The Work of Representation Stuart Hall Summarized by Jesse Tseng

1 Representation, meaning and language

          At first, we have to know that：

Representation is an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture. It does involve the use of language, of signs and images which stand for or represent things. And surely it is not a simple or straightforward process.

How this article exploring the concept of representation connect meaning and language to culture？

We will be drawing a distinction between three different account or theories：the reflective, the intentional and the constructionist approaches to representation. Most of this text will be exploring the constructionist approach with two major variants or models of the constructionist approach, the semiotic approach- Ferdinand de Saussure and the discursive approach- Michel Foucault.

 But we have to answer the question first：what does the word representation really mean？

1.1 Making meaning, Representing things

Representation is the production of the meaning of the concepts in our minds through language.

There are two processes, two systems of representation.

   First, there is the system by which all sort of objects, people and events are correlated with a set of concepts or mental representations which we carry around in our heads.（like chair, table）

   Second, Language is, therefore, the second system of representation.

                   (When we say we belong to the same culture, it is because we interpret the world in similar ways. That’s why culture is sometimes defined in terms of shared meaning or shared conceptual maps. However, we must also able to represent or exchange meanings and concepts.)

          The relation between things, concepts and signs lie at the heart of the production of meaning in language. The process which links these three elements together is what we call Representation.

1.2 Language and Representation

          As people who belong to the same culture must share a broadly similar conceptual map, so they must also share the same way of interpreting the signs of a language.

          In the SHEEP example:

          In order to interpret them, we must have access to the two systems of representation: to a conceptual map which correlates the sheep in the field with the concept of a sheep: and a language system which is visual language, bear some resemblance to the real thing of looks like it in some way.

          The relationship in the system of representation between sign, the concept and the object to which they might be used to refer is entirely arbitrary. (Tree will not mind if we used the word Seert to represent the concept of them)

1.3 Sharing the codes

          The meaning is constructed by the system of representation. It is constructed and fixed by the code, which sets up the correlation between our conceptual system and our language system in such a way that, every time we think of a tree the code tells us to use the English word TREE, or Chinese word 樹.

          The code tells us that in our culture!

          One way of thinking about culture is in terms of these shared conceptual maps, shared language systems and the codes which govern the relationships of translation between them.

          Not because such knowledge is imprinted in their genes, but because they learn its conventions and so gradually become culture persons. They unconsciously internalize the codes which allow them to express certain concepts and ideas through their systems of representation.

          But of our social, cultural and linguistic conventions, then meaning can never be finally fixed, we can all agree to allow words to carry somewhat different meanings.

          Social and linguistic conventions do change over time.

1.4 Theories of representation

          In the reflective approach, the meaning is thought to lie in the object, person, idea or event in the real world, and language functions like a mirror, to reflect the true meaning as it already exists in the world. We can also call it as a mimetic approach.

          The second approach to meaning in representation argues the opposite case. It holds that it is the speaker the author, who imposes his or her unique meaning on the world through language. Words mean what the author intends they should mean. This is the intentional approach.

          The third approach recognizes this public, social character of language. Things don’t mean: we construct meaning, using representational systems. Hence it is called the constructionist approach.

1.5 The language of traffic lights

          The simplest example of this point, which is critical for an understanding of how languages function as representational systems, is the famous traffic lights example.

          According to the constructionist approach, colors and the language of traffic lights’ work as a signifying or representational system.

          In the language of traffic lights, it is the sequence and position of the colors, as well as the colors themselves, which enable them to carry meaning and thus function as signs.

          It is the code that fixes the meaning, not the color itself. This also has wider implications for the theory of representation and meaning in language. It means that signs themselves cannot fix the meaning. Instead, meaning depends on the relation between a sign and a concept which is fixed by a code.

          Meaning the constructionist would say, is relational.

2. Saussure’s legacy

          In the important move, Saussure analyzed the sign into two further elements. There was, he argued, the form, and there was the idea or concept in your head with which the form was associated. Saussure called the first element, the signifier, and the second element the signified.

          Signifier：  The word or image of a Walkman, for example

          Signified：  The concept of a portable cassette-player in your head

          Saussure also insisted on what we called the arbitrary nature of the sign: There is no natural or inevitable link between the signifier and the signified. Signs do not possess a fixed or essential meaning. What signifies, according to Saussure, is not RED or the essence of redness, but the difference between RED and GREEN.

          Signs are members of a system and are defined in relation to it the other members of that system.

          Furthermore, the relation between the signifier and the signified, which is fixed by our cultural codes, is not permanently fixed.

                   BLACK is dark, evil etc.

                   BLACK is beauty.

          However, if meaning changes, historically, and is never finally fixed, then it follows that taking the meaning must involve an active process of interpretation. There is a necessary and inevitable imprecision about language.

2.1 The social part of language

          Saussure divided language into two parts.

1.         The first consisted of the general rules and codes of the linguistic system, which all its users must share if it is to be of use as a mean of communication. Saussure called the structure of language, the langue.

2.         the second part consisted of the particular acts of speaking or writing or drawing, which are produced by an actual speaker or writer. He called this, the parole.

For Saussure, the underlying structure of rules and codes was the social part of language, the part which could be studied with the law-like precision of a science because of its closed, limited nature.

The second part of language, the individual speech-act or utterance, he regarded as the surface of language.

