Summary

Introduction

Dragonflies inhabit an aquatic environment as larvae and a terrestrial one as adults, and are extremely useful as indicator species of both climate change and of pollution (Corbet 1999; Brooks et al. 2007), with some species being particularly susceptible to the latter.

During the Jewish period of mourning over the destruction of the first and second temples – Tishah B'av – it is written in the Siddur that Plato accompanied King Nebuchadnezzar when he destroyed the First Temple. Once the building was in ruins Plato encounters the wailing prophet Jeremiah near the Temple Mount. Aghast that such a preeminent and wise sage should be weeping over a pile of ruins, Plato asks him why on earth he is crying, explaining to him that it is pointless to cry over the past. He goes on to ask Jeremiah what good his tears can possibly do now that the building is just a pile of sticks and stones. Jeremiah answers by exclaiming Plato couldn't possibly understand because this was where he acquired his wisdom. According to Jewish tradition, Jeremiah demonstrates the key attributes of anyone worthy of being a prophet and the lesson drawn from the story is that Jeremiah is neither wallowing in self-pity, nor is he consumed by feelings of injustice or even personal suffering.

Fought between 1956 and 1975 American involvement in the Vietnam War saw over two million US citizens serve and some 58,000 die or be declared missing in action. Michal Belknap in his study of the war cites that during the period August 1965 to October 1967 those who felt it was not a mistake to send troops to Vietnam fell from 61 percent to 44 percent, not to mention that by 1967 a total of seven people had set themselves alight in protest, and the antiwar movement had expanded to become a serious force within American social and political life, including not just students and professors but also members of the clergy and business executives.

The journalist K. C. Summers comments that tickets to the ground zero viewing platform in New York City were available between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. Although Summers turned up at 1 p.m. tickets for that day had run out and one was issued for 10 a.m. the next day. When arriving at the viewing platform it was noted that people should be prepared to be in line for at least 45 minutes. Similarly, and writing for the travel section of the New York Times, Joseph Siano reminds his readers that tickets for the viewing gallery were only valid for a half-hour time slot. He went on to warn readers to keep in mind that, since each time slot had 250 tickets, lines were long.

The contemporary western urban environment is a transcultural locality, understood as a self-organizing entity producing and reproducing itself through the participation of sensorial and material movements. These include the smells and tastes of different localities, such as trees, gardens, parks, and eateries; the rhythms of wind flow, flashing street signs, the pulse of traffic, the circulation of people and goods, the throb of music vibrating throughout streets and buildings; the visual clamor of color, shape, texture, scale, lighting, shade, fashion, building density, branding, and the composition of all these elements; the soul of a neighborhood, whether that be the various places of religious worship, forms of sociality, traditions and rituals, or simply the overall tone of collective behavior; and finally modes of economic production and consumption, such as the types of commercial activity defining a particular landscape. At times these characteristics collide and in other instances they proliferate through or even participate with each other. There are differences in cultural specificity, social wealth, degrees of racial and ethnic segregation, as well as population density and quality (the local population of residents and the homeless or the semi-local population of visitors and commuters).

What has just been described is neither the model of a ‘multicultural’ urban environment, whereby each cultural space is independent of the other, nor is it a homogenous entity. Rather it is best characterized by the proliferation of various localities that are not places bound by fixed relations, in the territorial sense. The urban condition just described is one of praxis. In other words, the process of urban activity is what creates distinct urban realities.

There is an old Israeli joke of a Jewish mother who immigrated to Israel from Germany during the war. She is taking the bus through Jerusalem with her son Itzhak. She speaks animatedly to him in Yiddish and yet he keeps answering her in Hebrew. The mother insists he speak in Yiddish – ‘No, no, no. Answer me in Yiddish mein sun.’ Finally, an impatient Israeli leans over to her and exclaims: ‘Lady, why on earth do you keep insisting that the boy speak Yiddish and not Hebrew?’ To which the mother retorts with indignation and surprise: ‘Why, I don't want him to forget he's a Jew of course!’

What this joke pokes fun at is the way the past is revered as a primary signifier of identity. This chapter intends to examine the problem of how memorialization might create a connection to the past without reinstating the Oedipal shadow of an original trauma, one that forces out an illegitimate conjunctive synthesis by compelling us to identify with one particular subjectivity. In order to argue this it will be proposed the past is not so much a tangible terrain, a demarcated and identifiable space, or a monumental time that acts as a warning or reminder both in the present and for future generations, but an admixture of times that affirm the present and future and in so doing encourage a more nomadic subjectivity that identifies with a variety of subjectivities.

