![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
acknowledgements
My thanks to Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, Felicity Haynes, Helen McLaughlin-Jones, Saul Newman, William M. Taylor, Nicole Sully, and an anonymous reader for Angelaki.
Notes
notes
1 Winter 5.
2 Young, “Memory and Counter-Memory” 3.
3 See MacIntyre. I do not share MacIntyre's views about what constituted the shared background and common values that provided for a more or less common ethics in the western world. Nevertheless, public commemoration of any sort has to rely on shared ways of seeing and feeling – a common worldview and ethos. This has been sufficiently shattered to render public memorials either obsolete or more the ground for contestation than remembrance.
4 See Howett, for a useful background discussion. She writes, for example:
The potential for a wide range of public reaction is even greater [than in public art generally] in the case of traditional public art – monuments and memorials – because these works have as their primary function the articulation of a specific message, no matter how vaguely defined.. (3)
Also, see Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past,” for an interesting account of attempts to deal with the commemoration of “a difficult past” – especially the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
5 No doubt, some will object to the specific examples I employ. Nothing in my thesis, however, relies on the particular examples, and one can substitute the cases I discuss mutatis mutandis for memorials they regard as better suited to my thesis. After all, my thesis is that the age of memorialization is over, and memorials can no longer (supposing that at one time they were able to) perform their function. So, with the exceptions already mentioned, it applies to memorials across the board. You may take your pick.
6 Young, “Memory and Counter-Memory” writes: “In the eyes of modern critics and artists, the traditional monument's essential stiffness and grandiose pretensions to permanence thus doom it to an archaic premodern status. Even worse, by insisting that its meaning is as fixed as its place in the landscape, the monument seems oblivious to the essential mutability in all cultural artifacts, the ways the significance in all art evolves over time”; my emphasis (2).
7 Jay Winter 5.
8 See Lagueux. He argues that architects must seek to resolve aesthetic and ethical problems together since they are, for architecture, inseparable.
9 The connection between aesthetic and ethical judgment is a huge and recently revived topic in aesthetics. See Anderson and Dean; Carroll, “Moderate Moralism,” “Moderate Moralism versus Moderate Autonomism” and “Art and Ethical Criticism”; Devereaux; Gaut; Levinson; Lagueux.
10 See Haskins and DeRose; Curtis.
11 Maleuvre 59–60.
12 See www.eniar.org/stolen.htm, for the Australian Government's response to the stolen generation report. Also, see www.library.trinity.wa.edu.au/aborigines/stolen.htm; and www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/rsjproject/rsjlibrary/hreoc/stolen/
14 See Levine and Newman, “Sacred Cows and The Changing Face of Discourse on Terrorism: Cranking it Up a Notch”; Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, The Anatomy of Prejudices.
15 Quoted in William Hubbard, “A Meaning for Monuments” 17.
16 Mary Mcleod, “The Battle for the Monument: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial” 381.
17 See Levine and Newman.
18 Hubbard writes: “Maya Ying Lin, has said that she intended a monument that ‘would not tell you how to think’ about the Vietnam War” (21).
19 There are memorials that are better, far better, than the Vietnam Veterans Memorial – conceptually, aesthetically, morally, educationally, and emotionally – that nevertheless fail for similar reasons. The memorials to the Jews by Horst Hoheisel in Kassel and Buchenwald that Young, “Memory and Counter-Memory” (3–6), discusses are, I think, examples. Young writes: “German artists have attempted to embody the ambiguity and difficulty of Holocaust memorialization in Germany in conceptual, sculptural, and architectural forms that would return the burden of memory to those who come looking for it. Rather than creating self-contained sites of memory, detached from our daily lives, these artists would force both visitors and local citizens to look within themselves for memory, at their actions and motives for memory within these spaces” (9). The “ambiguities and difficulties” embodied in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial are, however, of a different order.
20 Freud, Mourning and Melancholia.
21 Savage 14. See Nora.
22 Maleuvre 59–60. Cf. Nora 7.
23 Slavoj Žižek argues, for instance – following Pascal, and also Althusser's theory of ideology – that it is the ritual itself that believes for us. In other words, belief is performative and crystallised within certain external rituals, rather than being an internal phenomenon. Suppose a non-believer who wants to believe takes part in a Catholic ritual: while this person engages in the ritual in a mechanical way, it is the very material performance of the ritual itself that symbolises his faith. The subject's belief, in other words, is constructed as a retroactive effect of the ritual itself – if the subject asks himself why he performed the ritual, the answer must be that he must have been a believer in the first place without being aware of it. That is to say, the ritual comes first, followed by belief, and belief is an effect of performing the ritual rather than the other way round. Žižek uses several examples here: the Tibetan prayer wheels which do the praying for us; canned laughter on TV which does the laughing for us; and ‘weepers’ who in certain cultures are employed by mourners to grieve for them at funerals. See The Sublime Object of Ideology. Perhaps memorials function – or are intended to function – in the same way: purely by engaging in the external ritual of visiting memorials, even in a perfunctory way, we are in effect performing an act of commemoration, while internally we might be thinking of something completely unrelated to what is being commemorated – shopping, for instance. In this sense, buying a “Ground Zero” t-shirt may be just as profound or at least ‘heartfelt’ an act of commemoration as leaving flowers or a photo at the site itself. I do not think it is, however. These acts have alternative explanations. My thanks to Saul Newman, for calling my attention to Žižek here.