          In separating the social part of language from the individual act of communication, Saussure broke with our common-sense notion of how language works…… The author decides what she wants to say, but she cannot decide whether or not to use the rules of language.

2.2            Critique of Saussure’s model

In his own work, he tended to focus almost exclusively on the two aspects of the sign-signifier and signified. He gave little or no attention to how this relation between signifier/signified could serve the purpose of what we called reference.

Another problem is that Saussure tended to focus on the formal aspects of language-how language actually works. However, Saussure’s focus on language may have been too exclusive. The attention to its formal aspects did divert attention away from the more interactive and dialogic features of language.

Later cultural theorist learned from Saussure’s structuralism but abandoned its scientific premise. Language remains rule-governed. But it is not a closed system which can be reduced to its formal elements.

3.         From language to culture: linguistics to semiotics

The general approach to the study of signs in culture, and of culture as a sort of language, which Saussure foreshadowed, is now generally known by the term semiotics.

          The French critic, Roland Barthes, he brought a semiotic approach to bear on reading popular culture, treating these activities and objects as signs, as a language through which meaning is communicated.

          In much the same way, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, not by analyzing how these Amazonian peoples, but in terms of what they were trying to say, what messages about the culture they communicated.

          In the semiotic approach, not only words and images but objects themselves can function as signifiers in the production of meaning. Clothes, for example.

          In this example, we have moved from the very narrow linguistic level from which we drew examples to a wider, cultural level……Barthes called the first, descriptive level, the level of denotation: the second level, that of connotation.

3.1 Myth today

          In his essay Myth today, in Mythologies, Barthes gives another example which helps us to see exactly how representation is working at this second, broader cultural level.

a.     A black soldier is giving the French flag a salute.

b.     The Panzani ad for spaghetti and vegetables in a string bag as a myth about Italian national culture.

Think of ads, which work in the same way.

4. Discourse, power, and subject

          Already, in Roland Barthes’s work in the 1960s, as we have seen, Saussure’s linguistic model is developed through its application to a much wider field of signs and representations.

          Semiotics seemed to confine the process of representation to language, and to treat it as a closed, rather static, system…some people had more power to speak about some subject than others. Models of representation, these critics argued, ought to focus on these broader issues of knowledge and power.

          Foucault used the word representation in a narrower sense than we are using it here, but he is considered to have contributed to a novel and significant general approach to the problem of representation. What concerned him was the production of knowledge through what he called discourse.

         His work was much more historically grounded, more attentive to historical specificities, than the semiotic approach. As he said ‘relation of power, not relation of meaning’ were his main concern.

4.1 From language to discourse

          Foucault studied not language, but discourse as a system of representation. By ‘discourse’, Foucault meant ‘a group of statements which provide a language for talking about a particular topic at a particular historical moment….Discourse is about the production of knowledge through language.

          Discourse, Foucault argued, never consist of one statement, one text, one action or one source. The same discourse, characteristic of the way of thinking or the state of knowledge at one time, will appear across a range of texts, and as forms of conduct, at a number of different institutional sites within society. However, whenever these discursive events refer to the same object,……, then they are said by Foucault to belong to the same discursive formation.

          Nothing has any meaning outside of discourse.

4.2 Historicizing discourse: discursive practices

          Things meant something and were true, he argued, only within a specific historical context. He thought that, in each period, discourse produced forms of knowledge, objects, subjects, and practices of knowledge, which differed radically from period to period, with no necessary continuity between them.

                   The mental illness example

                   The homosexual example

                   The hysterical woman example

          Knowledge about and practices around all these subjects, Foucault argued, were historically and culturally specific. They did not and could not meaningfully exist outside specific discourse.

4.3 From discourse to power/knowledge

         

          In his later work, Foucault became even more concerned with how knowledge was put to work through discursive practice in specific institutional settings to regulate the conduct of others.

          This foregrounding of the relation between discourse, knowledge, and power marked a significant development in the constructionist approach to representation which we have been outlineing.

          Foucault’s main argument against the classical Marxist theory of ideology was that it tended to reduce all the relation between knowledge and power to a question of class power and class interests.

          Secondly, he argued that Marxism tended to truth. But Foucault did not believe that any form of thought could claim an absolute truth of this kind, outside the play of discourse.

                   The Gramsci’s theory has some similarities to Foucault’s position.

          Knowledge linked to power, not only assumes the authority of the truth but has the power to make itself true.

          The Regime of truth!

          Secondly, Foucault advanced an altogether novel conception of power. We tend to think of power as always radiating in a single direction and come from a specific source.

          It is deployed and exercised through a net-like organization. This suggests that we are all, to some degree, caught up in its circulation- oppressors and oppressed.

4.5 Charcot and the performance of hysteria

          The activity 7, look the figure 1.8 and answer the follow questions. (page 54.)

5. Where is the subject

          The conventional notion thinks of the subject as an individual who is fully endowed with consciousness……it suggests that, although other people may misunderstand us, we always understand ourselves.

          Indeed, this is one of Foucault’s most radical propositions: subject is produced with discourse.

          Foucault’s subject seems to be produced through discourse in two fidderent senses or places.

                   First, the discourse itself produces subject.

But the discourse also produces a place for the subject.

