art and its relevance in guiding the shape of collective memory.

1 Retracing the Past Zhang Xiaogang experienced the first decades of the Chinese socialist project, having witnessed and felt the regime’s surveilling, punitive intrusion into the intimate sphere of personal and family affairs. As one of the Chinese contemporary artists evoking the recent past through a continuous and complex memorial work, and promoting an interaction between those events and present experiences, Zhang Xiaogang became widely known, both in China and abroad, for his series of paintings entitled Bloodline – The Big Family, a series created between 1994 and 2005 and inspired by a set of photographs of the 1960s and 1970s that he found in an old family album. Those family photographs unsettled him in such a way that he has henceforth dedicated many of his works to exploring what triggered the reenactment of those emotions, to the understanding of emotional memories and the way they resonate into the present. In the form of private and shadowy landscapes, this series of figurative oil paintings depicts revolutionary subjects and their inner tensions. These works strive to reveal emotional states of pain, sadness, identity rupture and massive loss, caused by the impact that the Cultural Revolution had upon interpersonal relationships, leading to a deep redefinition of the traditional concepts of self, family and community. In China, the family had hitherto constituted an important context for the development of notions of body and self. Indeed, family was considered the key

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institution, providing all the main tools of socialization. Children were taught to define themselves as members of the family and to recognize that their actions would eventually affect all the other family members. Even though the bodies did not exactly belong to individuals themselves, as they were nurtured and educated to serve family obligations inspired by Confucian ethics and to comply with its rigid and complex hierarchical relations, there was a very strong sense of belonging, continuity and identity that, somehow, preserved a certain sense of embodied harmony. The figurative paintings making up the Bloodline series, as well as more recent series such as Amnesia and Memory, In and Out, Landscapes and Green Wall, explore the state of distress and displacement caused by the severing of the ties that linked family members and friends. The works furthermore reflect on the loss of a certain sense of belonging and identity in the name of loyalty to a political leader and a blurred collective under the yoke of a dystopian regime. In an attempt to retrieve traces of memory concerning a time and space rendered opaque by public and private silences, the bodies of the Bloodline series appear linked by a very thin red line – as in Frida Khalo’s My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (1936) –, a bloodline that runs between family members as a way of rescuing a certain dignity and moral sense and also as a symbol of an umbilical connection that extends far beyond biology, although severely weakened by the emotional distance promoted by Mao Zedong’s regime. Although Zhang Xiaogang may have intentionally created a strong resemblance between these figures in order to suggest familial ties, their rather crystallised, beautified, almost sanctified portrayal – emphasised by their smooth and pristine facial skin – can be, in fact, understood as a mechanism to mourn those who were directly or indirectly affected by the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. This also works as a strategy to embody the loss of belonging to a family or community in favour of a loyalty to an opaque collective, that is to say, as an attempt to unpack the unspoken (Vinistzki-Seroussi and Teeger 2010), an effort to capture the shadowy presence of what has been silenced or forcibly removed from the contemporary landscapes (Kuhn and McAllister 2006). The artworks presented in the 2009 solo exhibition at the Pace Beijing Gallery resumed and further deepened this subtle yet provocative theme. Inaugurated just a few days before the official commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, The Records, an exhibition comprising Zhang Xiaogang’s artworks from 2008 and 2009, also revisited this period of China’s recent history, although exploring it in a rather different tone. The wish to evoke and give shape to the unspeakable records that have endured in the individual and collective imagination, as well as to reinforce the texture of cultural memory, and the need to mourn those who were physically and psychologically affected by decades of political, social and cultural turmoil, inev-

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itably led to a dramatic shift from the artist’s earlier works, not only through the incorporation of other techniques such as sculpture and mixed media artworks, but also of new materials such as stainless steel plates and cement. The title of the exhibition, The Records, is inspired on the Han Dynasty classical text Shi Ji, The Historical Records or Records of the Historian, which is believed to have been compiled by the court historian Sima Qian (145–c.85 BC) and deemed as the first official history of China, a document that profoundly shaped “the way the Chinese have conceived of their past – and thus of themselves” (Ebrey 1999: 67). By using all the documents recording Chinese traditions and legends then stored in the imperial archives, Sima Qian completed his father’s (Sima Tan) attempt to write China’s first comprehensive history from the legendary Yellow Emperor up to c. 90 B.C. (Perkins 2000: 465). Patricia Ebrey’s description of this document vividly illustrates the impact the classic had on the construction of cultural and historical memory and in shaping a strong sense of identity: The resulting monumental work in 130 chapters presents the past from several perspectives: a chronological narrative of political events; topical accounts of key institutions; and biographies of important individuals: The political narrative begins with the Yellow Lord and continues through the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties, down to Wudi of Sima Qian’s day. Chronological charts with genealogical data and information on government posts come next, followed by topical treatises on matters of interest to the government, such as state rituals, the calendar, the construction of waterworks, and government finance. Thirty chapters are devoted to the ruling houses (…). These are supplemented by seventy chapters on other important individuals, including not only great officials and generals, but also personalities not associated with the government, the famous and the infamous – philosophers, poets, merchants, magicians, rebels, and assassins. Even non-Han peoples along the frontier were described in narrative accounts (Ebrey 1999: 67).

The influence of this classic on Zhang Xiaogang’s exhibition lies in the fact that it stresses the importance of raising awareness to the past and remembering the people that lived in it, given its relevance to understanding current times and to dealing with present needs. Nevertheless, if victories and heroic people have been memorialised in historical records, contemporary narratives and archives have, however, a further responsibility – that of filling the discursive gaps existing in the interstices of public narratives. Filling them with memory fragments silenced by history itself in order to allow alternative visions and private versions of past episodes to be inscribed in the contemporary annals. Outlining more complete images of the past, enriched by private memories and personal testimonies, can emerge as a strategy to ensure that emotional as well as factual memories of the past are properly recorded for the young and the next generations to come. Notebook, one of the sculptures in this exhibition, sets out to value the importance of autobiographic accounts given how they mark “an intersection of per-

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sonal and societal histories” (Misztal 2003: 79) (figure 1). By publicly presenting two excerpts from a diary, this piece establishes a profound intersection between private records and the inscription of past traumas in the prevailing collective memory, taking on the role of a public statement and consequently reframing public memory: Where are we? Are we living in the past, the present or the future? Are we living in a constant accumulation starting from scratch? On quite a few occasions I thought I almost came up with the answers – on quite a few occasions I struggled to wake up from dreams of the past and scrambled to touch the reality of the present, but only reached sheets, pillow shams and lamps bought from IKEA. What we can see on different TV channels are only different faces playing the same role (Zhang 2009: 74).

Figure 1: Zhang Xiaogang, Notebook (2009). Bronze, 25 x 200 x 135 cm. Courtesy Pace Beijing Gallery, Beijing.

2 Unveiling and Appeasing Wandering Memories The employment of new materials in this exhibition, such as the stainless steel plates, opened up new possibilities for approaching questions of memory and provided new understandings on the way contemporary art may, in fact, play an important role in both the production and transmission of collective remem-

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brance, as well as converting into a site for both individual and collective catharsis. Upon visiting the exhibition, and at first glance, I immediately thought the paintings on the stainless steel plates were mostly variations of Zhang Xiaogang’s earlier oil paintings included in the series In and Out, Landscapes and Green Wall, artworks that mainly explored the question of space and its relevance in the process of anchoring personal and group recollections (Halbwachs 1992: 172). By retrieving traces of landscapes that take us back to the early decades of Chinese socialism – in particular to those obscure and violent periods such as the Cultural Revolution – but whose symbolic references extend down to the present day, the works of these three series actually present a critical view of the architecture of power and surveillance that silenced personal voices and that regulated the realm of intimacy. The new works, such as Green Wall – Bedroom, Green Wall – Dining Room and Green Wall  – Corner, however, strongly seek to reinstate boundaries between public and private realms, emphasising the significant meaning of the domestic environment – usually understood as the sphere where subjectivity can be freely explored and exposed  – and stressing the limited connections to the outside world or even the desire for no connectivity at all. Some paintings depict plugs that are not properly fitted. In other cases, they are simply disconnected from the socket or, if properly connected, the space is mostly devoid of people or the subjects depicted are totally immersed in a state of inner consciousness. Only when starting to photograph the exhibition works did I realize that the stainless steel plates actually played a specific role. The difficulty in taking good pictures stemmed from how I was able to see my reflection and the reflection of the camera on some parts of the plates left empty by the artist. No matter which position my body took up in the exhibiting room, my image would inevitably appear and inscribe itself onto the blank spaces in the artworks. This first disturbed me as I felt I was being intrusive. However, I then realised that for Chinese viewers of the exhibition this feeling could actually be exactly the opposite. They might feel summoned to fill in those blank spaces with their own versions of the past, with their own private memories of suffering, hardship, fear, guilt, persecution, torture and death. The fact that viewers were able to see their own images reflected on the mirrored plates proves that the works can be more than a mere representation of personal experiences. In opening up a space for inscribing and sharing similar or different images of the past and by alluding to their resonance in the present, these works foster connections between a plurality of experiences and enable the reconstruction or re-imagination of a whole body of remembrance. Furthermore, the use of mirrored surfaces may also enable an exploration of liminality as a relevant aspect in the context of visual media, since it reinforces the deep linkage

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between life and afterlife, promoting a continuity of bonds between the living and those who perished during the “10 bad years of great disaster” (Pye 1986: 597). Aleida Assmann’s argument inspired by Sebald’s conviction in Austerlitz that the time zones of past and present are deeply interconnected brought to my attention the possibility that through these mirrored plates “the living and the dead can pass back and forth between them as they see fit” (Sebald quoted by Assmann 2010: 16), revealing that the artists and the viewers are both implicated in a “process of recovering and reclaiming lost memories, of fathoming the traumatic impact of the past” (Assmann 2010: 16). Indeed, one of the most important Chinese beliefs regarding this subject is how those who suffered a violent or sudden death may become wandering spirits and, as a result, persist among the living in a rather disruptive manner. Thus, such symbolic screens as these mirrored plates, on the one hand, allow for the imprint of these ghostly presences on alternative narratives of the past and subsequently recording and projecting a myriad of “textures of cultural and personal memory” (Sturken 1991: 119). On the other hand, the stainless steel plates may as well act as exorcising and healing surfaces, serving both the living and the dead in the process of facing the wounds and shadows emerging from traumatic experience. Zhang Xiaogang’s stainless steel plate paintings also bring to our attention the importance of the body as both a “reservoir of memories and a mechanism of generating them” (Misztal 2003: 79). The body, taking the form of a present as well as of an absent body, appears as the carrier of a set of deep and strong emotions concerning the individual and collective past, the public and private domains, as well as the narratives and counter-narratives related to contemporary China. These especially concern the 1960s and 1970s, a dark period in Chinese history when collective memory and cultural history were required to be forgotten within the scope of the successive campaigns that came to be known as the Cultural Revolution. The process and effects this traumatic experience had on individual and collective identities, as well as the tensions caused by the politics of silence established afterwards, pervade Zhang Xiaogang’s artworks. In a rather subtle way, the images of bodies mainly evoke silences, records registered in the interstices of the official memory, defined by Foucault as discursive gaps and absences, “empty spaces that have been masked by omission or concealed in a false and misleading plenitude” (Foucault 1977: 135). As such, the painted bodies can act as foundations for inscribing the “conspiracies of silence” (Zerubavel 2006: 2) generated during those decades, even while emphasizing their persistence into present times. Some of the stainless steel plate paintings foster a relationship between traumatic memories, visuality and the body, evoking embodied experiences

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and establishing what Jill Bennett defined as “interconnections between bodies and events” (Bennett 2005a: 71). In works such as Green Wall – Bathroom, Green Wall – Baby Room, Green Wall – Corner, Green Wall – Living Room and Untitled, the body is depicted as a ‘silencescape’, a landscape expressing the quiet unfolding of the unspeakable, assigning a corporeal shape to an emotional domain restrained by a particular regime of memory and power built upon a politics of silence. Emotional memories related to pain, loss and grief, as well as a profound sense of displacement, are evoked through the depiction of certain body parts and organs, such as the face, the legs, the hand and the heart. These emerge as channels linking the past, present and future, as though some essential media, through which collective memory is inscribed, shared and negotiated. In the aforementioned paintings, unspeakable memories become embodied entities (Kaplan 2005: 70), manifest as fragments, as surviving remnants of memory, denouncing a confusing state of rupture and disconnection. On the one hand, interpreting these corporeal fragments as features capable of activating the work of remembrance and forgetting, as well as the re-enactment of images of the past, emphasizes Paul Connerton’s claim that memory is, in fact, “sedimented, or amassed, in the body” (Connerton 1989: 72). On the other hand, more than reflecting the state of fragmentation that defines the postmodern condition, these destabilizing images can also be defined as imprints of trauma that “incite affect” (Bennett 2005b: 31), since they do not simply deal “with a past event or with the objects of memory but with the present experience of memory” (Bennett 2005a: 24). Drawing on Jill Bennett’s considerations about the relationship between visuality, memory and affect, I would argue that these images reveal the possibility of evoking and conveying non-representational memories through visual images, as the images recorded in Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings relate to processes extending beyond the capacity of representation (Bennett 2005b: 28). In sharp contrast with the portrayals of ideal revolutionary subjects depicted in propaganda materials, the bodily images presented in this exhibition reveal a post-revolutionary state of identity and cultural instability caused by conflicting memories. In addition, these images unearth the unfinished work of mourning past catastrophes. They recall the deeply emotional and open wounds along with the immense void that emerged in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, highlighting the tension between the need to remember, the desire to forget and the efforts to deal with the unspeakable. Moreover, the fact that the body is depicted as a site where memories of traumatic experiences resonate and materialize, gaining “an almost palpable presence” (Christen 2007: 56), suggests that the body can be seen as a piece of evidence capable of interfering with the transmission of testimony (Griffiths 2009: 5).

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In Green Wall  – Bathroom, a young man’s body is immersed in a bathtub. Except from the man’s face that resists vanishing, all his other body parts have disappeared into the quiet yet disturbingly dark waters. Despite a fatal bodily mutilation – symbolically represented by a huge heart, stabbed with a knife and inserted into a wooden box  – the face bears witness to traumatic experiences, unveiling memories that otherwise seemed to have apparently been flooded. Green Wall – Baby Room depicts a cold and almost empty room whose walls are also adorned with a thick green band, a colour related to the materialization of power in both public and private realms (figure 2). In the middle of a cradle rests a baby’s head, painted red. The extreme isolation and the atmosphere of sorrow emanating from the room, however, contrast with the realistic and wide open eyes of the red baby. A first reading of this painting would suggest that the baby’s face is searching for itself in the viewers passing by, appealing for social dialogue and a renewed sense of community. Yet, a more careful look allows us to discern how the baby’s eyes actually seem to be simultaneously sharing and contemplating unspeakable traces of the past, depictions of suffering and loss that became silently embodied and ingeniously stored in corporeal archives. Contrasting with the visual absence of the other body parts, the baby’s eyes reflect in a rather intricate way the process of imagenation that results from the confrontation, re-appropriation and re-deployment of those personal and collective archival, blurred images of trauma, “showing evidence of what seemed to be vanished from sight” (Deriu 2007: 200), thereby activating the work of remembrance. Even though the eyes are not facing directly the viewers, they interpellate them, recounting personal stories and simultaneously retrieving and reframing their memories. The baby’s eyes reveal the “haunting absences” (Wong 2007: 173) of missing bodies and retrieve those absent images of experiences that cannot be spoken as they are felt (Bennett 2005a: 35), acting as a “mute witness” (Radstone and Hodgkin 2005: 24).

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Figure 2: Zhang Xiaogang, Green Wall – Baby Room (2009). Detail. Stainless steel plate, silk screen print, oil paint, silver marker, 150 x 200 cm. Courtesy Pace Beijing Gallery, Beijing.

Questions concerning the relationship between the disappeared body and the dialectics of memory are returned to in other works on display in this exhibition, especially in Green Wall – Corner, Green Wall – Living Room and Untitled. Featuring a young man’s red face apparently disconnected from the physical world and totally immersed in personal and collective traces of the past (figure 3), a pair of legs in green trousers sitting on a sofa, and a man’s red face – partially covered by a hand – somehow resembling Mao Zedong, these works reflect the tension between the private and the political worlds that emerged during the Cultural Revolution. Although referring to a rather different context, Matthias Christen’s analysis of memory and body in post-Soviet society provides an interesting perspective on the persistence of this tension in contemporary China, when proposing that “the emblem of the old political power is indelibly fixed on the subject’s skin, and thus continues to interfere with his private life. Even though it has passed quite some time ago, this power continues to assert its hold on the living” (Christen 2007: 54).

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Figure 3: Zhang Xiaogang, Green Wall – Corner (2009). Stainless steel plate, silk screen print, oil paint, silver marker, 150 x 200 cm. Courtesy Pace Beijing Gallery, Beijing.

3 Shaping Silent Records Zhang Xiaogang’s exhibition The Records also resorts to other techniques and materials through which the artist creates what may be defined as a site of memory. The displayed artworks suggest that the time has arrived for the burdens of the past to be perceived as an essential piece of cultural memory and an important component of national history. Using cement, a hard material in dark grey tones, the artist designed and sculptured an installation composed of a memorial wall and a graveyard, evoking the painful and shadowy memories of certain past events that took place in the first decades of Chinese Socialism (figure 4). The use of this solid material may be interpreted as an effort to add additional layers to the already existing narratives of past traumatic experiences such as the Cultural Revolution. Simultaneously, it also seems to function as a material statement of mnemonic resistance and of cultural and identity continuity, a statement that counters the liquid condition of late modern times, an era characterized by mobility, instability and instantaneity, and that Zygmunt Bauman described as

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an “epoch of disengagement, elusiveness, facile escape and hopeless chase” (Bauman 2000: 120). The cement cemetery in The Records, as a materialization of memorial consciousness and an anchor for the condensation, expression and engraving of personal and collective memories, can be interpreted in light of Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de memóire (1989). Focusing on memory’s vocation to record (ibid.: 12), Nora claims that sites of memory are both “simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at once immediately available in concrete sensual experience and susceptible to the most abstract elaboration” (ibid.: 18). The author also reveals their fundamental purpose of blocking “the work of forgetting” (ibid.: 18) and of immortalizing death through the materialization of the immaterial. The cemetery created by Zhang Xiaogang can thus be seen as a place where memories converge and enter into dialogue, converting into a multivocal repertoire of what people remember, but also of what is at risk of being forgotten. Drawing on Elisabethada Wright’s analysis of cemeteries as cultural texts and “physical storehouses of memory” (2003: 28) that “remind us of what and how we overlook memories” and “make evident what is so difficult to see, the unseeable, what is not there” (ibid.: 35), I would suggest Zhang Xiaogang’s cement cemetery brings to light traces of the past that were blurred but not completely buried by history, evincing not just the lives lost during the traumatic period of the Cultural Revolution but especially accentuating the subsistence of times past in the present. By exploring the memorial presence of painful and dark pasts, the artist unveils memory as an active process situated in the present (Bal 1999) and configures through these artworks the great persistence, influence and intrusiveness of traumatic events in reshaping the lives of individuals and communities. Furthermore, beyond rendering invisibility visible, Zhang Xiaogang’s memorial artworks also allow private silenced records of grief and mourning to be whispered and shared. As mentioned above, the installation is composed of two main sections: a memorial wall and several cement blocks resembling horizontal tombstones, on top of which several objects are displayed. Unlike what usually occurs in sites of remembrance erected to prevent the work of forgetting, in Zhang Xiaogang’s memorial there are no engraved names, no birth and death dates, no explicit information about any specific location or place of origin, no commemorative flowers, no memorial photographs, and no grave markers with epitaphs. Instead, there are mostly cold, sombre and practically empty grey surfaces. However, the void and anonymity that seem to enfold it are nothing but specious since the grey colour is strategically applied not only to emphasize the importance of remembering the dead but also to recall the lives that, although spared, were extremely

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affected and influenced by those traumatic experiences during and in the aftermath of the catastrophic event.

Figure 4: Zhang Xiaogang, The Record No.1–59 (2009). Cement. Dimensions variable. Courtesy Pace Beijing Gallery, Beijing.

Both the absence of names and of all other common memorial artefacts, as well as the somehow unfinished appearance of the artworks, reinforce, on the one hand, the wide-reaching dimension of the tragic experience and the impossibility of knowing the exact number of casualties. On the other hand, the lack of individual names denounces how the event resulted in a cultural trauma impacting deeply on the configuration of cultural identity. In the words of Jeffrey Alexander, cultural trauma “occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (2004: 1). Neil Smelser also relates the concepts of trauma, identity and community, defining cultural trauma as the

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memory accepted and publicly given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event or situation which is a) laden with negative effect, b) represented as indelible, and c) regarded as threatening a society’s existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions (Smelser 2004: 44).

This means that collective identities not only rely on past victories and triumphs but are also constructed and readjusted through the impact of violent experience and through the period of latency and silence that is established afterwards as a common response to traumatic events. However, the process of reframing personal and collective identities may prove highly disruptive where the state of muteness is extended to subsequent generations, when part of the memories within a given culture are not shared and consequently become  – at least partially  – excluded from official narratives of the past, as well as from interpretations of present realities. This inherited silence prompts a rupture in terms of collective identity and collective consciousness, leading to a state of “uncanny strangeness” (Kristeva 1994). I adopt Kristeva’s notion of strangeness here not in relation to people who live in a society which is not their own, but as an emotional condition, a state of alienation induced by a process of repression (ibid.: 184) that pervades both the self and the collective within the society they have always belonged to. The artist’s memorial evokes that state of muteness and the consequent strangeness that emerged from within while simultaneously fostering the idea of mourning as a means of “working though” traumatic experiences. While offering a particular shape to private and collective understandings of the past, and forging a linkage – through the use of an apparently homogenous material – between past and present, the memorial can be grasped under Foucault’s notion of heterotopia or “other space”, since it is a site “unlike ordinary cultural spaces” (Foucault 1998: 233) to which, however, individuals feel deeply connected with (ibid.: 233). The memorial wall, as well as the cement tombstones, appear as cultural and imaginative places dedicated to collective mourning and emotional and historical involvement. Both constructions reveal themselves as “counter-sites”, as places that are “outside of all places” and “absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about” (ibid.: 231), enclosing features of both past and present and suggesting a “sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place” (ibid: 234).

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4 Evoking Nostalgia’s Other Side The “memorial signs” (Boym 2001: 49) displayed in the two sections of the installation call for an understanding of the relationship between nostalgia and the transfiguration of traumatic experiences. On top of each tombstone and also fixed on the memorial wall, we may discern several replicas of daily life objects that function as visual tokens to the past, especially to the period of Mao Zedong’s regime. Among the wide range of memorial objects there is a camera, a notebook, a lantern, a desk lamp, a small electric stove, a radio cassette recording with a tape of folk music, a soldier’s cap, a loudspeaker, a lock, an ashtray with four cigarette butts, a little radio, a glove, a bicycle saddle, a pen, an outlet, a water bottle, a teacup, a vacuum flask, a small book with a big and shining star on the front cover, a watch, a magnifying glass, a tape recorder, a spoon, a can, an electric heater, a bottle of ink, a bag with the word ‘youth’ written on it, a telephone, a book of Mao Zedong quotes (figure 5). As objects of common usage in previous decades, these artefacts emerge as the embodiment of personal as well as of cultural memory. Like “testimonial objects” (Hirsch and Spitzer 2006), they encapsulate the past and sustain a sort of evidence of what happened. Because they carry “powerful personal, historical, cultural, and symbolic meanings” they can be perceived as “material remnants”, carrying memory traces from the past, embodying the process of its transmission

Figure 5: Zhang Xiaogang, The Record No.42 (2009). Cement, silver marker, 25.5x70x50cm. Courtesy Pace Beijing Gallery, Beijing

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and enabling a reflection about the “past itself and about how the past comes down to us in the present” (ibid.: 355). By recalling certain traces of a traumatic period, these memorial objects activate mnemonic relations between the survivors and the dead. At the same time, these material representations are “infused with the capacity to endure time” (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 8) and to provide emotional connections related not only to loss, grief and mourning, but also linked up to issues of guilt and forgiveness. The artist’s decision to craft cement replicas instead of using real objects is quite significant, since Cultural Revolution memorabilia can easily be found in contemporary Chinese markets and everyday life objects from previous decades are still available in flea markets. The use of artificial and distorted objects raises two different questions worthy of some concluding remarks. First, they foster a reflection on the intersection of trauma, memory and authenticity. Since these objects evoke certain personal and collective understandings of the past, a search for emotional authenticity rather than a quest for material authenticity seems to prevail. This is highlighted by the fact that many of the displayed objects present distortions. This exercise suggests that distortion is a central element in the process of identity and memory reconfigurations following collective trauma. Simultaneously, however, these distortions represent the unveiling of silenced and emotional memories, drawing attention to the traces of the past that, for a long time, were excluded from the dominant narratives but still circulated in the realm of private memories. In addition, they also highlight the “significant shift of emphasis” from texts to traces “as media of cultural memory” (Assmann 2011: 196), since “their silent, indirect testimonies contain a higher degree of truth and authenticity” (ibid.: 197). Secondly, the cement objects reveal another concern that goes far beyond the current fashion for nostalgia and thus reaching out to a deeper debate on memory and identity. Following the end of the Cultural Revolution, post-Mao economic reforms and the subsequent policies of national modernization, commercialization and urbanization, China went through a double process of identity crisis and root-seeking, embracing nostalgia as a mechanism for both restoring identity consciousness and recreating cultural memory. According to Nimrod Baranovitch, the “conflict that many Chinese intellectuals faced in the pos-revolutionary era, being deprived of history and tradition after the Cultural Revolution, cynical about communism and the whole revolutionary ethos, and suddenly flooded with Western culture” (2003: 21) triggered the yearning to reconnect with the past and the imaginative path of articulating feelings of loss and longing. Nevertheless, along with this contained excitement of recalling “memories of yesterday” (Dai 2000: 207), nostalgia erupted as a fashion with the purpose of providing a “construction and embellishment of remembrance to assuage the present” (ibid.:

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207), eventually turning into a commodified process of prefabrication (Boym 2001: 351) that does not help in dealing either with the past, the present or the future. Zhang Xiaogang’s artworks, however, suggest an alternative nostalgic concern with time and experience that combines both past and present, both dream and everyday landscapes, while also revealing “an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory” (Boym 2001: xiv) based on public and private mnemonic elements. These artworks seem to evoke a tendency that Svetlana Boym termed “reflective nostalgia” (2001). While profoundly related with the individual as well as with cultural memory, the cement objects and the paintings on stainless steel plates intensely focus “not on the recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on history and passage of time” (ibid.: 49). The Records takes silence as the trigger element to engage in a process of re-envisioning early traumas and at the same time proposes that “longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgement or critical reflection” (ibid.: 49–50). This leads us to conclude that the artworks displayed in the exhibition can be defined as artefacts of critical memory since they incorporate “nostalgia’s complicating ‘other side’” (Spitzer 1999: 96), and open up a space for dialogue and negotiation between the negative and the positive aspects of the past, the conventionalized versions of past events and the alternative narratives of those same collective experiences. In evoking the unspeakable and manifesting a sense of ambivalence and inconclusiveness, Zhang Xiaogang’s Records spurs the emergence of new possibilities in the process of retracing the past and its inscription into the present.

