Marianne Hirsch, describing her choice of theme for the 2014 MLA convention, wrote, “Vulnerable Times addresses vulnerabilities of life, the planet, and our professional disciplines, in our own time and throughout history. Its aim is to illuminate acts of imagination and forms of solidarity and resistance that promote social change.” Over the past century, studies and theorizations of trauma and memory—whether alone or paired with each other—have created flourishing academic subfields in the disciplines of history, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and neurobiology (to name only the most prominent). And of course trauma and memory have been treated in artistic works for more than two thousand years, from the Bible and Greek tragedy to contemporary fiction, theater, and visual arts. The joining of vulnerability to these established concepts is more recent; if I am not mistaken, vulnerability as a concept linked to trauma and memory entered into circulation after September 11, 2001. Another related and relatively recent concept is that of resilience, which is sometimes seen as the antithesis of vulnerability, though I think it is not exactly that, since one can be both vulnerable and resilient at the same time.
One thing that may appear significant to some readers of the four essays that follow, but that I believe is not significant in this instance, is a difference in gender: the two women on the panel, María José Contreras Lorenzini and Ananya Kabir, speak about specific works of art that involve or invoke the human body—whether actual or virtual—in performing acts of mourning and memorialization. The two men, Michael Rothberg and Andreas Huyssen, speak in more general and abstract terms—about implication and responsibility, about memory and its relation to human rights discourse. A stereotypical division, one could say—but one would be wrong, because these particular men have written eloquently and in great detail about specific artistic works in addition to theorizing, and these particular women have done important theoretical work in addition to thinking about the body and performance. So we can safely lower our feminist-critical antennae and consider instead the commonalities among the four essays.
What seems to me most striking is that all these reflections on trauma and memory are framed in collective and political terms rather than in terms of individual psychology. Historically, as we know, the concept of psychic trauma—which was from the very beginning linked to issues of remembering or forgetting—was elaborated by theorists who, even though they often discussed traumatic events that affected more than one person at a time, did not consider trauma in collective, let alone political, terms. Freud, in his most sustained discussion of trauma and memory (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920]), gave as his two examples of trauma the “war neurosis” suffered by soldiers in the First World War (what we now call PTSD) and a train accident, both of which involved groups rather than single persons (6–8). But his theorization in this essay remained exclusively on the individual level; right after those two examples, he moved on to his now famous discussion of the fort-da game, which involved a young child’s successful attempt to overcome the trauma of separation from his mother (8–11). Similarly, later theorists like Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott, as well as others who worked on traumas related to collective historical events (such as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok or Robert Jay Lifton), spoke mainly about the effects of trauma and survival on individuals rather than on groups or nations.
This would seem to make obvious sense, since psychoanalysis is first of all concerned with the individual psyche. But a number of psychoanalysts, including Lifton in his work on Vietnam War veterans, have sought to place individual trauma within a larger historical and political context. Freud, as we know, was deeply interested in the possible application of psychoanalytic concepts to collective phenomena and devoted major works to it between the two world wars, from the 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to his last book, Moses and Monotheism (1939). In the latter, he proposed an extended “analogy” between individual and collective trauma with his speculations on the historical development of monotheistic Judaism (the “trauma” of the collective murder of Moses was, Freud speculated, followed by a period of “latency” and then the reemergence of Mosaic ideas).
Freud’s conceptual move to project individual psychology onto the collective level provided inspiration for a number of influential works in the decades after World War II, starting with Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich’s psychohistorical study of postwar Germany, The Inability to Mourn (published in German in 1967). The book’s subtitle indicated its broad theoretical aim: Principles of Collective Behavior. Twenty years later, the French historian Henry Rousso published his now classic study of the evolution of public memory of the Vichy regime in France, The Vichy Syndrome, in which he similarly applied the psychoanalytic categories of trauma and mourning to the level of the nation. This work went hand in hand with the so-called memory boom in historical studies, inaugurated in the 1980s by Pierre Nora’s collective project on “sites of memory” (lieux de mémoire), a concept that is firmly linked (certainly for Nora) to the nation. The historical memory boom also revived the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’s earlier work on collective memory, which has influenced the field of memory studies in literature and other disciplines.
Contemporary trauma studies, as suggested by these four very distinct but in many ways overlapping essays, carries the concepts of trauma and memory several steps further. It is no longer a question of finding analogies between individual and collective trauma, where the former acts as a template for the latter, but rather of constructing models that start with the collective. The concept of systemic trauma or slow trauma—produced by ongoing economic exploitation, political repression, or climate change—obviously affects individuals, but it does not start with them; furthermore, it is not based on the traditional definition of trauma as a single catastrophic event and thus constitutes an important innovation in trauma theory. Also important is the attempt to think through the relation of vulnerability and the body to political action, which Judith Butler has been working on for several years and to which all these essays refer in more or less direct ways. I believe that further work needs to be done in this area, to try to understand more clearly the interactions between the individual and the collective. The extension of trauma theory to areas of the world that have not traditionally been the subjects of such discussion is yet another new, and I think very promising, development suggested—indeed, confirmed—by these contributions.
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961. Print.
———. Moses and Monotheism. Trans. Katherine Jones. New York: Vintage, 1967. Print.
Mitscherlich, Alexander, and Margarete Mitscherlich. The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior. Trans. Beverley R. Placzek. Pref. Robert Jay Lifton. New York: Grove, 1975. Print.
Nora, Pierre, ed. Les lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92. Print.
Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Print.
Susan Rubin Suleiman is C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.
I would like to shift from vulnerabilities and catastrophes in the past and from the subsequent move into trauma theory to the politics of prevention. As humanists and readers engaged in memory studies, we are legitimately involved in reading extant texts, testimonies, art projects, museum sites, performances. Much of my own work has been in this vein. In recent years, however, I have become increasingly skeptical about the future of memory studies—or, better said, about the role of the future in memory studies. I have begun to ask myself what kind of cognitive and political gain could be made if one reflected on the relation of memory and human rights. We all recognize that there is an intimate link. And yet memory discourse in the humanities has remained largely separate from human rights discourse in law and political theory. To be sure, the critics of the current status of human rights are as vociferous as those of memory studies. No doubt, to some the coupling of these two afflicted and contested bedfellows may exacerbate the problem instead of opening up new venues. And yet it may be worth the effort.