                   Subject-positions

         

5.1 How to make sense of Velasquez’ Las Meninas

5.2 The subject of/in representation

          Look the Diego Velasquez’ Las Meninas, and follow the question in activity 9.

6. Conclusion: representation, meaning and language reconsidered

         

          Representation is the process by which members of a culture use language to produce meaning.

          Meaning, consequently, will always change, from on culture or period to another. Because meanings are always changing and slipping, codes operate more like social conventions than like fixed laws or unbreakable rules.

          In semiotic, we will recall the importance of signifier/signified, langue/parole and myth, and how the marking of difference and binary oppositions are crucial for meaning.

          In the discursive approach, we will recall discursive formation, power/knowledge, the idea of a regime of truth, the way discourse also produces the subject and defines the subject-positions from which knowledge proceeds and indeed, the return of questions about the subject to the field of representation.

Ambegen

Four essays. Preface opens with the reasonable proposition that the discrepancy regarding Auschwitz “concerns the very structure of testimony” (12): “On the one hand, what happened in the camps appears to the survivors as the only true thing and, as such, absolutely unforgettable; on the other hand, this truth is to the same degree unimaginable, that is, irreducible to the real elements that constitute it” (id.). The discrepancy concerns “facts so real, by comparison, nothing is truer; a reality that necessarily exceeds its factual elements—such is the aporia of Auschwitz” ((id.). One survivor, Lewental, a sonderkommando, wrote that “the complete truth is far more tragic, far more frightening” (id.)—to which author responds: “more tragic, more frightening than what?” We see that the “aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge: a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension” (id.). We also see that

One of the lessons of Auschwitz is that it is infinitely harder to grasp the mind of an ordinary person than to understand the mind of a Spinoza or Dante. (Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the ‘banality of evil,’ so often misunderstood, must also be understood in this sense.) (13)

Though Agamben states that this text has little that can’t be found in the actual testimonials, “it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna: in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to” (id). His task became an interrogation of the lacuna, even though “listening to something absent” may seem counterintuitive: “it made it necessary to clear away almost all of the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, have been advanced in the name of ethics” (id.).

I – “The Witness”

In Auschwitz, one reason to survive was “the idea of becoming a witness” (15). Primo Levi “does not consider himself a writer; he becomes a writer so that he can bear witness” (id.). 

Latin has two terms for our ‘witness’: testis (“from which our word ‘testimony’ derives, etymologically signifies the person, who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of a third party (*terstis)” (17)) and superstes (“a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it”) (id.). These latinate concepts problematize the notion of bearing witness to Auschwitz, as we shall see. Levi is interested only in “what makes judgment possible: the gray zone in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims” (17). Judgment can be made, of course, but important that “the law not presume to exhaust the question. A non-juridical element of truth exists such that the quaestio facti can never be reduced to the quaestio iuris” (id.). 

Author notes the standard “tacit confusion of ethical and juridical categories” in this connection (18)—all of this is “contaminated by law,” which has the “ultimate aim” of “the production of a res judicata” (id.), quite distinct from the finding of truth or the disposition in justice. Rather, “the sentence becomes the substitute [supplement?] for the true and the just, being held as true despite its falsity and injustice” (id.). Via reference to Kafka, law is reduced to judgment, and judgment to trial: “execution and transgression, innocence and guilt, obedience and disobedience all become indistinct” (19) (the plotinian hoion, of course) and dude concludes that judgment constitutes “the mystery of trial.” Some suggestion that the post-war trials (which involved “only a few hundred people,” an “evident insufficiency” (19)) “are responsible for the conceptual confusion that, for decades, has made it impossible to think through Auschwitz,” as “they helped spread the idea that the problem of Auschwitz had been overcome.” We get now that “law did not exhaust the problem, but rather that the very problem was so enormous as to call into question law itself” (20). 

Some discussion here on ‘responsibility’—it has been “irredeemably contaminated by law” (20) (likely we need an archaeology of contamination, considering dude’s reliance thereupon) (cf. also Bakhtin on ‘answerability’). Levi would place certain occurrences in a “zone of irresponsibility,” based on his “unprecedented discovery” at Auschwitz of “an area that is independent of every establishment of responsibility,” wherein “the long chain of conjunction between victim and executioner comes loose” (21). We are not “beyond good and evil” (i.e., with Nietzsche), but “before them”; “before is more important than any beyond—that the ‘underman’ must matter to us more than the ‘overman’” (id.). Again, this “First Circle” of irresponsibility is Arendt’s banality of evil. The sonderkommando is the representative of this zone of irresponsibility (25).

Etymology again tells the story: spondeo “means ‘to become the guarantor of something for someone (or for oneself) with respect to someone’” (id.). For the Romans, the “custom was that a free man could consign himself as a hostage—that is, in a state of imprisonment, from which the term obligatio derives—to guarantee the compensation of a wrong or the fulfillment of an obligation” (22), and the “term sponsor indicated the person who substituted himself for the reus, promising, in the case of a breach of contract, to furnish the requested service” (id.). Responsibility is accordingly “genuinely juridical and not ethical” wherein “the legal bond was considered to inhere in the body of the person responsible” (id.). (We shall recall this when we get around to volume IX.)

