Abstract
When Polish artist Artur Żmijewski asked 92-year-old Józef Tarnawa, a former prisoner of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, to ‘restore’ the camp number tattooed on his forearm, ómijewski’s film of the event, 80064, evoked an unsettling complicity in spectators. ómijewski has since explained that he aimed for a ‘film experiment with memory’, that ‘under the effect of the tattooing the “doors of memory” would open, that there would be an eruption of remembrance of that time, a stream of images or words describing the painful past’.1 Tarnawa, who initially agreed to the proposed ‘redoing’ of the wound, appears uncomfortably reluctant on screen. The reinscription is ‘not necessary’, he repeats, for ‘it won’t be the same number, it will be restored’. ómijewski persists and, by the close of the film, Tarnawa seems unconvincingly pleased with the updated version: ‘It looks nicer now, it’s more visible, more eye-catching & I have renovated it like some piece of furniture. ‘2 As Claire Bishop has remarked, ómijewski’s decided troubling of the traumatic wound addresses ‘ethics as an explicit theme’: it makes a point of our role in watching the wound become a site of repetition.3 As we watch, we are bystanders to ómijewski’s desire to incite a performance of memory, and while that performance misfires, we nonetheless become part of his anticipation that the ‘Real’ will erupt and touch us with its feeling.
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Notes
Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), p. 353, 43n.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Emily Apter argues that affect ‘is what comes (quite logically) after the performative subject’, in Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 20.
Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 65.
Judith Butler, ‘Afterword: After Loss, What then?’ in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.) Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 467–73, p. 467.
Laurie Beth Clark, ‘Always Already Again: Trauma Tourism and the Politics of Memory Culture’, Encounters 1 (2010), pp. 65–74, p. 71.
Paul Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 133. Italics in original.
Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2011), pp. 1, 2.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 23.
Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
Michael Hardt, ‘What Affects Are Good for’ in Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (eds.) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. ix–xiii, p. ix.
Patricia Ticineto Clough, ‘Introduction’ in Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (eds.) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 1–33, p. 2.
Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’ in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.) The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–28, p. 13. Italics in original.
Brian Massumi, ‘The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat’ in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.) The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 52–70, p. 65. Italics in original.
Eric Shouse, ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’, M/C Journal 8.6 (2005), para. 15. http://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php, page accessed 10 September 2013.
Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 1.
See Jan Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, trans. John Czaplicka New German Critique 65 (1995), pp. 125–33
Maurice Halbwachs On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1941]).
Richard Crownshaw, The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), p. 3.
Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory 41 (May 2002), pp. 179–97, p. 182.
Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin (eds.) argue that the study of what they term ‘regimes of memory’ opens out questions that foreground ‘not memory’s essence nor its ontology, but discursive productions of “memory” ‘, in Memory Cultures: Memory, Subjectivity and Recognition (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2009), p. 1. Italics in original.
Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 5, 9.
Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’ trans. Marc Roudebush Representations 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7–25, p. 7.
Marianne Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001), pp. 5–37, p. 9.
Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 245.
Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 189. I would like to thank Caroline Wake for directing me to this text.
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 2.
Lauren Berlant, ‘The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics’ in Karyn Ball (ed.) Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect in and Beyond Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, 2007), pp. 305–47, p. 309, p. 310.
Landsberg has been taken to task for her generality — what Crownshaw sees as the ‘universalisation of affect or assumption of trauma’ (The Afterlife, p. 24); and also for what James Berger describes as the literalisation of the term ‘prosthetic’. Berger writes: ‘Whatever it is we are experiencing or encountering in the events Landsberg describes, it is highly mediated...In a word, we encounter representations’. In ‘Which Prosthetic? Mass Media, Narrative, Empathy, and Progressive Politics’, Rethinking History 11.4 (2007), pp. 597–612, p. 604.
Dora Apel, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2002), pp. 12, 31.
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John Sutton et al. note that while there is a disjunction between the humanities’ and scientific approaches to embodied cognition, their merging also raises problems, as it is ‘difficult for humanities scholars to find the right scientific and psychological theories on which to draw and with which to seek articulations’. It is, however, equally deceptive to think that ‘there are substantially unified visions of memory within either the sciences or the humanities’. See John Sutton, Celia B. Harris and Amanda J. Barnier, ‘Memory and Cognition’ in Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (eds.) Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), pp. 209–26, p. 209. Italics in original.
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As summarised by E.B. Titchener in ‘Affective Memory’, The Philosophical Review 4.1 (January 1895), pp. 65–76, p. 70.
Sutton et al., ‘Memory and Cognition’, p. 211. See also John Sutton, Celia B. Harris, Paul G. Keil and Amanda J. Barnier, ‘The Psychology of Memory, Extended Cognition, and Socially Distributed Remembering’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9.4 (2010), pp. 521–60.
Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study 2nd edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000 [1987]), p. 167.
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C. Nadia Seremetakis, ‘The Memory of the Senses, Part 1: Marks of the Transitory’ in C. Nadia Seremetakis (ed.) The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 1–18, p. 9.
Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Conciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co. 1999), p. 10.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio, ‘We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education’, Mind, Brain and Education 1.1 (2007), pp. 3–10, p. 8.
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© 2014 Bryoni Trezise
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Trezise, B. (2014). Introduction: Feeling the Return of Memory. In: Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336224_1
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