Memory takes its subject matter from the past but is, as we know, of the present. In certain political discourses, memory of the past is meant to guide us in the present and guarantee the future: never again. In the breakup of Yugoslavia, this laudable goal led to military intervention by NATO. Other memory discourses mobilize the past to legitimize violence, ethnic cleansing, genocide. The case of Yugoslavia is one among many: memory of past violence generated violence to stop violence in response to violence generated by memory. We’re not the first ones to discover the political dark side of memory.
But as we recognize that the effects of memory in the present can be deleterious and destructive, memory discourse might want to establish a closer reciprocal relation to human rights, which articulate struggles in the present oriented toward the future even if they are energized by injustices suffered in the past. Memory without justice can lead to revenge. Justice without memory will remain a dull tool. At the same time, a universalist understanding of human rights is no panacea, as long as we don’t acknowledge our own position as beneficiaries and “implicated subjects,” as Michael Rothberg suggests in his essay.
Today both memory studies and human rights politics are vulnerable. Samuel Moyn has called human rights the last utopia. As such it was often naively oriented to an alternative, imagined future. The reproaches to human rights, some of them legitimate, others blatantly self-interested, are legion: abstraction, Eurocentrism, universalism, lack of historical understanding of different cultures and traditions. Memory studies are equally vulnerable where they seek redemption or homeopathic healing through remembrance of the past. The wave of public apologies has shown how absurd this can get. Memory studies are also in danger of getting stuck in trauma. Even the new multidirectionality of trauma studies, valuable as it is in that it moves beyond the limitations of Pierre Nora’s always national lieux de mémoire, may not entirely escape this trap. Traumatic effects are always after, belated. Rights struggles and the securing of rights should prevent trauma from happening. But what rights and what trauma? We are still too used to thinking of trauma in terms of major events and shock experience: massacres, genocide, terror. We forget the slow and simmering trauma of poverty, colonial and postcolonial subjection, the sometimes endless detention of immigrants, untreated disease, radiation, climate change. How can the humanities contribute to trauma prevention? How can we create more robust conceptual and practical links between memory studies and reflections on human rights, links that may benefit both projects?
So far there have been only a few publications that discuss the relation of memory and human rights in a substantive way. W. James Booth, Joachim Savelsberg and Ryan King, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider are some recent examples in political theory and sociology. Recent books by the political theorist Jean Cohen and the legal scholar Ruti Teitel have greatly expanded our horizon regarding international law and human rights in such a way that links with memory studies can be established. The key issue here is state sovereignty and its relation to human rights. In this debate, scholars distinguish two opposing positions: statists insist on national and state sovereignty in a traditional sense, and liberal cosmopolitans celebrate the waning of state sovereignty and the emergence of an international human rights regime. Cohen, in Globalization and Sovereignty, and Teitel, in Humanity’s Law, articulate more complex positions, drawing on both these extremes and transforming them along the way.
Both Cohen and Teitel acknowledge the shift in international relations from sovereign impunity to a responsibility of states to the international community. Perpetrators of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and state terror may be held liable in international courts and tribunals, however incomplete and politically deficient this new regime still is. But Cohen and Teitel differ in their assessment of this development for human rights.
In my reflection on memory and rights, I’m particularly struck by Cohen’s political argument that we need to disaggregate the new guarantees of international human security law (e.g., the UN’s adopted norm of a Responsibility to Protect, or R2P) from human rights law proper. It is precisely the shift toward legitimizing humanitarian interventions in the name of security rights and democracy that has Cohen worried about new political, if not neo-imperial, hierarchies of power and a new potentially hegemonic international law. Instead of speaking of a blend of national and international dimensions, as Teitel does, Cohen insists on a dualistic structure that separates the politics of international humanitarian intervention from the pursuit of human rights within the confines of the sovereign national state. Cohen recognizes the Janus face of national law as both authorizing and limiting public power. Her argument, finally, is in favor of two political conceptions. One refers to those human security rights violations, specified by the international community, that can legitimately and legally suspend the sovereignty argument against forceful intervention and other forms of international enforcement; the other refers to international human rights that “function as public standards of critique to which citizens and denizens, domestic rights activists, and social movement actors can refer in their political struggles against domestic oppression, injustice, and arbitrariness” (16). Cohen’s disaggregation of international security law and national struggles for rights in the context of local social movements suggests that memory studies needs to distinguish more clearly among different scales of memory, vulnerability, and violence. This would not require that we give up on the notion of migrating and multidirectional memory discourses across the globe or on cross-regional political alliances and networks. But it would require us to pay more attention to the slow and simmering effects of poverty, migration, and oppressive gender regimes and labor conditions being generated at the local levels where basic rights are denied or not even recognized. Clearly the struggle for such rights cannot be waged in an international forum at this time. It remains subject to local—that is, national—politics, which provide discursive and electoral parameters for social movement actors and the securing or even expansion of rights. There are no transnational multitudes here as political agents, even if successful struggles in one country may nurture similar movements in another (e.g., Occupy Wall Street, the Indignez-vous! campaign in Spain and France, the Bangladesh clothing factories labor movement). A careful look at the scale of vulnerabilities, violations, and disempowerment would, it seems to me, also have to affect trauma studies and perhaps lead to different language when it comes to the injuries of poverty, migration, and other forms of everyday subjection.
Let me conclude with a brief remark on the aesthetic. More than ever, we need artistic works that challenge the perpetuation of racialized and displaced colonial practices in the metropole itself, works that in their aesthetic figuration can break through the second nature of common belief systems, disavowals, and oblivion. One powerful example is Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth, a 2008 installation in London’s Tate Modern. In this work, the theme of immigration enforcement as exclusion and denial of rights is articulated in relation to language and visuality as a widening crack in the floor all along the Tate’s old Turbine Hall. The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel-mesh fence—not the barbed wire of the Nazi or Bosnian camps but the steel mesh of today’s border fortifications and the concrete of the walls intended to keep the barbarians outside, whether in Israel or at the Mexican-American border. Shibboleth is the biblical word that cannot be pronounced correctly by the foreigners and that divides the world into friend and foe with deadly consequence. The biblical past and the contemporary present clash in this work that reflects in powerful visual and architectural language on the continuities among colonialism, racism, and immigration. The arc leads not only from the Holocaust and colonialism to Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur but also to migration and the practices of a denial of dignity, if not rights. It points to those fundamental asymmetries of power among human beings in our present that will perhaps one day become part of a politics of memory. One wishes it were that already now.
Works Cited
Booth, W. James. Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. Print.
Cohen, Jean L. Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print.
Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Trans. Assenka Oksiloff. Philadelphia: Temple U, 2006. Print.
Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. Print.