Responsibility and guilt thus express simply two aspects of legal imputability; only later were they interiorized and moved outside law. Hence the insufficiency and opacity of every ethical doctrine that claims to be founded on these two concepts. (22)

Eichmann at his trial walked this distinction by claiming meaninglessly that he felt “guilty before God, not the law” (23). The silliness arises after “having raised juridical categories to the status of supreme ethical categories and thereby irredeemably confusing the fields of law and ethics,” secular ethics still wants to be separate (24): “But ethics is the sphere that recognizes neither guilt nor responsibility; it is, as Spinoza knew, the doctrine of the happy life” (id.), which reduces, furthermore, the ethical with the mere aesthetic. One would think that if there were an irreducible core of the ethical, regarding which aesthetics is of no moment, then it should be discoverable at Auschwitz.

The analysis turns to Greek martis, ‘martyr,’ as translation for ‘witness’: though the ante-Nicene fathers regarded martyrdom as witness to the faith, the Auschwitz survivors are unanimous that “what happened in the camps has little to do with martyrdom” (26). Conceptually, however, there is some connection, insofar as the Greek term is derived from the verb ‘to remember,’—“the survivor’s vocation is to remember; he cannot not remember” (id.). More significantly, however, the ante-Nicene fathers “were confronted by heretical groups that rejected martyrdom because, in their eyes, it constituted a wholly senseless death (perire sine causa)” (27). The doctrine of martyrdom was confected to justify “the scandal of a meaningless death, of an execution that could only appear as absurd” (id.): “Confronted with the spectacle of a death that was apparently sine causa, the reference to Luke 12: 8-9 and to Matthew 10: 32-33 [quotations omitted] made it possible to interpret martyrdom as a divine command and, thus, to find reason for the irrational” (id.). Levi does not like the term Holocaust because of the implication of an offering or a punishment for sins (28), noting how Wiesel coined the term “then regretted it and wanted to take it back” (id.). 

As we might have predicted, an etymology follows: holocaustos ultimately as a ‘complete burning,’ “used to translate […] the complex sacrificial doctrine of the Bible” (there’s several different Hebrew terms, and the term that the Vulgate rendered as holocaustum, olah, concerns “the dispatch of the offering to the divinity” (29)). The Ante-Nicene fathers used the term literally against Judaism, to “condemn the uselessness of bloody sacrifices” (id.), but then used it metaphorically to refer to the torture of the Christian martyrs, with the ultimate extension, by Augustine, to se holocaustum obtulerit in cruce Iesus. 

The metaphorical usage is not limited to holocaust; the preferred term has been so’ah, which also reveals a metaphorical usage, meaning “‘devastation, catastrophe’ and, in the Bible, often implies the idea of divine punishment (as in Isaiah 10:3)” (31). Unlike holocaust, however, so’ah “contains no mockery”; the former term is an “attempt to establish a connection, however, distant, between Auschwitz and the Biblical olah and between death in the gas chamber and the ‘complete devotion to sacred and superior motives’” (id.). In swearing off the use of the term forever, author notes that “Not only does the term imply an unacceptable equation between crematoria and altars; it also continues a semantic heredity that is from its inception anti-Semitic” (id.).

Agamben had been challenged for trying to “ruin the unique and unsayable character of Auschwitz” (31). ‘Unique’ is conceded, but ‘unsayable’? Works through Chrysostom’s notion that God is unsayable, unspeakable, unwritable (32), such that the angels must merely adore Him in silence. Author translates ‘adore in silence’ as euphemein, and regards it as the proper way to cognize the complaint that he has ruined the unsayable character of Auschwitz.

“Testimony, however, contains,” once more, “a lacuna” (33): as Levi notes, “witnesses are by definition survivors and so all, to some degree, enjoyed a privilege.” This lacuna “calls into question the very meaning of testimony and, along with it, the identity and reliability of witnesses” (id.); Levi: “I must repeat: we the survivors, are not the true witnesses.” Levi makes his testimony essentially a representative capacity: “Weeks and months before being snuffed out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy” (34). Agamben notes that “the value of the testimony lies essentially in what it lacks; at its center it contains something that cannot be borne witness to and that discharges the survivors of authority” (id.). Rather, the survivors speak as “pseudo-witnesses” insofar as “they bear witness to the missing testimony” (id.). Of course, by means of the standard adverse inference under the requisite rules of evidence, disappeared witnesses and concealed evidence compels the presumption that the party procuring the absence fears its disclosure and therefore we should assume the worst—so we should not be troubled by pseudo-witnesses.

This difficulty is explained otherwise as an inside/outside distinction: “The Shoah is an event without witnesses” because “it is impossible to bear witness from the inside” (no one survives to tell) or from the outside “since the ‘outsider’ is by definition excluded from the event” (35). Agamben thinks that the threshold of indistinction (hoion, recall) between inside and outside “could have led to a comprehension of the structure of testimony” (36). Testimony as the “disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness” (39)?

II – “The Muselmann”

Muselmann as the “untestifiable” to which “no one has borne witness” (41). The Muselmann as a “staggering corpse,” “mummy men,” “living dead” (id.), who “became indifferent to everything happening around them” (43). (The designation arises in Auschwitz from “the impression of seeing Arabs praying” (id.), according to one survivor.) No one had sympathy for the muselmanner (id.), and “all the muselmanner who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story” (44). Little agreement on the “origin of the term Muselmann,” but many synonyms (45). 