Works Cited Alexander, Jeffrey (2004) ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey Alexander et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1–30. Assmann, Aleida (2010) ‘Impact and Resonance: A culturalist approach to the emotional deep structure of memory’, in http://www.liv.ac.uk/soclas/conferences/Theorizing/ Kurzfassungok2.pdf (accessed 8 November 2011). Assmann, Aleida (2011) Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Bal, Mieke (1999) ‘Introduction’, in Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal et al. (Hanover: University Press of New England), vii–xvii. Baranovitch, Nimrod (2003) China’s New Voices – popular music, ethnicity, gender, and politics 1978–1997 (California: University of California Press). Bauman, Zigmunt (2000) Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press).

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Benjamin, Walter (1968) ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books), 253–264. Bennett, Jill (2005a) Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Bennett, Jill (2005b) ‘The aesthetics of sense-memory: theorising trauma through the visual arts’, in Regimes of Memory, eds. Susannah Radstone and Katherine Hodgkin (London: Routledge), 27–39. Boym, Svetlana (2001) The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books). Brink, Andre (2000) ‘Stories of History: Re-imagining the Past in Post-Apartheid Narrative’, in Negotiating the Past: The making of Memory in South Africa, eds. Sarah Nuttal and Carli Coetzee (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 29–42. Christen, Mathias (2007) ‘Symbolic Bodies, Real Pain: Post-Soviet History, Boris Mikhailov and the Impasse of Documentary Photography’, in The Image and The Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, eds. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (London: Wallflower Press), 52–66. Connerton, Paul (1989) How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Dai, Jinhua (2000) ‘Imagined Nostalgia’, in Postmodernism & China, Boundary 2 Book, ed. Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang (Durham: Duke University Press), 205–221. Deriu, Davide (2007) ‘Picturing Ruinscapes: The Aerial Photograph as Image of Historical Trauma’, in The Image and The Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, eds. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (London: Wallflower Press), 189–203. Ebrey, Patricia (1999) ‘The Creation of the Bureaucratic Empire: The Qin and Han Dinasties’, in Cambridge Illustrated History: China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 60–85. Foucault, Michel (1977) ‘What is an Author?’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. and introd. Donald Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press), 113–138. Foucault, Michel (1998) ‘Of Other Spaces’, in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge), 229–236. Griffiths, Jennifer (2009) ‘Introduction’, in Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press), 1–13. Hallam, Elizabeth and Jenny Hockey (2001) ‘Introduction: Remembering as Cultural Process’, in Death, Memory and Material Culture, eds. Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey (Oxford: Berg), 1–22. Halbwachs, Maurice (1992) On Collective Memory, ed., trans. and introd. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Hirsch, Marianne (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Hirsch, Marianne and Spitzer, Leo (2006) ‘Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission’, Poetics Today, 27: 2, 353–383. http://www.columbia.edu/~mh2349/ papers/testimonail%20objects.pdf (accessed 10 September 2011). Kaplan, Ann E. (2005) Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press). Kristeva, Julia (1994 [1991]) Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press). Kuhn, Annette and Kirsten McAllister (2006) Locating Memory: Photographic Acts (Oxford: Berghahn Books).

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Misztal, Barbara (2003) ‘The remembering process’, in Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead: Open University Press), 75–98. Nora, Pierre (1989) ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations, 26, 7–24. Pye, Lucien (1986) ‘Reassessing the Cultural Revolution’, The China Quarterly, 108, 597–612. Radstone, Susannah and Katherine Hodgkin (2003) ‘Introduction’, in Regimes of Memory, eds. Susannah Radstone and Katherine Hodgkin (London: Routledge), 1–22. Roceur, Paul (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Saltzman, Lisa (2006) Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Smelser, Neil (2004) ‘Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma’, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey Alexander et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press), 31–59. Spitzer, Leo (1999) ‘Back Through the Future: Nostalgic Memory and Critical Memory in a Refuge from Nazism’, in Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal et al. (Hanover: University Press of New England), 87–104. Sturken, Marita (1991) ‘The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial’, Representations, 35, Special Issue: Monumental Histories, 118–142. http://beauty.gmu. edu/AVT307/AVT307001/Marita%20Sturken%20The%20Wall,%20The%20Screen%20 and%20The%20Image.pdf (accessed 9 September 2011). Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered and Teeger Chana (2010) ‘Unpacking the Unspoken: Silence in Collective Memory’, Social Forces, 88.3, 1103–1122. Winter, Jay (2010) ‘Thinking about silence’, in Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, ed. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 3–31. Wong, Edlie L. (2007) ‘Haunting Absences: Witnessing Loss in Doris Salcedo’s Atrabilarios and Beyond’, in The Image and The Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, ed. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (London: Wallflower Press), 173–188. Wright, Elizabethada (2003) ‘Reading the Cemetery, “Lieu de Mémoire par Excellance”’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 33.2, 27–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3886096 (accessed 9 September 2011). Zerubavel, Eviatar (2006) The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Zhang, Xiaogang (2009) The Records – Zhang Xiaogang (Beijing: Pace Beijing).

Elisabetta Colla

“Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought”: Ritualistic Artefacts and Mourning Mediation in Imperial China 1 Introduction This paper aims to provide an overview of the function of certain artefacts in helping to fill the emptiness created by loss. One of the positive outcomes of mourning is that of creativity, which can be expressed in many ways and in many fields, and, in analysing mingqi 㢝⣷, we inevitably try to answer the question on how mourning can trigger creativity. While Freud avoided probing this in his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1915), Maria Cristina Mélgar underlines the theme in her essay ‘Mourning and Creativity’, while centring her discourse on the “ways and mechanisms with which men create so as to be able to retain what death makes him lose” (Fiorini, Bokanowski and Lewkowicz 2007: 110). Both symbolic loss and literal death lead to the anxiety of survival that tries to compensate loss through many kinds of rituals and objects that are somehow the physical expression of “animism, magic and the omnipotence of thought” (Freud 1995: 75), which is the name of one of the conferences held by Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century and originally published in the psychoanalytical journal Imago in 1912 (Freud 1995: ix). It was, together with three other essays,¹ later published in one of his masterpieces, Totem and Taboo. Mourning may be considered both as a private and/or a collective process that redirects emotional ties from loss to a symbol, a sign or a symbolic space. Such space can be identified both as the museum and the burial chamber where ritualistic artefacts symbolically replace the denial of loss, specifically, the loss of a beloved person and the loss of the past respectively. In this sense, art and aesthetics have their own cathartic dimensions and help survival insofar as they constitute ways of overcoming the grievance and melancholia provoked by loss. In this sense, Chinese mingqi 㢝⣷ or ‘bright objects’ might prove a valuable example of this cathartic dimension. They belong to the funeral kit and

1 ‘The Horror of Incest,’ ‘Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence,’ and ‘The Return of Totemism in Childhood’. The edition used for this paper is the The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIII, edited in 1995 and first published in 1955 (see bibliography).

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are located in burial chambers, which are the loci and the key ritual spaces for mourning mediation and performance. Ever since their appearance, these objects have been considered part of a well-established ceremonial and mortuary practice aimed to recreate the worldly space of the deceased in the burial cluster in order to grant him/her a happy and smooth passage to the afterlife and netherworld. To define mingqi 㢝⣷, which are today considered valuable artefacts, is a quite complex matter, in fact some researchers believe they were non prestige goods, however, when we focus on Xunzi’s² own definition, we reach a different conclusion. In fact ‘spirit objects’ were classified as distinct from the daily use objects belonging to the tomb paraphernalia³. The definition of mingqi 㢝⣷ as ‘spirit objects’ allows us to think about “animism” defined by Freud in his masterpiece Totem and Taboo and other works (1995: 75) as “the doctrine of souls and […] spiritual beings in general” (ibid.: 75), which is intimately linked to “animatism” or the “living character of what appears to us to be inanimate objects” (ibid.: 75). In line with the Chinese belief in a strict link between nature and human beings and between the universe and earthly life, Freud stated in the same chapter that this world is populated by “spiritual beings, both benevolent and malignant, and these spirit and demons are regarded as causes of natural phenomena and […] also inanimate objects in the world are animated by them” (ibid.: 78). Mourning helps shift grief to a symbolic order as a way to overcome it, and, in this sense and in our specific case, one can find many objects that are created for the purpose of potentially keeping the deceased in the netherworld, but probably also as a means for combating the emotional arousal linked to the loss. The survivor looks for a magical recovering from grief through a substitute for what has been lost. Death creates in human beings a profound psychological trauma that can find its catharsis through mourning. The pain caused by the loss of a very close person can be overcome by funerary rituality. Panic attacks due to death arise when there is a defect in the defensive and symbolic representation of death, and a general collapse of defensive functioning. Mourning, in this sense, plays a very key role in solving the repulse of death, through placing the focus on

2 Xunzi 嗏⷟ (312–230 B.C.) was a Confucian philosopher who traditionally belonged to the so called “hundred schools of thought” and was concerned about human nature and involved in this debate with Mencius. He basically believed man’s nature was evil therefore needing to be educated through rituals. 3 According to the Yili 券䰽 (Book of Rites – attributed to Confucius), among burial objects one can find: mingqi 㢝⣷ and shengqi 䞮⣷. The latter included daily use utensils (yongqi 䞷 ⣷), musical instruments for entertainment (yanyue qi 䑤㲑⣷), weapons and armour (yiqi ㈈ ⣷), and intimate objects belonging to the deceased, normally a shi ⭺ (literate) (Loewe and Shaughnessy 1999: 728).

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the ritual, on the ‘performative domain’. Art, even if it lacks a satisfactory definition, is the domain where mourning rituals find their material expression, sometimes becoming the sole witnesses of how mourning was performed by different cultures in the past. As Julia Kristeva suggests, “the loss can be replaced by language” (1987: 55) and art is but a “language”⁴ through which the object lost is translated and the pain of loss is created. Jessican Evans and Stuart Hall have remarked that “there is a sense that the privileging of the linguistic model in the study of representation has led to the assumption that visual artefacts are fundamentally the same, and function in just the same way, as any other cultural text” (Evans and Hall 1997: 2). In this sense, visual culture is a system with a specific language. Within the Chinese cultural context, the Chinese language – being an ideographic form of expression – perfectly merges this concept into its system. In fact, the Chinese language is a medium that translates the world into both images and text, merging the world of images with the world of script. The function of art as language is openly stated for example in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593),⁵ where concepts were organized alphabetically as in a dictionary and the symbolic meaning described verbally. In fact, as stressed by Moshe Barash, Ripa’s masterpiece Iconologia was “based on […] the philosophy of a parallelism between literature and art, which at the time was known as ut pictura poesis” where Ripa “pleads for a more precise concept, in which painting and imaginary are both defined as language” (Barash 1997: 4). The museum is the place where the visible turns to be legible and where the “text” found in the burial chamber – for instance – is translated into a “language” understandable to most of the people.⁶

4 For Julia Kristeva, language is not simply language, but is intended as the outcome of the Verneinung (denégation) of loss (1997: 236). 5 Iconologia overo Descrittione Dell’imagini Universali cavate dall’Antichità et da altri luoghi. 6 Donald Preziosi has noted how “in attending to the artifice of museological stagecraft […], the ambivalent semiotic character of this extraordinary object may be made more palpable. […] The aim of art historical exegesis is to render legible what is visible – and this has always included those form of reading where illegibility and enigma were articulated as versions of the legible” (Preziosi 2006: 54).

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2 The Ritualistic Space: The Mediation of Mourning in Museums and Burial Chambers In this paragraph the “ritualistic space” should be understood as both the burial chamber and the museum. The former is the special sacred place created to worship ancestors and the latter is a modern Western reinvented space for cultural pilgrimage where the past is mourned. In the last few years, we have witnessed a marginalization of traditional forms of ritualistic spaces and the development of new forms of ritual spaces,⁷ nevertheless some kind of museums, being lieux de memoire, may still be considered as a cemetery of the past, where mourning is performed by silently worshiping the reconstructed memory of our past in a supra-religious process. Museums are mainly a Western invention and only recently became relatively commonplace in Eastern Asia, more specifically in imperial China. They came into being around the eighteenth century through collections of artefacts testifying to the material life of the past, mostly labelled under the category “ethnography”. This is the case of Sir Hans Sloane who founded the British Museum in 1753 and where Chinese culture was displayed as a collection of “luxury artefacts, mediated through the international market and categorized by British individual and institutional collectors [and considered] a satisfactory synecdoche” (Clunas 1997: 421). What it does and does not represent of the past of a specific culture is but a cultural construction, mainly filtered by colonial spectacles even if China is mostly considered as a “not-colonialized”⁸ country (Barlow 1997: 374). When looking at the history of Western museums, they developed as a new concept for the classification of objects within archaeology meant to display the history of Western civilization. The museum was seen as an organized depository of things that during the nineteenth century became a symbol of national identification and a display of power and where almost all the emerging nation-states embodied their reappropriation of heritage through becoming symbolic of their respective identities down through centuries. At that time, the emerging discursive jus-

7 The latter are characterized by a pilgrimage and new forms of localized rituality in public spaces. 8 Macau was actually considered as a Portuguese colony in China from 1849 up to 1999 when, after the handover, it became the Special Administrative Region of Macau. Nevertheless, the Portuguese settlement began much earlier during the second half of the XVI century. The question of Portuguese sovereignty over Macau is not particularly linear; in fact Christina Cheng defines it as “an anomaly in colonization and decolonization” processes characterized due to what she calls the “Janus complex of having two controlling forces” (Cheng 1999: 9, 26).

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tification was the triumph of the industrial capitalism of the so-called developed countries, heirs to the development of science and technology. During the latenineteenth century, it became increasingly centered on the imperialist discourse where the “employment of anthropology within the exhibitionary complex which proved most central to its ideological functioning” (Bennett 2009: 77) played a major role. On the other hand, the museum became a ritualistic space especially if we consider the expression that turned art into das Göttliche (lit. the divine)⁹ where the Hegelian conception of art symbolizes the “crisis that simply marks the transition from a religious to a secular tradition” (Rutter 2010: 123). In museums, art is abstracted from real context¹⁰ and displayed, and museums are still conceived as depositories of imagined traditions and identified as places where we mourn our glorious past. The viewer, merged in a sacred silence, is guided step by step by an imagined reconstruction of the past following the path drawn by the curator exhibit by exhibit. Where the real “dissolved in the general form of the symbolic” (Baudrillard 1988: 123) lies under small spotlights driving the attentions of the viewer to their uniqueness as authentic symbols of the imagined past. In the end, the museum is the place where “every masterpiece, implicitly or openly, tells of a victory over the blind force of destiny” (Malraux 1956: 628) and where the visitor is asked to mourn the past according to his subjective translation of the curator’s reading of the history conveyed through selecting a specific path in displaying the artefacts chosen in representation. There is not much difference between a museum and a burial chamber. Indeed, as Theodor W. Adorno put it, “museums are [in fact] like the family sepulchers of works of art” (1983: 175) and are therefore considered as places of symbolic death because of the impossibility of the artefacts returning to their original spaces, contrary to what Malraux seems to have suggested with his idea of a postmodern “museum without walls”. In China, since the time of the Warring States, the burial chamber was mostly considered a mark that distinguished the aristocracy from the people. During the same period, ritual vessels (in bronze or mingqi 㢝⣷)¹¹ were never seen apart from in burial chambers. The construction of a burial chamber was a ritual in itself that had to follow several rules (e.g. of geomancy) as well as specific timings. The burial chambers were microcosms that

9 “Die Kunst habe vor Allem das Göttliche zum Mittelpunkte ihrer Darstellungen zu machen” [Art proves a central point in its representation of the divine] (Hegel 1842: 424). 10 André Malraux, for instance, was one of the forerunners of the “museums without walls” as representing “the highest idea of man” (1956: 882). 11 These burial goods were normally inventoried on bamboo strips.

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loyally respected the earthly life of the deceased and portrayed it in the afterlife. There are several materials and sources that testify to an ongoing rituality in the past, during and after the burial, mostly including time sacrifices¹² subsequent to funerals. Death and funerary rituals in Chinese culture were mostly an opportunity to display filial piety as can be seen in the following section in an analysis of a passage of the so-called Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei 摠䞅㬔), one of the most outstanding novels of the Ming period.¹³ The burial chamber and all the objects connected to Chinese mourning during imperial times were expressions of the power of thought, animism and magic.

3 Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought: the mingqi 㢝⣷ “Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought” (1995: 75–99) expands the application of psychoanalysis to the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and the study of religion, and is considered a classic of early psychoanalysis. Mingqi 㢝⣷, which literally means ‘bright object’, ‘visible object’, also known as guiqi 淋⣷ or ‘objects for ghosts’, is a collective name used to identify a set of funerary goods with different uses¹⁴ that followed the corpse into the burial chamber. This custom began most probably from the fifth century B.C. onwards, and became popular from the late Western Zhou period up to the end of Imperial China. Normally, they had reduced scale features, but with one exception: the Mausoleum of the first Chinese emperor Qin Shihuangdi, whose burial goods measured on a scale slightly superior to real items. Mingqi 㢝⣷ were earthenware objects normally produced in large quantities by molds and, as far as human figures are concerned, appeared quite lively, and in fact seemed ‘frozen’ in their final movement. They did not only represent living beings (humans, animals, etc.), fantastic creatures (tomb guardians, fantastic animals etc.), but also buildings, farms, wells,

12 According to Robert Bagley: “though sacrifices at funerals and burials of retainers persisted to much later times, however, the recurrent slaughter of anonymous victims in rituals subsequent to funerals seems to have ended with the Anyang dynasty” (Loewe and Shaughnessy 1999: 194). 13 On this topic cf. also Standaert (2008). 14 According to Wu Hong, mingqi 㢝⣷ became popular during the Warring States period and were used for several centuries as independent objects within the complex of Chinese tomb furnishing, such as, for example, the objects of daily use or sacrificial vessels that already belonged to the dead person in lifetime (Loewe and Shaughnessy 1999: 728).

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watchtowers. Usually, they reproduced the actual objects in a faithful manner and thus became valuable sources for studying the material culture of imperial China, especially for ancient times when the real objects and buildings have since been literally wiped out by the corrosion of time. The aim of these miniature objects was to reproduce the environment where the deceased was used to living in order to comfort him/her and therefore ensure that his/her soul would not linger in the afterlife or would not return to the living world, which was an even worse possibility. The more the burial chamber was similar to his actual environment during his lifespan, the more the deceased felt satisfied and therefore did not leave his realm in the tomb. The architectural styles of burial chambers were mostly decorated and full of symbolic elements both belonging to the Daoist and Confucian traditions spread all over vaulted ceilings and bricked walls. Some more elaborate tombs could also present lowrelief carvings depicting various scenes of life and death. Mingqi 㢝⣷ were actually only a part of the huge funerary agenda that ritually prepared the deceased for the afterlife that also involved living people performing offerings to the deceased in line with Confucian values that obliged family members to worship the deceased according to their respective prescribed social roles, based on the five relations and in harmony with the cosmos. In the Chinese tradition, to ensure the well-being of the dead was a means to grant them continuation in the afterlife world and harmony in the world of the living. Mingqi 㢝⣷, as a sample of the living world in the afterlife, of course depict many elements of the society and culture of the various dynasties (e.g. in the Tang dynasty). During the period of expansion – for example – we find many facets of foreign influences arriving along the Silk Road, evident in the use of colours and which clearly reflect a cosmopolitan environment. In the burial chamber three main kinds of objects are normally found: spirit articles (mingqi 㢝⣷), daily use objects and temple ritual vessels. These funerary objects marked three important moments in the life of the deceased, i.e. ceremonies, entertainment and warfare, symbolizing these three central moments in his/ her afterlife. Their function was to connect the deceased with his/her past lifetime, and in the case of human figurines,¹⁵ some historians argue that they gradually replaced the real human beings that normally accompanied the deceased in his/her journey to the afterlife (Loewe and Shaughnessy 1999: 734). This marks the passage from the real to the simulacra, characterized by the belief that mingqi 㢝⣷, among other objects, could perfectly replace real objects, humans or animals. The funerary rituals of course varied according to family status and

15 Normally identified with the term renxunⅉ㸘 (companion in death).

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origin and it is therefore very difficult to describe ‘the Chinese funerary rituals’. However, we may attempt to describe the main features that characterized the mourning procession of wealthy people during imperial China.

Figure 1: Procession. Painted earthenware, China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 16th century, Museum of the Macau Scientific and Cultural Centre, Lisbon, inv. 1538 to 1557.

The sample of mingqi 㢝⣷ analysed in this paper is exhibited at the Museum of the Macau Scientific and Cultural Centre in Lisbon,¹⁶ and one of the few samples

16 There are at least two museums in the world entirely dedicated to Macau’s history and culture, one in Macau and one in Lisbon. The Macau Museum in China was constructed on the hillside of the Monte Fort and inaugurated in 1998. Meanwhile the Macau Museum in Lisbon was installed in the old Burney complex, soon becoming a charity centre known as “Vila Sant’Antonio” created by Count Burney in order to support Portuguese Tramway Company workers in Lisbon and managed by Franciscans. As a charity organization, it was inaugurated in the presence of the Portuguese royal family in 1875. During the First and Second World Wars, the Red Cross was installed there, as well as the “Portuguese Legion”. After the left-leaning military coup, known as “The Carnation Revolution”, took place in 1974 it became the institute responsible for supporting “Portuguese returnees” from the newly independent colonies (Instituto de Apoio aos Retornados do Ultramar). The Macau Museum in Lisbon belongs to the

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available in Portugal. This image depicts an example of mortuary work of ritual significance: the funerary procession can be understood as a dual representation of mourning and mourning mediation itself. Most of the Macau Museum collection was purchased from António Sapage,¹⁷ even though the origin of these mingqi 㢝⣷ is not really clear and, as far as we know it, bought in Macau shortly before the handover and dated as belonging to the Ming dynasty by the scientific committee in charge of the installation of the permanent exhibition. On the funerary agenda, the mourning procession is one of the most important moments of all the funerary rituals as an important public and social event. On the one hand, the peace of the deceased was granted at any time of the ritual, especially en route to the burial chamber, and, on the other, the procession itself represented part of the mourning formalization, performing a function of collective catharsis and reconciliation. The number of ritual staff members varies from eight, sixteenth to thirty-two,¹⁸ etc., but in this specific case we count nineteen figures, constituted by two rows of nine figures plus one placed in the centre, which most probably is the person in charge of the procession and we may correspondingly speculate that some individuals are missing. From these artefacts we can but imagine the real scene and, thanks to the support of literature, reconstruct its original form. In fact, as we read in the famous Ming novel, the Jin Ping Mei 摠䞅㬔: On his lofty wooden platform, at the eighth hour of the morning, the leader of the funeral procession, with eight blows of his mallet, gave the signal for the sixty-four bearers to lift the coffin. And the endless procession began its deliberate progress. In front went a long row of inscribed banners and honorific pennants and innumerable figures and objects of gilt and silvered papier-mâché which were destined to be burned. Before the coffin strode a troop of bonzes […] who provided the funeral music. Immediately behind the coffin came the palanquins of Moon Lady and Hsi Men’s other wives, and then followed, in an endless train, the rest of the participants. Young Chen, who during the whole period of mourning

Macau Scientific and Cultural Centre (which is tutored by the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education), established to encourage the study of the PortugueseChinese relations and the history of Macau. The Museum of Macau in Lisbon was opened in 1999. The two museums are in effect very similar but while the Museum in Macau focuses much more on Macau’s history from the 16th up to the 20th centuries, paying much more attention to cultural aspects and giving some space to Portuguese culture; the Lisbon museum is far more focused on the history of the discoveries before suddenly jumping to the handover (summarised in one single painting portraying the last Portuguese governor in Macau). The museum moreover dedicates one entire floor to Chinese art from the Neolithic period up to the Qing dynasty. 17 António Sapage was a Macanese collector of a vast sample of Chinese art from the Neolithic up to Qing times. 18 Multiples of eight, which is a symbolic number for fortune, luck and prosperity.

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had to represent the son of the house, walked beside the coffin with one hand resting on the bier, as though he were helping to carry it as befitted a pious son. […] The streets through which the procession passed were thronged with spectators. […] On turning out of the East Street the procession came to a standstill at a signal from the leader. High Priest Wu of the Jade Emperor’s Temple, wearing over his dark red priestly robe a mantle of crane’s feathers of five colours, and on his head the nine-storied thunder-and-lightening tiara, and on his feet double-soled shoes of cinnabar red with upturned toes, while in his hand he held his ivory writing tablets, was carried aloft in a chair, on the shoulders of four powerful bearers, swaying high above the heads of the other participants. […] at a sign from Hsi Men he suddenly unrolled the full-length portrait of the deceased which had been painted by Master Han. And then, while the person representing the son, […] had to kneel before the portrait […] he delivered, in a loud, sonorous voice, which was plainly heard by the near relatives in his more immediate neighbourhood, a long encomium to the memory of the deceased (Xiaoxiaosheng 1985: 227).

As expressed in this novel, everyone in the procession takes on a specific role with the Confucian rituals expressed by filial piety¹⁹ present and mixed with other religious figures holding ceremonial umbrellas (now lost  – but evident owing to the gestures of the figures and arm position), musical instruments, flags and banners, etc. Music²⁰ also played a very important role and was deployed to serve a variety of purposes within the Confucian order imposed on society. The procession might reflect the official rank of ancestral processions including troupes numbering over a thousand, complete with flags and banners, drums and music. Normally, these funerary processions were characterized by roadside offerings. These offerings were considered another part of the send-off, probably with an altar. These booths were specially erected along the route to the grave taken by the bier procession, so that friends and relatives could pay respects to the dead person and the bereaved family. This practice had been excoriated by Sima Guang but, despite centuries of Confucian opposition, was still common in late Qing Shandong and other regions (Sutton 2007).

19 Filial piety, or xiao ⷬ, is considered one of the most important Confucian virtues since it is the respect showed by the young to the old. In mourning rituals, it has been considered fundamental because, as Kutcher points out, “to be filial was to serve parents according to the rites when they are alive, bury them according to the rites when they die, and sacrifice to them according to the rights thereafter” (Kutcher 1999: I-II). Upholding the xiao ⷬ was not seen as a private fact but a matter of governance, where the Confucian government encouraged proper mourning in order to assure loyalty to the ruler. This was very clear when the protagonist was obliged to kneel in front of the portrait of the deceased. 20 Music is an organic constituent of Chinese culture and tradition since very ancient times. The ritual orchestra made use of various instruments.

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The excerpt quoted above from the Jin Ping Mei 摠䞅㬔, besides being a valuable historical source for reconstructing and re-imagining the funerary procession on display in the Macau Museum in Lisbon, is above all an important sample for analysing the dynamics between narrative tropes and mourning. The “flexible theory on mourning” proposed by Nouri Gana in his most recent work (2011) is but an example of how the poetics of mourning becomes a catachresis of melancholia and trauma. This process is not universal, apart from some of its most ancestral aspects (like the Freudian Todestrieb, lit. “death drive” or also “instinct of death”), and is understood properly if culturally contextualized. Mingqi 㢝⣷ are means of “signifying the loss” (Gana 2011) and contained in tactics that are geopolitically distributed and culturally determined.

Conclusion If Freud seems somehow outdated in discussing primitive races vs. “modern man” (read positivist man), what is still valid in his work is his reliance on the “omnipotence of thought” (1995: 85) in overcoming the panic provoked by death and the importance of mourning. Freud in quoting Hume says: “[h]e [Hume] has already justified the animation of the inanimate in his Natural History of Religions, where he [Hume] said: ‘There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted and of which they are intimately conscious’” (Freud 1995: 77). Mingqi 㢝⣷ is an expression of this universal tendency of mankind and becomes a ritual that helps to overcome the panic provoked by death no matter if it results from a psychological process led by the “omnipotence of thought” (1995: 85), superstition or beliefs. This ethico-political significance of loss (Gana 2011) may find its expression through various “languages”, and the arts, alongside literature, are just one disclosure of mourning mediation.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. (1983) Prisms (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press). Allan, Derek (2009) Art and the Human Adventure: Andreé Malraux’s Theory of Art (Amsterdam: Rodopi). Barasch, Moshe (1997) The Language of Art: Studies in Interpretation (New York: New York University Press). Barlow, Tani E. (1997) ‘Colonialism’s Career in Postwar China Studies’, in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani E. Barlow (Durham: Duke University Press), 373–412.