Savelsberg, Joachim J., and Ryan D. King. American Memories: Atrocities and the Law. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011. Print.
Teitel, Ruti G. Humanity’s Law. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.
Andreas Huyssen is Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature and founding director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.
The dominant scene of trauma theory has been one of victimization, and the figures who most frequently populate its landscape have been victims and perpetrators. This is no surprise: human-created trauma often involves the infliction of violence by a perpetrator or group of perpetrators on a victim or group of victims. Trauma, victims, and perpetrators are necessary categories for thinking about violence, suffering, and vulnerability, but they are not sufficient. Trauma theory’s victim-perpetrator imaginary comes with several interconnected risks: it tends to polarize and purify the relationship between victims and perpetrators, evacuate the field of other crucial subject positions, and model violence on a small-scale, decontextualized scene, even when it takes on large-scale historical events such as the Holocaust or transatlantic slavery. To avoid these pitfalls, we need to supplement our familiar categories with concepts of implication and implicated subjects that help us better capture the conditions of possibility of violence and suggest different routes for opposing it.
The first limitation of trauma theory’s dominant imaginary is that scenes of violence—especially the collective, political violence that concerns me here—rarely permit clean distinctions between traumatized victims and traumatizing perpetrators. From the beginning, some of the most famous subjects of trauma—say, soldiers of World War I or Vietnam—have been perpetrators at the same time they suffered from the conditions of violence they helped produce. Recognizing this complexity of subject positions in the field of violence is one of the rarely remarked and, perhaps, unintentional insights afforded by Cathy Caruth’s now canonical theory of trauma (Trauma; Unclaimed Experience). Ruth Leys and others have criticized Caruth for mobilizing the figure of the accidental murderer Tancred as the emblematic subject of trauma in Unclaimed Experience, but the confusion of subject positions in Caruth’s scene of trauma indexes real, pressing dilemmas (see Rothberg). It also suggests that we need to distinguish between the diagnostic category of trauma and the legal or moral categories of the victim and perpetrator.
The second limitation of trauma theory’s imaginary is that it radically simplifies the field of violence by ignoring subject positions beyond victims and perpetrators, however complexly conceived. Indeed, it leaves out of the picture a large and heterogeneous collection of subjects who enable and benefit from traumatic violence without taking part in it directly. I call these missing figures implicated subjects, and I hold that they are essential to the production of much of the traumatic violence that concerns us. The category of implicated subjects emerges in relation to both historical and contemporary scenarios of violence: that is, it describes the indirect responsibility of subjects situated at temporal or geographic distance from the production of social suffering. It helps direct our attention to the conditions of possibility of violence as well as its lingering impact and suggests new routes of opposition. Like the proximate term complicity (see Sanders), but with more conceptual flexibility, implication draws attention to how we are entwined with and folded into (“im-pli-cated in”) histories and situations that surpass our agency as individual subjects. The distinctions between forms of diachronic and synchronic responsibility—between, say, contemporary United States citizens’ responsibility for transatlantic slavery, on the one hand, and contemporary imperial wars, on the other—are significant. But, I venture, we also need a general category to describe modes of responsibility beyond the criminal guilt of the perpetrator—a project Karl Jaspers inaugurated with The Question of German Guilt in the wake of National Socialism—if only because such indirect modes of responsibility frequently overlap and interact.
The third limitation of a trauma theory oriented around a victim-perpetrator imaginary is that it tends to circumscribe the forms of violence at the center of analysis. Feminist, Marxist, queer, and postcolonial critics, including Laura Brown, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Rob Nixon, and Stef Craps, have faulted recent versions of trauma theory for their focus on extraordinary catastrophes at the expense of insidious, structural, everyday, and slow forms of violence. Here, too, a theory of implication and implicated subjects proves necessary for making sense of and resisting violence. As one moves from the punctual and event-like violence that concerned early theorists of trauma, who were influenced by psychoanalysis, to more structural forms of damage, the field of violence becomes exponentially more complex and the need to fill in other subject positions more pressing. Consider how both capitalist globalization and climate change reconfigure agency, for instance. The suffering produced in the circuits between spaces of consumption and spaces of production in globalization or between human beings’ “geological agency” and the climate chaos that ensues in the Anthropocene cannot be grasped through the linear causality of the victim-perpetrator model (Chakrabarty; see also Nixon; Rothberg). Neither simply perpetrators nor victims, though potentially either or both at other moments, implicated subjects are participants in and beneficiaries of a system that generates dispersed and uneven experiences of trauma and well-being simultaneously.
Besides providing a new footing for trauma theory, the concept of implication can help us reflect as well on one of the other key words of this forum: vulnerability. In a series of texts over the last decade, Judith Butler has sought to “reimagin[e] the possibility of community on the basis of vulnerability and loss” (Precarious Life 20). “Each of us,” she writes, “is constituted politically by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies. . . . Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure” (20). Theorizing from the site of loss, as Butler so powerfully does, makes vulnerability and precariousness the bases for a critique of violence and the construction of solidarity. But what if our relation to others is characterized by excess in addition to loss? By a capacity to wound as well as a fundamental vulnerability? Might this starting point provide an alternative perspective on the uneven distribution of precariousness that concerns Butler and ought to concern us all? The concept of implication asks us to think how we are enmeshed in histories and actualities beyond our apparent and immediate reach, how we help produce history through impersonal participation rather than direct perpetration. It shifts attention to the other side of precariousness: to complicity and privilege. In calling for this change of course, my argument is not that we should do away with the concepts of vulnerability and precariousness (nor of trauma, victimization, and perpetration), but rather that a shift of focus to implication and implicated subjects may help us address pressing political issues, including climate change, globalization, and the transgenerational legacies of slavery, genocide, and indigenous dispossession.
Such a shift can also help illuminate another case that has challenged easy solutions: Israel/Palestine. The endemic conflict between Israel and the Palestinians certainly has identifiable victims and perpetrators (even if consensus about who those victims and perpetrators are might be hard to reach). Yet, as recent debates about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS; http://www.usacbi.org) among scholars in professional associations like the MLA indicate, the conflict also involves a panoply of subjects beyond the most immediate participants. Proponents of the BDS movement might be seen as arguing that academics—both in and beyond Israel—are implicated subjects who participate in the conflict at a distance. In response, opponents of BDS deny the kinds of links between the academy and the occupation that would entail implication or responsibility at a distance. Yet American (and other non-Israeli) supporters of Israel also act out of a sense of implication in the situation in the Middle East; they simply draw opposite conclusions about the meaning of that implication. Although an approach based on implication and implicated subjects does not provide simple or direct answers, it can help illuminate the stakes and background assumptions of the BDS debate.