Muselmanner as marking “the moving threshold in which a man passed into non-man and in which clinical diagnosis passed into anthropological analysis” (47); “in Auschwitz ethics begins precisely at the point where the Muselmann, the ‘complete witness,’ makes it forever impossible to distinguish between man and non-man” (id.) (NB: hoion). This particular zone of indistinction is what ties this volume very plainly to volume I (to the extent that “the Muselmann’s ‘third realm’ is the perfect cipher for the camp, the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed” (id.)) and volume II (insofar as the philosopher’s “extreme situation” is the jurist’s “state of exception”). In this latter connection, Karl Barth’s notion that “human beings have the striking capacity to adapt so well to an extreme situation that it can no longer function as a distinguishing criterion” (49), i.e., noting the “incredible tendency of the limit situation to become habit (hexis recall): “Auschwitz is precisely the place in which the state of exception coincides perfectly with the rule and the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of life” (id.) (we shall recall the notion of ‘perfect coincidence with the rule’ in volume VIII).

Muselmanner described with increasing intensity: “witnesses confirm the impossibility of gazing upon the Muselmann” (50); filmmaker who “patiently lingered over naked bodies, over the terrible ‘dolls’ dismembered and stacked one on top of another, could not bear the sight of these half-living beings” (51); Muselmanner as “an absolutely new phenomenon, unbearable to human eyes” (id.); although the Muselmann is noted by most survivors as “a central experience,” the figure is “barely named in the historical studies on the destruction of European Jewry” (52); Levi designates the Muselmann as “he who has seen the Gorgon” (53). Lots on the Gorgon stuff, impossibility of seeing and being seen, &c.

Much on other interpretations of the Muselmann (57 ff): a biological machine, a limit of certain principles, an experiment, a refutation of Apel’s obligatory communication thesis, as Aristotle’s ‘plant man,’ a radical refutation of all refutations (66).

Critique of the doctrine of dignity thereafter (67 ff.): “Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm” (69) insofar as “the bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands not conforms to anything” (id.). Rather, “the atrocious news that the survivors carry from the camp to the land of human beings is precisely that it is possible to lose dignity and decency beyond imagination, that there is still life [zoe] in the most extreme degradation” (id.). The Muselmann is accordingly on the threshold of the new ethics of “a form of life that begins where dignity ends” (id.).

Camps as having the role of “the fabrication of corpses” (as stated by Arendt) (71): “In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced” (72). (Am skipping over all the Heidegger stuff.) Some reflections on Adorno’s well known positions on Auschwitz (80 ff.), as well as on Foucault’s notation of the passage of sovereignty (“to make die and let live”) to biopower (“to make live and let die”) (82 ff). The Third Reich is of course where the “unprecedented absolutization of the biopower to make live intersects with an equally absolute generalization of the sovereign power to make die, such that biopolitics coincides immediately with thanatopolitics” (83). The NSDAP dream of volkloser Raum, “not simply a matter of a desert,” but rather “a fundamental biopolitical intensity” (85), “an absolute biopolitical space, both lebensraum and todesraum” (86).

III – “Shame, or on the Subject”

Upon his liberation by the Red Army, Levi reported a sense of shame, which “becomes the dominant sentiment of survivors” (88), which conflated very soon with guilt. Bettleheim reports it as a survivor’s guilt: “one cannot survive the concentration camp without feeling guilty that one was so incredibly lucky when millions perished” (89). 

This leads to a critique of the doctrine of collective responsibility (94 ff), which Levi acknowledges to be bogus insofar as “it makes no sense to speak of a collective guilt (or innocence) and that only ‘metaphorically can one claim to feel guilty for what’s one’s own people or parents did” (95). 

Some thoughtful comments on Hegelian theory of tragedy in this connection (96 ff). Also, Nietzsche: “The ethics of the twentieth century opens with Nietzsche’s overcoming of resentment” (99) via the eternal return thesis—but: “Auschwitz also marks a decisive rupture” (id.). (I.e., who wants Auschwitz to return? “One cannot want Auschwitz to return for eternity, since in truth it has never ceased to take place; it is always already repeating itself” (101).) 

Levinas on shame: it does not derive from “the consciousness of an imperfection or a lack in our being from which we take distance” (104), but rather “shame is grounded in our being’s incapacity to move away and break from itself” (id.). Shame as “the subject thus has no other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness [sic] to its own disorder” (106). Shame as “the fundamental sentiment of being a subject, in the two apparently opposed senses of this phrase: to be subjected and to be sovereign. Shame is what is produced in the absolute concomitance of subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty” (107). 

In Levi, we find “the impossible dialectic between the survivor and the Muselmann” (120): “Who is the subject of testimony?” A zone of indistinction “in which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the ‘imagined substance’ of the ‘I’ and, along with it, the true witness” (id.). 

We see that “life bears with it a caesura that can transform all life into survival and all survival into life. […] survival designates the pure and simple continuation of bare life [cf. volume I]” (133).

IIII – “The Archive and Testimony”

Lotsa linguistics stuff: Benveniste, Foucault, &c. “Auschwitz represents the historical point in which these processes collapse, the devastating experience in which the impossible is forced into the real” (148). We see that the Muselmann is the absolutely unwitnessable, invisible ark of biopower. Invisible because empty, because the Muselmann is nothing other than volkloser Raum, the empty space of people at the center of the camp” (156).