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Baudrillard, Jean (1988) ‘Simulacra and simulation’, in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 164–188. Bennett, Tony (2009) The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge). Brook, Timothy (1989) ‘Funerary Ritual and the Building of Lineages in Late Imperial China’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 49.2, 465–499. Cheng, Christina Miu Bing (1999) Macau. A Cultural Janus (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University). Clunas, Craig (1997) ‘Orientals Antiques/Far Eastern Art’, in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani E. Barlow (Durham: Duke University Press), 413–447. Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian (2003) Loss. The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press). Evans, Jessica and Stuart Hall (1997) ‘What is visual culture?’, in Visual Culture: The Reader, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage), 1–7. Fiorini, Leticia Glocer, Thierry Bokanowski, and Sergio Lewkowicz (2007) On Freud’s “Mourning and melancholia” (London: International Psychoanalytical Association). Freud, Sigmund (1995) ‘Totem and taboo and other works’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XIII (London: Hogarth Press), 1–225. Gana, Nouri (2011) Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning (Lewisburg [Pa.]: Bucknell University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and H. G. Hotho (1842) Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik [Lecture on Aesthetics] (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot). Kristeva, Julia (1987) Soleil noir: dépression et mélancolie (Paris: Gallimard). Ku Chieh-Kang (1981) ‘Funeral Processions’, in Chinese Civilization and Society: A Source Book, ed. Patricia Buckley Ebrey (New York: Free Press), 289–293. Kutcher, Norman Alan (1999) Mourning in Late Imperial China: Filial Piety and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press). Loewe, Michael and Edward L. Shaughnessy (1999) The Cambridge History of Ancient China: from the origins of civilization to 221 B.C (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press). Malraux, Andreé (1956) Les voix du silence (Paris: La Galerie de la Pléiade). Preziosi, Donald (2006) ‘Art History and Museology: Rendering the Visible Legible’ in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub), 50–63. Ripa, Cesare (1593) Iconologia, overo, Descrittione dell’imagini vniversali cavate dall’antichita et da altri lvoghi (Rome: Gli heredi di Gio Gigliotti). Rutter, Benjamin (2010) Hegel on the Modern Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Standaert, Nicholas (2008) The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press). Sutton, Donald (2007) ‘Death Rites and Chinese Culture’, Modern China, 33.1, 125–153. Xiaoxiaosheng and F. Clement, C. Egerton (1995) The Golden Lotus: a translation, from the Chinese original, of the novel Chin Pʻing Mei (London: Kegan Paul International).

III. (Re-)mediated affects and performances

Frederik Tygstrup

Affective Spaces In a series of draft chapters from Robert Musil’s unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities, the protagonist embarks, in his diaries, on a dissertation on emotions, pondering questions pertaining to the genesis of emotions, the nature of emotions, and the (puzzling) location of emotions. At some point, he makes the following note: The German language says: I feel anger inside, and it says: I am in anger. […] This difference between the linguistic images of our feelings […] is mirrored by our present scientific ideas […]. There are psychological doctrines to whom the ‘I’ is an indisputable core piece, detectable in every movement of the spirit and particularly in the emotion, and there are doctrines that completely disregard the ‘I’ and only consider the relations between expressions and describe them as appearances in a field of forces, their origin notwithstanding (Musil 1978: 1160).

This distinction, pretty evident and then quite subtle at the same time, suggested by Musil in the 1930s, provides a good starting point for a preliminary mapping of the extensive interest in the understanding of emotions that can be witnessed in a wide array of academic disciplines today. Current research in the history of emotions, phenomenology of emotions and psychology of emotions seems to comply most with the first alternative set forth by Musil, i.e. regarding emotions as something that exist within an ‘I’ and thus appears as a predicate to a subject. This approach also has the merit of conforming to the grammar of our present everyday understanding of things, positing an ‘I’ who is able to account for its worldly position in space and time as well as for the reactions this position provokes as emotions in an inner dimension of the self. On such a basis, we can study the self in different historical situations and chart different historically contextualized emotions, we can see how subjectively felt emotions taint the perception of outer stimuli, we can even start graphing the physiological markers of specific emotions, whose nature we establish simply by applying the habitual designations of how an individual reports feeling. What one risks forgetting, however, when applying this model for the different ventures of mapping emotions according to historical, pragmatic or physiological distributions, is the historical nature of the model itself. The grammar of emotions as a designation of predicates to a subject, of the model ‘NN feels XX’, is probably a predominantly modern one. “If I were a nobleman”, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister at some point longingly exclaims, and explains: a nobleman appears, according to a specific code, whereas the bourgeois simply is, by virtue

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of his individual qualities (Goethe 1979: 174f). Emotion, thus, for the aristocrat, is a matter of appearance (Schein), of codified expression, whereas for the bourgeois it is a matter of being (Sein), of inner authenticity. Goethe’s self-conscious bourgeois could have been the case in point for Arnold Hauser’s harsh historical diagnosis: Emotionalism, like individualism, is a means for the bourgeoisie to express its spiritual autonomy in relation to the aristocracy. The bourgeois, so long held in contempt, now fashions himself in the mirror of his own spiritual life and feels the more important when he contemplates with utmost seriousness his own emotions, moods and inner movements (Hauser 1953: 576).

Historicizing the grammar of emotion along these lines would thus entail an awareness of how not only emotions, but also the ways in which we attribute them and talk about them as facts of inner human life, are embedded in characteristic social and epistemic conditions and in fact constructed through a quite specific historical set of agencies and interests. Eventually, when glossing and interpreting different emotional states as something ongoing inside psychological persons, we would have to see ourselves as the heirs of the 18th century, of all the Rousseaus and the Richardsons and their insistent elaboration of a panoply of inner sentimental movements paving the way for a grammar of feelings that we have by now interiorized to a degree where they appear to be perfectly natural objects of scientific mapping and measurement. It is when embarking on this skeptical line of thought, to which the founding and synthesizing powers of the ‘I’ might not amount to more than a frail historical compromise, that Musil’s other option comes to the fore: that emotional life might in some cases be more accurately described as ‘relations between expressions’ and ‘appearances in a field of forces’. And where, consequently, the grammar is turned upside-down, no longer addressing emotional states as something that we carry within us, but rather as something in which we find ourselves passing or dwelling. This reversal seems to inform the increasing interest of late in the notion of affects and in affect studies.²¹ Although there might not be any clear-cut and consensual distinction between the notions of emotion and of affect (of which a proper conceptual history still remains to be written) other than somehow vague and intuitive semantic groupings, a preliminary differentiation might be established on the basis of the two different grammars evoked by Musil: emotions are something you have, whereas affects is something you are in. Put

21 Some prominent contemporary examples include Thrift (2008), Butler (2009), Lordon (2010), Massumi (2002), and Boutang (2007).

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differently: subjects have emotions, but affects produce subjectivity. This will not of course provide us with a workable distinction pertaining to the object-side, i.e. enabling us to point and say this is an emotion and that is an affect; we are still dealing with a somehow nebulous set of ‘states of mind’ and ‘feelings’, as was also the case initially for Musil. But what we do have with these two grammars are two distinct ways of approaching and talking about feelings: one, say, Romantic, describing feelings in terms of psychology and interiority, and another, postRomantic, describing them in terms of contexts (‘relations between expressions’) and events (‘appearances in a force-field’). It will of course ultimately depend on the object you want to study, i.e. the event of some feeling appearing in a precise set of conditions, which of the two approaches proves the better. Take an example: the opening sequence of the 2008 HBO-series Generation Kill (fig. 1), directed by David Simon, portrays a handful of young soldiers in an SUV traversing the Iraqi desert; the inside of the vehicle is noisy, the speed of their convoy high and the outlook fragmented, the men are fully harnessed for battle but do not seem to know exactly what to expect and are thus all the more ready in some general sense, yelling among themselves and on the radio, fiddling with their equipment, eating chocolate bars, trying to be on watch while also tending to internal hierarchies and jargons.

Figure 1: Generation Kill (David Simon, 2008)

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The intensity of feeling permeating the sequence is beyond question  – panic, fear, aggression, boredom would all be eligible candidates for naming it  – but then again, and that would be the central point here, not really as someone’s feeling. It seems more accurate to say that an affect prevails in the SUV traversing the blank and inscrutable desert space loaded with frail young men in full military gear. The first-person perspective and the related languages of contemplation and introspection would appear somehow inadequate because the affect is so obviously derived from the situation. Thus, analyzing affects entails a shift of focus from the psyche to the situation. And, in turn, the situation appears as a complex composition of material elements, social scripts and protocols for agency, human bodies and their different tools and prostheses, and an ensemble of individuals expressing their different volitions, imaginaries and propensities. It is by way of such a relational arrangement that the locus of a given feeling moves from the inner state of the individual to a less clearly delineated field of shared ‘atmosphere’. This does not prevent, of course, that a feeling is actually felt by someone and can be articulated as a specific state of mind. Only the way in which that particular feeling emerges, amplifies and propagates transcends the strictly individual and autonomous sphere. We are propelled, in other words, to consider the situation in what would be Sartrean terms, that is, as a negation of any individual aspiration and self-projection onto the world, and at the same time as the very possibility of such a thing as an individual aspiration. The individual is always already heteronomous and given over to the situation in which one finds oneself, but indeed also invited precisely to find oneself by way of affirming the constraints of the situation. The situation, in this rather strong sense of the notion, thus already entails an attenuation of the strict demarcation usually drawn between what would pertain to an individual and what would pertain to its surroundings, taking us from considering these somehow overly abstract entities to analyzing more concretely what Sartre calls the “internal metabolism” of the situation (Sartre 1943: 611). Given the situation as a relational ensemble, we can study the logic of affects in one of its basic forms, as the dynamic interplay of affecting and being affected. If you put a young man into a SUV in a convoy on a military mission in some sunny desert, you affect him by framing him in a specific situation characterized by the ways in which spatiality, temporality and alterity are formatted (to stick here to Sartre’s elements for analysing situations): the convoy, the mission, the crew. This framing, however, is not only an interchangeable frame for an otherwise self-identical individual; the composition of the situation also defines the individual as it prescribes the range of reactions he can mobilize. His training and socialization as a soldier, the equipment around him and attached to his body, the entire set of relations in the box in which he is enclosed invites him to act in

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particular ways, clumsily or cleverly, depending on his ability to be affected. Relational analysis of a situation invites consideration of the kind of micro-mechanics involved in the production of affect. How is a peculiar component of a situation (the soldier, or the unit, or the convoy…) affected by what happens, which affects does this component in turn produce? This almost engineer-like approach to the affective component of a situation is spelled out by Gilles Deleuze in his influential commentary on Spinoza. Affectivity here stands out as something fundamentally processual, as the signature of an event that unfolds, combining on the one hand the modification of a body (affectus) and on the other hand the way in which this modification is taken up or responded to by the receiving body (affectio). Deleuze: “Affectio refers to the state of an affected body and implies the presence of the affecting body, whereas affectus refers to a passage from one state to another, in relation to the correlative variation of the affecting bodies” (Deleuze 1981: 69). Affect, then, and ultimately the production of feeling, is inscribed in a relational network where processes of affecting on the one hand and articulation of specific affects on the other develop through an ongoing relational interaction. Such an empiricist mapping of the relational structures that underpin affectivity in turn gives us an opportunity to characterize more precisely the nature of the ‘situation’. In fact, the situation can be described according to two different perspectives: we can consider it as a diagram, i.e. as a kind of blueprint of relations charting the reciprocal relations between elements that are put together in a particular way, and we can consider it as an event, where the relations are so to speak set in motion, where the intensities produced through the relational juxtaposition of elements spark something happening. The situation is a set-up, and designed to unfold the potential invested in the set-up. Describing affects as something that pertains more to situations than to psychological persons  – as events in a force-field, to once again retain Musil’s instructive definition  – underscores the role of contingency in human matters (also a core facet to Sartre’s theorizing of the situation), contingency understood both in a pragmatic sense referring to what is nearby, and in a more logical sense referring to the relative chance of what happens to be nearby. Affects mark out the contingency of any being and invite us to understand how the production of subjectivity essentially relies on this contingency. Judith Butler succinctly spelled it out as follows: That the body invariably comes up against the outside world is a sign of the general predicament of unwilled proximity to others and to circumstances beyond one’s control. This ‘coming up against’ is one of the modalities that define the body. And yet, this obtrusive alterity against which the body finds itself can be, and often is, what animates responsive-

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ness to that world. That responsiveness may include a wide range of affects: pleasure, rage, suffering, hope, to name a few. […] Hence, precariousness as a generalized condition relies on a conception of the body as fundamentally dependent on, and conditioned by, a sustained and sustainable world; responsiveness  – and thus, ultimately, responsibility  – is located in the affective responses to a sustaining and impinging world (Butler 2009: 34).

Whereas Butler’s stress on contingency and involvement is clearly in line with the situational approach outlined above, it also adds an important dimension to the understanding of affectivity, namely the ways in which affect has to be understood as a fundamentally bodily phenomenon. Bodies are affecting and affected through the situational relations in which they are engaged. It is equally important, however, not to think about bodylines as just a slightly more materialistic version of personhood, substituting the egological ‘I’ with an enhanced, corporeal version of the autonomous subject. Butler, to be sure, stresses this reservation by remarking that the body is “fundamentally dependent on, and conditioned by, a sustained and sustainable world”, thus taking as the point of departure the presence of a body, while not positing the body as an epistemologically fundamental category. Bodylines, then, is not a metaphor of the subject, but rather a stage for the processes of subjectivization taking place. This understanding of the body is thus neither Cartesian, as opposed to the mind, nor the traditional phenomenological one, as a situated center of perception, but more akin to the idea of bodylines formulated by the late Merleau-Ponty as a dynamic point of intersection between outer and inner impulses. According to Merleau-Ponty, bodylines remains a reflective moment, the body being at the same time just another thing in the world, and the agent of a self experiencing the world: object and subject in one, and thus consequently neither properly one nor the other. Alternatively, in the clever formula coined by Terry Eagleton: “It is not quite true that I have a body, and not quite true that I am one either” (Eagleton 1993). Being in the world, for Merleau-Ponty, is essentially a negotiation of this chiasmic structure, an undulating movement to-and-fro between subjectivizing the predicaments of what is given as objective, and giving over the subjective to the objective conditions that determine and carry it. The idea of the body never comes to rest on either side, as something predominantly subjective or something predominantly objective, but remains suspended in the reciprocal reflection between these aspects, “like two mirrors facing each other, giving birth to two indefinite series of infolded images that no longer belong to either of two surfaces, as each image is just a reflection of the other, thus making the couple of mirrors more real than any of the two” (Merleau-Ponty 1965: 183). The sustained paradoxical nature of these different formulae, however tiresome, has the merit of emphasizing the processual nature of any (embodied) situation, the ongoing

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‘metabolism’, as Sartre had it, between inner and outer reality. Thus, while we cannot pin down a straightforward definition of the body, we can see bodylines as an interface involved in any human situation and an interface that constantly coordinates and processes the interaction between ‘psychic’ and ‘material’ components as they swiftly oscillate and transcend into the realms of the other. That affects are bodily, therefore, implies that we localize affect precisely at this elusive interface where internal and external reality are projected onto each other, or where affectus and affectio come together in a specific affective quality, excessively involved in the situational context to be deemed strictly subjective and overly tainted by individual receptivity to be strictly objective. The triple approach to affects as relational, as situational and as corporeal thus all point in the same direction: that affects cannot be pinned down to one specific realm or layer of reality, but seem to persist as a material/immaterial halo or sphere hovering indistinctly but none less insistently above and within any field of human agency and interaction. Affects alight and persist in the unfinished and processual, as scintillating qualities of the present with their own characteristic signature. They appear as a kind of quasi-objects, atmospheric facts, as it were, to which we must accord a being of their own as they emerge from the stratum of human reality. It is this ‘almost objective’ nature of affects that makes Brian Massumi argue for what he calls ‘the autonomy of affect,’ and it seems to be very much the same endeavor that made Raymond Williams coin the succinct (and slightly oxymoronic) notion of ‘structure of feeling’, combining the connotative vagueness of feeling with the regularity of the structural: We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships; not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought; practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting and dominating characteristics (Williams 1977: 132).

Both Massumi and Williams thus highlight the need to take the reality of the affective as an object of cultural studies, precisely because affects not only derive from, but also inform and guide cultural agency and the formation of ideas and beliefs that will eventually be socially institutionalized. The crucial question then remains, of course, how cultural analysis of the social reality of affects would proceed. Given the theoretical emphasis on the exteriority of affects developed from Musil’s second option for studying ‘appearances in a field of forces’, a lot

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of traditional approaches to individual feelings and their expression become somehow unattractive due to the limitations on the scope of analysis they imply. The somatic approach, localizing the affect in the bodily presence and the swift interactions and reversions it mediates between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between the psychological and participatory on the one hand and the social and the positional on the other, furthermore directing interest towards the dimension of the ambient, the expanse of relations that mark out specific situations and the capacities and capabilities inherent herein. In other words, towards the dimension of space. Theorizing affects in terms of exteriority, atmosphere, or ambience: as something you are ‘in’ rather than something you ‘have’, already invests the affective with spatial qualities. It is probably also no coincidence, by the way, that contemporary academic focalization on affects as an important research topic has very much been advocated by sociologists and geographers (not least following Nigel Thrift’s groundbreaking writings on the subject) working on techniques of mappings social spaces, rather than by scholars in the historical and aesthetic disciplines. The methodological challenge, thus, clearly seems to be to develop analytical tools and concepts with which we can describe affects as spatial phenomena, or perhaps better: with which we can pinpoint the spatial existence of affects. The idea of adding affects to the list of what can be mapped converges well with the prolific use of mapping techniques in the wake of what has been called the spatial turn in cultural studies. The power of maps to chart not only metric relations but, as Rem Koolhaas once put it, “the diagram of everything” (Koolhaas 2004: 20) has been intensively developed to enhance our understanding of the spatial distribution of all sorts of flows, of social relations, of power and authority, of social agency, of modes of imagination and contemplation, and much more. The expanded field of mapping practices is very much dependent on the thriving theories of space throughout recent generations, updating as it were our ideas of space to match the spatial complexity and malleability of contemporary social life. A good starting point for developing this flexible notion of space could be the distinction proposed by David Harvey (2009: 133ff) between absolute space, relative space and relational space. The two first, absolute and relative space, are quite well known, and also really the only two notions of space that are generally acknowledged and widely understood. Absolute space was invented by the Renaissance. This was the realm of Galileo’s and Kepler’s space in which planets could be conceived as bodies in motion and in positional relations to each other – space, in other words, where all things have their proper coordinates. The practical usefulness of this notion of space has remained uncontested; it became the space that rendered Newton’s mechanics and modern physics feasible as well as

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the foundations on which Kant’s critique of pure reason rests and is indeed the space within which we map the distances we experience, a homogenous, theoretically unlimited space on which we may plot every bit of matter with utmost exactitude through three coordinates (x, y, z). From Galileo to GPS, absolute space (or objective space) has set the standard of spatial positionality of everything that is and everything that takes place. The second notion, relative space, may be considered as a reversal of this idea. Here, we are no longer dealing with the space in which events take place, but rather the space – the organization of space, and the intuition of space – which is produced through the individual event. Relative space is, precisely, relative to a perspective, to the event of seeing and using space in a particular way. This idea of space goes back to more ancient understandings of space, most notably to the notion of place. Place, here, is not just something positional but is also endowed with a more qualitative side, the resonance of all the traditions, narratives and practices it has become imbued with. Furthermore, relative space also became a prominent notion in modern phenomenology, which contributed to shift the focus from our understanding of space to our perception of space and thereby highlighting the experiential relativity of space, extending always from a specific point of view and conditioned by the receptive capacities and inherent prejudices of the beholder. These two notions of space pretty much cover the ways in which we think about space and somehow intuitively conceive of space on an everyday basis and despite the fact that they are obviously very different, we have learnt to combine them freely and flexibly by locating relative space in absolute space and developing absolute space from relative space, manoeuvring freely, as it were, between the map and the territory. But these notions also take us back to the predicament of the ancient cognitive architecture of object and subject, leaving us without any choice but to consider space as either objective or as subjective, and consequently with no real options for transgressing this polarity, which represented the precise challenge should we be able to understand the atmospheric nature of affectivity. This is where Harvey’s third notion comes in very usefully: that of relational space. To Harvey, relational space is really a category for all the rest, i.e. for that which does not fit into the two first and somehow more straightforward categories, such as the spaces of memories, spaces of dreams, spaces of imagination, and so on, but which nonetheless have a very real and effective importance for our understanding of space. Memory is an interesting case in point. To be sure, one could claim the way in which memory invests space with particular qualities would indeed be an example of a relative space, tainted by a subjective perspective; but if we then add that memory is not just an individual phenomenon, but really more often exists as a collective memory that is culturally produced, inscribed and circulated, then the space of memory transcends the neat polarity

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of the subjective and the objective: more than just subjective, but also without becoming objective, and not quite objective, but without being squarely subjective. This is thus precisely the merit to the notion of relational space: it outlines a social and cultural construct, a relational distribution of things and ideas, of sensation and imagination, which mark out a very real historical space that cannot be mapped according to the traditional notions of absolute and relative space. The usefulness of the ‘relational space’ concept very much resides in its simplicity. As an analytical concept, it is directed towards an actual set of effective relations in an environment, and additionally, it specifically focuses on how this distribution of relations constitutes a spatial structure. In so doing, it draws on a very fundamental feature of spatiality, namely that everything spatial is essentially defined by relationality. This very generic definition of spatiality, going back to Leibniz and Kant, would eventually also allow us to consider both absolute space and relative space as relational spaces, i.e. pertaining to the special cases of metric relations and sensual or subjective relations, but it moreover also invites us to chart all kinds of other relational distributions as well. In particular, it would enable us to gauge relations that are not composed by the same kind of elements, such as, for instance, the metrical relations of absolute space, but also relations between, say, material elements, linguistic forms, haphazard sensations, fragments of historical views, and so forth. In fact, this is the approach to space also suggested by Henri Lefebvre, who insisted that the historical space in which people’s lives unfold should always be considered as a compound space, merging, as he systematically put it, material, symbolic and experiential components. These components do not refer to different spaces but represent different aspects involved in the formation – or, as Lefebvre (1991) has it, the production – of human space. Space, in this understanding, is essentially a relational space, and lived space always a human participation in the web of relational structures between all sorts of facets that together make up its reality. Clearly, such complex spatial assemblages can be considered in numerous different ways, corresponding to different aspects of lived, human space, and the relational structures they embrace, consequently, apprehended in different ways, momentarily highlighting some lines of the web while ignoring others, depending on attention, receptivity and the directions of agency followed at a given moment. When proposing the term affective spaces, the intention is thus not to single out another particular spatial order, but to focus in on the relational spatiality of lived human experience according to one specific aspect, that is, the question of just which affects are produced in this relational economy. Coming back to the methodological challenge of analyzing affects as ‘autonomous’, as something that pertains more to social situations than to individual states of mind, a tentative answer would therefore be to examine how affects exist

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in the composition of relational spaces. To acknowledge, in other words, that the real relational spaces in which we live, and in the formation of which we take part as agents and participants in social and material situations, have an affective dimension. If affects somehow are there, out there, before they mature as inner sentiments and feelings, it is because they are spatial, virtually present in the blueprint of relational structures in which we express and unfold ourselves as spatial beings. Our interest in affects beyond psychology, in the social life of affectivity – or in the historical formation of structures of feeling, following Raymond Williams once again – direct us towards analyzing bodily situations and the different social and material relations underpinning them. What we address here, and this is the important lesson of modern relational geographies, is the spatial being of social existence, inviting us to construe affectivity as a spatial phenomenon. To briefly sketch how such an analysis might work, I would like to evoke two recent novels by John DeLillo and J.G. Ballard, not particular to propose an interpretation of them as literary artworks but rather to show how they in fact interpret two specific historical spaces and their affective infrastructures. DeLillo’s Falling Man from 2007 is an examination of the reverberations of terror in the urban atmosphere of New York City in the aftermath of 9/11. Some of the challenges of writing this novel had already been formulated in DeLillo’s 2001 essay ‘In the Ruins of the Future’: The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. […] In its desertion of every basis for comparison, the event asserts its singularity. There is something empty in the sky. The writer tries to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space. We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations. Where we live, how we travel, what we think about when we look at our children. For many people, the event has changed the grain of the most routine moment. […] What has already happened is sufficient to affect the air around us, psychologically. We are all breathing the fumes of lower Manhattan, where traces of the dead are everywhere, in the soft breeze off the river, on rooftops and windows, in our hair and on our clothes (DeLillo 2001).

There are a number of important insights in this text, which have in turn been reworked in Falling Man. First of all, it pinpoints the atmospheric nature of the collective shock and outrage: that it “affects the air around us”. And furthermore, that this affect remains present, not just as a feeling, but through the ways in which it “change[s] the grain of the most routine moment”. The story of the novel is about a survivor from the Twin Towers who literally climbs out of the ashes and somehow by instinct heads back to his beloved ones, his wife and son. However, by the time of the catastrophe they had already long since been divorced and

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home but a faint memory; going back to this idea of normalcy, in other words, is not just going back to before the crash, but further back, before the average lifeform of a NY corporate worker, into which the catastrophe intervened, was put in place. Consequently, the novel is not about overcoming and the restoration of what was before, as in much bad 9/11-fiction, but about the reverberation of the event in three people’s lives (the father’s, the mother’s and the son’s), as they follow their own erratic – and indeed diverging – pathways. The three protagonists remain affected throughout but DeLillo seems to very consciously avoid any overly easy designation of this affect, such as fear, sense of danger, the feeling your life-form is being contested, vulnerability, and so on. Instead, he examines how the affect actually works as a transfiguration of “the grain of the most routine moment”, as a monumental and at times almost anaesthetizing defamiliarization of everything known and intuitively taken for granted. Through the protagonists, he diagnoses the affect in the ways in which the life of the city seems to stutter, how sensation becomes myopic and disoriented, how the familiar spaces of everyday life become partly unrecognizable, partly spaces of punctual wonder and strange beauty. Don DeLillo, to be sure, is an uncontested master of detailing those small fissures in the surface of the normal, where the well known breaks up in moments of inconsequential and bereaved contemplation of the ordinary and reveals something monstrous. This is the protagonist walking the city: Keith walked through the park and came out on West 90th Street and it was strange, what he was seeing down the community garden and coming toward him, a woman in the middle of the street, on horseback, wearing a yellow hard hat and carrying a riding crop, bobbing above the traffic, and it took him a long moment to understand that horse and rider had come out of a stable somewhere nearby and were headed toward the bridle path in the park. / It was something that belonged to another landscape, something inserted, a conjuring that resembled for the briefest second some half-seen image only half believed in the seeing, when the witness wonders what has happened to the meaning of things, to tree, street, stone, wind, simple words lost in the falling ash (DeLillo 2007: 103).