In recent writings and public appearances, Butler has been one of the most visible unofficial spokespeople for BDS in the United States (see Butler, “Academic Freedom”). Her engagement with the question of Israel/Palestine strikes me as better explained through the concept of implication, however, than through the concepts of vulnerability and precariousness that she has been elaborating in recent writings. For instance, in Parting Ways, her most significant scholarly contribution to the debate about Israel/Palestine, Butler writes that if we are “to depart from [the] communitarian moorings” that undergird the project of political Zionism, we also need “to depart from a concern only with the vulnerability and fate of the Jewish people” (27). While Butler’s formulation implies the need to recognize the vulnerability of Palestinians (and others) alongside that of Jews—certainly a necessary project—it can also be read as a call to explore Zionism from the perspective of indirect responsibility and implication rather than vulnerability. Indeed, it is as an implicated subject that Butler approaches the conflict, and, to my mind, this is one of the most important features of her approach: instead of mobilizing a critique on universal, “objective” grounds, she attempts to work through her subjective formation as a Jew to break with those aspects of Jewishness that might support an ethnically absolutist ideology. She draws on the resources of Jewish (as well as Palestinian and other) philosophy, art, and political theory to think a non-Zionist, diasporic Jewishness that is inseparable from the conditions of Palestinian life and death and that opens onto a binational, post-Zionist future. Butler’s point is not that a critique of political Zionism must come from an attempt to work through the formation of Jewish subjects or can only come from such an attempt; rather, the fact that she pursues her critique along this path demonstrates a recognition of the philosopher and activist as implicated subject. In her writings on Israel/Palestine, it seems to me, her wager has been that working from and through implication carries moral weight and opens up political possibilities.
Bruce Robbins’s affecting film Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists offers similar insights. Some of My Best Friends consists of interviews with Jewish American intellectuals (including Butler) about how they came to change their minds about Israel and play a more critical role in the American Jewish community. The film’s interviews make palpable both the production of implication—in the stories of how Jewish Americans are inculcated into unquestioning support for Israel—and the recognition that such implication produces, in turn, long-distance responsibility. Not all the interviewees in Robbins’s film have the prominence of Butler or of the playwright Tony Kushner, who is also featured, but they have all decided to confront their uncomfortable implication as diaspora subjects in a state project of occupation they have come to see as unjust.
The attention to one’s own position as implicated subject fostered by Butler and Robbins can provoke more robust and politically efficacious forms of self-reflection than a sole focus on trauma and victimization, which—at least in the case of Israel/Palestine—can feed the dynamics of violent conflict. Such attention also serves to caution us against self-righteousness and to encourage us to acknowledge how we are caught up in the very policies we oppose. For Butler and Robbins, as for me, our implication as diaspora subjects needs to be placed within our even more consequential location as citizens of the United States. We are implicated not just because Israel sometimes claims to speak for all Jews but also because our own country makes the occupation possible through military aid and other forms of material and ideological support. As the examples of Butler and Robbins demonstrate, accounting for implication brings the scholar of trauma back into the picture and highlights the uneven but consequential relation between privilege and the production of suffering.
We live in vulnerable times, to be sure, as Marianne Hirsch has suggested in choosing the presidential theme of the 2014 MLA convention. If we want to understand the unequal distribution of vulnerability both locally and globally, we need to track the silent participation of implicated subjects. And we need to remember that we too are implicated.
Works Cited
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.
Brown, Laura. “Not outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma.” Caruth, Trauma 100–12.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. Print.
Robbins, Bruce, dir. Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists. Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists, 2013. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. <http://www.bestfriendsfilm.com>.
Rothberg, Michael. “Beyond Tancred and Clorinda: Trauma Studies for Implicated Subjects.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. New York: Routledge, 2013. xi–xviii. Print.
Sanders, Mark. Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Print.
Michael Rothberg is professor and head of the Department of English and director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.
In a recent lecture that explored the connections among bodily vulnerability, coalitions, and the politics of the street, Judith Butler reminded us that “it is not just that this or that body is bound up in a network of relations, but that the body, despite its clear boundaries, or perhaps precisely by virtue of those very boundaries, is defined by the relations that makes its own life and action possible . . . we cannot understand bodily vulnerability outside of this conception of relations.” I want to juxtapose this quotation with a comment made in the very specific context of a long-term conflict zone: “[T]wo moments seem to have entered history. Kashmiris creating a hollow grave as a mausoleum to memory and resistance and India making a craven declaration: that a Kashmiri corpse can be seditious. It must remain in prison” (Waheed, “India’s Message”). These words are of the Kashmiri intellectual Mirza Waheed, writing in the aftermath of the Indian state’s surreptitious hanging of the Kashmiri activist Afzal Guru on 9 February 2013, on the grounds of his involvement in the attack on India’s parliament in 2001, in which nine people were killed (Roy; Haksar). The hanging was conducted inside Delhi’s Tihar Jail, where Guru had been imprisoned, without a fair trial, since 2001. What can these two statements, in conjunction, tell us about the 2014 MLA convention’s presidential theme, Vulnerable Times?
Butler’s words remind us that we cannot analyze vulnerability outside the network of social relations that the body is suspended in. Waheed’s commentary on Afzal Guru’s empty grave illustrates how such vulnerability is tied up with collective trauma and its memorialization. Together, they frame my contribution to our collective consideration of vulnerable times as a reconsideration of the body—specifically, the body as bound up in networks of mutual dependency. While Butler talks of bodies in physical spaces primarily to problematize the “street,” I focus on the virtual realm of social networks. My reconsideration of the body in the (social) network turns to emergent strategies of resistance in Indian Kashmir, a conflict zone since the moment of South Asia’s decolonization in 1947 but with roots in the relationship between colonial modernity and fantasy that formed during the late nineteenth century, a key moment being the entry of the camera into the geographic space of the Valley of Kashmir (Kabir, Territory). In recent years, however, this tenacious history of Kashmir’s being represented to the world primarily through the camera as a space of idealized natural beauty—a “territory of desire”—is increasingly being challenged by a micropolitics of counterrepresentation that is heavily reliant on various forms of social media.
This micropolitics thrives on the disembodiment enabled by the Internet. Simultaneously, it chooses to remain entangled with the body in the landscape that forms the center of the Kashmiri struggle for dignity and self-determination. In the words of the late Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali:
I won’t tell your father you have died, Rizwan,
but where has your shadow fallen, like cloth
on the tomb of which saint, or the body
of which unburied boy in the mountains,
bullet-torn, like you, his blood sheer rubies
on Himalayan snow?