Ultimately, “the subject of testimony” is “a remnant” (158). This is a “theologico-messianic concept” (162). Regarding the remnant, “the aporia of testimony coincides with the aporia of messianism” (163).

“Let us indeed posit Auschwitz, that to which it is not possible to bear witness; and let us also posit the Muselmann as the absolute impossibility of bearing witness” (164).

Recommended for those who examine the incomparable; phenomenology of heteronymic depersonalization, degree zero pseudonyms, and readers in secret solidarity with the arcanum imperii.

Abc

Dominick LaCapra is a Cornell historian concerned with history and historiography, especially how traumatic experiences (which he also refers to as “limit experiences”) relate to historical writing. He might be called one of the first writers to ask serious questions about what has lately come to be known as “trauma studies,” in which he integrates concepts from psychoanalysis, critical and literary theory, and philosophy all for the purpose of better understanding, talking about, and writing about historical traumatic experiences. Because of the way this short book is constructed - it’s a series of five essays in addition to one long interview - there is no unifying thesis but instead a number of ideas that popped into the foreground and, at least in my opinion, were of both real theoretical and practical importance in the writing of history. 

The first essay mostly carves out two kinds of historical writing, which LaCapra calls the “documentary or self-sufficient research model” and “radical constructivism.” In the former, “priority is often given to research based on primary (preferably archival) documents that enable one to derive authenticated facts about the past which may be recounted in a narrative (the more ‘artistic’ approach) or employed in a mode of analysis which puts forth testable hypotheses (the more ‘social-scientific’ approach).” The purpose of this method is to tell what happened, how it happened, oftentimes with an emphasis on facts, figures, dates, places, and names. Its extreme form is positivism, which was popular in nineteenth-century historical writing. Radical constructivism, less widely known outside of the academy, suggests that history is merely one mode of writing, and really has no pride of place over any other form of writing, whether it’s philosophical or literary, and that we are mistaken in believing that the writing of history is in any way more objectivist or “real” than a novel. Two proponents of radical constructivism working today are the theorists Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White. LaCapra eschews both of these and advocates for what he calls a “middle voice” – a term he takes from linguistics – which carves out a middle road between these two methodologies which can leave room for both objective facts, but also account for the performative, figurative, aesthetic, rhetorical, political, and ideological factors that “construct” structure and narrative. As LaCapra asks in another essay, “Rather, the problem [of resolving these two approaches] is how an attentiveness to certain issues may lead to better self-understanding and to a sensitivity or openness to responses that generate necessary tensions in one’s account. This attentiveness creates, in Nietzsche’s term, a Schwergewicht, or stressful weight in inquiry, and it indicates how history in its own way poses problems of writing or signification which cannot be reduced to writing up the results of research” (p. 105). 

In the second essay, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” he argues for a more clear distinction between loss and absence in historical writing – a difference which he says is often made ambiguous. Absence is transhistorical and signifies an existential lack whereas loss is always historical specific and tangible: something is taken away or let go. Therefore, loss always entails absence, but not always vice versa. “My contention is that the difference (or nonidentity) between absence and loss is often elided, and the two are conflated with confusing and dubious results. This conflation tends to take place so rapidly that it escapes notice and seems natural or necessary. Yet among other questionable consequences, it threatens to convert subsequent accounts into displacements of the story of original sin wherein a prelapsarian state of unity or identity, whether real or fictive, is understood as giving way through a fall to difference and conflict” (p. 47-48). In other words, ignoring or not recognizing this difference can exacerbate historical traumas needlessly by creating unnecessary tension. 

Nepali Politics in Limbo-2

अब त केही गर्नुहोस्, गगन जी

यो हाम्रो दुर्भाग्य हो । हामीलाई पहिलादेखि थाहा थियो यस्तो हुन्छ भन्ने कुरा । हामीले आस गर्यो, हामी मुर्ख भयौं । आखिर तपाई पनि मुर्ख हुनु भो नि !

यही बीचमा आएको प्रधानमन्त्रीको निर्वाचनको प्रश्तावले मलाई उत्साहित पारेको छ । मलाई गलत नबुझ्नु होस् । पक्कै पनि यो घोषणा जायज छैन । यसले अझ बढी अन्यौलता दिनेछ, यसमा कुनै दुईमत छैन । तर यसलाई ब्याब्थापन गर्न सकिन्छ । मात्र यति हो, तपाई हामीहरु तयार रहनु पर्छ । यो तयारी मुलत: ब्याबाहारिक एवं फलदायी हुनेछ ।

म यसको शान्दर्भिकतालाई यसरी प्रश्तुत गर्छु । हिजो बुद्धिसागरले यस्तो लेखेका थिए फेसबुकमा, “नयाँ चुनावमा जाने रे ! के नेताहरुलाई जनताको ठेगना थाहा छ ?” हो, तपाईहरुलाई हाम्रो ठेगना थाहा छैन । तपाईहरु भनें, मनमा नराख्नु होला । आखिर थोर बहुत हो त त्यही, तपाई पनि त्यो गैरजिम्मेबारी जत्थामा आफूलाई देखाउन प्रयत्नशिल देखिनु हुन्छ ।