Such a passage reveals the working of affect in its most primitive way. All the relations that make up the innocuous space of this everyday scene are shattered, disfigured, as if struck suddenly with a spell of meaninglessness, and in the same instant, then evoked and reiterating the power that was able to disrupt the solidity of the everyday. It is this very basic logic of the affect that DeLillo keeps developing throughout the novel, the collective state of being affected, of losing balance, of being unable all of a sudden to read and understand what is around. De Lillo’s art is that of the still life, of spatial arrangements that stand out clear-cut but nonetheless vacillating in terms of what they might mean. Per-

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ception constantly stops dead, pieces of ingoing information that do not carry any meaningful knowledge along, lots of signs, but no signification. “She was arguing with herself but it wasn’t an argument, just the noise the brain makes” (p. 236). The affect hovering over the city effectively subverts the routines and habits of those living there, and much of the novel’s plot is really about whether it will be possible to re-cultivate habits sufficiently robust to uphold a human life. The child concentrates on learning to talk only in monosyllables, the mother takes up volunteer aid for Alzheimer patients, in whose company she finds some relief, the father embarks on professional poker rather than going back to his job: they all struggle to obtain a life in the guise of a habit, but eventually never seem really to make it. They remain suspended in the affect in an unnaturally protracted moment of hesitation and disorientation, inhabitants of a city between two breaths, unsure whether it is processing the affect or simply waiting, waiting for the blessing of forgetting. DeLillo’s novel reads like a map, as a cartographical recording of an affect that resounds and reverberates in the very fabric of the urban space. A similar affective cartography, albeit starting out from a quite different set of parameters, can be found in J.G. Ballard’s late novels. With the three novels published after 2000, Ballard became increasingly known as an unsurpassed chronicler of his present. Shortly after his death in 2009, his younger colleague Jonathan Lethem wrote an essay on him in the New York Times, praising “the stark visionary consistency of the motifs that earned him that rarest of literary awards, an adjective: Ballardian”. This term, Ballardian, is now furthermore defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.” Lethem also calls him a “poet of desolate landscapes” (Lethem 2009). The landscapes of Ballard’s three last novels are the new European urban (or post-urban) designed landscapes of the thriving middle classes. In SuperCannes from 2000, it is a new-built settlement around a hi-tech industrial production plant, with its innate life around empty swimming pools, verandas with a view from where nobody views and twin carports made for expensive cars. In Millennium People from 2003, it is a refurbished dockland area in London replete with Range Rovers, kids in expensive public schools and a population of affluent lawyers, doctors and symbol managers. And in Kingdom Come, finally, from 2006, it is the new suburban sprawl in southwest London around Heathrow and M25 with pompous new or refurbished houses with lawns, fountains and flags, interspersed by corporate headquarters behind empty and evergreen lawns and gigantic shopping malls. In Kingdom Come, this new territory of the affluent and

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hardworking upper middle class is charted by an intruder, a successful advertising agent from London who comes to bury his father who has died under suspicious circumstances. As a professional in advertising, he knows quite a lot about this kind of place (and its potentials for consumption) but not from actually having spent time in the area. Thus, the reader explores this landscape together with the protagonist, as the latter meanders about, following the itineraries of his late father and his acquaintances. The topography of the site is quite simple; framed by the huge and constantly humming transportation infrastructure, there are four different landscape types: the extended sprawl of habitations, the malls, the sports arenas, and the derelict villages overgrown by the ramifying sprawl. And the life form of the area is partitioned along the same lines. In the sprawl, general boredom reigns, only partially kept in check by endless and industrious refurbishment works. The malls and the sports arenas then offer temporary relief from boredom by offering endless opportunities for consumption and for watching violent spectacles, respectively. And when this cocktail of boredom, buying and watching does not bring sufficient relief, the disciplined inhabitants transform into a violent mob and attack the Pakistani restaurants and Polish-owned garages of the villages. Ballard describes an ever more fragile sense of order and an atmosphere where aggression surfaces as a way out for an otherwise blocked propensity for acting. In this environment, as Ballard boldly describes it, “consumerism and a new totalitarianism had met by chance in a suburban shopping mall and celebrated a nightmare marriage” (Ballard 2006: 188). Ballard’s critique of consumerism (where “everything good comes with a barcode”) as existentially hollow is of course not particularly new. However, he very aptly portrays the logic of frustration as he subtly plays out the perennial substitution of the new with more of the same in an algorithm neatly spelled out by Rosi Braidotti: “In a totally schizophrenic double pull, the consumerist and socially enhanced faith in the new is supposed not only to fit in with, but also actively to induce, the rejection of in-depth changes” (Braidotti 2006: 2). In Kingdom Come, Ballard offers a full-scale mapping of the atmosphere induced by this logic and how it permeates virtually everything that goes on in this slightly futuristic, but still chillingly recognizable settlement. The novel, however, also takes another few steps beyond this casuistic mode. It is narrated in the first person, and throughout large parts of the book, the protagonist and the reader so to speak share the outsider’s observation mode, but eventually, and quite strangely, this accord between reader and narrator is somehow uprooted. What happens is that an uncanny amount of unpredictability enters into the universe. First, we experience this through the narrator, as the other characters he encounters inexplicably seem to develop striking inconsistencies in their actions and utterances, switching alliances and agendas in unpredictable ways and thus

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inconveniently blurring the distinction between friends and foes. This lability adds another layer to the already high-strung affective climate, as if everybody is constantly negotiating some tipping-point and manoeuvring somehow blindly among all sorts of stratagems. And further down the road this infection also seems to take grip of the narrator himself, whereby the reader is somehow gradually brought to ask whether the alliance with the narrator is dissolving. This results in quite a powerful reading experience, as a first hand report of a progressive transformation of a consciousness when exposed to the affective climate of this particular place. Both DeLillo and Ballard are experimenting with developing techniques of mapping affective spaces and of recording how spatial being also implies a participation in affective transactions and becomings. As cartographers of affect, they delineate the relational diagrams of spaces with prominent contemporary interest: the city under the spell of terror, and the suburb under the spell of consumerism, and test the affective impact of living in these spaces. By charting affects as ‘appearances in a field of forces’, they contribute to the understanding of the contemporary micro-politics of affects and the changing relational geographies underpinning them and thus eventually also to understanding how affective spaces mould our lives and the selves we come to embody.

Works Cited Ballard, J.G. (2006) Kingdom Come (London: HarperCollins). Boutang, Yann Moulier (2007) Le Capitalisme Cognitif: La Nouvelle Grande Transformation (Paris: Éd. Amsterdam). Braidotti, Rosi (2006) Transpositions (Cambridge: Polity Press). Butler, Judith (2009) Frames of War (London: Verso). Deleuze, Gilles (1981) Spinoza. Philosophie Pratique (Paris: Minuit). DeLillo, Don (2001) ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, Harper’s Magazine, December. DeLillo, Don (2007) Falling Man (New York: Scribner). Eagleton, Terry (1993) ‘It is not quite true that I have a body, and not quite true that I am one either’ (review of Peter Brooks’ Body Work), LRB 15.10. Goethe, J.W. (1979) Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. Eric A. Blackall (Princeton: PUP). Harvey, David (2009) Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (NY: Columbia University Press). Hauser, Arnold (1953) Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur (Munich: Beck). Koolhaas, Rem (2004) Content (Köln: Taschen). Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell). Lethem, Jonathan (2009) ‘Poet of Desolate Landscapes’, New York Times, September 8. Lordon, Frédéric (2010) Capitalisme, Désir et Servitude (Paris: La Fabrique).

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Massumi, Brian (2002) Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1965) Le Visible et l’Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard). Musil, Robert (1978) Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Hamburg: Rohwolt). Sartre, Jean-Paul (1943) L’Être et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard). Thrift, Nigel (2008) Non-Representational Theory (London: Routledge). Williams, Raymond (1977) Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Eduardo Cintra Torres

Catastrophes in Sight and Sound ‘There are no words to describe what happened’ are the words most commonly issued whenever attempting to describe a catastrophe. How should the sublime, whether applied to horror or to beauty, be described? From late antiquity onwards, catastrophes have been put into words but, given their enormity, remain beyond the human capacity of verbal expression. Painting, drawing, and the later mechanical reproduction of images, from photography to digital mobile phones, solved this difficulty in describing the horror with words, even though within moral limits. Mechanical reproduction, with its aura of truthfulness and faithful imitation, coincided with the onset of the mass media, which reinforced the power of representing catastrophes. In the société du spectacle, catastrophes were turned into sight and sound, proving as popular a theme as they had always been, particularly on television, the most suitable medium for representing catastrophe (Torres 2006). In this essay, we attempt a brief and historical survey of representations of catastrophe through sight and sound, simultaneously accounting for representational techniques and media contexts. Visual representations of catastrophes were scarce in Antiquity. Art represented the victors in wars, like Egyptian, Assyrian or Roman armies crushing their enemies; the Other’s disasters were portrayed as felicitous moments. Yet, it was in Antiquity that the first important representations of catastrophes appeared, in historical texts and in theatre. The Greek tragedies were sight and sound representations of catastrophes placed at the centre of civic life. The action revolved mostly around the personal disasters of community leaders, but since they were representing their very own community, the catastrophes performed on stage were collective disasters. The presence of the chorus on stage amplified the social collective character of the catastrophes. The Greek public probably experienced these theatrical catastrophes as a third dimension between fact and fiction. They were fictional as spectacular representations in theatre, with actors, musicians, etc; and they were factual as reconstructions of the lives of gods and kings that people may have believed in and thus seen as credible and as social events, because tragedy was in fact a civic ritual. Some plays are known to have had a highly close relationship with community life. The Supplicants, by Euripides, dealt with a refusal to bury the dead after a battle. When the play was written, the Beotians “had just refused the Athenians the right to recover the bodies of dead soldiers […]; protests lasted seventeen days and deeply moved Athenian opinion” (Romilly 1999: 142).

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In the Persians, the only surviving play dealing with important contemporary facts, Aeschilus centred the action on the side of the opponents, in order to create a spatial distance (Torres 2006: 62–4). He thus avoided the problem faced by the dramatist Phrynichus before him when staging the defeat inflicted by the Persians over the Athenians in Miletus just two years before. He shocked the city so much that he was fined and the play forbidden (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 2001: 87). Although real tragedies were part of civic life, the city was not prepared to reenact them on stage, in sight and sound. A certain distance in time and space was needed, as were some rules regarding what could be shown: representing murders and having corpses on stage was an issue that dramatists had to solve. Death was shown in at least four plays and there are cadavers in 21 of the 32 complete surviving plays. Dramatists used other methods to deal with the visual dimension of death and catastrophe. For instance, Aeschilus invented the off-stage murder with death being narrated by words (Deforge 1997). This permanent tension between showing or describing disasters and death is a permanent feature of representation through to contemporary times (Torres 2006: 111–34). The Bible, made of words only, has provided a myriad of sight and sound representations of the catastrophic events it contains. We will leave apart theatrical and other performances of biblical events and concentrate on visual representations. The paintings and drawings analyzed, like most figurative paintings, share the quality of what photographer Cartier-Bresson called moment décisif, which is the moment registered when a photograph acquires the aesthetic qualities of painting composition. Events described in both the Old and New Testaments became the core visual representations of tragical, disastrous or catastrophic events for centuries and each of their visual representations seeks to depict it as a decisive moment of disaster. Most visual representations of catastrophic events until the 18th century refer to biblical events. Like the events in tragic plays, these biblical episodes correspond to real events or were, or are, considered as real by believers, who accept the pluralistic latitude of visual representations of narratives and descriptions of events registered in words in the Bible. They then become real events with the moral, correct interpretation already attached, thus protecting their transposition to visual representations from accusations of misinterpretation and excess. Often the moral intention originates visual depictions in series. Where a catastrophe is part of the narrative, the whole series will provide a moral lesson. For instance, the Deluge is completed with images of the previous tenacity of Noah, who put himself at the margin of society, and with the happy outcome of the ark episode. Nowadays, there is a similar pattern in television with catastrophes presented through blanket coverage that allows for a certain organization of narratives, including their morality.

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Some biblical themes seem to have been chosen because of their dramatic, catastrophic potential for visual representation. The viewer is put in the position of the voyeur enjoying the pleasure of seeing the mimesis of awful events, which results, according to Aristotle, from the natural interest in learning from the comparison of the imitation with reality (Aristotle s.d.: 1452b). Deluge representations, from the Middle Ages to 1900, concentrate on the action of the rising waters upon humans and animals. As in medieval and Renaissance illustrated bibles and in works by Michelangelo in Sistine Chapel (1508–9), by Cornelis Cornelisz Haarlem (ca.1588), J. M. W. Turner (1805), Anne Louise Girodet Trioson (1806), Thomas Cole (1829), John Martin (1834), Francis Danby (1837), Gustave Doré (1865) or Jakob Steinhardt (1912). People suffer, drown, die, their corpses are not buried. The dying or dead people are naked or almost naked and show glorious contorted bodies to the viewer. The Deluge is thus a moral tale of something terrible, given for pleasure and learning. Terror is made aesthetic and pedagogic. The biblical episode is a reminder of what can happen to anyone. The depiction of the past event is a warning about what may happen in the future. They work in the listener, reader or viewer as a cognitive aide-mémoire and as a psychological as if. What would it be like, if this happened to me? Salvador Dali painted the Deluge (Aquae diluvii super terram, 1964) two years after floods in his native Catalonia killed more than 815 people in less than three hours. The catastrophe is represented abstractly, the horror is highly (in)visible in an enormous black stain. The real event speaks to the morals of Noah’s episode, making it more acceptable, inscribed in the order of culture and society, allowing the horror to be overcome. The biblical episode of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah relates to a catastrophe of human origin. The destruction of cities, towers, castles and fortresses, which is a mark of wars, strongly related the episode to real events. Medieval visual representations of Sodom and Gomorrah show mutilated corpses among wrecked buildings (Figure 1); more recent ones, from the 19th century, prefer blurred, far away depictions of fire and ruined cities (Figure 2), as was defended by Burke, as we shall see, and as chosen by Dali for the aforementioned disaster in Catalonia. The biblical episode of Sodom and Gomorrah warns against those who are visually attracted by the spectacle of disaster. God warned Lot “Look not behind thee”, but Lot’s wife “looked back from behind him” to the burning cities “and she became a pillar of salt” (Genesis 19: 17–26). There is a certain irony in the fact that visual representations of episode (and all representations of catastrophes) do look behind with Lot’s wife, showing the viewers the images of catastrophe. There she is, Lot’s wife, transformed into a pillar of salt, but there they are, the burning cities for us to see (without punishment). The same attraction to disaster is present in visual representations of the Tower of Babel and the Massacre of the Innocents.

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Figure 1: Unknown author, The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, circa 1320.

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Figure 2: John Martin, The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, 1852.

Following God’s intervention, the people “left off to build the city” of Babel (Genesis 11: 8). The unfinished tower became a visual sign of some catastrophe (the confusion of languages, that is, the division of the people until then united) to the point that the Tower is shown falling apart, a destructive act unmentioned in the Bible. Another important source of visual representation of panic, disaster and mourning, the Massacre of the Innocents allowed for a certain aesthetics of pleasure in the depiction of a catastrophe. There is blood, heads rolling, naked corpses flying and on the floor. Painters suggest sound by showing children and their mothers screaming, crying and mourning. In several representations, Herodes and other people (vicariously, as viewers) look down on at the massacre from above, as if it were some spectacle (Figure 3).

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Figure 3: Matteo di Giovanni, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1482

Mythological themes also provided topics for visually representing catastrophes but from the 18th century onwards real catastrophes began taking their place. A modern society was emerging as a consequence of scientific thought, public opinion, new developments in communications and the printed press. New ideas and dogmas replaced religion. The first contemporary catastrophe to be at the centre of public debate across the Western world, and subject to visual depictions, was the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Before this highly destructive catastrophe, visual arts did not represent similar events in the Bible. The only visual earthquake references known to us relate to that which happened at the precise moment of Christ’s death (Matthew 27: 51) and were painted more than

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one century after the Lisbon earthquake. The 1755 event originated graphic representations trying to depict the destruction of buildings and the tidal wave, or tsunami, which followed. The devastation was enormous, just like that in 2001 with the fall of the Twin Towers in Manhattan, the representations concentrating on the action of the quake against buildings and vessels, with most drawings not showing any human suffering. A few do though. In one drawing, the tidal wave is bearing down on a large crowd gathered in the main square of the city (Figure 4); in another, survivors mourn the victims while the quake ravages Lisbon; in another drawing, the only visible observers, in boats and ashore, as if spectators in the stalls of a theatre, bring the viewer of the drawing into the spectacle of the earthquake (Figure 5). Massive destruction and mass extermination become the central theme of the visual representation with no religious framing included. The reproduction of the catastrophe replaced the mythological, biblical and ancient events previously represented in public debates and also became part of the popular imagination. Owing to the importance of Lisbon at the time, and the magnitude of the catastrophe, the new public sphere produced a great number of published, written and visual materials that may together be considered, with no anachronism, the first media event of modern times.

Figure 4: Lisbon earthquake, engraving, 18th century.

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Figure 5: Lisbon earthquake, engraving, 18th century

The power of visual representations of catastrophe was revitalized in the beginning of the 19th century with the painting of the raft of the Méduse, by Géricault (Figure 6). Just as Phrinicus created a stir when he wrote a tragedy about the catastrophe that had occurred two years before, Géricault created a sensation throughout Europe with his large painting of the event, in 1819. In 1816, the French frigate Méduse ran aground off the coast of Africa. The 233 privileged travellers on board, including the captain, were saved; 17 sailors stayed on the Méduse, three of whom survived; 149 sailors and soldiers were put on a raft of 20 meters per seven meters and left adrift with scarce provisions. Thirteen days later, another ship located the raft, with just 15 survivors, of whom five later died. The frigate’s captain was held responsible for the tragedy. The political and social dimensions of this case became clear for the public viewer when the painting was presented. Géricault enhances the tragedy and the historical dimension through his pictorial alteration of the actual details of the raft episode. Owing to the explosion of the means of communication and the printing press, the event was widely

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discussed all over Europe. The painting was seen in London by more than 40,000 people, in 1820. If the Lisbon earthquake had originated a sort of Ancient Régime debate about the causes of the catastrophe between divine punishment and natural disaster (Arquembourg 2011, Buescu and Cordeiro 2005, Voltaire 2005, Neiman 2002), Le Radeau de la Méduse brought to the visual arts a new notion of modernity, the upshot of social democratization, public opinion and mass media, and a new attitude towards the lower classes. Henceforth, all victims should be counted, independently of their class origin. Géricault’s painting embodies what Beck would call the “political potential of catastrophes” transforming the modern “risk society” into a “catastrophic society” (Beck 1992: 24; italics in original). The Méduse episode also showed that in modern societies with ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, political power would put political power at risk, and, in consequence, would bring about a need for censorship by the political powers. In a letter to King Louis XVIII, the French Navy minister wrote: “I bemoan the fact that journalists revel in disclosing details of deplorable scenes, the picture of which must never be brought before the eyes of the public”. That was precisely what Géricault did, and visual representations of disasters became the order of the day, thus weakening political power. Today, when catastrophes occur, authoritarian and democratic regimes alike resort to similar “overall patterns” of media control and censorship (Graber 2010: 16–7).

Figure 6: Géricault, The Raft of the Méduse, 1819

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Edmund Burke would not have enjoyed Géricault’s Méduse. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) Burke expresses his views against “clear representations” of “terrible ideas”, and criticizes painters for painting them clearly, thereby rendering them “ridiculous”. Instead, Burke prefers images of the “obscure kind” because of the indirect effect they produce. The “judicious obscurity”, or the “obscure kind” of painting “contributes to the effect of the picture; because the images in painting are exactly similar to those in nature; and in nature dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those which are more clear and determinate” (Burke 1998: 57–8). For a period, painters did confuse catastrophic representations with ‘judicious obscurity’. In the room dedicated to Art and the Sublime at the Tate Gallery, 11 of 37 paintings, almost one third, include tragic-catastrophic elements. Six of them are based on biblical episodes, two have battle motives; two shipwrecks by Turner and an avalanche complete the room. With rare exceptions these paintings depict catastrophic actions of the ‘obscure kind’. We find the same pattern in the room next to it, Turner’s War and Peace room, where several catastrophic situations are portrayed, some as recent as the Napoleonic Wars, with other resorting to biblical and mythical themes, such as the Destruction of Sodom. Catastrophes were within the concept of the sublime but any overly realistic depiction was considered to be in bad taste, following the line of thought founded by Aristotle who opposed the “monstrous” against the correct “tremendous” (s.d.: 1453b). Aristotle considered excessive mimesis would contradict verisimilitude. Verisimilitude and excess were not a problem for Goya when depicting the Napoleonic wars in Spain. Like Géricault, some years later, Goya details horror. There is not a single extreme long shot angle among his Desastres de la Guerra because the painter wanted to bring us up close to the horror of war (Figure 7). Photography would follow Goya’s trend. The new analog representation of reality encountered difficulties in representing catastrophes due to technical limitations, but war was among the first concerns for news magazines, like the Illustrated London News and L’illustration (Amelunxen 1998). Both magazines sent ‘special artists’ to battlefields in times of war: the Crimean War (1853–6), the American Civil War (1861–5), the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) and the Boer War (1898–1902). Photos of dead soldiers in the printed press created a great impact in the US during the Civil War (Figures 8 and 9). Some pictures were especially disturbing because of the proximity and the angle chosen, allowing the faces of dead men to be recognized. In France, the press tended only to publish photos of dead enemy soldiers. In 1914, L’illustration used drawings to create visual representations of heroic acts by the French army, while photography only showed dead German soldiers, or the destruction inflicted by the German army upon churches

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and state buildings. The annihilation of the enemy was proven through photography, as in the previously mentioned wars. In 1903, L’Illustration published photos of ‘Turkish atrocities in Macedonia’ and wrote that the Turks “cannot contest their veracity, because a photographic plate cannot lie”. On 21st November, 1914, L’Illustration filled its two large central pages (56,6cm x 39,1cm) with a photo by Ph. Tiranty titled ‘Lendemain de bataille: cadavres allemands dans la prairie’ (Figure 10). The large caption of 180 words is a poetic text about farmers who should have been farming their fields. Only the last 24 words mention the dead soldiers shown in the photo but the text indicates neither where nor when the battle took place. The photographer chose an angle that avoided revealing the faces of the dead men.

Figure 7: Goya, Desastres de la Guerra, N.º 36, Not This, 1810–5.

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Figure 8: American Civil War, Battle of Antietam, Alexander Gardner, photographer, 1862.

Figure 9: American Civil War, Battle of Antietam, Alexander Gardner, photographer, 1862.

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Figure 10: L’Illustration, Lendemain de bataille: cadavres allemands dans la prairie, 21.11.1914.

The connection between the popular press and catastrophic events, a trend inaugurated with the Lisbon earthquake, acquired its basic structural characteristics with the sinking of the Titanic (Figure 11). The need for images is exemplified by the 99 photos and 10 drawings published by the Excelsior between 16th April and 24th May, 1912. The catastrophe took up its front page seven times, tentatively portraying representations of the disaster: archives photos of the Titanic, icebergs and the personalities on board. Excess was a new feature in the coverage of catastrophes, a consequence of the competition and the technological advances in communications and the press. The Titanic disaster had an important characteristic that made it a ‘perfect’ media event. It had no national or political ideology. It killed people from different nationalities, both from the upper and lower classes. It was a consensual catastrophe so to speak. It fitted into the mainstream media, extending itself to a global media, as demonstrated by the worldwide appeal of subsequent documentary and film adaptations.

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Figure 11: Titanic sinking, postcard, 1912.

While photography tended to concentrate on real events (popular in the 19th century, fantasy and staged scenes almost disappearing), cinema tended to create an alternative world of fiction. Not that real events did not attract cameras. Newsreels were a popular feature in cinema houses and with some screens showing only newsreels. Pathé put out a daily edition of its Gazette up until 1914. By 1933, the ‘Big Five’ newsreel companies, all independent from the film industry, “were producing an average of 520 newsreels per annum” (Briggs and Burke 2007: 140). However, audiences preferred the dark rooms to be filled with fantasy. Both the documentary, emerging as a genre in the 1920s, and the newsreel were marginal to the film industry. In the newsreel catalogues of the age, there are reports on tragedies and catastrophes, but it seems that the other media, the press and the radio, were more successful in relating with the audiences and the public. They also were more professional, flexible and agile in reaching audiences. Words and photos travelled faster and could fit more easily into narratives and meeting media audiences uses and expectations. In earlier years, when cinema sought was set to imitate the real world, newsreels would show catastrophes like fires, sinking boats, floods and hurricanes, but when the newly founded film art gradually approached fiction, disaster cinematography was born. The first major disaster epics follow the rules in theatre, poetry, literature and the visual arts in dealing with Greek, Roman and Christian episodes: The Last Days of Pompeii (1908; 1913), The Fall of Troy (1910), Quo Vadis? (1912) and Cabiria (1914) (Figure 12). The success of these films was enor-

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mous and worldwide. The disaster sequences in the first two versions of The Last Days of Pompeii were “so effective that they would go on to be recycled in other remakes and, indeed, other films through the 1910s and 1920s” (Keane 2006: 6). The merger of the “sublime and elevated style” with the “low style”, in continuity with what had begun with the Bible and Christian literature (Auerbach 2003), became an intentional feature of the epic disaster movie. While writing about Cabiria, Italian novelist Gabriele D’Annunzio, who contributed the story and the intertitles, said he wanted “to represent, in the 3rd century BC, the most tragic spectacle that the combat of races had ever given to the world”, when “a great human civilization totally scrambles in one coup”. D’Annunzio added that the film was a spectacle for the masses with elite values: “we are dealing with great historical compositions glued with an adventurous fiction addressing the most naïf popular feeling” (quoted in Banda and Moure 2008: 267–8). The moral values and psychological lessons about human characters would become a standard in disaster film making, including the factual modern catastrophes that would soon emerge on screen. The first two of 20 known fictional versions of the sinking of the Titanic were filmed in 1912, the year of the disaster (In Nacht und Eis, Germany; Saved from the Titanic, USA).

Figure 12: Cabiria, directed by Giovanni Pastrone, Italy, 1914.

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In Quo Vadis? (1912), the Roman emperor Nero gazes at the burning of Rome in a veranda while playing the lyre. The shots show him from behind, the viewer watching the fire with Nero. In the 1950s, the French film theorist André Bazin coined the term ‘Nero complex’ to define the viewer’s pleasure of watching catastrophes, “the vicarious pleasures experienced by popular cinemagoers who, like the bloodthirsty emperor, delight in the spectacular destruction of cities, towns and various conspicuous landmarks”. This ‘Nero complex’ is of course an updated version of Aristotle’s explanation of the pleasure enjoyed in watching the dead or Schadenfreude. For Schopenhauer, more than pleasure, it was the necessity of ‘feeling horror’, as preparation to death (Schopenhauer, 1998: 30). Disaster cinema is one of the most resilient and popular genres: “From early biblical epics and 1950s science fiction B-movies through to more recent action/ disaster/science fiction hybrids, scenes of mass destruction have proven a longstanding and pervasive feature of the cinema of spectacle” (Keane 2006: 1). The human narrative is a basic pleasure in these films, but “disaster movies quite simply would not be disaster movies without key disaster sequences” (idem: 5). Albeit fictional, disaster cinema has consistently represented real catastrophes from Pompeii, Carthage or Babylon to the San Francisco earthquake, Chicago fire, Titanic, the Holocaust, Galipoli and September 11. Mass extermination is also a common feature in them all. The fictional reconstructions of real events allow for a logical reorganization of the narrative regarding disordered and unexplainable disasters. While in reality catastrophe looks like fiction, in fiction, catastrophe fits into reality (Figures 13 and 14). Cinema limits what it allows itself to show. There is a tenuous line between the bearable and the unbearable. Some decades ago, director Samuel Fuller “argued that it was impossible to film the Normandy landing because you couldn’t decently film yards of intestine on a beach” (Virilio 1989: 116n). In 1998, director Steven Spielberg filmed those yards of intestine on a beach in Saving Private Ryan, a film that was no longer intended to ‘embellish death’, as Virilio argued about military-industrial films, but rather to embellish the heroism of soldiers in a war that was unwanted but necessary to save humankind from evil. Beginning with the Normandy landing, represented as a goyesque catastrophic ‘desastre de la guerra’, the film worked as an undoing of the final catastrophe, with the war a necessity to avoid a bigger catastrophe (the victory of Nazism).

