class notes

October 21 - Remembering

:( Shannon's little ones are ill.

Julie Naplan and Christina Hagstrom -> going to share their work on the role of remembering and memory in post 9/11.

Pre-amble. What is remembering?

Different formative thinkers. Proceeds from different political/philosophical allegiances. Ways in which performance and memory have been joined.

Nora & Connerton go togother. Trauma as a discourse - Bryson. Then Peggy Falen. Justaposition of trauma, mourning, melancholia. In the dance narrative. Central to Freud's theories. Freud & Eng together. Psychoanalytic model of memory. Benjamin - different type of place.

Nora -> standing on the shoulders of the annales historians - central figures in revisionist history in france... attention to micro-history of particular communities and collectives. less of an emphasis on large scale continuums, more on micro-interactions in medieval communities, renaissance as they performed themselves in various periods in french history.
- informs nostalgia that animates his loss of memoires de noir
- le lieux de memoir -> overt, official forms of remembering, particularly modern
--- like overt memorials, archives, places of memory have a kind of artificial, a see-ability, an overtness -> necessary in modern since we have lost environments of memory (do remembering through daily ritual activity, corporeal memory, part of daily life); history normally implicitly recalled
- anxious about archiving because we're not good at remembering anymore
- de-ritualization of our world (p. 12/534; see last para for reflection)
- problem that resonates from our discussion re: Ong, mnemonics that are built into orality... one doesn't need a written culture (structures within which we phrase) (see p. 13/535)
- qualities of orality (identifying particularlity of medium of performance) -> wraps one in a language that can sound naive/nostalgic to a critical context in which an omni presence of discourse.. how does one articulate without sounding nostalgic without sounding regressive? seeking: pre-nostalgic space.

Connerton
- past is cemented in the body; identify the realm of the habitual
- in what context does bodily remembering, overt inscriptive memory happen? what happens?
- do you start to think of certain practices as inherently inscriptive?

Psychoanalytic section
- mourning and melancholia
- desirability of closure
- in conventional understanding of trauma/mourning, we have an experience of loss and an experience of mourning and/or working through that allows one to move on by accepting or coming to terms with the loss. allow the trauma to become part of the past. what it is to pursue health, to be healthy. to engage in processes of mourning, but allow the past to stay in the past.
- think about whether the processes that have been pathologized (melancholia).. inability to let the past be in the past.. the need to keep it present. ambivalence that turns into an aggression to the ego. can that be thought of as pathological? or as a more complicated (accurate?) of how the past of necessity will remain present in the formation of an ego. making lost objects go in the past might not be appropriate to understanding how it is that we constitute ourselves. might be about maintaining co-presence that's equally important for ego-formation.

david & david | martin jay (making links between freud and benjamin)
- questioning the desirability of closure

benjamin
- preoccupation with questioning the desirability of closure -> for him, it resides from a different sort of place.. historical materialism... identifying important, transformative movements in the classes
- coming to terms with class struggle has to resist a progressive model of history (identifies with the victor)... line up the litany of causes that get us to that end which closes the openness and multiplicity of the present that might have gone otherwise. starting with the end, we foreclose all the buoyancy that was the full presence of the past.
- attaches to messianic presence.. kind of consciousness that has biblical origins... identification that certain kinds of most transformative acts/events of history are moments that break the continuum of time; will make a temporal leap that confounds beginning/middle/end
- counter-intuitive consciousness of time disrupts continuum of history has to be, regardless of mystical, part and parcel to how a historical materialist comes to terms with history
- a belief that one can work with an alternate calendar so that we get ideas of "true picture of past flits by"
- co-presence of past with the present has to be a necessary part of an alternative historiography; from there one can imagine how the dead will not be safe... this has a melancholic sensibility... a will to maintain the presence of the dead.
- p4 of david & david discussing benjamin

presence of the past is interesting in performance -> constant vacillation in performance about whether it is about hyper presence or ephemerality. each terms rely on the other to argue for themselves. a certain sense to argue for exceptionalism. sense: going awayness is part of what it is. equally important sense: performance is about a kind of co-presence in real time/real space that is fundamental and particular to it as a form. one mode of thought emphasizes going awayness, other confoundingly literal hearness

[Individual presentations on what we brought in.]

Rudy brought in great bits about Iraqi War Vets telling activists how to approach them.

What are the ethical issues around the imperative? "We must..." -> Butler trying to get away from it.

We are in a melancholic state. Aggression to oneself, to components of the nation... not resolved, can't come to terms with the object with which you're dependent. cannot fully recognize it.

Individuals identity -> a national identity... that slippage is concerning.

Is the psyche the appropriate place of understanding recognition. In Freud, psyche is the locus of everything that is the problem even if it doesn't know it. You are doing pain upon yourself based on your own histories. A past might bite the present; it comes upon you... your relation to it coming upon you might not be anything that can be anticipated or located in your consciousness.

How do you think about trauma as daily activity rather than special event? Brison posits a "normal" subject and to goal is to re-achieve that "normalcy." This doesn't question the privilege she has... Todd brought in great accounts from hip-hop urban Chicago, challenging this notion of trauma, white-man's war... that these events happen in the ghetto constantly. In a marginalized world, there is no normal... it's about adjusting to a world with constant trauma.

Trauma - derived from German word for 'dream'.

Post-911. "I've been asleep and now I've woken up." US's disavowed relationship with countries other than itself as a part of identity that has been oppressed... now has become recognized.

Notion of nation - national identity.

Mundane life being repeated trauma?

Takes an external pressure to jolt you into understanding how mileux de memoir exist as a nation

[presentations by visitors... on memorial and sound... sadly, can't really summarize]