24 Broszat; Krauss; Huyssen, “The Monument in a Post-modern Age.”
25 Young, “Memory and Counter-Memory” 3.
26 Haskins and DeRose 378.
27 Choay 6–7. See Vico, for a discussion of burials and Wordsworth's “Essay Upon Epitaphs.” There are numerous other theoretical perspectives that can be used to support the thesis about memorials. I have focused mainly on those that deal explicitly with memorials.
28 Choay is quoted in Maleuvre 59.
29 Similarly, to say, for example, that a large part of the reason people enjoy movies is because watching a film allows them to transiently (temporarily and harmlessly) invoke sadistic, masochistic, voyeuristic, and other wish-fulfilling phantastic tendencies, the fulfilment of which they find deeply satisfying, is not to say this is a bad thing. If enjoying films (or books) substantially depends upon such satisfactions, as well as intellectual and other affective ones, then given that such satisfactions are by and large good, it is a positive thing that film is able to invoke those psychological needs in harmless ways. See Levine, “A Fun Night Out.”
30 Curtis 306–07.
31 Young (“The Counter-monument”; The Texture of Memory; “Memory and Counter-Memory: The End of the Monument in Germany”) seems to regard Germany as a special case and memorials in Germany as a particular problem. He writes (“Memory and Counter-Memory”): “perhaps no single emblem better represents the conflicted, self-abnegating motives for memory in Germany today than the vanishing monument” (1). He is discussing Horst Hoheisel's competition submission of a “memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe” which proposes blowing up the Brandenburg Gate and sprinkling
the remains over the former site….. At least part of its polemic … is directed against actually building any winning design, against ever finishing the monument at all. Here he seems to suggest that the surest engagement with Holocaust memory in Germany may actually lie it its perpetual irresolution, that only an unfinished memorial process can guarantee the life of memory. (1–2)
Young's speculations about Hoheisel's proposal and what it means are directly relevant to the thesis of this paper. However, in so far as Young regards Germany as a special case rather than an example, he suffers from blind-sight. In many ways, Germany has come to grips with its horrendous and unique past in ways that the US and other countries – Australia (with Aboriginal peoples as well as refugees) and Israel (not only with the Palestinians but with Jews worldwide) – are unable to. They cannot even acknowledge their current course.
32 In statements that should be taken as a repudiation of democratic principles, George Bush Jr. and Tony Blair have both said that it is God (understood to mean “God, rather than ordinary citizens”) who will judge their actions regarding Iraq – while maintaining that the Iraq war is meant to bolster democracy.
33 Curtis writes
At the inauguration of the memorial in 1982, complaints concerning the alienation and betrayal suggested by the design precipitated two additions to the site. The first is a figurative bronze of three soldiers standing tall in the face of war; a flagpole and a statue of a group of nurses being added shortly after. Whereas the granite bears witness to something unrepresentable, to catastrophe and the immemorial, the additional bronzes edify loss as bravery and righteous sacrifice. (306)
34 Some apologists are keen to point out the quantitative differences and scope between, for example, the Holocaust and other instances of genocide. This, too, is subterfuge, since the issue is surely qualitative rather than quantitative.
35 Broszat, “Plea for a Historicization of National Socialism” 129.
36 Krauss 280.
37 Huyssen, “The Monument in a Post-modern Age” 11; Twilight Memories: Marketing Time in a Culture of Amnesia 249–60.
38 Young, “The Counter-monument” 2.
39 Young, “The Counter-monument”; Young and Michael Van Valkenburgh, “A Last Chance for Ground Zero.”
40 National Parks Service, Vietnam Veterans Memorial [brochure] (www.nps.gov/vive).
41 Brown 257. There is no shortage of those who praise Lin's memorial. See, for example, Charney, who sees its success as due in no small part to Lin's knowingly drawing on the “elegiac tradition” (87). According to Charney (92 n. 2), Betsky (4), “effectively argues that Maya Lin's abstract design mirrors nothing more significant that the inability of contemporary architecture to symbolize and order our society.” If the thesis of this paper is right, then Lin's design is evidence of far more important things than such an inability on the part of contemporary architecture. It is evidence of both a need to mourn and come to grips with the past; and at the same time a debilitating inability to do so.
42 Haskins and DeRose 380.
43 Abramson, “Make History, Not Memory” 80. Cf. Abramson, “Maya Lin and the 1960s.”
44 On the issue of “legibility” in the monument, compare Haskins and DeRose (380) with Abramson, “Make History, Not Memory” (80).
45 See Foss, for a quite different view. She thinks the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a great success – appealing both to those who supported the war and to those who opposed it. Furthermore, she attributes this success largely to the aesthetic features of the monument.
46 Henry Kissinger is perhaps finding this out with evidence showing that he sought to delay and undermine the peace plan for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. See Abramson, “Make History, Not Memory,” for a discussion about memory and history in relation to monuments.
47 Haskins and DeRose 380.
48 Freud, Mourning and Melancholia and Civilization and its Discontents.
49 In this final section, I am indebted to Damian Cox, who delineated the two different arguments for me, as well as pointing out the consequences of each. He raised the objection about memorials of colonial conquest in Victorian times that I have tried to respond to. Some of the wording in this section is his.