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Figure 13: The Poseidon Adventure, film poster, Germany, 1972.

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Figure 14: The Towering Inferno, film poster, USA, 1974.

Yet, the opposite movement occurs when people deny, or are denied, the viewing of disaster images. In an age when war has become unbearable, but at the same time democratic powers ought not to censor images, the catastrophic nature of conflict is masked or even subverted in some televised events, as in old paintings. In the 1992 Gulf War, the cameras were deliberately kept away from the action by the military; in the Second Gulf War, in 2003, embedded reporters only reported the victor’s point of view, and, in the end, little was shown of the conflict. It was cinema and cable television that, after the events, depicted them through cruel images, like in Redacted (2007), Generation Kill (2008), and The Hurt Locker (2008). It is beyond the scope of this essay to explain why cinema gave up on factual material and went instead for fiction or fictionalized reality. Probably one of the main reasons for that was the technical impracticability of capturing catastrophes as they unfold. In this matter, radio, and later television, have a clear advantage: live broadcasting. Radio was a live media from the beginning; it mixed information and entertainment in a lively way, impossible to do with the printed press and cinema. Radio could provide news of catastrophes with greater realism through verbal language. The Hindenburg disaster, near New York, in May 1937,

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provides a clear example of radio’s scope. The zeppelin burst into flames and dropped to the ground in 37 seconds, killing 35 people. In one radio account of the disaster, the radio reporter is filling in time with verbal descriptions while the Hindenburg catches fire. He immediately changes to a very dramatic description of the disaster, with comments and facts mixing. At a certain point, with a shaken voice, while trying to get a better position to see the accident, the reporter said: “This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world (get out of the way, please)”. The dramatic tone of his discourse was part of his professional coverage. The right voice for future audiovisual coverage of catastrophes had thus been found. The zeppelin disaster was also registered on film (Figure 15). Without sound, the film conveys the crude facts as they happened thereby exercising the function of an imitation of reality as no other media would do, while not able to transcend the event. It feeds the viewer’s ‘sinful’ aesthetical pleasure. Radio gives through words the essential facts and the structured discourse of catastrophes, bringing along the horror, the unexpected and unscripted, the disbelief, the mourning of victims, the invocation of tragedy, the events as they happen, the bear witness tone, the attempt to categorize the unexplainable as unexplainable, thus explaining it through that very character definer of the catastrophic. Rough, unedited, rushed images can hardly do that. In paintings and drawings, artists can visually express the morals of catastrophes. They are inscribed by unwritten words. The imitative images of events in film and television hardly obtain the same degree of ideological interpretation without words.

Figure 15: The Hindenburg disaster, New York, 1937

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In addition to radio and press, television proved the perfect vehicle for rendering catastrophic events. David Sarnoff, president of RCA and one of those who shaped radio and TV, as we know them, wrote, in 1942, that television would “bring to the home a complete means of instantaneous participation in sights and sounds of the outer world” (quoted by Miller 2010: 4). The first catastrophes of the television age could not be shown live, as happened with the Capelinhos eruption of Faial volcano in the Azores in 1957. The first great catastrophe made for TV was a personal tragedy, the fall of the hero, experienced or at least presented as a national catastrophe: the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In Torres (2006) we tried to establish an arch of representations of catastrophes from Athens to contemporary sociétés du spectacle, analyzing agency aspects, media texts and reception studies. Here, we would like to stress that even though televised tragedy blanket coverage is replete with repetitions, talking heads and void moments, the reality of the catastrophe is present and its consequences are visible: devastation, destruction, death, all shown in crude or symbolic images and sounds. Television proves the tragedy visually and, through verbal discourse, makes it acceptable. The repetition of the event’s crucial images is not only a consequence of the industrial nature of the media, but also an exhibition of the catastrophe in action. Those images are it. Repetition not only feeds the blanket coverage; it also convinces the incredulous viewer, since catastrophe goes beyond his/her human experience. Biblical catastrophic descriptions are also repeated with the same purpose. As sensorial experiences, catastrophes have to be ‘felt’ to be fully apprehended through senses. What if there are no images of the decisive moment? In these cases, different materials have to fill in the gap, as Excelsior magazine did with the Titanic disaster, or the Portuguese television, with the fall of the bridge over the Douro River in 2004. On that occasion, television used drawings and virtual reconstructions, but mainly descriptions by witnesses. In “our visually oriented culture” (Ellis 2000: 35), bearing witness through words is still as powerful as in ancient times. Ellis has argued that in “our witnessing culture” witnessing is one of television’s defining functions, tying it to the ever-increasing emphasis on liveness, which represents its unique privilege. In any case, even when it does not show the disaster moment, television shows the catastrophe through its consequences, since there is no single catastrophe without human consequences: in Bhopal, India, 1984, the venom leakage was invisible, but the following human devastation was highly visible; the same with nuclear disasters. A catastrophe is a human concern but with the concept ranging from natural, technological to moral, social, political and religious issues. When they occur, or through their consequences, catastrophes are visible and audible events, they are ‘audiovisual’ by ‘nature’ – there are neither invis-

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ible nor silent catastrophes. Thus, television has shown a compulsion for catastrophes as a result of its live coverage, with sight and sound, of images and words, action and comments, nothingness and totality, narratives and descriptions, heroes and crowds, drama and melodrama. Television became the ideal media for catastrophic representation in the société du spectacle. The Internet, for several reasons, seems to project a thinner togetherness quality, with both less morality and less structured discourses. Thus, it has not yet replaced television as the catastrophe medium par excellence. As a mass media, television is the perfect vehicle for a spectacle of the masses. Catastrophes have always been a social and collective event. They concern the society as a whole, either because a collective hero is hit by tragedy (Oedipus, Kennedy, Princess Diana) or because a large number of anonymous people are the victims of disaster. In catastrophe coverage, the masses are on both sides of the screen: as victims (directly, when crowds are hit or symbolically if the leader is the victim) and as audiences.

Conclusions Catastrophes are historical events: they are human and display the same structural characteristics since ancient Greek authors represented them. They are still the same as far as facts, emotions, politics, characters and their narrative nucleus are concerned. The main evolution has been in their media representation. Some issues of representation have not evolved greatly (like the display of death) but analog images of photography, cinema and television, and especially live audiovisual transmissions, have put catastrophes at the centre of the société du spectacle and its collective events. The visual fascination with catastrophes has been extensively documented since ancient times. The very existence of a historical lineage of works of art visually depicting and interpreting collective disasters is proof of the necessity for their representation. The “désir de catastrophe” (Jeudy 1990) has always existed as a need to adjust catastrophes to our frame of mind, preparing ourselves for a ‘last judgement’, either in this world or at the end of times. Words prepare us for the worst, and moralize events. Images, especially in a visual culture, guarantee the unexpected and the unspeakable. The rupture with the representation of collective disasters occurred with the Lisbon earthquake, in 1755. The catastrophe happened in a world about to change from religious dogma to social and scientific dogma, from a closed world of communication to a universe, where the flow of freer information took the lead over the Church and the political powers. This historical tendency reached its full

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expression in present day democratic capitalistic societies, with a communications-industrial complex that includes the press, radio, television, cinema and the Internet, with its potential for all kinds of informational transactions. Spectacle became a means and an end in itself for masses of people all over the world: “death is just a big show in itself”, said Samuel Lionel Rothhapfel, the inventor of the first giant cinema house, not by chance baptized as “cathedral” (quoted by Virilio 1989: 41). Cinema and television, the great masters of analog representation of the audiovisual era, developed two different ways of bringing catastrophe to the front door of consciousness, and to the back door of unconsciousness: cinema specialized in the fictionalization of real past tragedies, or invented gigantic mass destruction spectacles; television specialized in the live broadcasting of real catastrophes. Catastrophes in sight and sound are a moral and ideological narrative of the disaster. They become part of the daily life and of the daily expectations of viewers until the next catastrophic event occurs, and the process of humanizing the unthinkable rewinds an old story anew.

Works Cited Amelunxen, Hubertus von (1998) ‘The Century’s Memorial’, in A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot (Koln: Könemann), 131–147. Aristotle (s.d.) Poética, trans. Eudoro de Sousa (Lisbon: INMC). Arquembourg, Jocelyne (2011) L’événement et les médias: Les récits médiatiques des tsunamis et les débats publics (1755–2004) (Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines). Auerbach, Erich (2003) Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Banda, Daniel, and José Moure (org. and pres.) (2008) Le Cinéma: Naissance d’un Art. 1895–1920 (Paris: Flammarion). Beck, Ulrich (1992) Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage). Briggs, Asa, and Peter Burke (2007) A Social History of the Media from Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge: Polity). Buescu, Helena Carvalhão, and Cordeiro, Gonçalo (2005) O Grande Terramoto de Lisboa (Lisbon: Gradiva). Burke, Edmund (1998) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Deforge, Bernard (1997) Le festival de cadavres. Morts et mises à mort dans la tragédie grecque (Paris: Les Belles Lettres). Ellis, John (2000) Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I.B.Tauris). Graber, Doris A. (ed.) (2007) Media Power in Politics (Washington, DC: CQ Press). Jeudy, Henri-Pierre (1990) Le désir de catastrophe (Paris: Abutre). Keane, Stephen (2006) Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe (London: Wallflower Press). Miller, Toby (2010) Television Studies (London: Routledge).

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Neiman, Susan (2002) Evil in Modern Thought. An alternative history of philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Romilly, Jacqueline de (1999) A Tragédia Grega (Lisbon: Edições 70). Schopenhauer, Arthur (1998) Aforismos (Mem Martins: Publicações Europa-América). Torres, Eduardo Cintra (2006) A Tragédia Televisiva. Um Género Dramático da Informação Audiovisual (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais). Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (2001) Mythe et Tragédie en Grèce Ancienne, vol. II (Paris: La Découverte). Virilio, Paul (1989) War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso). Voltaire (2005) O Desastre de Lisboa (seguido de Carta a Voltaire por Jean-Jacques Rousseau) (Lisbon: Colibri).

Diana Gonçalves

From Panic to Mourning: 9/11 and the Need for Spectacle September 11 was a hugely mediated event and broadcast live to a global audience. Like the terrorists, who according to Jean Baudrillard, “exploited the ‘real time’ of images, their instantaneous worldwide transmission” (2003: 27), the media also engaged in the exploitation of the immediacy of the event, trying to transport viewers to the exact moment and space of the catastrophe in an attempt to place them ‘right there in the middle of it’.¹ The notions of real time and spectacle were, therefore, of critical importance in the dissemination and reception of 9/11 as a televised event. This very fact was indeed noted by Lee Rodney, who wrote that “[i]n the coverage of September 11, from its start as a ‘breaking news event’ to the media frenzy that followed for months afterward, it became clear that real-time footage took on a new status in terms of its relationship to spectacle” (2005: 38). The role of real-time media was not only to provide news fast but, above all, to produce the deepest impact, thus resulting in a greater and massattracting spectacle. From the very first instances and especially through television, people from all over the world were able to witness the panic experienced by Americans, New Yorkers in particular. The repercussions of the event were so strong that, while watching the news, viewers found themselves mirroring the feelings they viewed. The panic, the fear and the insecurity people felt that day were shared by millions of others on the other side of the television sets despite their actual physical distance from the attacks. In contrast, in the early phase of events, TV channels strove to adopt a reassuring tone so as to avoid further alarm. As pointed out by James W. Carey, the manner of delivering the news was “calm, poised, systematic, without panic or speculation, thorough and factual” (Carey 2003: 73). This was briefly jeopardized when the second plane crashed, as this constituted a surprising change of narrative from mere accident or incident to terrorist attack.

1 We may follow here the definition of ‘immediacy’ provided by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation: Understanding New Media, where they argue that this term may be used in two senses: “In the epistemological sense, immediacy is transparency: the absence of mediation or representation. It is the notion that a medium could erase itself and leave the viewer in the presence of the objects represented, so that he could know the objects directly. In its psychological sense, immediacy names the viewer’s feeling that the medium has disappeared and the objects are present to him, a feeling that his experience is therefore authentic” (2000: 70).

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From CNN to Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, among many other television networks, the instant this plane hit the upper floors of the second tower of the World Trade Center complex, the reaction was general and almost instinctive: “Oh my God!”.² That moment of incredulity and adjacent silence was intercut by the screams of people running away from the falling debris and the sound of emergency vehicles rushing to the site of the towers. By analyzing the role of the media, however primarily focusing on television (hereafter TV), this article seeks to explore how 9/11 mutated into a media event, disrupting life and satisfying the need to render it as spectacle. It should nevertheless be stressed that I here apply the concept of media event inspired by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz while not actually employing it in the exact same way they do. In their seminal work, Media Events: the live broadcasting of history, Dayan and Katz argue that media events are, essentially, characterized by interruption, monopoly, live broadcasting, and remoteness. Yet, in their opinion, media events correspond above all to scheduled or premeditated events of great interest, scale and audience, particularly great ceremonial events, such as contests, conquests and coronations. They are described as ritual and integrative events, whereas, according to the authors, disruptive happenings, such as the assassination of President Kennedy, fall into the category of news events. Over the years, the narrowness of Dayan and Katz’s concept has been discussed and criticized by numerous scholars, resulting in a rethinking and an expansion of its original meaning.³ My intention when deploying the term ‘media event’ instead of ‘news event’ is to recover the main features attributed to this kind of events and apply them to 9/11, an event characterized by the blurring of the notions of news and spectacle: i.e. the interruption of the normal flow of broadcasting or the cancellation of scheduled programming; the live broadcasting of an incident that originated and is taking place outside the media/studio; the transformation of the viewing experience; and the suspension of people’s routine to focus on the event, on the spectacle. It is thus my contention that Dayan and Katz’s conception of media events can be extended and is hence valid to 9/11: The most obvious difference between media events and other formulas or genres of broadcasting is that they are, by definition, not routine. In fact, they are interruptions of routine; they intervene in the normal flow of broadcasting and our lives. […] In the most character-

2 The images of the (American) television broadcasting of the events of the morning of September 11, 2001 may easily be accessed via Youtube. 3 For further information on the concept of media event and its extended usage, see: Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz’s Media Events in a Global Age (2010).

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istic events, the interruption is monopolistic, in that all channels switch away from their regularly scheduled programming in order to turn to the great event […]. Moreover, the happening is live. The events are transmitted as they occur, in real time; the French call this en direct. They are therefore unpredictable […]. Typically, these events are organized outside the media […]. By “outside” we mean both that the events take place outside the studio in what broadcasters call “remote locations” and that the event is not usually initiated by the broadcasting organizations (1994: 5).

Attesting to the labelling of 9/11 as a media event, the media, particularly TV, and practically from the outset, took upon themselves the role of covering the catastrophic moment, showing and explaining step by step what was happening. An example of this may be found in Brian A. Monahan’s words when he states: On the morning of September 11, the media dropped everything to cover the attacks. Television as the medium best able to quickly capture and disseminate information about and images of the attacks set the standard early for what the overall media coverage would be (i.e., extensive and, eventually, excessive) (2010: 55).

Complying with the always-latent motto ‘the show must go on’, despite the horror, the main focus was to keep showing, keep telling, keep feeding the audience’s eagerness to see and know more about what was going on. At that point, even if journalists did not know exactly what was taking place and the consequences of the terrorist attack, the order was to keep broadcasting. Against this backdrop, as James W. Carey remarked, “[b]y the end of the day speculation was pouring forth” (2003: 74), giving rise to new narratives and a new reality.

1 Keep Rolling Given the lack of any ready vocabulary for describing what one was seeing and experiencing or even a specific frame for handling such an out of the blue event, the media often made use of Hollywood codes, morphing an awful and shocking event into a spectacle – what Daniel Dayan calls la terreur spectacle.⁴ Given the

4 In his book, La Terreur Spectacle: Terrorisme et Télévision (2006), Daniel Dayan tackles the intricate system of representation of catastrophic events, 9/11 in particular. Dayan reflects on 9/11 as a moment where event and performance subsume each other. He organizes the book by pointing out four different performative responses to the event, involving either the media or the audience: to identify, show, react and judge. Although Dayan does not openly define the

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inherent spectacularity of the event, many viewers thought they were watching a movie and not the real thing. As Slavoj Žižek put it: For the great majority of the public, the WTC explosions were events on the TV screen, and when we watched the oft-repeated shot of frightened people running towards the camera ahead of the giant cloud of dust from the collapsing tower, was not the framing of the shot itself reminiscent of spectacular shots in catastrophe movies, a special effect which outdid all others, since – as Jeremy Bentham knew – reality is the best appearance of itself? (2002: 11)

The images were so spectacular, so absurdly (un)real, that most people thought they could have only been produced by the Hollywood machine: “it’s just like a movie”, the newscasters blurted out, a remark echoed repeatedly that morning; “it’s just like Independence Day”; “it’s like Towering Inferno”. Even King Kong scrambling up the Empire State Building after having devastated midtown Manhattan entered the chain of association. Thus the actual reality before our eyes was almost immediately transformed into and by the virtual reality of Hollywood and made familiar, déjà vu (Kahane 2003: 107).

Regardless of the shock and incomprehension, news shows lasted for hours, permanently covering the latest happenings. Every small detail was wearisomely scrutinized. The same information was conveyed over and over again, either directly by the anchorperson or indirectly by the use of text messages on the lower end of the screen, emulating the multilayered style of an Internet website. Nevertheless, if the first hour was characterized by the permanent broadcasting of images from the site of the attacks, during the following hours, most TV channels used a split screen to show, on the one side, the latest news or interviews and, on the other side, footage from Ground Zero or replayed images of the catastrophe.⁵ Over the next few days, TV networks stopped their regular programming

idea of ‘spectacle of terror’, one may easily read between the lines the relationship between the event and the spectacle effect. According to Daniel Dayan, terrorist acts are performative, symbolic acts. They always entail a communicative dimension, i.e. an underlying message. The main goal of contemporary terrorism is to have a huge exposure and, consequently, reach the largest number of people. As an audience, we need to make sense of these acts, we need to frame them and become familiarized with them. We do such a thing through narratives. As already pointed out in this paper, one of the examples we may apply to 9/11 is the immediate association to the structure of Hollywood movies. 5 The coverage of 9/11 was a paramount example of how media influenced each other. News shows and newspapers, for instance, resorted to similar layouts to those usually associated to a website, trying to emulate the Internet style in terms of graphics and content.

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schedules to almost exclusively cover the attacks. The main goal was to endow spectators with the impression that ‘they were there’, experiencing the events first-hand at the exact moment ‘things were happening’. As a matter of fact, for many people, having seen the events in real time on TV meant that they were witnesses of the event, thus justifying collective trauma. Nevertheless, this sense of immediacy was counterbalanced by the feeling of security provided by the screen. Despite the sense of ‘being there’, the horror and the shock transmitted by the disturbing shots taken at the site of the disaster or even by the testimonies of journalists and victims, the screen worked as a filter, a shield, protecting viewers from the drama at Ground Zero.⁶ People were watching the events but, ultimately, participating as mere spectators, separated from the stage where the horrific spectacle was taking place. This security offered by the TV screen and the physical distance from the actual events was only menaced by the on-going threat of further attacks, transporting the panic lived at the setting of the catastrophe to beyond it or, in this case, inside people’s homes. The immediate days after 9/11 were characterized by the continuous repetition of footage of the attack: the plane hitting the tower; people screaming; the plane hitting the tower; people running; the towers burning; people falling; debris falling; people covered in ash; the planes hitting the towers; people screaming; people falling; the towers collapsing. As a result of this loop of images, people were constantly reliving the panic experienced during the early hours. In addition to the broadcasting of loose images, TV networks edited several short pieces with moving and still pictures, reminiscent of Hollywood montages. As addressed by Brian A. Monahan:

This experience of hypermediacy occurs within the logic of experiencing the authentic while bearing in mind the presence of the medium. According to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation: Understanding New Media, hypermediacy may be used in two senses: “In its epistemological sense, hypermediacy is opacity – the fact that knowledge of the world comes to us though media. The viewer acknowledges that she is in the presence of a medium and learns through acts of mediation or indeed learns about mediation itself. The psychological sense of hypermediacy is the experience that she has in and of the presence of media; it is the insistence that the experience of the medium is itself an experience of the real” (2000: 70–71). 6 As mentioned by Jean Baudrillard in Screened Out, “[t]here is no ‘through’ the screen the way there is a ‘through’ the looking-glass or mirror” (2002: 178). Unlike the mirror, which merely reflects an image, the screen works as a surface on which an image is displayed. This image is not a simple reflection but goes through a process of sorting out or editing before the actual projection. In this sense, as opposed to the mirror, which tries to give a true picture of something else, the screen is representative of the ‘artificiality’ of the image being conveyed, which may link with the idea of the screen as a blocking or protective device from (the disturbing) reality.

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The way the media packaged and presented the attacks and their aftermath transformed the web of events leading up to and following the attacks into a mediated public drama. The complexities of the causes and consequences of these events were quickly stripped away as the coverage was fashioned into a story filled with spectacular moments, compelling characters, human tragedy, heroism, gripping images, and other staples of dramatic storytelling (2010: 9).

These strategies denote an attempt to build an iconographic memory of the event. The media convey and package (to adopt the term employed by Monahan) images so as to tell a story, the story of 9/11. In doing so, not only do they continually reevoke the horrific events and all their adjacent feelings, but they also contribute to the construction of a narrative, of a memory. As far as the other media are concerned, newspapers came up with special editions and with special front pages – featuring a strong title above a single, large picture, similar to a movie poster. Most used keywords such as ‘terror’, ‘horror’, ‘attack’, ‘tragedy’, ‘evil’, ‘the darkest day’, ‘unthinkable’, or ‘infamy’ in association with key images such as the burning or the collapsing towers to recapture all the emotions awakened by the catastrophe: fear, panic, and confusion.⁷ On the front-page of the New York Times September 12, 2001 edition, N. R. Kleinfield described the “panic-stricken hours” of the day before focusing on the people, on those who had personally witnessed the previous day’s events: Every sound was cause for alarm. A plane appeared overhead. Was another one coming? No, it was a fighter jet. But was it friend or enemy? People scrambled for their lives, but they didn’t know where to go. Should they go north, south, east, west? Stay outside, go indoors? People hid beneath cars and each other. Some contemplated jumping into the river. For those trying to flee the very epicenter of the collapsing World Trade Center towers, the most horrid thought of all finally dawned on them: nowhere was safe (2001).

The radio incessantly broadcast interviews and expert opinions on the matter, temporarily relegating music to a secondary place.⁸ Several websites were created, turning the Internet, along with TV, into a preferential medium to

7 See September 11, 2001 (2001) by The Poynter Institute. 8 The role radio played in the coverage of 9/11 has not been studied with the same intensity as the other media have been. Nevertheless, in September 11 in Popular Culture (2010) by Sara E. Quay and Amy M. Damico, for example, there are some references that may shed light on the relevance of radio and music during and after 9/11.

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find, put out and gather information about the attacks.⁹ From this angle, it is thus fairly easy to realize that, instead of looking for other subjects to cover in order to escape the panic and the fear, the media took the opposite approach. September 11 remained the main theme: some addressed the terrorists and their motives, others the victims, their families and the so-called heroes of 9/11. What they all had in common was their usage of the words, the images, and the sounds recorded that September morning and the persisting sense of panic and insecurity underlying every testimony, every picture.

2 Mournitainment Following the exploitation of the panic and fear generated by 9/11, the afterlife of the catastrophe was also characterized by the exploitation of mourning, trauma and loss. While, on the one hand, the shock and the pain were highly personal, on the other, people also experienced a need to express their feelings in a very public fashion. Writing on this subject, Marita Sturken observed that “[i]n New York, small and spontaneous memorials sprang up immediately around the city, in Union Square Park and at numerous fire stations, and more widely on numerous websites, as people felt the need to perform some kind of ritual to mark their loss” (2002: 380). Thus far, this public demonstration of mourning and grief had been closely followed by the media, which had seized every opportunity to tell a story under the pretext of paying respect to victims, families and the lives they had prior to 9/11. As a result, “the rituals of memory have become incorporated into the media spectacle of September 11, and the media has been in part a vehicle for mourning” (ibid.: 381). The next few months, the New York Times, for instance, published a special daily feature called “Portraits of Grief”. The “Portraits of Grief” series provided brief bibliographical notes or snapshots of the lives of those who disappeared on 9/11. Originally entitled “Among the Missing”, its renaming moved the emphasis from the missing people on to those who mourn their loss.¹⁰ More than an obituary, these portraits were a celebration of life. They came out in homage to the person behind the label of victim, capturing moments of happiness instead of

9 For more information, see: Stuart Allan (2003), ‘Reweaving the Internet: online news of September 11’; Michelle Brown, Leia Fuzesi, Kara Kitch and Crystal Spivey (2003), ‘Internet News Representations of September 11: Archival Impulse in the Age of Information’. 10 See Nancy K. Miller (2003), ‘Reporting the Disaster’.

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focusing on the sadness of the moment of loss. They paid tribute to the life interrupted that morning, to a life before catastrophe. TV was nonetheless the most aggressive medium, capitalizing on every chance to draw on people’s emotional disturbance so as to create a show about 9/11 and hence reach audiences of millions. Only ten days after the attacks, a twohour live TV telethon was aired featuring musical performances and solemn short speeches by top American artists. Aiming, as Tom Hanks declared in his speech, at raising spirits and money, America: a Tribute to Heroes, organized by George Clooney, was broadcast on over 30 channels (and 8,000 radio stations), seen by around 60 million people and raised over $100 million on September 21, 2001. In a serene, dark stage, under candlelight, 21 singers performed songs of mourning, loss and hope while actors and other public figures delivered spoken tributes and answered phones. However, this telethon was more than a benefit event. Looking beyond the over-advertized charitable cause, Jeffrey Melnick critically defends that “in many ways Tribute felt more like a tribute to entertainment industry” (2009: 52). I would prefer to call it a tribute to the ‘mournitainment’ industry. By ‘mournitainment’, I mean the act or art of publicly exhibiting feelings related to a state of mourning in an entertaining way, especially through a performance or a show. If, from one standpoint, the media grasped this opportunity to turn mourning into a happening, into entertainment, from another standpoint, the artists themselves used their airtime for self-promotion and to convey a more positive, generous, sympathetic image of themselves. By joining the cause and being part of the show, the performers would not only openly condemn the attacks and ‘do something to help’ but also showcase themselves and their work in a display window with worldwide reach. This type of response – a fundraising event as a sort of award-like show – was again used on the occasion of other catastrophic and devastating events such as the South Asia tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake.¹¹ Apart from telethons, artists also came together to organize benefit concerts such as Madison Square Garden’s The Concert for New York City on October 20, 2001 or Washington DC’s United We Stand: What More Can I Give on October 21, 2001 to promote the idea of a grieving community. Nevertheless, in a twisted

11 Tsunami Aid: A Concert of Hope telethon (January 15, 2005) was seen by an estimate of 19.5 million viewers and raised $18.3 million for the American Red Cross International Response Fund. Shelter From the Storm: A Concert for the Gulf Coast, (September 9, 2005) was broadcast on over 29 channels and raised around $30 million for the American Red Cross and Salvation Army. Hope for Haiti Now (January 22, 2010) was seen all over the world and raised about $61 million.

