How Do We Know What We Remember?
Is there an ancestral
memory? I can no longer doubt it, because that which I then learned seems to me
not to have been learned at all but to have been remembered.[1]
To be sure, great events—traumatic occurrences—and not just the passage
of time make breaks in the memory of large groups of people, individually and
collectively; and that is not always bad, as cleansing of the mind and the
culture of too many details is necessary to make room for new experiences of
more importance to the present to interact without getting bogged down in
things no longer vital. Thus, aside from
historians, professional and amateur, there is no stigma attached not to
recognizing names like Lazare and Fleg or Péguy, although if either Dreyfus or
Arendt do not tug some little bells, then perhaps there is a fault in the way
people are educated these days…just as ware shocked when young students can’t
tell the difference between World War I and World War II. But the questions here are rather: what
happens when the memories and associations connected to those memories are
wrong, fully or only in part, so that decisions taken in regard to current
events that stem from past events go awry? or What do we do or say in reply to
those who have completely false versions of the past and thus different
premises upon which to live out their lives and those different ways intrude on
our memories and lives? If people who believe they inhabit the same cultural
zone, let alone the same political and social space, disagree fundamentally on
the form, extent and value of those areas, and thus do not share memories to
the extent that they can even argue over the reality in which they live, how
can there be peace?
Grand Guignol
The name
Guignol (pronounced Geen-yole) comes from a Lyonnaise puppet character who
often touched upon both social and political satire in his comedy…The Theatre
du Grand Guignol is therefore literally “the big puppet show”: a violent puppet
show for adults, with big acting and larger-than-life stories to match—think
Punch & Judy with an R rating.[2]
In her study of the making of a Chechan Jihadi,[3] Nancy Kobrin cites several
scholarly authorities, including Stephen L. Carter and Leo Braudy, as well as
crime novelist John le Carré (The Little
Drummer Girl), who explicitly or implicitly compare the performance of terrorists acts as theatre,
something dramatic in both concept and execution. She goes elsewhere to tell us the Russian
theorist of fiction and satire in the 1930s Mikhael Bakhtin imagined propaganda
as a form of potent and vivid theatrical acts.
The idea of terrorism as drama or theatre is more than a nice metaphor. First of all, the two terms do not
historically or conceptually refer to the same phenomenon, though they are
indeed closely related. On the one hand,
drama (drumenon, the thing done) has to do with the action, the players, a
shaped performance and thus must be approached through the psychodynamics of an
imitated action, Aristotle’s mimesis;
this does not mean the work enacted necessarily must be scripted, performed by
professionals, or seen by a passive audience.
On the other, theatre (actually the place, locus or topos where
something is performed—and this could as well be in a script, a little book or libretto or in the mind or even in a
longer event, such as a ritual or legal process) has to do with a public or private show, a set place, an
audience, and a social function. When a drama—whether comedy or tragedy—is put
on by actors before a gathering of the community—all together, players, viewers
and listeners, embody a myth, a transformative narrative: so that for a moment,
the at the time and in the place of the performance, ordinary chronological and
normal spatial dimensions become something else—and that new experience of an
enhanced or intensified reality indeed may continue to influence everyone’s
lives thereafter.
In the grotesque, explosive moment of a terroristic action imitated on
the stage of world history, not only are players (terrorists) and innocent
victims transformed (dismembered and then fused in the ensuing scene of
carnage) but, in the myth of the mass murderer’s sick mind they are made one,
so that he returns to innocence and purity before his mind was insulted,
humiliated and detached from a primary ideal of identity and the victims take
into themselves the terrorist’s defilement, discomfort, and rage, thus
justifying such punishment inflicted on them for no other reason.
In regard to the phantasmagoria of Gaza Propaganda, the Pallywood
directors have attempted to create a vision of innocent civilians and children
pummelled by an aggressive Israeli fighting power with no concern for the rules
of war or compassion for the victims. To
manufacture this fictional scenario, they have expropriated victims from Israel
itself and claimed it to be their own children, transferred scenes from Syria
and Iraq.