As this address to a young Kashmiri man who was tortured by Indian security forces reveals, this micropolitics has long turned on the body that celebrates its own vulnerability. In shedding its blood through the violence enacted on it by biopolitical regimes, the body reclaims the contested landscape as its own. In the process, it is sanctified through the heuristics of an indigenous sacrality (the tomb of the saint), apotheosized into an esoteric, translucent, and lapidary durability (rubies). The point I wish to make in this essay is that this tradition of “cryptopolitics” now enters into dialogue with a new “cyberpoetics.” Embracing its vulnerability, the Kashmiri body passes through memory portals to pose new challenges to the political status quo and generate possibilities of a collective posttraumatic existence.
Cryptopolitics and the New Pastoral
In Territory of Desire, on desire and resistance in Indian Kashmir, I noted contemporary Kashmiri literature’s propensity for graves, gravediggers, funeral processions, and phantoms—all symptoms of a “living death,” a suspended condition of uncertainty provoked by the machinations of the state. Finding resonances between this propensity and Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics (itself a step up from Foucault’s biopolitics), I nevertheless found it necessary to distinguish the Kashmiri trope as an example of cryptopolitics. This concept also owed to Derrida’s distinction between the crypt and the forum. The labyrinthine crypt subtending the public forum, which Derrida invoked in his introduction to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, manifests itself in the complex and highly militarized urban geography of Srinagar, the capital of Indian Kashmir. Through cryptopolitics, the Kashmiri creative intellectual critiqued the Indian state’s paranoid and excessive control over his or her subjectivity through the exercise of power on the Kashmiri body. This body’s surreptitious movement between the crypt and the forum recalibrates its relation to the desiring machines that, through the fantasy of the pastoral, anesthetize citizens to the democratic state’s unacceptable regime of terror that masks its own “nervous system” (Taussig).
The fantasy of the pastoral reiterates and reifies a long-standing discourse on the Kashmir Valley. The valley has been celebrated in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods alike as exemplary in its natural beauty and, from urban plains dwellers to Mughal emperors and British imperial administrators to domestic tourists in independent India, as a place to refresh and reimagine the self. I have demonstrated in detail that the discursive processes that thereby evolved, and their relation to the genesis and prolongation of political conflict, were the conditions and consequences of the valley’s being a “territory of desire” (Territory). In that context I noted that attempts to reclaim Kashmiri landscape by Kashmiris have been a powerful way to rethink the much used but not often clarified concept of azadi (“sovereignty,” “freedom”). Cryptopolitics, as evidenced in the quotation from Ali’s poem, often carried with it an implicit resistance to the pastoral mode, which nevertheless encoded a strategic essentialism (rather than rejection) of the landscape as the autochthon’s birthright. Since 2010, however, we can glimpse a new pastoralism in conjunction with an evolving cryptopolitics of the body, through which cultural producers from the Kashmir Valley now stake their claims anew to a much praised, much fought-over space. Two striking examples of this emergent counterdiscourse are Waheed’s fictional depiction of a nomadic shepherd community in his novel The Collaborator and the Kashmiri cartoonist Sajad Malik’s iconographic use of the endangered Hangul deer in the graphic novellas disseminated through his Web site, Kashmir in Black and White.1
Doubling back on the pastoralization of Kashmir, these and other texts participate in a movement that asserts both the constructed nature of Kashmir’s desirability and the need to reclaim Kashmir for collective healing. This new phase within Kashmiri resistance emerged by 2010 through the combined stimuli of unfolding events in the Arab world and increased recourse to Internet resources. Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and online journals proliferated, enabling a new generation of Kashmiris to talk relatively freely among themselves, to engage in dialogue with older generations and Kashmiris in diaspora, and to invite the world to eavesdrop on the conversation. This conversational “multidirectionality” (Rothberg) was engendered by Facebook, in particular its comments and sharing functions. Facebook profile pages of individual Kashmiris as well as event pages began functioning as memory portals, or interfaces between users and new forms of collective memory. Suffused with the memory of earlier modes of memorialization (the repetition is deliberate on my part), these portals open into concurrent digital and print forms: books that anthologize online essays, essays uploaded to online journals, YouTube videos of soldiers cracking down on youth and essays about those videos, Kashmiri protest rap and documentaries on Kashmiri rappers, and planned events on the ground whose ability to take place remained dependent on the daily political situation but whose Facebook existence exhaled a fragile hope of change.
Bodies, behind the Canvas
These developments of “Facebook Kashmir” (as some have called it—fittingly—on Facebook) are stunningly visualized by the veteran Kashmiri artist Masood Hussain’s mixed-media work Behind the Canvas. Hussain calls his piece a “demonstration work” for the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Barmahani’s documentary, Look behind the Canvas, shot on location in Kashmir during Barmahani’s two visits to the valley and subsequently produced by Al Jazeera. As its YouTube promotional video reveals (“Look”), the film splices scenes of the work’s making with scenes of curfew, stone throwing by Kashmiri youth, and military shooting. The artist painting on the canvas in the secluded studio is contrasted with long sequences in which his daughter navigates delicately the troubled lanes of downtown Srinagar. The scene is set during the days of the kaani jung (“stone-throwing war”) that erupted in 2010, when Kashmiri youth and the Indian army were once again pitted against each other in a volatile and unequal pitched battle. Yet daily life must go on. Through the eye of the artist, looking through the house’s windows to follow his daughter’s journey through the streets as far as his eyes can see, the enclosed house becomes endowed with an aura of vulnerability that connects it to the persona and body of his daughter. This vulnerability also seeps back into the body of the artist as father.
The painting’s commentary on the transmission of vulnerability and memory brings together three generations of women. The oldest, Mugli, “was found dead in 2010, in her house in a sitting position, with her eyes open looking towards the door” waiting for her disappeared son.2 Represented as a “black-and-white portrait,” which, as a “representation within a representation,” draws attention to her hypericonicity, she “still awaits her missing son.” The second woman, Rafiqa, waits with her own young son for her disappeared husband, whose ID photograph she holds. Finally, Mehvash, Hussain’s daughter, “who grew up in the period of turmoil . . . look(s) towards the sky at the dove which is carrying an electronic gadget in her beak, represent[ing] the age of technology” and the hope of a “better and peaceful future.” The electronic gadget is not defined, but its small size points to its probably representing a smartphone. These negotiations between iconicity and the real short-circuit the painting’s status as “mere representation” and charge it with talismanic power. Newspaper cuttings pasted on the lower edge of the painting and dating to the time of its making forge a further link among the indexical, the iconic, and the talismanic.