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sense, it also corroborates what I seek to demonstrate in this paper, i.e. the subjacent need for a spectacle, even in times of tragedy.¹² As stated by David Simpson, 9/11 “occurred within a culture of commemoration” (2006: 31), largely explaining the subsequent metamorphosis of 9/11 anniversaries into media(ted) events. Taking advantage of the global impact of the catastrophe, the media have approached the planned September 11 memorial events and presidential acts as an opportunity to recall the events of 2001 and guarantee huge audiences in the process. Counterbalancing the gravity of the day and the highly personal suffering, the anniversaries of 9/11 have always been extremely public and massively broadcast from Washington, Pennsylvania and, above all, New York.¹³ The first anniversary of 9/11 was the most symbolic and the most media-saturated. This day marked not only the return to the empty Ground Zero site, which the victim’s families were allowed to visit for the first time, but also an attempt to find some kind of closure, a sign of healing or recovery. Mary L. Dudziak describes: “One year exactly after the first plane exploded into the World Trade Center, a moment of silence was observed in New York City” (2003: 212). In an intense and grave ceremony, bells tolled at the exact time the planes crashed and the towers collapsed, the names of the dead were recited where the towers once stood, commemorating the lives of those who perished. Such a somber and understandably private day nevertheless became a media frenzy, a spectacle. The Ground Zero site was once again transformed into a stage, regaining a new life as a place to remember and mourn, a place of pilgrimage, endowed with an almost sacred charge while also serving as a touristic attraction drawing millions of people every year to the site of the catastrophe. Sticking however to the anniversary celebrations, people have also turned into characters: some speaking lines (i.e. the names of the dead), others carrying flags, signs and photos, thus conveying a message of mourning, pain and grief. More than spectators, the public present at Ground Zero has become part of the event, part of the spectacle.

12 This recalls the influence of the classical Greek and Roman Tragedy tradition in Western civilization, which basically focuses on the representation of human drama and the emotional effect it causes on the audience. 13 The destruction of the World Trade Center has proven to be the 9/11 event with greatest impact, the most widely covered by the media and the one we remember the most. Hence, it is not surprising that both the celebratory acts and monument building have been concentrated especially in New York City: “the question of memorialization of September 11 has focused on what is called ‘Ground Zero’ in New York City, completely overshadowing the sites of destruction at the Pentagon and in Western Pennsylvania, making it clear that the New York site is the symbolic center of this tragic event” (Sturken 2002: 375).

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Uninterruptedly covered by the media, September 11 has grown to be a day to recall the attacks, remember the subsequent panic, shock and confusion while mourning the victims. As argued by Wheeler Winston Dixon, “9/11 now joins July 4 and Memorial Day as dates of national remembrance” (2004: 4). In fact, the media, TV in particular, dedicate the entire day to the event, airing numerous debates and talk shows, documentaries and movies about 9/11 to portray and explain the significance of the catastrophe and of the lives changed that morning. In respect to this, as James Young demonstrates in his essay “Remember Life with Life: The New World Trade Center”, mourning gradually turns into memory. This close association between commemoration and memory was also studied by Peter Burke in “Co-memorations. Performing the Past”. In this article, by operating in the intersection between the study of memory and the study of performance, the author emphasizes the weight celebrations have in constructing the memory of specific events. Burke, who describes co-memorations as “collaborative acts of recall or recollection” (2010: 106), thus discusses the re-enactment of past events and its importance in the reconstruction of history, the elaboration of a narrative and the canonization of particular moments. As shown by Peter Burke, these comemorations serve the double purpose of re-activating memory and suggesting what to remember and how to remember. From this perspective, commemorations are fundamental tools in the process of evoking a past event but also in telling its story. As far as 9/11 is concerned, given the extremely active participation of the media in what to remember and how to remember, these celebrations tend to be also spectacle-oriented, amplifying drama and emotion so as to make it more audience appealing. This approach echoes the way the media resorted to Hollywood from the outset in order to deal with such an incredibly disturbing event and to ensure its remembrance. As pointed out by Brian A. Monahan, the media told the story of September 11, particularly what was happening at New York City’s “Ground Zero”, as a public drama. Even though this was a major moment in U.S. history destined to have enormous cultural and political consequences, and therefore arguably demanding more measured and balanced coverage and discourse, the dominant narrative through which these events were communicated to the public was transformed into a dramatic tale that more closely mirrored popular fiction than detailed journalistic inquiry. September 11 was fashioned as an emotional story that, like so many popular television dramas, was stocked with stirring accounts, heartfelt moments, captivating images, harrowing encounters, and compelling characters (2010: xii-xiii).

However, Hollywood itself took some time to respond. Some productions were suspended, others reedited allegedly out of respect for the victims’ families and the American audience in general. However, according to Thomas Pollard,

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“months later it seemed to be business as usual. Eventually a few filmmakers began depicting the 9/11 attacks themselves, while others turned once more to the time-tested genres of patriotic and combat films” (2009: 195). From Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center to Paul Greengrass’s United 93, both from 2006, or numerous other superhero and disaster movies, 9/11 became an inescapable theme.¹⁴

3 Conclusion In conclusion, the media have played a crucial role in the mediation of one of the darkest episodes of recent history, 9/11. They have exploited to the fullest the human dimension of the catastrophe, seizing every opportunity to put on a show. Nevertheless, this is but a reflection of society at large, which turned 9/11 into a commodity¹⁵ and the World Trade Center site into a tourist spot, a must-see/mustphotograph place in New York City. Since that Tuesday morning of 2001, 9/11 has become the ultimate example of what Geoff King calls ‘the spectacle of the real’¹⁶ or what Kevin Rozario calls ‘spectacles of calamity’.¹⁷ These two expressions illustrate the fascination with the liveness, the all-too fictional and spectacular

14 For more information, see: Wheeler Winston Dixon (2004) (ed) Film and Television after 9/11; Thomas Pollard (2009), ‘Hollywood 9/11: Time of Crisis’. 15 Dana Heller contends in the introductory chapter of her book The Selling of 9/11. How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity that the aftermath of the catastrophic event of 2001 was characterized by a collective compulsion to engage in practices of consumption as a response to a “national hunger for meaning” (2005: 6). Heller argues that after 9/11 “the market for goods representing American patriotic unity and pride expanded dramatically” (ibid.: 6). Americans were particularly interested in 9/11-related material, from photos to firefighter figures or WTC memorabilia. The logic behind the consumption of these goods was the reinforcement of the American national identity as well as the promise of closure and healing. 16 “Hollywood special effects offer spectacular creations or re-creations that make claims to our attention on the grounds of their ‘incredible-seeming reality’. They can appear both ‘incredible’ and ‘real’, their appeal based on their ability to ‘convince’ – to appear real in terms such as detail and texture – and on their status as fabricated spectacle, to be admired as such. At a seemingly very different end of the audio-visual media spectrum, ‘reality’ television offers the spectacle of, supposedly, the ‘real’ itself, a ‘reality’ that ranges from the banality of the quotidian to intense interpersonal engagements […]. The two also overlap in many instances, however, nowhere more clearly and jarringly in recent years than in the ultimate ‘spectacle of the real’ constituted by the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, live-reality television coverage of which evoked constant comparison with big-screen fictional images” (King 2005: 13). 17 “Spectacles of calamity command our attention because they present an occasion for processing, intellectually and emotionally, the experience of living in a world of systematic ruin

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reality of 9/11 – in other words, the juxtaposition of reality and fiction/entertainment. First evoking the big blockbuster plots and special effects, 9/11 later stimulated the organization of megaspectacles, exploiting people’s emotions and the event’s social, cultural, historical, political and economic impact. Overlapping catastrophe, spectacularity and reality, 9/11 became unavoidable for the media, especially TV (American TV in particular), that live off entertainment. As a result, and despite the horror, the shock and the pain, the cameras must keep rolling, the show must go on.

Works Cited Allan, Stuart (2003) ‘Reweaving the Internet: online news of September 11’, in Journalism after September 11, ed. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan (London: Routledge), 119–140. Baudrillard, Jean (2003) The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso). Baudrillard, Jean (2002) Screened Out, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso). Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press). Brown, Michelle et al. (2003) ‘Internet News Representations of September 11: Archival Impulse in the Age of Information’, in Media Representations of September 11, ed. Steven Chermak, Frankie Y. Bailey and Michelle Brown (Westport: Praeger), 103–116. Burke, Peter (2010) ‘Co-memorations. Performing the Past’, in Performing the Past, ed. Karin Tilmans, Frank Van Vree and Jay Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), 105–118. Carey, James W. (2003) ‘American Journalism on, before, and after September 11’, in Journalism after September 11, ed. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan (London: Routledge), 71–90. Couldry, Nick, Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz (eds) (2010) Media Events in a Global Age (London: Routledge). Dayan, Daniel (2006) La Terreur Spectacle: Terrorisme et Télévision (Brussels: De Boeck Université). Dayan, Daniel and Elihu Katz (1994) Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Dixon, Wheeler Winston (ed) (2004) Film and Television after 9/11 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University). Dixon, Wheeler Winston (2004) ‘Introduction: Something Lost – Film after 9/11’, in Film and Television after 9/11, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University), 1–28. Dudziak, Mary L. (2003) ‘Afterword: Remembering September 11’, in September 11 in History. A Watershed Moment?, ed. Mary L. Dudziak (Durham: Duke University Press), 212–215.

and renewal, destruction and reconstruction, where technological and environmental disasters always loom” (Rozario 2007: 6).

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Heller, Dana (2005) ‘Introduction: Consuming 9/11’, in The Selling of 9/11. How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity, ed. Dana Heller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 1–26. Kahane, Claire (2003) ‘Uncanny Sights: The Anticipation of the Abomination’, in Trauma at Home: after 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska), 107–116. King, Geoff (2005) ‘Introduction: The Spectacle of the Real’, in The Spectacle of the Real. From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff King (Bristol: Intellect). Kleinfield, N. R. (2001) ‘U.S. Attacked. Hijacked jets destroy Twin Towers and hit Pentagon in Day of Terror’, in The New York Times, September 12. Melnick, Jeffrey (2009) 9/11 Culture: America under construction (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell). Miller, Nancy K. (2003) ‘Reporting the Disaster’, in Trauma at Home: after 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska), 39–47. Monahan, Brian A. (2010) The Shock of the News: media coverage and the making of 9/11 (New York: New York University Press). Pollard, Thomas (2009) ‘Hollywood 9/11: Time of Crisis’, in The Impact of 9/11 on the Media, Arts, and Entertainment, ed. Mathew J. Morgan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 195–207. Quay, Sara E. and Amy M. Damico, (eds) (2010) September 11 in Popular Culture (Santa Barbara: Greenwood). Rodney, Lee (2005) ‘Real time, Catastrophe, Spectacle: Reality as Fantasy in Live Media’, in The Spectacle of the Real. From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff King (Bristol: Intellect), 37–45. Rozario, Kevin (2007) The Culture of Calamity: disaster and the making of modern America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Simpson, David (2006) 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Sturken, Marita (2002) ‘Memorializing Absence’, in Understanding September 11, ed. Craig Calhoun, Paul Price and Ashley Timmer (New York: The New Press), 374–384. The Poynter Institute (2001) September 11, 2001 (Kansas City: Andrews McMeel). Young, James (2003) ‘Remember Life with Life: The New World Trade Center’, in Trauma at Home: after 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska), 216–222. Žižek, Slavoj (2002) Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (London and New York: Verso).

David Duindam

Stage, Performance, Media Event: the National Commemoration of the Second World War in the Netherlands The annual Dodenherdenking commemorates all Dutch war victims who have been killed since 1940, with a special emphasis on World War II. This ceremony is held at Dam square in Amsterdam, at the foot of the National Monument. It is attended by the Queen, the Prime Minister and about 20,000 people and broadcast live on television, with an audience of over 2.5 million people.¹⁸ It is a key event in the construction of the memory of the war and in the contemporary nation-building of the Netherlands. The central question of this paper is: what kind of community is being constructed with the Dodenherdenking and how is this done? I will examine three topics: the double function of the National Monument as a war memorial and stage for the nation; the Dodenherdenking as a performance of what I term nationalized memory; and the televised broadcast of this ceremony as a media event (Dayan and Katz 1992). To analyze the mechanism of this media event, I conclude with a case study of the 2010 ceremony when the two minutes of silence were disrupted by a screaming man in an incident that caused mass panic. The first part of this paper addresses the establishment of the National Monument and its role in the dynamics of cultural memory (Erll and Rigney 2009). As a sculpture, it embodies a very specific and limited narrative of the war: one of national unity, Christian suffering and resistance. As a symbolic site, however, the monument functions as a stage for state ceremonies and the performance of a constantly changing but always nationalized memory of the war. Similar to a theatrical stage, the National Monument does not impose a specific meaning but rather provides a spatial and nationalized framework for the performance of the Dodenherdenking. The second part of this paper addresses the performance of memory in the various commemorative services in the Netherlands. There is a general shift from a nationalistic and singular narrative focused on the resistance movements to a

18 See ‘Verslag Nationale Herdenking op de Dam 2010', 4en5mei.nl, last updated May 2010 (accessed 24 March 2011). The ceremony was simultaneously broadcast by six different television channels. See ‘Miljoenen kijkers voor Dodenherdenking op de Dam’, Mediacourant. nl, last updated 5 May 2010 (accessed 18 March 2011).

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pluralization of victimhood. The national commemoration at Dam square aspires to be all-inclusive but remains bound to a national framework. In the final two sections of this paper, I analyze how the Dodenherdenking is televised as a media event in order to reach an audience of millions. A media event supposedly transforms the experience of the viewer at home into ceremonial participation (Dayan and Katz 1992: 17). This virtual semblance of ‘being there’ was disrupted by the screaming man in 2010. Drawing on Becker’s typology of media rituals, I analyze footage of the incident (Becker 1995) to help in understanding how the interrelated elements of stage, performance and media event are employed in the imagination and construction of a nationalized community.

1 The National Monument as Sculpture and Stage of the Nation The annual ceremony attended by the Queen and other officials takes place at the National Monument, established in 1956. This monument has two important features. As a sculpture, it embodies a specific and restricted memory of the war. As a symbolic site, it offers a ceremonial stage for performances that endorse the nation. The current National Monument is the successor to a temporary memorial that was built in 1947. This provisional wall contained eleven urns with soil from battlefields and cemeteries from all Dutch provinces. This soon turned out to be a source of conflict: veterans and victims from the former colonies were not included. In 1950 this ‘omission’ was rectified by the addition of an urn with soil from the former colony the Dutch Indies. This act appropriated the colonial history as part of the national narrative of the war without actually criticizing the questionable role of the Netherlands overseas (van Ginkel 2011: 73).¹⁹ These urns were all incorporated in the permanent monument in 1956, which consists of a twenty-two meter high pylon surrounded by several sculptures in the tradition of Christian iconography. We see a crucified man surrounded by three shackled men. Below, two men and three dogs represent the resistance movement, loyalty and sorrow. Above them, a woman holds a child in her arms; doves and lions

19 There was also soil added from war-cemeteries dating from after the war, when the Dutch fought against the independence of Indonesia. These military acts had little to do with World War II but were nevertheless incorporated into the monument. See van de Reijt (2010: 25).

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symbolize tenacity, peace and victory (ibid.: 75–79). The National Monument embodies a specific interpretation of World War II. The Dutch suffered as a united and mainly Christian people. The resistance movement fought back loyally and bravely. Their sacrifice was interpreted in terms of the suffering of Jesus, heroic and serving a direct cause: victory over the Nazis and peace for future generations. This would be the hegemonic narrative of the war until the historical perspective gradually shifted in the 1960s.²⁰ The war had devastated the national self-image of neutrality and independence. The nation had to reinvent itself and the memory of the war became an important stake in this politics of memory. There was something that everybody shared: the loss of loved ones, either directly or indirectly. Judith Butler argues that mourning is a potential basis for community: “Despite our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a ‘we,’ for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous ‘we’ of us all” (Butler 2004: 20). Loss is not only a negative force but can also be used as a tool for constructing a new collective. The question then becomes: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, what makes for a grievable life?” (ibid.: 20, original italics). Butler argues it is possible to enumerate a ‘hierarchy of grief’ (ibid.: 32), which raises the issue of political representation and recognition. We have suffered in unity, but some have suffered more than others. In the case of the post-war Netherlands, the resistance movement had been instrumental in winning the war. Their suffering deserved more attention than that of other victims. This hierarchy of grief is embodied by National Monument: part of its sculptural representation suggests inscription into the national narrative of the war and therefore recognition of one’s suffering and sacrifice. One group that is notably absent in this visual narrative is the Jewish community. In the first post-war period, there was no room for the commemoration of any particular victim group in the public realm. The government was in the process of rebuilding the nation and prohibited the establishment of monuments in commemoration of particular victim groups. The official narrative held that the Dutch had suffered as a collective: Jews and non-Jews had endured the same terrors. It was even argued that paying special attention to the persecution of the Jews would be in line with the Nazi ideology of racial separation. This policy did not change until the 1960s, when the general perspective on the war gradually shifted (van Vree 1995a). The first monument in the Netherlands dedicated specif-

20 This is not a uniquely Dutch development. Frank van Vree describes how there are structural similarities in the nationalistic appropriations of the memory of the war in the Netherlands, France and Poland. See Frank van Vree (2002: 202–220).

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ically to the victims of the Shoah opened no sooner than 1962 at the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Aleida Assmann argues that in the first period after a war, ‘active’ victims (sacrificia: soldiers and members of the resistance movement killed in action) are often prioritized over ‘passive’ victims (victimae: persecuted Jews, Roma or Sinti). The former can be inscribed into a heroic reconstruction of the past, while the latter confront us with a traumatic memory: “Traumatic experiences of suffering and shame are incorporated with difficulty in the memory [of a war], because they cannot be integrated with a positive individual or collective self-image” (Assmann 2006: 75).²¹ The National Monument was designed to highlight the sacrifices of active victims. The unimaginable massacre of millions of (non-Christian) victimae could not be re-appropriated for such a positive interpretation: it was simply not included.²² Not long after its instalment, the monument started to function as a stage for official ceremonies unconnected to the memory of World War II.²³ Representatives from a woman’s peace movement laid wreaths, as well as several foreign heads of state. In 1957, Hungarian refugees commemorated the first anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution (van Ginkel 2011: 84). These ceremonies were approved by the government because they followed the rules of stately conduct and underlined the natural authority of the nation. In contrast to these official ceremonies, it was also the site of unofficial practices. In 1969 and 1970, a group of rebellious hippies occupied the monument for several weeks before they were removed by the authorities (Blom 1995: 146). As a sculpture, the National Monument could offer only a limited narrative of the war. As a stage, it provided a nationalized context for different kinds of ceremonial performances.²⁴ The National Monument offers a spatial framework that endorses official ceremonies: a performance executed on this specific location

21 My translation. Original text: “Traumatische Erfahrungen von Leid und Scham finden nur schwer Einlass ins Gedächtnis, weil diese nicht in ein positives individuelles oder kollektives Selbstbild integriert werden können”. 22 Sacrifice is an important element of Christianity: it transforms suffering into a positive experience. The unimaginable genocide of the Jews, however, could not be understood as meaningful in this sense. See Frank van Vree (1995a: 165–67), and Aleida Assmann (2006: 74–75). 23 I use the term stage as part of the theater trope. A theatrical performance needs a stage (spatial framework) and an audience to be effective. The same holds for ceremonial performances held at the National Monument. 24 I use the term nationalized instead of nationalist. The term nationalist is often associated with cultural assimilation. In the 1990s, the hegemonic political ideology shifted to a multicultural model that envisioned integration rather than assimilation of other cultures (this model has been criticized increasingly by right-winged political parties). The ultimate cultural,

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takes on a different character to a similar ceremony at another site. The National Monument was soon used as a stage for both official and unofficial practices that had, strictly speaking, nothing to do with the memory of the war. This stage was intended to represent the entire nation, but was far from a neutral and open space. The unambiguous and thoroughly politicized reference to a specific hierarchy of grief was gradually elevated to a more general and symbolic character that retained a common sense morality based on a consensual memory of the war. This ‘collective memory’ had a distinct nationalized ideology that would change over time. It would determine who could use the stage and how: unpatriotic practices would not be tolerated. As such, it became a nationalized stage rather than a democratic site for open debate.

2 The National Dodenherdenking as a Performance of the Past The relationship between stage and performance is reciprocal: performances of memory invest meaning in the stage, and the stage provides a framework for the performance to actually function as a national ceremony (Rigney 2005: 11–28). The National Monument functions as a stage for the Dodenherdenking. This ceremony is a performance of memory that both repeats and reshapes the past: Memory performed is at the heart of collective memory. When individuals and groups express or embody or interpret or repeat a script about the past, they galvanize the ties that bind groups together and deposit additional memory traces about the past in their own minds. Through performance, we move from the individual to the group to the individual (Winter 2010: 11).

Performances of memory can construct new cultural meanings and historical interpretations. The national Dodenherdenking is such a performance of memory. It is both an important agent and a product of the dynamics of the collective memory of the war. When we look at the development of the ceremony in Dam square and its position in the Dutch culture of commemoration, we begin to understand the politics implicit to this nationalized performance. May 4th became the national commemoration day in 1946. Every village, town or city district had its own local ceremony that was embedded in a coun-

political and historical framework, however, continued to be the Dutch nation. This is what I will mean with the term ‘nationalized’.

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trywide structure with two minutes of silence as its ritual center. A speech by a local dignitary and the location of the ceremony gave these performances a sitespecific character. This flexibility to adapt to local narratives is still an important characteristic of these diverse ceremonies. There was also an additional national ceremony that took place in the morning or afternoon. It never gained popular support until 1988, when it was synchronized with the local commemorations and broadcast live on television. It is important to note that the local ceremonies evolved separately from the national ceremony. Where the former bottom-up performances were able to incorporate local stories, the latter top-down service was shaped by the aspirations and ideals of the government and had to represent a national collective memory of the war and thereby became an instrument of nation-building. The Dodenherdenking changed over time under the influence of the dynamic memory of the war. An important shift in this memory took place in the 1960s. The hegemonic narrative of resistance and united suffering was scrutinized by a new and critical generation. The general public was confronted with events that would greatly influence the public memory of World War II: the Eichmann trial in 1961; the publication of a seminal study on the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands (Presser 1965); and an influential documentary about the war, De Bezetting.²⁵ These events, amongst others, led to a growing awareness of the horrors of the Shoah. Before that time, the persecution of the Jews was not often addressed specifically at both local and national ceremonies.²⁶ The national commemoration had to embody the collective memory of the war. When this memory was contested in the 1960s, this ceremony did not adjust easily to these new insights. Former members of resistance were still very influential when it came to organizing the national ceremony, and this group continued to prioritize the commemoration of the sacrificia, the active victims of the war (van de Reijt 2010: 43–79). The national ceremony had to negotiate between this traditional perspective and an emerging desire to shift the focus to the loss of the victimae. This struggle was about more than the past: it was a conflict between two different worldviews that fought over the hierarchy of grief. In order to be inserted into the hegemonic narrative of the war, the Shoah had to be universal-

25 Though this documentary did not part with the tradition of the myth of resistance, it did pay special attention to the persecution of the Jews. See Frank van Vree (1995b). 26 A disturbing example of this is an internal city board of Amsterdam memorandum in 1960. The board prevented the public speaking of several Jews during a local commemoration, because this would render the service excessively Jewish in character. In 1961, the situation was turned around: just weeks after the start of the Eichmann-trial, the mayor of Amsterdam specifically mentioned the suffering of the Jews in his speech at local commemoration in stark contrast with the internal memorandum a year before.

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ized: this genocide stood for more than just a historical event. As such, it was used as a political and didactic tool. It had to remind younger generations of what anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance could lead to (de Haan 1997: 46–50). The memory of the Shoah functioned as a moral imperative against racism and other forms of discrimination and was in line with the growing importance of universal human rights. This gave way to the commemoration of other victim groups such as the Roma, Sinti and homosexuals. This pluralization of victimhood still resonates in the national ceremony through the wreaths that are laid after the two minutes of silence by several victims associations (van de Reijt 2010: 67). In order to be inscribed into the official narrative of the war, victim groups that were previously ignored stand in line to pay their respects. The shift of the hierarchy of grief was thus only accepted within the framework of the nation. The ideology of multiculturalism was not part of a nationalistic discourse but was still based on a nationalized conceptualization of the state: unity, tolerance and multiculturalism under the protection of the Dutch flag. The first part of this paper describes how the National Monument functions as a stage for the nation. The Dodenherdenking is a historically-shaped and politically-charged ceremony. Both are framed by and re-produce a nationalized interpretation of the past. This memory of the war changed radically over time, from commemorating the war heroes in an effort to celebrate nationalist unity, to the collective mourning the loss of millions of innocent victims. This transformation was fuelled by an increased awareness of the horrors of the Shoah in the 1960s and later by a political wish to utilize this memory in preventing contemporary forms of racism. The national Dodenherdenking was politicized and gradually detached from its original inception, remembering the historical events of World War II. In the next section, we look at the way this ceremony is televised. Erll and Rigney point out that we should consider “the specifically medial processes through which memories come into the public arena and become collective” (Erll and Rigney 2009: 2, original italics). In 1988, the Dodenherdenking was turned into a media event, enabling viewers at home to feel as if they are participating in the ceremony on site.

3 The National Ceremony as a Media Event Attending the annual commemoration in person is an affective experience: the two minutes of silence are the ritual core of the ceremony, the moment people feel connected. As Jay Winter points out:

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The performative act rehearses and recharges the emotion which gave the initial memory or story imbedded in it its sticking power, its resistance to erasure or oblivion. Hence affect is always inscribed in performative acts in general and in the performance of memory in particular (Winter 2010: 12).

Until 1988, the national ceremony lacked such an emotional charge in comparison to its local counterparts. This was the year the government decided to change the national Dodenherdenking drastically. The national ceremony moved from four o’clock in the afternoon to eight o’clock in the evening, synchronous to the local events. This was a successful change; suddenly, the national ceremony could compete with popular local services such as the one held at the Waalsdorpervlakte. The most fundamental transformation, however, was its medial framework. Prior to 1988, the national ceremony was not broadcast live on national television but merely reported after the event by the daily news outlets.²⁷ This changed with the alignment of the local and national ceremonies: henceforth, the national ceremony would be broadcast live. The national ceremony was not only attended by a crowd of a few thousand people at Dam square; viewers at home watched the ceremony, increasing the audience into the millions. The advisory committee that had suggested these changes argued that the national ceremony should, “in addition to the personal and emotional experience, also attain the eminence of a general event” (quoted by van de Reijt 2010: 71, my translation). The organization tailored the commemoration to the needs of the public television broadcaster that readily cooperated in the production of a massive annual media event. According to Dayan and Katz, media events “hang a halo over the television set and transform the viewing experience” (Dayan and Katz 1992: 1). This applies to the broadcasting of the national ceremony: people watch it in order to join the crowd in the two minutes of silence, whereby “passive spectatorship gives way to ceremonial participation” (ibid.: 17). It is precisely this that the organization wanted to invoke: to commemorate the war collectively in a shared and affective experience, rather than a cerebral exercise: ‘Being there’, attending to the spot, in person, is still an enjoyable experience. However enjoyable, it is no longer the sole route to ceremonial participation. The reality of the event – that which will be retold – is not what happened ‘there’ (ibid.: 211).