There seems to be a fundamental difference between public apathy toward past communal trauma and being morbidly obsessed with such events. Anyone attempting to come to terms with the incommensurability of representation with regard to trauma has inevitably to address this difference. Ultimately, apathy towards the past provides the motivation for the self-indulgent question of ‘Why bother caring?’ to be posed, while critical distance encourages us to ask ‘What does it really matter?’ The latter is a question Theodor W. Adorno discusses in Negative Dialectics, but contrary to the belief that questions posed in this way are a sign of bourgeois indifference, he points out that this type of question turns one into a spectator and as such it effectively brings to our attention the inhuman aspect of human existence. In what seemingly appears to be a paradoxical proposition, Adorno announces that the inhuman inheres in the human and it is here where negative dialectics begins. That is, he does not just advance the importance of being a spectator for critical selfreflection; rather the point he makes is that the authenticity of thinking comes from thinking against itself.

When Adorno puts forward in his essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ his now well-cited dictum that to ‘write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ he is not suggesting we give up on culture altogether (although he is certainly suspicious of political art); instead he brings to our attention the problem of re-presenting the wound of traumatic events and the difficulty any concept of the ‘inhuman’ poses for humanism per se.

On 28 April 2004 CBS 60 Minutes aired a report on the brutalization of Iraqi detainees at the hands of US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison; this was rapidly followed by an article on the same story that appeared in The New Yorker on 30 April 2004. These images flooded newsstands and media outlets worldwide, and the debate over moral culpability and immunity occupied talk-show radio hosts and news commentators alike. Needless to say, the then US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, responded to the media frenzy by quickly engaging a hermeneutic battle over the definition of ‘torture’ in an attempt to water down the legal ramifications of what had happened and save the face of his administration, demanding the actions be described as ‘abuse’ not ‘torture.’ Our focus will be not so much on the problem of ideology – the hermeneutic hair splitting that went on over the definition of ‘torture’ – or even the subsequent legal arguments surrounding the moral responsibility of the military and/or the individuals involved; rather, carrying on from the previous discussion in chapter 4 concerning the media's role in producing an overabundance of memory, we will explore the effects of this situation, asking the question: how is collective memory put to work in the service of social subjection?

Using Foucault's notion of power as a form of disciplinary control in concert with Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desire as social, we will explore the sociality of memory in terms of a productive power. This means we will attend not so much to the problem of free will (the moral culpability of certain individuals) but we will start with the nonindividual forces and affects operating in relation with other forces, such as collective memory, delving down deep to discover how these libidinal affects and energies are invested throughout the social field. It will be proposed that the potentially revolutionary social energies that the release of the Abu Ghraib images initiated were disciplined by another series of social forces: the collective memory of 9/11 still fresh in every American’s mind and the deeper racist visual history that the Abu Ghraib images resonated with.

If trauma is defined as an incommensurable experience or reality, then we can never ever really hope to use the logic of signification to interpret its meaning. How is it possible then to respond to traumatic memories if the fundamental presupposition of signification that semiotics, psychoanalysis, and structuralism all share in common no longer holds sway? Whereas in Chapter 4 our analysis of postmodern aesthetics and logic produced what Deleuze and Guattari might call an illegitimate disjunctive synthesis, in this chapter we will try to extract the sense of trauma by engaging the same synthesis in its legitimate form. The shootings of ten Amish schoolgirls and the community's response to this horrific event provides us with an important shift in focus away from either being an unrepresentable trauma figured as lack (void as content), or an uncompromising repetition of memory that refuses to forget a traumatic experience. The Amish response to the brutal killing of their children doesn't mask over the insurmountable difference trauma poses but, as will be argued, their response extracted the sense of trauma that emerges between appearances and copies, memory and history, all the while encouraging us to pose our question of traumatic memory in slightly different terms. That is, the question of what a traumatic event means or how it can be represented becomes redundant, because we no longer presuppose that a concrete experience or lived reality has to be represented in order to be real. The difficult question is now one of how the sense of trauma can be grasped in the absence of resemblance, imitation, or identification.