Behind the Canvas, mixed-media work, Masood Hussain, 2010
This oscillation between metonymy and mimesis defines the entire painting. The clock “signifies endless waiting,” but a tear in the canvas conveys Hussain’s anguish. “I feel that this work of mine is not really complete and I am really trying to find somebody who will heal our wounds; I am not signing this painting; I am just tearing it.” This self-inflicted wound is also a cry for help: “I have put a needle here with the hope that somebody will come and stitch this painting for me.” Meaning seeps out to the obverse, hidden from the casual eye: “I will write something here (behind the painting). . . . This is ‘The Paradise Lost.’” Hussain has been using this work as his Facebook profile picture, whose frame grants new significance to the depicted window (an old leitmotif of his). Instead of having to travel to Delhi and Srinagar to view Hussain’s work, as I did several times between 2006 and 2008, I could now access this image and discuss it with him on Facebook. Yet this new ability to communicate and converse across time and space cannot forget the body. Indeed, in the case of Kashmir, it continues to focus on the disappeared body—represented in Hussain’s artwork by the son of Mugli and the husband of Rafiqa.
Afzal Guru’s Empty Grave
The new cryptopolitics of “Facebook Kashmir” has been best literalized by the crystallization of commentary around the empty grave of Afzal Guru. Guru’s was a special category of disappeared body: Guru was hanged in prison by the state, without notice given to his family in Srinagar. In uncanny populist response in Srinagar, an empty grave in the memorial site known as the Martyrs’ Graveyard spontaneously appeared (Fayyaz). This empty grave mimicked one created a generation earlier for the original Kashmiri martyr, Maqbool Bhat. Waheed reports:
[T]he text of the epitaph was the same as that of another epitaph, erected in memory of Maqbool Bhat, the founder of Kashmir’s main pro-independence militant group turned political formation the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, who was hanged in the same jail 29 years ago. The epitaph reads, “The martyr of the nation, Mohammad Afzal Guru, Date of Martyrdom: 9th February 2013, Saturday, whose mortal remains are lying in the custody of the Government of India. The nation is awaiting its return.” (“India’s Message”)
The triangulation of embodiment, disembodiment, and reembodiment through entangled online and offline modes continued. On 13 February, continues Waheed, “Kashmiri news websites reported that the police had removed and destroyed the tombstone and then, after the news spread via Twitter and Facebook, a replacement tombstone mysteriously reappeared.”
The viral transmission of the news through social media took overwhelmingly, and swiftly, the form of poetry. One of the first poems to be written, on the day of the hanging, 9 February, was “Epistolary Multitudes,” published on 19 February on the blog of a Kashmiri writer bearing the nom de plume Pharmakon. “We are yet undelivered,” it declared, “[b]ut your letter, little late though, reached safely.” The reference here is to the last letter written by Guru to his family, which was posted to arrive after the news of his death (“Revealed: Last Letter”). This belatedness took on portentous status for Kashmiris and became a foundational trope for subsequent poems—many bad in literary terms, some good, all emotionally taut and angry. Most were written in English (hence addressed to multiple non-Kashmiri audiences); even when a Kashmiri poem appeared, it was swiftly translated, often within the same day. Poems, translations, and commentaries were thus shared, reposted, commented on, and linked in various ways to the scandal of the prisoner’s hushed-up hanging and the corollary scandal of the belated letter. By 17 February 2013, Guru’s last letter had gained the status of a cyberrelic: links multiplied on Facebook to its scanned and uploaded photograph, along with transliterations of the original Urdu and translations into English. A stream of poems acknowledging the letter continued to circulate; the ones that attracted multiple “likes” were always reshared.
Afzal Guru’s letter, in fact, allowed copious citation of Ali’s foundational poetry anthology, The Country without a Post Office. Facebook pages often began resembling an oral poetry recitation session, where not merely poems but also comments on poems cited, alluded to, and riffed on central ideas from Ali’s poetry concerning letters, graves, disappeared bodies, and eternally waiting mothers. Guru’s last letter began to function metonymically as his corpse being ritually prepared for Muslim burial—the memory portals through which this letter-corpse passed became, accordingly, the grave that was no longer empty. Through this chain of substitutions, the cyberpoetics of “Facebook Kashmir” augmented an established cryptopolitics, even troping users of Facebook as mothers and lovers. The memory portal function of Facebook and its multiplying functions lent themselves particularly well to this inherited cryptopolitics, which ultimately is shaped by a particular nexus of affect, body, and place in this part of the world—a nexus that in turn is deeply contoured by a long-standing mythopoesis of Sufi love, unrequited and leading to self-annihilation (see Kabir, “Affect”).
It is of interest to me to bring to memory studies, or whatever form this scholarly work is transforming into, an awareness of this layering of affective resources, vernacular and global, persistent and newly emergent, by individuals in conflict zones such as Kashmir, who forge ways to move themselves and their communities toward posttrauma. Hussain’s gadget-carrying dove signifies his hope of “a better and peaceful future” for his daughter’s generation through new and unpredictable lines of communication. New instabilities of memory also arise thanks to our lack of precedent for storing, accessing, and destroying Facebook data (Parmar). We need to find ways to conceptualize as well as mobilize these developments, which mesh virtual and real through a porousness of embodiment and disembodiment. I have elsewhere analyzed how molecular change in contemporary Kashmir is proceeding through rhizomes and small platforms that involve the body in quotidian acts of labor, pleasure, and collective reclaiming of the Kashmiri environment, while using Facebook as a memorializing and mobilizing facility (“‘You’”). Thinking anew about memory, trauma, and vulnerability must attend to the transformation of our bodies by social networks that are daily generating new archives, repertoires, and poetries of resistance and solidarities.
Notes
Malik’s Web site is currently under construction. ↩
All quotations about the painting in this and subsequent paragraphs are taken from personal communication between Hussain and the author on Facebook in January 2013. ↩
Works Cited
Ali, Agha Shahid. “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight.” The Country without a Post Office: Poems. New York: Norton, 1997. 25–26. Print.
Barmahani, Mohsen, dir. Look behind the Canvas. Documentary and Experimental Film Center; Al Jazeera Documentary, 2013. Film.
Butler, Judith. “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics.” Univ. of Cambridge. May 2013. Address.
Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Foreword. Trans. Barbara Johnson. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. By Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Trans. Nicholas Rand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. xi–xlviii. Print. Theory and History of Lit. 37.
Haksar, Nandita. Framing Geelani, Hanging Afzal: Patriotism in the Time of Terror. New Delhi: Promilla, 2007. Print.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Affect, Body, Place: Trauma Theory in the World.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Gert Buelens, Samuel Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. New York: Routledge, 2014. 63–75. Print.
———. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Print.
———. “‘You Can Only Appreciate Kashmir through the Cycle Pace’: Reclaiming Kasheer through Zalgur.” Kashmir Lit: An Online Journal of Kashmiri and Diasporic Writing (2013): n. pag. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. <http://www.kashmirlit.org/category/archive/2013-summer/>.
“Look behind the Canvas—Documentary—Promotion.” Dir. Mohsen Barmahani. YouTube. YouTube, 3 Apr. 2011. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. <www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DHriKaUlRI>.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40. Print.
Parmar, Maya. “Memorialising Forty Years since Idi Amin’s Expulsion: Digital ‘Memory Mania’ to the ‘Right to Be Forgotten.’” South Asian Popular Culture 12 (2014): 1–14. Print.
Ananya Jahanara Kabir is professor of English literature at King’s College London. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.
10 December 2013. The streets of Santiago in Chile are crowded, as they are every day. Only some police detachments distributed along the streets are evidence that this is not a usual Tuesday. You can breathe the tension in the city. It’s just one day before the fortieth anniversary of the state coup in Chile that occurred on 11 September 1973. The government and police forces are alert to possible demonstrations or protests. At 8:49 a.m., twelve hundred people interrupt their walk and lie down on the streets, creating a two-kilometer line running through the main street of the city from Palacio de La Moneda (the government building that was bombed by military forces during the state coup) to Plaza Italia (one of the main squares in the city). People lie down for eleven minutes, evoking “the 11th,” as Chileans typically refer to the date of the coup. Present bodies (or should we say a present collective assembled body) conjure the missing bodies of the twelve hundred detenidos desaparecidos during the dictatorship in Chile. Hundreds of bodies mobilize to expose what Chilean society insists on forgetting. The city stops for a minute. Police forces are perplexed; they don’t know how to proceed. The line is too long—there are too many prone bodies. People don’t know what is happening. Silence. At 9:00 a.m., the hundreds of people rise and continue on their way through the city. This performance is called #quererNOver, and I’m its “author.”1
Photograph by Kena Lorenzini
In what follows I attempt to draw preliminary links between #quererNOver and the notions of trauma, memory, and vulnerability. I named this performance #quererNOver since it seemed to me that it could somehow mirror the attitude of Chileans regarding the desaparecidos: forty years later, some people stop and observe the performance, trying to understand what this is about (as many people still battle to establish the meaning of the missing), whereas others decide to continue on their way, refusing to see.2
During September 2013 there was a saturation of images of and discourses on the dictatorship. The politics of memory raised in the fortieth anniversary of the state coup in Chile was profoundly tricky and perverse. Chilean society was tempted to think that some kind of disclosure was occurring after forty years. To my view, this was just an illusion. The sudden explosion of memorial gestures was actually creating a sort of fog effect to heighten the idea that everything that happened was already the past. These images and discourses promoted the idea of a new Chile that could look backward to a terrible but concluded and closed past. While open-access television almost obsessively broadcasted documentaries, soap operas, and reportages about the dictatorship, many politicians tried to advance the idea that after forty years Chilean society was ready to move forward. The polemical (but necessary) gesture of President Sebastián Piñera’s decision to close Penal Cordillera (an absurd prison with a spa-like infrastructure [it included individual cottages and tennis courts, among other luxurious privileges] for those condemned for violations of human rights) contributed to the illusion of closure. This narrative raised the fortieth anniversary as a milestone that could change the way we thought and confronted our past.
Photograph by Juan José Godoy
To my view, this explosion of memorializing gestures responded to a sort of compulsion of repetition typical of trauma. As Cathy Caruth describes, the traumatized “carry an impossible history within them or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely process” (108). All the images, TV programs, and political discourses were other ways of iterating trauma, symptoms of an “impossible history.” This saturation didn’t contribute to reparation but remained in a reiterative loop where we all could see what happened but were unable to learn about our past. In Chile, this loop is exacerbated by the lack of justice that impedes any sort of closure.3
Few people in the media spoke about the fact that we still don’t know the whereabouts of twelve hundred Chileans. Some right-wing politicians and ex-collaborators with the regime took the commemoration as an opportunity to insist that the desaparecidos were products of a few radical military forces that acted on their own initiative. Many generals have sworn during these years that they were not aware of the violations of human rights at the time—inconceivable, considering the hierarchical structure of the armed forces. This unacceptable minimization and cover-up motivated me to create and promote #quererNOver as a way of contesting denial. A two-kilometer line of bodies displayed in the city intended to challenge the narrative of desaparecidos as a marginal effect, to give evidence that the missing were the result of a clear state policy. The name of the performance is provocative: if you claim you didn’t know about the desaparecidos forty years ago, then you just didn’t want to see.
#quererNOver intended to advance a way to overtake the vulnerability produced by the community’s diminished sense of agency since the state terror, a vulnerability that persists to some degree in our society. For eleven minutes, bodies assembled to remark, remember, and resist these echoes of the regime. For eleven minutes, a new body arose, one that allowed a new sense of collective agency: we can do something about our past; we can construct (other) memories together.
Photograph by Edison Araya
The line was made up of unknown people that united under a political scope. This assembled body somehow dismantled vulnerability, understood as the isolation of a singular body. #quererNOver reclaimed that condition of dependency of the body to other bodies. As Judith Butler points out, “despite its clear boundaries, or perhaps precisely by virtue of those very boundaries, the body is defined by the relations that makes its own life and action possible.” In the context of the performance, the dependency on other bodies offers the possibility of political agency and the empowerment of individuals.