27 Until 1988, the popular local ceremony at the Waalsdorpervlakte was broadcast live at eight o’clock. See Havermans (2000).

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This is enhanced by the fact that a media event barely contains any newsworthy elements: everything is planned in advance, both the ceremony and the way it is filmed and broadcast. These events: may be said to have moved from a theatrical model  – where performance and reaction are joined in the same space – to a cinematographic model which dissociates performers not only from their public but sometimes from each other as well (ibid.: 209–210, original italics).

This is what I term the semblance of being there: the national ceremony is attended by a crowd of 20,000 people who are joined by an audience of 2.5 million viewers. This meditated extension feels almost natural. As Winter argues, the performance of memory is inscribed by affect: the semblance of being there allows the viewing experience to take on such an affective charge. With this in mind, we can understand why the government changed the ceremony in 1988. Media events “integrate societies in a collective heartbeat and evoke a renewal of loyalty to the society and its legitimate authority” (ibid.: 9, original italics).²⁸ This strategy extends the reach of the national ceremony at Dam square through a nationwide and live broadcast. The aim of the national ceremony is to integrate society and renew loyalty to the Queen and the nation. It does so by making use of audiovisual conventions in the context of the nation’s most important symbols: the Queen, the flag and the national anthem. The viewer is invited to identify with the nation as part of a collective, and with society as an individual. When we analyze the live footage of 4th May 2010 up until the screaming man disrupts the ceremony, we can observe the strategies that have been described by Karin Becker, who argues that the media and the crowd work together to produce a single and coherent narrative (Becker 1995).²⁹ The first shot shows a trumpeter signalling the start of the two minutes of silence. The camera slowly moves to the crowd,³⁰ shown as a collective; after that, we see the flag half-staff and hear the

28 Nick Couldry criticizes Dayan and Katz, arguing that they have a too collectivist and neoDurkheimian approach that is based on two presumptions: first, that society needs to have a center, and secondly that the media can represent this center. This conceals the fact the media can never represent the full multivocal scope of society, while at the same time naturalizing their own legitimacy as society’s spokesperson. See Couldry (2003). 29 The footage can be viewed online: ‘Paniek Dodenherdenking 2010 (live)’, YouTube, last updated 4 May 2010, accessed on 23 March 2010. 30 This slow camera-movement is typical for media events: “Both pictures and words are slowed to a ceremonial pace, and aesthetic considerations are unusually important” (Dayan and Katz 1992: 11).

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church bells tolling. We return to the crowd: the director tactically selects specific individuals that represent the diversity of society. First, we see active military men saluting; after that, we see certain individuals, including a man wearing a turban; next, there is a shot of the National Monument, emphasizing the specific site as a ceremonial stage. Now the camera turns to a saluting veteran; this is followed by a shot of a young couple with an intense look of sadness in their eyes. The viewer at home is invited to identify with these images and is offered several, though limited, positions he or she can relate to: that of a veteran, a foreigner, an active soldier or a young person. The soldiers and veterans salute, embodying their extraordinary role in society; civilians on the other hand radiate gratitude and sadness. An example of this is the close-up shot of a young couple that knows it is being filmed since the camera is clearly right in front of them. They act according to the conventions of the televised event and do not look straight into the camera. They are in an emotional state of contemplative mourning and flawlessly play the role they have undoubtedly seen performed many times before. The camera crew and the crowd harmoniously perform the ceremonial and audiovisual conventions of the Dodenherdenking. Becker argues that the media construct a coherent narrative by capturing peak moments, liminal moments and the general atmosphere, in collaboration with the crowd. In spite of the fact that the people in the crowd are supposedly authentic, their actions “can also be staged, or a gesture may be held for an extra moment, suspending time for the purpose of recording it” (ibid.: 638). She argues that the general atmosphere is captured by showing typical and outstanding examples, ordinary people and special guests: “Media are thus contributing to the construction of the public event’s significance as an inclusive cultural performance” (ibid.: 639, original italics). This last point is crucial: the man in a turban stars next to young people and old veterans, embodying a multicultural, inclusive society. This is the kind of community that is envisioned by the Dodenherdenking: an inclusive and open society, based on solidarity and equality. What we should not forget, however, is that this performance is ultimately framed within the history and boundaries of the Dutch nation, based on a narrative of the past that is not neutral and objective. This is further emphasized by the nationalized stage provided by the National Monument.

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4 The Scream: Mourning, Panic and the Collapse of the Media Event The national ceremony is repeated every year in approximately the same fashion. It is important to note that media events are not news events: “Great news events speak of accidents, of disruption; great ceremonial events celebrate order and its restoration” (Dayan and Katz 1992: 9).³¹ The media event of the Dodenherdenking was violently disturbed in 2010, when during the two minutes of silence a screaming man caused mass panic. The crowd fled the scene and more than sixty people were injured as a result. When we analyze the video from the scream onwards, two things stand out: the crowd explodes into mass panic and the broadcast turns to a high-angle shot. The director needs some time to figure out what is happening and how to react. After twenty seconds, the crew starts to film the incident within the conventions of a news event: the operators film the panicking crowd and do so outside the conventions of the media event. The cameras move at a higher pace than before and sporadically we see ‘failed’ shots obstructed by objects.³² The Queen is taken away to safety and we see injured people being helped by the police. Cameramen walk through the crowd, capturing the panic that ensued. Two and a half minutes after the scream, order is restored. The master of ceremony at Dam square announces somebody in the crowd was taken ill and is now being cared for. He wants to minimize the panic and announces the ceremony will be continued soon after. The audience applauds and the organization directs everybody to his and her proper place. Three minutes and ten seconds after mass panic broke out, the Queen returns to the square and the ceremony is wrapped up with the national anthem. What starts as a media event turns into a news event. The incident has two direct consequences: the television team is confronted with an unexpected situation that eludes the conventions of the media event; and the ceremony at Dam square turns into chaos. This is quickly resolved by the master of ceremony. It is very important for the organization that the ceremony is completed: what could have been a major incident was quickly contained within the framework of the ceremony itself. What is not restored, however, is the ‘semblance of being there’,

31 This clear-cut distinction between media event and news event has been criticized by several authors. See Couldry, Hepp, and Krotz (2010). For the scope of this article, however, we can effectively employ this distinction in order to analyze this specific incident. 32 This is characteristic for the coverage of live news events, but unusual for carefully prepared media events.

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invoked by the media event. The viewer at home is no longer virtually participating but set at a distance, watching a news event he or she is not really part of. What happened here? A media event connects the viewer with what he or she sees because the mediated distance between these two positions is erased. Erll and Rigney follow Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin who argue that our “culture wants to multiply its media and erase all traces of mediation; ideally it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them” (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 5). The media should be invisible in order for the viewer to ‘experience the real’. This immediacy however can be disturbed and replaced by an exposing ‘experience of the medium’: “While ‘immediacy’ creates the experience of the presence of the past, ‘hypermediacy’, which reminds the viewer of the medium, points to the potential self-reflexivity of all memorial media” (Erll and Rigney 2009: 4). The incident at the national ceremony exposes this double logic of remediation. The broadcast initially transforms the viewing experience into a ceremonial participation, a semblance of being there. This experience erases the mediation of television and suggests that the viewer is actually attending the ceremony. After the screaming man disrupted this virtual experience, the viewer is no longer part of an integrating media ritual, but is watching an unsettling news event instead. The conventions of the media event are abandoned: the camerawork is no longer at a slow and reverential pace and the symbolic narrative built up by the director is discarded. Once the event is disrupted, the viewer is confronted by a problem. The immediacy of the medium is replaced with a hypermediacy and the viewer at home realizes that he or she is not present at the site: the ‘experience of the real’ is replaced by an ‘experience of the medium’. The cinematographic model is exposed and therefore collapses: the crowd at Dam square is abruptly separated from the audience at home. Despite the fact that the ceremony at Dam square is concluded, the viewer’s experience of ceremonial participation cannot be resumed.

5 Stage, Performance, Media Event: the Nationalization of the Dodenherdenking The Dodenherdenking is a performance of national unity. John Urry describes how such an ideology of communion is constructed: “efforts are made to attach conceptions of communion to buildings, or areas, or estates, or cities and so on, in ways which conceal and help to perpetuate the non-communion relations actually to be found there” (Urry 1995: 10). This is at the heart of the paradoxical logic of the Dodenherdenking in two ways: first of all, the pluralization of victim-

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hood is embedded in the ideology of a nationalized multiculturalism. Secondly, the feeling of national belonging, which finds its epitome in the two minutes of silence, is mediated by the television broadcast, when collective mourning is used to support the project of the Dutch nation. This feeling of communion conceals the social reality of inequality in the Netherlands, where tolerance and integration are possible only within a nationalized framework. We observed three general trends in the memory of the war: unity of the nation; a growing awareness of the suffering of the Jews; and a pluralization of victimhood. The first and the third have been fully incorporated into the Dodenherdenking because they supported a positive image of the nation. The memory of the Shoah however had to be universalized before it could play an essential role in the self-image of the Netherlands. The community that is performed by the national Dodenherdenking has always been a political project. When we look at the current situation, we see that the memories of minority groups are acknowledged as long as they fit into the framework of the nation. The National Monument offers a stage for the Dodenherdenking, a cultural performance that supports the nationalized (not nationalist) multicultural ideology. There is a place for minorities, both in the past and in the present, as long as they abide by the rules and values of the Netherlands. In this context, memory of the Shoah is used as a political instrument to endorse the multicultural project rather than in recognition of the social and cultural contribution of the Jews to the history of the Netherlands and their persecution during the war. The two minutes of silence are the ritual center of this ceremony. The idea that a large part of the population is silent at exactly the same moment has a strong symbolic, equalizing and affective potential. Participating in this ritual means performing your national identity, independent of your personal perspective. During this silence, individuals are encouraged to feel connected to those who join them and those who have passed away. This affect is enhanced by the televised broadcast that enables viewers at home to participate with the merest effort of switching their television sets on. The incident with the screaming man demonstrates how fragile this mediated participation is. Not only did this undermine the two minutes of silence, but it also exposed the vulnerability of the virtual solidarity central to this media event. When we analyze the theater of World War II memory, we see how the nationalized stage, performance of memory and the televised media event are effectively used for the construction of an imagined and nationalized community. Despite its current multicultural intentions and underlying democratic principles, the Dodenherdenking envisions a society that is framed within an ideology that is far from neutral and continues to uphold the nation as the ultimate cultural, historical and political structure of the Netherlands. Minorities and their memories of

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the war are equalized and stripped from their otherness in order to be inserted into a collective narrative of the past and performance of the present.

Works Cited Assmann, Aleida (2006) Der Lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck). Becker, Karin (1995) ‘Media and the Ritual Process’, Media, Culture & Society, 17.4, 629–646. Blom, J. C. H. (1995) ‘Het leed, de vastberadenheid en de mooie vrede. Het Nationaal Monument op de Dam’, in Waar de blanke top der duinen en andere vaderlandse herinneringen, ed. N. C. F. Sas (Amsterdam: Contact), 137–150. Bolter, J. D., and Richard Grusin (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press). Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso). Couldry, Nick (2003) Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (London: Routledge). Couldry, Nick, Andreas Hepp, and Friedrich Krotz (2010) Media Events in a Global Age (London: Routledge). Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz (1992) Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Erll, Astrid, and Ann Rigney (2009) Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter). Ginkel, Rob van (2011) Rondom de stilte: herdenkingscultuur in Nederland (Amsterdam: Bakker). Haan, Ido de (1997) Na de ondergang: de herinnering aan de jodenvervolging in Nederland, 1945–1995 (The Hague: Sdu Uitgevers). Havermans, Jos (2000), ‘Nationale herdenking rust op precair evenwicht van emoties’, Vier vrijheid, 4.1, 11–13. ‘Miljoenen kijkers voor Dodenherdenking op de Dam’, Mediacourant.nl, http://www. mediacourant.nl/?p=67868, last updated on 5 May 2010 (accessed 18 March 2011). ‘Paniek Dodenherdenking 2010 (live)', YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0cEQp8OQj2Y, last updated on 4 May 2010 (accessed 23 March 2010). Presser, J. (1965) Ondergang: de vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse jodendom, 1940–1945 (‘s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij Nijhoff). Reijt, Maud van de (2010) Zestig jaar herrie om twee minuten stilte: hoe wij steeds meer doden hingen herdenken (Amsterdam: Bakker). Rigney, Ann (2005) ‘Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory’, Journal of European Studies, 35.1, 11–28. Urry, John (1995) Consuming Places (London: Routledge). ‘Verslag Nationale Herdenking op de Dam 2010', 4en5mei.nl, http://www.4en5mei.nl/ herdenken/nationale_herdenking/de_dam/verslag_2010, last updated on May 2010 (accessed 24 March 2011). Vree, Frank van (1995a) In de Schaduw van Auschwitz: herinneringen, beelden, geschiedenis (Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij).

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Vree, Frank van (1995b) ‘Televisie en de geschiedschrijving van de Tweede Wereldoorlog’, Theoretische geschiedenis, 22.1, 1–26. Vree, Frank van (2002) ‘Auschwitz and the Origins of Contemporary Historical Culture’, in European History: Challenge for a Common Future, ed. Atilla Pók, Jörn Rüsen, and Jutta Scherrer (Hamburg: Edition Körber-Stiftung), 202–220. Winter, Jay (2010) ‘The Performance of the Past: Memory, History, Identity’, in Performing the past: memory, history, and identity in modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans and Frank van Vree (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), 11–23.

Frauke Surmann

No Fun: Mourning the Loss of Tragedy in Contemporary Performance Art A rundown room. The large window to the right is covered in dust and yet lets in just enough daylight in order to illuminate the scenery. Clothes, cables, food boxes, sheets of paper and other unidentifiable objects are spread randomly all over the wooden floor. To the left there is a rumpled sofa. One of its cushions lies on the floor in the corner of the room. Next to it lies, on its side, a knocked over green chair. From the ceiling hangs a young man dressed in a black sweatshirt and shorts, a white cable around his neck. His head is slightly tilted back, his eyes are closed, his mouth slightly open. His naked arms and legs hang loose in the air – almost motionless. Though barely perceptible, his body swings back and forth from time to time. There is no sound. Such was the staging of No Fun, one of the most recent online performances by the Italian artist collective Eva and Franco Mattes alias 0100101110101101. ORG.³³ On May 1, 2010 they staged an online suicide on Chatroulette, a website which pairs random strangers together for webcam-based conversations.³⁴ The performance went on for several hours. Over this time, thousands of Chatroulette users were exposed to the performer’s body hanging from the ceiling. Afterwards, a selection of the recorded reactions to this simulated suicide was edited and then launched as a 10-minute-video on the artists’ website. Subsequently this video was spread virally through video-sharing websites such as Youtube and Vimeo. The performance thus comprised two essentially different layers of reception – the immediate live encounter and the video document – both aimed at an indeterminable, heterogeneous media public which enabled for No Fun to become a medium of public debate. In the aftermath of the performance, the press reactions as well as the concomitant discussions in various online forums were dominated by a widely expressed indignation regarding the fact that only one user had called the police after witnessing No Fun, which also implied an assessment of all the other documented

33 A documentation of the performance is available on the artists’ website: http:// www.0100101110101101.org/home/nofun/ (accessed 24 November 2011). 34 Chatroulette (http://www.chatroulette.com) went live in November 2009 and has an average of over 500,000 users a day. Over the month of May 2010, 1.33 million users visited the site.

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reactions as inappropriate behaviour, due to their lack of genuine concern. When Youtube additionally banned the video shortly after its publication (the reason for which remains unknown), No Fun became the subject of a proper scandal. Its scandalous effect, I would like to argue, essentially derives from what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “the loss of tragedy”.³⁵ According to Nancy, tragedy now designates an ambivalent state: it appears to be lost forever while at the same time still haunting us as the inaccessible origin of the after into which we were born. In its separation from itself, tragedy marks a site of liminality – a transitional state between tragedy as an abandoned frame of reference and its pending replacement.³⁶ There are two possible attitudes to confront its loss: “We are either in a state of nostalgia for something that we have lost forever and that perhaps has never existed, or we long for the eruption of an absolute coming […]” (Nancy 2008: 19).³⁷ Correspondingly, both nostalgia and longing are aimed at overcoming the liminal state by either restoring or inventing its structural replacement. The controversy of No Fun is that in its particular staging it affirms tragedy’s pure loss while at the same time perpetuating it as its always already evasive point of reference and as such it does not allow for either nostalgia or longing. The following case analysis will seek to show how, in contrast, No Fun sustains the liminal ambiguity of the loss that has occurred in what I will call an aesthetics of the after. By transposing previously assumed concepts of reality, presence, and identity into an inescapable state of liminality, that is, the state of the after, No Fun dismantles various layers of the tragic dispositif, which Nancy defines as the epitome of “loss par excellence” (ibid.: 22). The aesthetics of the after thus creates an unstable equilibrium of irresolvable aesthetic and moral ambiguity. In sustaining this ambiguity, No Fun enables the adoption of a third attitude towards the

35 The loss of tragedy delineated by Jean-Luc Nancy is not solely an aesthetic judgement. Moreover, tragedy in Nancy’s sense must be understood as a particular metahistorical dispositif in the Foucauldian sense of the term, that is, as a certain communal structure, the aesthetic, ethic and political implications of which are intrinsically linked. Following Nancy, tragedy does not only denote a theatrical form of representation. The loss of tragedy, which is of “inaccessible exemplarity” (Nancy 2008: 28), is thus not to be aligned with the frequently invoked death of tragedy as first proposed by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) and echoes with various emphases in Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Walter Benjamin, Georg Steiner and Bertolt Brecht among others. 36 I use the term ‘liminality’ here following Victor Turner’s definition as “the essentially unstructured (which is at once de-structured and pre-structured)” (Turner 1967: 8) liminal phase, which in recourse to Arnold van Gennep’s threefold structure of rites of passage, denotes a transition rite which is preceded by a rite of separation and is ultimately resolved in a postliminal rite of incorporation. 37 Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine.

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after that is mourning.³⁸ This mourning does not mourn the loss of something but rather the very state of loss itself. It is a mourning in the after itself, which may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility when novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise (Turner 1967: 97).

I would furthermore like to show that the performance accesses a unique creative potential and a scope for development that essentially differentiates it from nostalgia and longing. In the following, the characteristics and consequences of the particular aesthetics of the after inherent to No Fun will be mapped out in order to show how No Fun can be read as an invitation to actively mourn and that correspondingly implies a productive mode in which to deal with the loss of tragedy – or rather the tragedy of loss – in the here and now of the after.

1 ‘Reality is overrated’ is the title of one of Eva and Franco Mattes’ most recent exhibitions.³⁹ In their works on display, they promote the disintegration of the distinction between reality and fiction, experimentally exploring the potential of the use of Internet technologies and video games. The online performance No Fun, which was part of the exhibition, locates itself in this increasingly expanding grey zone, in which reality and fiction intertwine up to a point where they become almost indistinguishable.

38 It is remarkable in this context, that, as Walter Benjamin points out, “Aristotle made no mention of mourning [Trauer] as the resonance of the tragic” (Benjamin 1998: 118). Following Benjamin, mourning can thus be argued to already belong to the realm of the after in which tragedy has been lost. In a way, this coincides with Arnold van Gennep’s reading of mourning. As he has shown in his analysis of funerals, mourning itself is to be considered a liminal activity, which is intrinsically linked to the experience of loss: “Mourning […] is a transitional period for the survivors, and they enter it through rites of separation and emerge from it through rites of reintegration into society (rites of the lifting of mourning). In some cases, the transitional period of the deceased, and the termination of the first sometimes coincides with the termination of the second – that is with the incorporation of the deceased into the world of the dead” (van Gennep 1960: 147). 39 ‘Reality is Overrated’ took place at Postmasters Gallery, New York from May 15–June 19, 2010.

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Furthermore, No Fun appears to be embedded in a specific context of other events, which taken together reinforce the impression of a progressive disintegration of reality and fiction. The first live suicide in a multimedia chat forum was reported in 2003. More recently in 2007, a 42-year-old hanged himself, broadcasting his suicide on Paltalk. One year later, a 19-year-old committed suicide on Justin.tv by taking an overdose. In a slight change of register, in 2009 an American was charged by the State of New York with false reporting of an incident and aggravated harassment for simulating his own suicide in an online chat forum. This is not an isolated incidence: on Youtube there are innumerable videos documenting fake suicides, dead bodies and murders in video chats. In another development, in 2010, a Spanish TV station called Buzz TV launched a viral marketing campaign introducing a serial killer on Chatroulette who murdered a girl in front of unsuspecting Chatroulette users. Against this background, it becomes evident that the concepts of reality and fiction – and thereby eventually the categorical differentiation between art and life – have become extremely fragile and therefore can no longer serve as unifying, consensus-building frames of reference. This is highlighted further by the highly ambiguous reactions of the witnesses to all of those incidents – real or simulated – all of which ultimately provide evidence of a fundamental feeling of insecurity regarding the finding of a code of conduct appropriate to the situation. No Fun too reflects how the boundaries of reality and fiction have blurred and become more and more indeterminable. According to Eva and Franco Mattes, “The message is the message. Who cares about the medium?” (Friedman 2003) In other words, according to them, a suicide is a suicide – simulated or not. This notion of a blending of reality and fiction beyond recognition is even further reinforced by Franco Mattes, who in another context stated that “since we live online, then we should get used to die [sic] online” (rebel:art 2010). In creating an indistinguishable oscillation between reality and fiction, No Fun not only proves that it has become impossible to sustain their differentiation,⁴⁰ but, by doing so in a previously assumed non-fictitious environment, it in fact transposes the concept of reality itself into a state of liminality, that is, into the realm of the tragedy of the after. The strategic point of departure for this transposition, which is characteristic for an aesthetics of the after, is inherent to the following suggestion by Michel Foucault: “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are” (Foucault 1982: 216). That is,

40 This impossible differentiation between art and life, respectively between reality and fiction, has already been argued a constitutive characteristic of contemporary performance art (cf. Lehmann 1999: 245).

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according to Foucault, No Fun can be said to refuse the concept of reality (which is not to be confused with its dismissal). Dissolving the fundamental dichotomy of reality and fiction into what Victor Turner calls the “peculiar unity of the liminal: that which is neither this nor that and yet is both” (Turner 1967: 99), reality as a valid frame of reference disintegrates into an irresolvable ambiguity, placing the witness of the performance in a perceptual state of crisis. He can be said to pass “through a symbolic domain that has few or none of the attributes of his past or coming state” (ibid.: 96). No Fun does not make an invisible truth about ourselves visible but rather presents the space of visibility itself as constructed and therefore constructible. According to Jacques Rancière: There is no reality per se, but configurations of that which is considered to be our reality, as objects of our perceptions, thoughts and interventions. Reality is always an object of fiction, that is, an object of the construction of a space in which the visible, the effable and the feasible intertwine (Rancière 2009: 83f).

No Fun exposes reality itself as a constant formation process, ultimately revealing, accepting and playing with it as an object of fiction. And it is only due to this disorienting effect of the aesthetics of the after, that reality can become an object of mourning in the sense of an individual, creative approach to its loss. In its aesthetic ambiguity, No Fun invites us to mourn the tragedy of life, the loss of a stable sense of “what we are”, the loss we are, which is what Nancy calls our “aporia” (Nancy 2008: 20).

2 The opportunity to mourn originates from a particular engagement of the spectator as it is engineered in the staging of the performance. No Fun was conceived exclusively to be staged on Chatroulette. In this regard, it can be characterised as a site-specific performance. This implies that the site itself has a fundamental impact not only on the conception of the performance, but also on the actual performance itself. Participation in Chatroulette is free and is accessible all over the world twentyfour hours a day. In order to enter the site of the performance, one’s physical presence in front of a computer equipped with Internet access, a webcam, a keyboard and a microphone is required. This performance took place in a specific timeframe, which had previously been determined by the artists but was not made known to the public. The performance itself was therefore the result of a chance encounter based on the algorithms of the Chatroulette software. The performance

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thus took place independently of a shared physical presence of the performer and the audience in a particular space, but was dependent on a certain timeframe. Chatroulette allows for the real-time exchange of images as well as spoken and written words. It thereby enables a synchronised and  – which is of even greater importance in this context – reciprocal interaction.⁴¹ The production and reception of signs, in other words the roles of the performer and the recipient, reverse constantly throughout the course of an encounter, essentially shaping (and continually reshaping) its very nature in what Erika Fischer-Lichte, referring to theatrical performances, calls a perpetual feedback loop (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 50). Embedded in the dialogic structure inherent to Chatroulette, even the absolute refusal of signification, which was manifest in the performer’s silent and motionless body, has thus to be understood as constituent of this feedback loop. Hence, No Fun can be characterised as a self-referential, autopoietic system, which, crucially, relies on the agency of its users (cf. ibid.: 39). Due to these factors, No Fun can be understood as demonstrating a fundamental openness towards the emergence of contingencies. It was subject to a collective formation process the outcome of which was unforeseen to both the audience as well as to the performers. Since Chatroulette is designed for pairing two computers with each other, No Fun can furthermore be characterised as a one-to-one performance (although the video record of the performance does document various cases of two or more people using the same computer and therefore witnessing the performance together as a group). As a one-to-one performance, No Fun took place as soon and as long as at least one user was connected to it. It was thus the Chatroulette user who first and foremost brought No Fun to life. In this regard, No Fun can be identified as a transitory performance: it unfolded and vanished depending on the life span of a chance encounter between at least one Chatroulette user and the performer. Yet, at the same time, No Fun involved a special case of the transitory. This is due to the fact that Chatroulette allows for its users to exit the chance encounter at any point by clicking a ‘next’ button. Once this button has been activated, the user will irreversibly be connected with the next person and it is impossible to return to the previous conversation. No Fun was thus a once-off, unrepeatable performance whose length was exclusively defined by the Chatroulette user. Against this background of No Fun as a site-specific, transitory and reciprocal one-to-one performance, the existence of which essentially relied on the

41 For a more detailed analysis of the theatrical use of media-related sign structures cf. Mike Sandbothe 1998: 87f.

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Chatroulette user, it becomes evident that in the case of No Fun the computer screen fundamentally exceeded its function as a mere proscenium stage. Rather, it was the site of an autopoietic encounter between the mourned and the potential mourner – its existence essentially depending on the willingness of the user to face and actively engage with the perceptual crisis s/he found her/himself confronted with.