त्यस्तै, जनआन्दोलनको बेला अग्रपंक्ति उभिएको मेरो एक मित्रको इस्टाटसपनि उत्तिकै शान्दर्भिक हुन्छ यसबेला । “ राजा आऊ, देश बचाऊ ।“ उसले लेखेको छ । यो त मात्र सयौं द्रिष्टान्तमध्धेको एक हो। तपाईलाई लाग्दैन तपाईहरुले नै संस्थागत गरेको परिबर्तन यो हो भन्ने ? मैले विगत एक हप्तामा बात मार्न पाएका मान्छेहरुको तर्कले पनि उत्तिकै शन्दर्भ भेट्छ यहाँ । उनिहरुको मूल आशय थियो – नेताहरुभन्दा राजा ठीक किनकी त्यतिबेला एउटा चोर थियो र त्यो चोर आँकलन गर्न सकिने खालको थियो ।  अहिलेकाहरु बढो अप्ठ्यारा छन् । यो सामान्य जनताको बिचार हो । गम्नु होस् त , असफलताको परकाष्ठा यो भन्दा बढी के हुन सक्छ र ?

मलाई लाग्छ, रबिन्द्र मिश्रले शुशिल कोइरालालाई सम्बोधन गरेर लेखेको लेख अबश्य पढ्नु भयो । राष्ट्रिय महत्वको बिषयमा तपाईको नेत्रित्व तप्काले देखाएको (अ)कटिबद्धता बेतुकको छ । तपाईको पालो कहिले आउँछ गगन जी ? तपाईको स्थान के हो ? बिन्ती यसलाई ब्याक्तिगत लान्छना नसम्झनू होस् । तर यो त बर्षौदेखि सोधिदै आइएको एक सामान्य प्रश्न हो, जसको उत्तर तपाईले दिन सक्नु भएको छैन । साँडेको फल झर्ला र खाउँला भन्ने सोच्नु भएको हो तपाई गलत हुनुहुन्छ । वास्तवमा साँडेको फल नै हुँदैन । त्यो फल जो तपाई हामीलाई देखाइएको छ , मात्र भ्रम हो । यदि तपाईलाई आफूले केही असल गर्नु भएको छ लागेको छ भने त्यो अझ ठूलो भ्रम हो । तपाईले केही गर्नु भएको छैन । सम्विधान सभामा भएको तपाईको उपस्थितिले लछारपाटो लगाएको छैन । तपाईको जादुइ ब्याक्तित्व जसले हामीलाई कायल पारेको थियो बकमफुस प्रतित भएको छ ।

अब निर्बाचन र हामी उँभिएको धरातलको शन्दर्भलाई हेरौं । यस बेला पनि जनता हाम्रो पोल्टामा छन् भनेर सोच्ने महामुर्खहरुको भिड्बाट बाहिर निश्किएर निहाल्नुहोस् । बाटामा हिंडिरहेको एक सामान्य भन्दा सामान्य नेपालीलाई सोध्नुहोस् । यदि चुनाव भइहाल्यो भनें, तपाईको पार्टी चुनाब गर्न दिइहाल्यो भनें , कसलाई भोट हाल्नुहुन्छ ? उत्तरले तँपाईलाई अवाक बनाउने छ । तर कांग्रेस र एमालेले कदापि चुनाव हुन दिदैनन् किनकी यसबेला उनीहरुको राजनैतिक बिश्लेशण अति सही छ –कुन मुख लिएर भोट माग्न जाने ? ब्याक्तिगत रुपमा भन्नु पर्दा, यदि यही परिद्रिश्यमा कोही भोट माग्न आउछ भनें त्यसको मुखमा थुक्ने प्रथम ब्याक्ति हुनेछु म ।

तर चुनाब अति आबश्यक छ । यसको बिरोध नगर्नुहोस किनकी यो सबैभन्दा ब्याबहारिक एवं प्रजातान्त्रिक उपाय हो जनमत लिने । बरु पार्टीहरुको बिकल्प खोज्नुहोस , सँगै मिलेर खोजौं । हिजो सम्बिधान सभाको बिकल्पको कुरा हुंदै थियो, आज म ति टाउकेहरुको बिकल्पको बारेमा सोचिरहेको छू । हो, मसँग धेरै सीमाहरु छन् । तर तँपाईसँग मेरो तुलनामा थोरै सीमाहरु छन् । तपाई यसो गर्नु पर्छ किनकी तपाई गर्न सक्नु हुन्छ, किनकि यो भन्दा सही केही हुने छैन ।

हामीहरुलाई अबगत छ, तपाईहरु धरैजानालाई यो घटनाक्रमले निरुत्साहित एवं असन्तुस्ट पारेको छ । तपाईहरु सबैजाना मिल्नुहोस्, मिडियाले सम्विधान र शान्तिको लागि अभियान चलाएका छन् । सहकार्य गर्नु होस । पक्कै यिनले सही कुरालाई महत्वका साथ जनतामाझ पुर्याउने छन् । नागरिक समाजलाई सहयोगको लागि अपिल गर्नुहोस । फेसबुकमा एउटा इस्टाटस लेख्नुहोस अनि चमत्कार हेर्नुहोस । यी सामाजिक सञ्जालहरुले तपाईको अभियानमा सबैभन्दा बढी सहयोग गर्ने छन ।