In his address to the nation on 11 September 2001, American President George W. Bush declared that no American will ever forget the terrorist attacks of 9/11, going on to announce that the country would ‘go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just’ in the world. This chapter will look to the social reality and function of remembering traumatic events such as 9/11 asking: at what point can we declare that we are remembering too much? Or more significantly, when does the trauma of a past event turn despotic? It will be argued that the mass media's appropriation and repetition of 9/11 images along with the public's will to consume these constitutes a repressive and authoritarian social organization, one that comes from converting the libidinal affects and energies of memory labor into a habitual, albeit paranoid Memory. In this way, the postmodern logic of memorial culture is understood not just as a periodizing concept exemplary of late capitalism, as Jameson proposes, it is also symptomatic of culture's complicity with a broader problem of social repression operating at the level of desire: seamlessly turning the creative and disruptive energies of a little forgetting into a repressing force of Memory signification.

Notwithstanding the fact that for the first five days after the 9/11 attacks the media covered the event around the clock in the absence of commercial breaks (even sports channels turned to disaster coverage), the majority of Americans persistently watched the pastiche of images repeat on their television screens despite the fact that viewing the material made them depressed.

Memorial culture appears in many different forms. There is the institutionalized setting of public commemoration, such as the celebratory activities of Memorial Day, or the countless memorials and monuments erected in public places. In addition, there is the whole industry of memorialization, such as memorial exhibitions and museums, as well as Hollywood's rendition of real-life collective traumas in film, not to forget the blossoming industry of memorial tourism to former concentration camp sites like Auschwitz and Birkenau. Further, there are the spontaneous memorials – teddy bears, flowers, wreaths, and letters – such as those flooding the gates of Buckingham Palace in London upon the death of Princess Diana (31 August 1997), or surrounding the perimeter of ground zero in Manhattan after 9/11. More recently, a new phenomenon of cyber memorialization has appeared giving people the opportunity to produce spontaneous memorials online and these commonly take the form of letters and poems. Needless to say, these are all examples of how culture is involved with shaping, organizing, and situating collective memory in space and time. Yet, how the movement of traumatic memory qualitatively changes the social field is not so easily located within the neat parameters of the public memorial or monument.

How we remember also affirms how we live our lives today and tomorrow: defensively or joyfully. Memory is dynamic and its movement is largely ungraspable. It can open new linguistic, economic, historical, and energetic combinations that either normalize or reinvent how the social field organizes itself. Yet the movement of memory cannot be clearly situated within space and time. Memory, unlike remembrance itself, is not in space and time, although it can be said to produce space-times. Memory does not happen to a body, it subsists throughout it. A body doesn't remember a defined slice of time, for memory is in excess of the chronological compartmentalizing of discrete temporal units. So, where do we start when we begin to think about memorial culture? How do we collectively grapple with trauma as it gnaws its way through the social field? Perhaps with a mixture of aggression, tears, outrage, overwhelming sorrow, and silence. How does culture answer to the memories that linger on in the wake of a trauma collectively experienced and the feeling that a community has been pushed to what seems like the end of the world? Questions such as these underpin a now commonly quoted statement Theodor W. Adorno made in 1949 that after the holocaust to write poetry is simply barbaric. This challenge has been met by the blossoming industry of memorialization – holocaust museums and memorials, holocaust remembrance day and so on.

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze says that you can never know a philosopher properly until you know what he or she is against. To know them at all, you have to know what puts fire in their soul, what makes them take up the nearly impossible challenge of trying to say anything at all. Too many people are content to say Deleuze, like Nietzsche, was against Hegel without ever asking why. And those who do trouble themselves to ask this question are too often satisfied with a merely philosophical answer. But if Deleuze found Hegel's philosophy intolerable it was not simply because he thought that the dialectic was a badly made concept, or that he objected to a metaphysics predicated on negation. These are the complaints of a sandbox philosopher and Deleuze was certainly not that. Hegel's philosophy was intolerable to Deleuze because in his eyes it offers a slave's view of the world (Deleuze 1983: 10). Worse, it is a model of thought that seems to participate in the legitimation of the very system that enslaves us by installing the master–slave dialectic at the centre of our ratiocination, making it seem like this is the only choice we have, effectively denying us in advance the option of asking our own questions and forming our own problematics. But this critique is only meaningful (for example, authentically critical) to the extent that it is read in terms of Deleuze's conception of philosophy's purpose, which is precisely Marxian to the extent that, like Marx, they hold that the point of philosophy is not simply to understand society, but to change it.