#quererNOver also restituted the street as a political and aesthetic arena. One of Pinochet’s first bandos (“proclamations”) prohibited gatherings of more than three people in public spaces. Thus this collective action not only occupied the current street but also symbolically occupied the street that forty years ago was out of bounds. Even if we’ve witnessed many massive demonstrations in Chile in recent years (e.g., the Revolución de los Pinguinos in 2006 and the enormous student protests in 2011), the echo of the dictatorship is still somehow present. While I was organizing #quererNOver, many people asked me whether we had permission to be on the streets. Some didn’t participate since they were afraid of the police reaction. The official authorization was an issue I discussed with my collaborators. At last, I decided that we wouldn’t ask for permission. Many reasons supported this decision. First, I defended the political gesture to recuperate the right to occupy the streets. Second, I wanted the action to provoke a surprise effect and to be ephemeral. Since the action lasted only eleven minutes, the television channels and many journalists couldn’t arrive in time to tape or photograph it. This inability to capture the event produced a phantasmagoric presence that somehow mirrored the situation of detenidos desaparecidos who are “not-present”—that is, who are part of what I think of as the “no-presence,” a liminal state between presence and absence. Detenidos desaparecidos are not absent; to be absent, you have to be somewhere else. The crucial fact is that the missing bodies are nowhere, they have no place, a paradoxical condition that makes it hard to talk, write, stage, and represent them. As Diana Taylor points out in Disappearing Acts, thinking and representing the desaparecidos implies traps and complexities that require us to question, “[H]ow to think and write about these bodies? What do these invisible bodies mean? Who determines the meaning?” (147).
#quererNOver was an attempt to mirror this paradoxical condition: the action constructed a presence in the city that immediately disappeared. The performance intended to articulate the material presence of the here and now with the nonpresence of the desaparecidos. The twelve hundred bodies lying in the streets were not representing the missing; rather, they exemplified and communicated the nonpresence of the desaparecidos and the strategies that supported their oblivion.
Photograph by Edison Araya
The performativity of #quererNOver allowed a disruption at many levels. It disrupted the material scenario of the city, which, as one participant said, “stopped for eleven minutes to remember.” Materially and symbolically a new city was created, one that could include the memory of a painful past. Something that called my attention that day was the opposition between the noise of the city and the silence of our action. People walking by could choose to continue in the city’s noise (and thus #quererNOver), to stop and observe, or even to stop and join the line. In any of these cases the line of persons lying down disrupted and dislocated the normal functioning of the city.
#quererNOver also disrupted the way in which the memory of the state coup was being produced at the moment. It stood up to the apparent closure and served to remind people and reinforce the idea that some injuries are still open, that justice has not been done, and that there are still hundreds of Chileans missing. It implicitly posed the questions, Can we still talk about reconciliation? What kind of reconciliation is possible?
The modality by which this disruption took place was performativity, which Butler defines as “a chiastic relation between body and language.” The efficacy of the action, its impact in Chile and overseas, is due, to my mind, to this alternative embodied way to remember and to resist hegemonic narratives. The twelve hundred bodies resisted the power of words that naturalized indifference and oblivion. #quererNOver was sustained by bodily performativity as an alternative to the verbal and visual disposition that predominated in the commemoration of the state coup, and this other way of remembering and commemorating resulted in an alternative politics of memory.
Photograph by Juan José Godoy
In addition, #quererNOver gave citizens the opportunity to manifest their resistance to the way the memorialization process was being carried out. Many participants declared after the action that they were willing to participate in the reconstruction of memory but didn’t know how. The fortieth anniversary reduced the space of participation to social media, where people could, in tweet-length reflections, make their opinions known. This outlet proved to be insufficient; people felt the need to participate more actively in the reconstruction of their own past. #quererNOver encountered the desire to participate in the memorialization process not only virtually but also corporeally. Participation functioned at various stages: beforehand, in collaborating on the project and recruiting participants; during, in the material action of lying down; and afterward, in the spreading of thousands of pictures and videos made by the participants that expanded the life of the performance. Participants were very heterogeneous in terms of age, gender, and origin, which means that the desire to participate transcended Chilean society. As the author of #quererNOver, I saw my most important contribution as that of interpreting this need and drive.
The bodily performance of #quererNOver allowed participants, to some extent, to surpass the vulnerability of a traumatic (present) past. The performance drew a scar in the city, one that is not always visible but that persists, haunting our present. That day, twelve hundred people resisted the narrative that intended to bury the bodies of the desaparecidos in a fictional past and stood up, or should we say lay down, to bring into presence the nonpresence of the missing bodies. #quererNOver resisted vulnerability and, by assembling and mobilizing bodies, empowered subjects to regain the possibility to construct an alternative memory of the past.
Photograph by Edison Araya
The gesture not only obliged society to remember but also allowed participants to connect with the terrifying experience of disappearance. As one of the participants wrote:
Lying in the cold pavement looking at the sky made me think about all those people, how they lived their last days and how they died. I never thought about that before. Feeling the indifference of some people in the streets who didn’t even stop to look at us, I was able to feel in my own body the painful crusade that the relatives of the missing have passed during the last forty years while pleading for some information that may reveal where the bodies of their beloved are. (my trans.)
Notes
#quererNOver can be translated as “wanting not to see.” You can visit the performance blog (www.querernover.wordpress.com) or my Web site (www.mariajosecontreras.com) for more information. The problem of authorship is particularly relevant in this performance. Even if I had the original idea, the performance was constructed and produced by the participation and collaboration of many people. I would like to acknowledge my close collaborators, Andrea Pelegri, Pablo Dubott, and Ivan Smirnow; the social media ambassadors who helped spread the call; and of course everyone who participated that day.↩
The denial of the violations of human rights during the dictatorship is strong in Chilean society, as many scholars have noted (see, e.g., Stern; Demaria; Nicholls). ↩
According to a report from the Universidad Diego Portales, as of May 2012, just seventy-six ex-agents of Pinochet’s regime were condemned, and of those only sixty-eight were in prison (Informe). ↩
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics.” Digital file.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and Culture. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.
Demaria, Cristina. Semiotica e memoria. Analisi del post-conflitto. Roma: Carocci, 2006. Print.
Informe anual sobre derechos humanos en Chile: 2013. Centro de Derechos Humanos. Centro de Derechos Humanos, U Diego Portales, 2013. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.
Nicholls, Nancy. “Chile: Las paradojas de la memoria entre el boom y la negación.” Puentes 22 (2007): 34–39. Print.
Stern, Steve J. “De la memoria suelta a la memoria emblemática: Hacia el recordar y el olvidar como proceso histórico (Chile, 1973–1998).” Memoria para un nuevo siglo. Chile, miradas a la segunda mitad del sigo XX. Comp. Mario Garcés et al. Santiago: Lom, 2000. 11–33. Print.
Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Durham: Duke, 1997. Print.
María José Contreras Lorenzini is a performance artist and theater director and assistant professor at the Escuela de Teatro at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.