The idea of terrorism as drama or theatre is, however, more than a nice
metaphor. First of all, the two terms do
not historically or conceptually refer exactly to the same phenomenon, though
they are indeed closely related. On the
one hand, drama (drumenon, the thing done) has to do with the action, the players, a
shaped performance and thus must be approached through the psychodynamics of an
imitated action, Aristotle’s mimesis;
this does not mean the work enacted necessarily must be scripted, performed by
professionals, or seen by a passive audience.
On the other, theatre (actually the place, locus or topos where
something is performed—and this could as well be in a script, a little book or libretto or in the mind or even in a
longer event, such as a ritual or legal process) has to do with a public or private show, a set place, an
audience, and a social function. When a drama—whether comedy or
tragedy—is put on by actors before a gathering of the community—all together,
players, viewers and listeners, embody a myth, a transformative performance: so
that for a moment, at the time and in the place of the drama,
ordinary chronological and normal spatial dimensions become something else—and
that new experience of an enhanced or intensified reality indeed may continue
to influence everyone’s lives thereafter.
In the grotesque, explosive moment of a terroristic action imitated on
the stage of world history, not only are players (terrorists) and innocent
victims transformed (dismembered and then fused in the ensuing scene of
carnage) but, in the myth of the mass murderer’s sick mind they are made one,
so that he returns to innocence and purity before his mind was insulted,
humiliated and detached from a primary ideal of identity and the victims take
into themselves the terrorist’s defilement, discomfort, and rage, thus
justifying such punishment inflicted on them for no other reason.
Would the kind of festive theatre that celebrates the blood of jihadist
justice[4] have to do with an
immediate audience of the players and the victims of terrorism themselves, and
then with the wider group of spectators and audiences, especially now with
electronic/digital ways of beaming out the staged performance? In ancient
Roman times, and even throughout the Græco-Middle Eastern world great states
displayed, manifest, and embodied their actions in mimetic performances--the
Romans re-staged great battles faraway they celebrated in Rome during triumphs;
with great throngs of prisoners captured on parade, killed in the arena, and
some kept in slavery captivity for years for subsequent performances.
Huge painted canvases, three stories high, were first paraded through the
streets of Rome, then kept in temples, where parents could take their children. Depicted on triumphal arches and other stone monuments, memories of such spectacular shows were available throughout the Middle Aghes and renaissance as paradigms of propagandistic acts.
The Chechyans and ISIS killers perform before the cameras, commit their
atrocities so that the terror precedes them, leads to submission or desertion
in the ranks of the enemy. The terrorists themselves embody mythical, i.e.,
Koranic and subsequent Islamic military action s, to recreate the Kaliphate.
They dress, speak and act as though they were no longer their modern
selves, but their play-acting is not mere self-indulgent pretence or intensely
willed fiction. For reasons yet to be
explained they lose their original selves and become what they imitate.
Obviously the Gaza "resistance" was long since prepared on
children's television programmes, not least of which were puppet shows, and in street parades, such as funerals of
so-called martyrs. The leadership identify with the ancient mujahadeen (warriors) and shadim (martyrs), and drag the populace
into the shared illusion/delusion, so that everyone, in the tension and
excitement, fear of blood and sexual arousal,[5] of battle come to live in
a vast trance-like state.
Would the kind of theatre have to do with an immediate audience of the
players and the victims of terrorism themselves, and then with the wider group
of spectators and audiences, especially now with electronic/digital ways of beaming
out the staged performance. In ancient Roman times, and even throughout
the Graeco-Middle Eastern world great states displayed, manifest, and embodied
their actions in mimetic performances--the Romans re-staged great battles
faraway they celebrated in Rome during triumphs; with great throngs of
prisoners captured on parade, killed in the arena, and some kept in slavery
captivity for years for subsequent performances. Huge painted canvases,
three stories high, were first paraded through the streets of Rome, then kept
in temples, where parents could take their children.