3 In addition to the site-specific characteristics elaborated above, the particular nature of Chatroulette furthermore allowed the performance of No Fun to transpose the conception of presence into a state of liminality by putting different levels of presence at stake. Embedded in the representational structure of Chatroulette, No Fun virtually unfolded as a mirror cabinet in which any potential frame of mimetic reference appeared to be perpetually broken down and multiplied. For the witnesses of the performance, this created a unique state of uncertainty not only about how to evaluate what was being seen but also about their own agency as a spectator in general. In other words, the presence at stake in No Fun comprised the presence of the artist and the presence of the Chatroulette user her/himself. Chatroulette provides a stage for self-dramatisation. Accordingly, the immediate encounter between strangers in a private conversational situation is at all times at least potentially permeated by performing and acting out identities and disguises. A transitional or liminal potential thus appears to be already inherent to the site in which No Fun was staged. And yet, the confrontation with No Fun put the Chatroulette users in an irritating and unsettling position, which fundamentally challenged their original role as a user. This was firstly due to the fact that the performance had not previously been announced as such. Thus, random Chatroulette users were made involuntary witnesses of a suicide, which they were not aware was simulated. They did not consent to participate or choose to be involved. Secondly, the sight of a stranger potentially having hanged himself suspended any habitual mode of perception as well as any coherent code of conduct that the user might have thus far acquired in Chatroulette. Correspondingly, in the face of a potential suicide, the difference between presence and representation literally becomes a question of life and death and thereby an object of not only aesthetic but also ethical responsibility, calling each Chatroulette user to account. That is, due to its particular staging as an autopoietic, self-referential

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system, No Fun eventually transformed even the absolute negation of (re)action into an act constitutive of the development of performance. The liminalisation of presence promoted by No Fun was facilitated by the visual appearance of Chatroulette. Once one signs into Chatroulette, the computer screen is divided into two windows, one of which broadcasts the randomly assigned other, while the second displays the Chatroulette user. Thus during the performance of No Fun, the Chatroulette users’ line of sight was fragmented, in that they were looking at the performer’s body and at themselves at the same time. In order to underline the live character of the performance, Eva and Franco Mattes had furthermore adjusted their webcam transmitting the performance so that it was pointed at their own computer screen, which also displayed the actual encounter and became an integral part of the performance itself. As a result, the image of the Chatroulette user appeared to be doubled, enabling the users to simultaneously perceive themselves as a viewing subject and as a visible object. The Chatroulette user thus experienced her/himself as both an external spectator and an integral performance participant. This kaleidoscopic splitting of the spectator’s perception not only disrupted any attempt to decipher an unequivocal signification of the scene revealing itself in front of the user’s eyes, but also of their own role in it. This deterritorialization, accompanied by the suspension of any aesthetic distance, marked the loss of tragedy as Walter Benjamin describes as follows: In tragedy, what takes place is a decisive cosmic achievement. The community is assembled to witness and to judge this achievement. The spectator of tragedy is summoned, and is justified, by the tragedy itself; the Trauerspiel, in contrast, has to be understood from the point of view of the onlooker. He learns how, on the stage, a space which belongs to an inner world of feeling and bears no relationship to the cosmos, situations are compellingly presented to him (Benjamin 1998: 119).

By making the Chatroulette users themselves an equally significant component of the performance, No Fun precluded the possibility of dissociation, making a retreat into a position of mere voyeurism impossible. Rather it transformed the dichotomy of the subject-object relation into the liminal state of an oscillating, unstable equilibrium, in which the position of the subject and the position of the object were no longer clearly determined or clearly differentiable (cf. FischerLichte 2008: 18). Accordingly, the Chatroulette user personally experienced his or her own self being subjected to a continuous oscillation between orders of presence and orders of representation. S/he was thus situated in an ‘in-between’, that is in the after of both presence and identity. However, No Fun did not stop at disclosing

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‘what we are’ in the sense of a critical questioning of the conditions of self-representation. It simultaneously enabled the Chatroulette user to freely shift between those orders  – while never being able to ultimately remain in one exclusively. The appearance of her/himself constantly being torn between a state of presence and a state of representation, caused the Chatroulette user to confront the liminal constitution – that is in particular the malleability – of his personal as well as his social identity. In this context, the exposure to a form of double mirror can be viewed as the user undergoing a kind of Lacanian mirror stage. Performing her/himself witnessing No Fun, the user resembled the child described by Jacques Lacan who performs “a series of gestures” in front of a mirror, in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates – the child’s own body, and the persons and things, around him (Lacan 1949: 1).

Against this background, the reactions of Chatroulette users to No Fun can be read as a playful probing of oneself in the interplay between various orders of signification which have not yet been allocated conclusively. According to Lacan, it is in this playful probing of potential allocations that the self undergoes an identification process, which eventually transforms the self into an ego (ibid.: 2). Identity thus originates from the ability to create one’s own frame of reference in the very act through which the other and the self are perceived. As has been shown above, No Fun did not provide such a signifying frame per se. The body hanging from the ceiling had no name, no address, no history. All he was, primarily stemmed from what one saw in him. This was also reinforced by Eva and Franco Mattes’ general abdication of their responsibility as authors: “We are neither artists nor activists: we are beholders. We stage paradoxical situations and then we sit in the armchair watching the consequences” (Bieber 2004). Regardless of whether the users called the police, laughed, masturbated or just stared at the performer’s body, they necessarily underwent a process of attribution by which they first and foremost created and shaped the body’s identity as well as their own. Each Chatroulette user thus played a unique role in the creation of the performance. That is to say, the performance of an identity formation process in No Fun was essentially assigned to the agency of the spectator. It is of interest in this context that Lacan used the verb assumer to describe the perception process of the specular image (Lacan 1949: 2). Assumer not only means to perceive, but also to take a risk, to take responsibility, to fill a vacancy and/or to hold office.

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Unlike Lacan’s notion of identification, the performance of an identity inherent to No Fun was not aimed at the emergence of an ego. In the mirror cabinet of No Fun, the liminality between reality and fiction, presence and representation was not to be resolved in a postliminal state of incorporation and reintegration, but was rather perpetually sustained. Each frame of reference therefore already presented itself as ultimately unsustainable and provisional. In an aesthetics of the after, there is no escape from the ‘in-between’. Rather it constitutes itself as a continuous formation process beyond any power of fixation. In other words: The performance is a third element (between the unknowing teacher and the emancipated apprentice), which no one owns and whose sense no one owns, which stays in between them and suspends each identical transfer, each identity of cause and effect (Rancière 2009: 25).

4 Up to this point, the analysis of No Fun has revealed various strata of an aesthetics of the after: the performance is at the same time the disclosure and the making of a loss of reality, a loss of presence as well as a loss of identity. All of those concepts are stripped of their constitutive function as reliable frameworks of reference for the reading of the performance and therefore for the adoption of an appropriate attitude toward the witnessed suicide by means of a staging, which in its site-specificity and medial fragmentation of the user’s line of sight has a fundamentally destabilising effect. Yet their destabilisation does not equal their dismissal. Moreover, they are transposed into a state of liminality – a liminality, as has been shown above, that is not a static condition but a zone of reciprocal activity. In so questioning the self-evidence of previously assumed concepts of reality, presence and identity, No Fun ultimately renders them objects of debate and malleability thus directly addressing the agency of the user to engage in what I have called the creative potential of mourning their loss. In the following, I would like to argue that all of those experiences of loss ultimately intertwine in the encounter with mortality, itself in the shape of the performer’s body, which constitutes the crucial hub of an aesthetics of the after. In the context of contemporary live performance art, the body of the performer is generally assumed as the vital embodiment of presence (cf. FischerLichte 2008: 147). In addition to No Fun having been staged in a mediated environment, resulting in the destabilising effect on the concepts of reality and presence, the characteristic staging of the performer’s body in No Fun confronted the Chatroulette user with yet another challenge. Regardless of whether the event the

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user encountered was real or fictional, s/he witnessed a body gone limp hanging from the ceiling, with a cable around its neck, strangling its respiratory tract. The man’s facial muscles were completely relaxed, while his limbs dangled uncontrollably in the air. The arrangement of the camera did not allow for a view close enough to see whether the body was still breathing. In the face of this equivocal situation, it was impossible for the Chatroulette user to tell whether the body was still alive or not. In a peculiar way, this correlates with Jean-Luc Nancy’s diagnosis, according to which our condition is situated “after the moment, which we believed to be blessed with the potential to say – sing, act, interpret – the bane of mortality” (Nancy 2008: 18). However, the body unquestionably appeared to be in a lethal situation. The body therefore became the embodiment of a transgressional, so to speak spectral, presence stemming from a fundamental paradox inherent to the staging of a body about to die: the immediate presence of a becoming-dead appears to be always evading while at the same time preceding its final petrification in terms of its own representation. According to Hans-Thies Lehmann its presence “in this sense of a floating, fading presence – which at the same time enters experience as ‘gone’ (fort), as an absence, as an ‘already leaving’ – crosses out dramatic representation” (Lehmann 2006: 144). Consequently, the performance of a public suicide can be characterised as partly disabling its mediation by theatrical or representational means. In its always evading presence, its staging thus presents itself as a substantial challenge for the artists as well as the users. According to Nancy, this challenge is mainly to be ascribed to the loss of an adequate format appropriate to the expression of our inevitable mortality – which was once embodied by tragedy (cf. Nancy 2008: 24). Detached from the predetermined, selfcontained conception of the world of tragedy as a signifying referent, in which mortality had a clearly assigned place,⁴² the performer’s body confronts the user with the transience not only of all attributions of signification but ultimately of life itself. In its transitional state that evades all meaning, it realises the loss per se, enabling an immediate experience of the after into which we were born: “But

42 For an excellent analysis of how death is dealt with in ancient tragedy, see Charles Segal’s study of Euripides’ Alcestis. Here, Segal plausibly outlines the implicit embeddedness of the representation of death in a broader cultural and social context characteristic for Greek tragedy: “Even the dead person is more important as an exemplar of cultural values among the living than as an individual being who has a separate existence in the otherworld. This is one of the ways, as Vernant suggests, that the Greeks ‘socialise and civilise death […] by turning it into an ‘ideal type’ of life’” (Segal 1993: 213). It is important to note however, that Euripides’ Alcestis in its direct exposure of a dying character presents a unique exception to Greek conventions of representation.

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we originate from nothing and head to nothing – and we cannot save ourselves. We are not given any origin; no destination, no way out is promised to us” (ibid.: 20). No longer alive but not yet dead either, the body in No Fun is thus the epitome of the loss which according to Nancy constitutes our life and thus manifests itself as the epitome of the after per se. The sight of this body on the borderline between life and death created a liminal perceptual situation, which can be characterised as “in every respect a privation of sense in all dimensions, a privation of trajectory as well as of sensation” (ibid.: 23). The Chatroulette user thus experienced her/himself to be situated “in the aftermath of a devastation, which [was] free of sense, origin or truth” (ibid.: 24). In the face of this all-embracing privation of sense, the idea of mimesis inevitably collapses. The artistic act of representation loses its directionality. An irreversible deterritorialisation of the cathartic was the result. According to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, which in its analytical, historicising approach can be regarded as already marking an after tragedy (cf. ibid.: 18), a catastrophe (such as the death of the hero) is staged, arousing the emotions of pity and fear in the spectator in order to purge their excesses and to reduce these passions to a healthy and balanced proportion (cf. Aristotle 335 BC: 1449b, 24ff.). The consensus-building affects of pity and fear result from a purposeful and directed staging of a catastrophic event, which requires the existence of a common, predetermined symbolic order. Thus, Aristotelian tragedy, according to Nancy, presents itself as a particular structure of thinking, that is “a construction of sense, a system […], or, if you like, a synergy or sympathy, which produces a self-contained ethos” (Nancy 2008: 26). To us, this system, which appears to be intrinsically linked to a particular model of community,⁴³ has been irrevocably lost: Whatever the truth of tragedy might be, it is not ours anymore, as close or familiar it might still seem to one or another, and no ethos, no techné poiétiké can give us back the possibility of sharing it here and now as a means of determining our life as people or the polis/state (ibid.: 27).

The loss of tragedy thus transposes any notion of a social order with its political and ethic implications into a state of liminality. This experience is most prominently reflected in the one-to-one performance set-up, which did not allow for

43 In contrast to an understanding of theatre as offering a replacement, antithesis or utopian alternative to an existing community, Erika-Fischer Lichte has argued that Greek tragedy directly emerged from the political community and was thus inseparably linked to its frame of reference (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2008: 56).

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a reassurance in relation to other witnesses of the staged suicide. The affective responses to No Fun in all their arbitrariness thus originated from the lack of an applicable code of conduct equally valid to and/or reaffirmed by all. According to Nancy, each one of us can sympathise with the pathos or ethos of what is at stake in Oedipus, in Antigone or Medea. […] Yet we are not […] in the liturgy of tragedy; we are neither in a mess, nor in a common service of a culture, nor in a code of conduct, a moral code, nor a structure by the means of which we could indiscriminately and syncretically determine the realms of politics, ethics, theology and aesthetics (ibid.: 27).

Deprived of this “liturgy of tragedy”, the affective impact of No Fun is essentially due to the loss of any potential frame and/or point of reference, which results in an irresolvable abeyance of doubt. As already shown, No Fun cannot be reduced to a certain structure of thinking, production or interpretation. It is therefore not subject to a clearly determined regime of representation assigning a certain mode of agency and/or interpretation; its ethics do not result from a predetermined social order. No Fun thus calls for an essentially different ethics, one that is not based on any predetermined points of reference. This ethics, I would like to argue, derives from the emergence of a communitas of mourning in the face of the experience of equally being lost as evoked by an aesthetics of the after. In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Victor Turner conceptualises communitas as an essential feature of the liminal: “Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality” (Turner 2008:128) as the equalising – that is the abandoning of social norms, roles and hierarchies – experience of interrelatedness in the face of the experience of a shared loss. The “spontaneous, immediate, concrete nature of communitas” thus appears to be opposed to the “norm-governed, institutionalized, abstract nature of social structure” (ibid.: 127). Limited to the sphere of the liminal, the ethics of this interrelatedness lies in its unique, unfounded creative potential: seperated from the norms and conventions of any given social structure, the communitas is forced to continually generate its own symbolic frame of reference (cf. ibid.: 128) in the very act of what I have called the mourning of its loss. Its ethics are object to continuous negotiation und thus underlie an interminable formation process. To return to Nancy, one could therefore argue, that in the face of tragedy being lost, its liminal suspension in a collective (yet not unified) communitas of mourning offers the only way to adopt an adequate attitude “towards ourselves as aporia. Our aporia, our hopelessness, is inherent to our birth, which follows in our absence, resulting in nothing but death” (Nancy 2008: 19). Consequently, No Fun does not solve the problem arising from the loss of tragedy by replacing it

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with an alternative social, political, or ethical model. Moreover, it makes its loss perceivable as a matter of common address and joint responsibility. It reveals the formation of a communitas of mourning in the shared timeframe of mortality as a continuous formation process, which is aimed at the contingent creation of a potential common presence in the after.

5 No Fun is the performance of an absolute loss, but this loss is not an external occurrence that we have been subjected to. Nothing has been taken, just as nothing fled from us. Nothing has been neglected, nothing deliberately destroyed. The loss revealed by No Fun knows neither repair nor redemption. It is not a wound necessitating healing, not an emptiness calling to be refilled. This loss has no point of reference, no grounds, no cause. It neither implies an anamnesis nor a potential recovery. This loss has no past and no future. It is absolutely and exclusively here and now. This loss which is conspicuously and irrevocably haunting and permeating our present, inevitably revealing it as an ultimate after, finds its performative expression in the staging of a multilayered aesthetics of the after. In disclosing the concepts of reality, presence and identity (ultimately intertwining in the concept of life itself) as well as in disclosing the concomitant dichotomic structure of thought essentially inherent to all of those concepts as irrevocably lost, the aesthetics of the after creates a state of liminality, which at the same time implies a peculiar a-moral and sense-less, undirected and unintentional opening with no prescriptive socio-political or ethical objective: that is the opening for a communitas of mourning. The crucial task we find ourselves confronted with in the face of an aesthetics of the after, is the obligation to decide whether we want to leave it up to the responsibility of police censorship (or the censorship of an authoritatively assigned and therefore illiberal responsibility for that matter) to create some sort of externally codified consensus for our social reality – as was the case with Youtube banning the video – or whether we accept the challenge to engage with the communitas of mourning in order to participate in a truly political formation process. To return to Foucault: “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be” (Foucault 1982: 216).

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Works Cited Aristotle, Poetics (335 BC), trans. S. H. Butcher, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1974 (accessed 24 November 2011). Benjamin, Walter (1998) The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London and New York: Verso). Bieber, Alain (2004) ‘How to Provoke Today?’, http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/ nikeground/interview.html (accessed 24 November 2011). Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2008) The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (New York: Routledge). Foucault, Michel (1982) ‘The Subject and Power’, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 208–226. Friedman, Gabe (2003) ‘Interview with 0100101110101101.ORG’, http://0100101110101101.org/ texts/wired_generic-en.html (accessed 24 November 2011). van Gennep, Arnold (1960) The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd). Lacan, Jacques (1977) ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytical Experience’, in Écrits: a selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock), 1–7. Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York: Routledge). Mattes, Eva and Franco (2010) No Fun, http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/nofun/ (accessed 24 November 2011). Nancy, Jean-Luc (2008) Nach der Tragödie, trans. Jörn Etzold and Helga Finter (Stuttgart: Legueil). Rancière, Jacques (2009) Der emanzipierte Zuschauer, trans. Richard Steurer (Vienna: Passagen Verlag). rebel:art (2010) ‘Eva and Franco Mattes: No Fun, 2010’, http://www.rebelart.net/diary/eva-andfranco-mattes-no-fun-2010/004301/ (accessed 24 November 2011). Sandbothe, Mike (1998) ‘Theatrale Aspekte des Internet: Prolegomena zu einer zeichentheoretischen Analyse theatraler Textualität’, in Inszenierungsgesellschaft. Ein einführendes Handbuch, ed. Herbert Willems and Martina Jurga (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag), 583–595. Segal, Charles (1993) ‘Euripides’s Alcestis: How to Die a Normal Death in Greek Tragedy’, in Death and Representation, ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press), 213–241. Turner, Victor (1967) ‘Betwixt and Between. The Liminal Period of Passage’, in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaka, NY: Cornell University Press), 93–111. Turner, Victor (2008) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Piscataway, NJ: Aldine).

Notes on the Editors Daniela Agostinho is a PhD Candidate in Culture Studies at the School of Human Sciences of Catholic University of Portugal, and a junior member of CECC  – Research Center for Communication and Culture. Her dissertation focuses on the photographic representation of Ravensbrück concentration camp and wishes to explore the negotiation between visibility and invisibility within visual regimes. She holds a B.A. in Communication Sciences from New University of Lisbon and also studied at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is a member of the research group ‘The Critique of Singularity: Catastrophic Events and the Rhetoric of Representation’. She currently holds a scholarship from the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) to develop her research. Her main areas of interest are Cultural Theory, Visual Culture, and Gender Studies. Elisa Antz is a member of the European PhDnet ‘Literary & Cultural Studies’ and as such is a doctoral candidate at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture at the Catholic University of Portugal, as well as at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen, Germany. In her dissertation ‘Transnational Root Trips in 21st century Literature and Cinema’, she explores the narrative interface of mobility and belonging. She received her BA in Arts & Culture from University of Maastricht and her MA in Comparative Literature and Political Studies from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. Her research interests lie in the fields of European Arts and Culture, especially modern philosophy, decadence and urbanism, Comparative Literature and Film Studies. Cátia Ferreira is a PhD candidate in Communication Sciences at the Catholic University of Portugal. She is a junior researcher at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture (Catholic University of Portugal) and at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (ISCTE). Her area of research is new media, particularly digital social platforms. She is graduated in English and German Modern Languages and Literatures, and has a specialization in publishing and editing techniques, both from the University of Lisbon. She holds an MA in Communication Sciences from Catholic University of Portugal. She lectures Videogames and Entertainment and New Technologies Atelier at the Master’s program in Communication Sciences at the School of Human Sciences of the Catholic University of Portugal, and Multimedia Technologies for E-learning at the Undergraduate level at ISTEC.

Notes on Contributors Luisa Banki studied Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies in Munich, Oxford and Berlin and is currently a member of the Research Training Group ‘The Real in the Culture of Modernity’ of the German Research Foundation at the University of Konstanz, writing a dissertation on W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin. Publications include ‘Melancholy and Modernity: Dovid Bergelson’s Nokh alemen’, in: European Journal of Jewish Studies 4:1 (2010) and “Über die Grenzen der Darstellung: Die ‚Holocaust-Komödie‘“, in: Transversal – Zeitschrift für Jüdische Studien (02/2009). Translations include Eric L. Santner, Zur Psychotheologie des Alltagslebens. Betrachtungen zu Freud und Rosenzweig, Berlin: Diaphanes Verlag, 2010. Lucy Brisley is a D. Phil. student at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, researching under the supervision of Dr. Jane Hiddleston. Her thesis, entitled ‘Beyond Melancholia: Algeria and its Spectres’, explores the recent turn to melancholia through the literature of three contemporary Algerian authors: Assia Djebar, Yasmina Khadra, and Boualem Sansal. Elisabetta Colla is a PhD candidate in Culture Studies at the School of Human Sciences of the Catholic University of Portugal. The title of her dissertation is ‘Xiangshan Xianzhi: Chinese Local Sources for a Cultural History of Macau (1661– 1796)’ and focuses on the Zeitgeist of the 17th and 18th century Macau. With her thesis and using a multidisciplinary approach, she also tries to question the place of history in the field of Cultural Studies. She is a researcher at the Macau Scientific and Cultural Centre in Lisbon, and teaches in various short courses approved by the Ministry of Science Technology and Higher Education (et. Visual Culture in Contemporary and Imperial China). She received her MA in Asian Studies from University of Porto and a further MA (Laurea) in Chinese Studies from the Universitá Ca’ Foscari of Venice. She also earned a diploma in Chinese language from Beijing Language Institute (today, Culture University). Her research interests are Cultural Studies, Cultural History and Arts of China. David Duindam studied Philosophy, Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and the Freie Universität Berlin. His current PhD project is a partnership of the University of Amsterdam and the Jewish Historical Museum, entitled “The Hollandsche Schouwburg as a lieu de mémoire”. He examines how this former theatre, used as deportation centre for the persecuted Jews of Amsterdam during WWII, became a memorial museum after the war. The focal points of this research project are the remediation of cultural memory, the

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performance of heritage and issues of spatial memory and museological innovations. Tânia Ganito is a PhD candidate in Culture Studies at the School of Human Sciences of Catholic University of Portugal and a junior member of the Research Center for Communication and Culture. Her dissertation explores the issues of silence, memory and identity in contemporary Chinese art. She is also a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Anthropology at the School of Social and Political Sciences, Technical University of Lisbon. She holds an MA and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Technical University of Lisbon and a BA in Chinese Language from Beijing Language and Culture University. Her research interests lie in the fields of Visual Culture, Contemporary Chinese Studies and Cultural Anthropology. Diana Gonçalves is a Junior Researcher of the Research Center for Communication and Culture of the Catholic University of Portugal (UCP). She holds a Translation degree and a Master degree in Culture Studies/American Studies from UCP. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Culture Studies at UCP within the international program ‘PhD-net in Literary and Cultural Studies’. She has developed research in Translation Studies, Culture Studies, American Studies, and Media Studies. Milan Miljković holds an MA in Serbian and World Literature and is currently a PhD student at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, Serbia. He works as a research assistant at the National Institute for Literature and Arts, Belgrade within the Literary Periodicals Research Department. His main fields of study and publication are Yugoslav modernist journals at the beginning of the 20th century, Serbian periodicals in the 1990s and gender studies. Anna Pehkoranta, MA, is working on her PhD dissertation on the aesthetic of displacement in Chinese American women’s writing at the Department of Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests include feminist and ethnic literary theories, postcolonial and transnational fiction and theory, and Asian American literature. Her recent and upcoming conference papers and articles investigate these topics with a special emphasis on questions of loss, melancholia, and agency in Chinese American women’s narratives. António Sousa Ribeiro is a full professor for German Studies at the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra. He is the coordinator of the doctoral programs on Modern Cultures and Literatures, Materialities of Literature and Languages and

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Heterodoxies and the co-coordinator of the doctoral program on Postcolonialisms and Global Citizenship. Among several other functions, he has been in previous years president of the Scientific Board of the Faculty of Arts (2000-2002), president of the Scientific Board of the Centre for Social Studies (2003-2007) and director of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the Faculty of Arts (2009-2011). He has published extensively on several topics in Austrian and German Studies (with special emphasis on Karl Kraus and Viennese modernity), Comparative Literature, Literary Theory, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies and the Sociology of Culture. He is also occasionally active as a literary translator (Portuguese translation e.g. of Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind, Lisbon, Antígona, 2003). His last book is entitled Translocal Modernisms. International Perspectives (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008). Frauke Surmann holds an MA in Theatre Studies and Musicology from Freie Universität Berlin. Since 2009, she has been a doctoral fellow at the International Research Training Group Interart. Her PhD research project is devoted to aesthetic interventions in public space. Her main areas of research comprise the interrelation between aesthetics and politics, contemporary performance art in the context of digital arts and new media as well as historical, philosophical and/ or theatrical stagings of the common. Recently, she has designed the concept for an international series of interdisciplinary joint symposia to be realized in 2011 in cooperation with Goldsmiths College, University of London and the Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies entitled ‘Unfolding the Academic – A critical Site Analysis in Three Loops’, which is primarily aimed at sounding present scopes and responsibilities of academic performance. Eduardo Cintra Torres is a Teaching Assistant of Television Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal. He received his PhD Degree in Sociology at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon with a thesis entitled The Crowd and Television: Contemporary Representations of Collective Effervesce, which will be published in 2012. Author of 13 books, the latest published in 2011: Television and Public Service and, as co-author, Life as a Movie: Fame and Celebrity in the 21st Century.  Author of book chapters and scientific articles in Portuguese, English and French, of pedagogic materials and of television and radio programmes. He has been a journalist since 1983, TV and media critic in daily newspaper Público since 1996 and advertising critic in daily newspaper Journal de Negócios since 2003. His main academic interests are Television Studies, Advertising Analysis and Sociology. In 2002 and again in 2011 he was named by the Government as member of the Working Group for Television and the Working Group for the Definition of Communications Public Service.

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Frederik Tygstrup is the Director of the Copenhagen School in Cultural Studies and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen. His primary specialization is in the history and theory of the European novel, and his work on the subject includes: Fictions of Experience: The European Novel 1615–1857 (1992), and In Search of the Real: Essays on the 20th Century Novel (2000). His present research interests focus on the intersections of artistic practices and other social practices, including urban aesthetics, the history of representations and experiences of space, literature and medicine, literature and geography, literature and politics. His recent articles include: ‘Witness. Memory, Representation, and the Media in Question’ (2008), ‘Changing Spaces: Salman Rushdie’s Mapping of Post-Colonial Territories’ (2008), ‘The Politics of Symbolic Forms’ (2009), ‘The Blue Chair. A Literary Report on Dementia in America’ (2009), and ‘Life and Forms in the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze’ (2010). Ban Wang is William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies at Stanford University. He received his PhD in comparative literature at UCLA. In addition to his research on Chinese and comparative literature, he has written on English and French literatures, psychoanalysis, international politics, and cinema. He has been a recipient of research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He taught at Beijing Foreign Studies University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Harvard University, and Rutgers University. Among his publications are Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (2004), History and Memory: A Critique of Global Modernity (in Chinese) (2004), History and Memory in the Shadows of Globalization (in Chinese), Narrative Perspective and Irony in Chinese and American Fiction (2002) and The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (1997). He co-edited with E. Ann Kaplan Trauma and Cinema: CrossCultural Explorations (2004). Liliane Weissberg is Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a member of the Jewish Studies Program, the Art History Graduate Group, the English Graduate Group, the Program in Visual Studies, the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and the Graduate Group in Religious Studies. Weissberg’s interests focus on late eighteenthcentury to early twentieth-century German literature and philosophy, and interdisciplinary studies. Much of her work has concentrated on German, European, and American Romanticism, but she has also written on the notion of representation in realism, on photography, and on literary and feminist theory. Among her more recent books are a critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen: The

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Life of a Jewess (1997), the anthologies Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (with Dan Ben-Amos, 1999), and Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (with J. Gerald Kennedy, 2001), Hannah Arendt, Charlie Chaplin und die verborgene jüdische Tradition (2009), the anthology Affinität wider Willen? Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno und die Frankfurter Schule (2011) and the forthcoming Picture This! Writing with Photography (with Karen Beckman, 2012).