The Chechans
and ISIS killers perform before the cameras, commit their atrocities so that
the terror precedes them, leads to submission or desertion in the ranks of the
enemy. The terrorists themselves embody mythical, i.e., Qoranic events, and
subsequent legendary Islamic military actions, to recreate the Kaliphate.
Obviously the
Gaza "resistance" was long since prepared for on children's shows and
in street parades. The leadership identify with the ancient mujahadeen
and shahim, and drag the populace into the illusion/delusion, so that everyone,
in the tension and excitement, fear and sexual arousal, of battle come to live
in a vast trance-like state.
I have already suggested that enargeia
(the generation of vivid images and speeches) generate a sense of verisimilitude (that is, lying like the
truth). To be frank, of course, there
are many schools of realism, Classical, Romantic, Naturalistic and Cynical, but
they share one quality: they give a sense of what is realistic, what is, in
other words, credible and plausible as equivalent to one’s apprehension of the
sensory perception of the world, because unlike the real—which can be
positively measured and logically registered, is a social construct. Paintings of trees, mountains and other
neutral objects in a landscape, for example, may seem to us as unreal: trees
like stalks of asparagus, mountains as lumps of clay, and other features merely
blobs of colour. Even so-called film noir and hard-boiled motion pictures
of the 1930s and 1940s now often appear to us as highly stylized, their speech
patterns forced and absurd, and the psychological depths once thought to be
there now sensed as superficial and clichéd. Yet thanks to photography we
learned to see the real way horses galloped, not with their legs splayed out in
parallel, but unevenly, assymmetrical curved limbs; how flowers unfold, drops of water turn into
crowns, and insects dance elaborate information-filled messages. When we try to speak of such works of art, our descriptions and narratives are called ekphrasis; and it is the constant movement back and forth from things actually seen to words renewed in ritual and festival occasions, and then recollected in memory, that shifts away from immediate experience to conventionalized pathosformeln, trauma inducing reproductions in the nachleben, the after life, of the now transformed reality.,
So how do we explain the way rhetoric and visualization transform ways
of seeing? There was recently (2008) a television documentary (now on
video) on "Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies"[6] about the powerful impact
of the first cinema on art (particularly Cubism) and actual perceptual, and
therefore, I would add, on how we restage history, memorialize our own
experiences, think about the world. cinematic techniques, George Méliès more
than the Lumière Brothers or Pathé. Through the Pallywood productions,
from the children's programmes, the adult prapaganda and the phony news videos,
the impressionable minds of toddlers and pre-schoolers can be manipulated.
Yet
does this account for adult intellectuals and artists in the West?
[3]See my review of Nancy
Hartvelt Kobrin, The Maternal Drama of the Chechen Jihadi in Family
Security Matters (12 August 2014) http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-maternal-drama-of the-chechen-jihadi.
[4] Norman Simms, Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice in
Biblical and Classical Literature (London,
Ont.: Sussco, 2008) gives a sustained look at the ancient models that lie
behind the contemporary forms we are examining here.
[5] In an interesting video clip shown briefly on u-tube showed a group of
teenage boys carrying a draped body of a flag-draped shahid, martyr, shortly after he had been killed in attempted
suicide attack out of one of the myriad tunnels that elad from Gaza into
southern Israel. The youths were
shouting “Allah Akhbar! God is mighty!” as they wended their way through the
narrow streets of some Palestinian town.
Suddenly, because of the jerky movements, the suicide belt which had not
been removed or at least disarmed on the corpse exploded, and several of the
marchers were blown apart, others lay writhing with pain on the ground, and
many changed their formulaic chants to
shocked, frightened and almost incoherent infantile screams of pain. The reality of what they were play-acting
intruded into their lives. As some of the
voices yelled “O my God, o my God” in English and with American accents, one
wonders whether these were terror tourists brought by their parents to let them
take part in the grand charade of a pseudo-jihad. After all, someone stayed around to video the
sights and sounds of this Grand Guignol.
[6] Arne Glimcher, director, Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies (2008; released as a video in 2010)
|
|
||
No comments:
Post a Comment