हामीले बुझेका छौ, सिद्धान्तगत रुपमा यो निर्णय जटिल छ ।  तर समग्र राष्ट्रको हितको निम्ति तपाईहरुले सिद्धान्तगत सम्शोधन गर्नै पर्छ । बह्य हस्तछेप उत्तिकै भइरहेको छ । भोक, गरिवी, अभाब एवं अनिश्चितता छ । विसौं समस्या छन् । यस मानेमा, अबसरहरु पनि छन् । तिनलाई पूँजीक्रित गर्नुहोस् । राष्ट्रहितप्रति कटिबद्ध  सम्पूर्ण ब्याक्तिहरुलाई एक गर्नु होस । नायक हुने समय यही हो, यदि तपाई सद्रिश्यता चहानुहुन्छ भने । होइन भने, छोडदिनुहोस नेतागिरी र उभिनुहोस हामी उभिएको धरतिमा अनि महशुस गर्नुहोस हाम्रा पिडाहरु । यसले पनि तपाईलाई खलनायक चाँहि बनाउँदैन ।

म यो पत्र तपाईलाई प्रेसित किन गर्दै छु भने मैले तपाईबाहेक बिश्वासयोग्य कुनै युवा नेता चिनेको छुँइन । तपाईले धेरैलाई चिन्नु भएको छ । मलाई अझै लाग्छ तपाई पार्टी बाहिर पनि केहि हुनुहुन्छ । अर्को ब्याक्तिगत कारण, मैले आजसम्म एमालेको झन्डा बोकेर हिडेको छु, जंगलेहरुलाई समर्थन गरेको छु (यतिसम्म कि, तपाई र उनीहरु बिच छान्न लगाउँदा, मैले तपाईलाई छानेको छुइन । यध्यपि म गैरराजनितिक मान्छे हुँ ।) हुनपनि सिद्धान्तले मान्छेलाइ अन्धो बनाई दिन्छ । अत: सिद्धन्तको कुरो गर्दै नगर्नुहोस् । यो परिबर्तनको समय हो। यसको लागि तयार रहनु होस् । हामीलाई नेत्रित्व दिनुहोस् ।  म लगायत लाखौंले तपाईको साथ दिनेछन् परोक्छय रुपमा किनकि तिनलाई थाहा छ पार्टीको बिकल्प छ, सबैकुराको बिकल्प छ तर राष्ट्र हितको बिकल्प छैन, न त प्रजातन्त्रको नै छ ।

Nepali Politics in Limbo

It is your Time to Speak, Gagan

This is our misfortune. Even if we had known it all the way long, we hoped. So we got fooled. You are also in the same lot, aren’t you?

Meanwhile, the proposition made by the Prime Minister to hold the fresh elections has made some of us very excited. Kindly don’t get me wrong. There is no telling how dicey it would be. But we can manage the quandaries. It is only that we have to be ready. This will only be the methodical and fruitful.

I will present the relevance of these elections herewith. Buddhisagar wrote on Facebook on May 27, “I hear they are going for fresh elections. I wonder if they know people’s address.” He was more or less right. You people have forgotten our addresses. Don’t get it otherwise as I’m including you in the lot. In fact, this is the reality. Aren’t you attempting to get visibility in that irresponsible entourage?  

Likewise, the status written by a friend of mine who had been in the frontline during the Resurrection II is contextually mentionable here. “King, come and save the country,” he has written. This is only one of the hundreds of grouses. Don’t you ever feel that this is ‘the change’ you people have institutionalized? In addition, the arguments made by the people who I spoke to during last week are even more relevant here. The essence of their arguments was- the king’s reign was better than this because there was only one thief, a predictable one. The ones today are mercurial. I am not manipulating. This is how people thought. Please mull over. Is there any other nadir of political failure?  

I hope you have already read the article written by Rabindra Misra addressing Sushil Koirala. How careless position your top brass has put on a nationally important issue! When will you have your time, Gagan Ji? What is your position now? I’m not running a personal tirade here. This is the question which has gone unanswered for years now thanks to your reticence. If you think that the ‘bull’s fruit’ will fall off and you will feed on it, you are wrong. In fact, the bull has no fruit. The fruit which has been shown to us as well as you is a figment. Or if you think that you have done something good, this will be a greater figment. Your presence in the Constituent Assembly hasn’t made much difference in our life, nor have you done anything noteworthy. The charismatic personality you had once boasted of seems to have gone worthless.

Let’s now assess the ‘possible elections’ and our position. Kindly get out of the flocks of the bright sparks who are still thinking that the people are with them and study the situations outside. Ask the most ordinary man possible in the street who he will vote for provided there is an election coming up despite possible resistance from your party and others. His answer will make you speechless. But NC and UML will never tend to go for elections because they had had an exact political analysis of late. It will be morally impossible for them to face the people. Personally, if a person comes to me for votes without any fundamental change, I will be the first to spit on his face.

Nonetheless, the elections are very essential at present. Don’t object to it as it is the most practicable and democratic way of having people’s mandate. Rather look for an alternative to the parties. Let’s look for the one together.

They were dialoguing about the alternative to the Constituent Assembly on May 27. Now I’m pondering over an alternative to the incapable leaders. Yes, I’ve got a lot of limitations. But you have got fewer of them. You have to do it because you can, because there is nothing better to do.

We are informed of the fact that you and the ilk have been disappointed by the series of the events that surfaced. But you all can get united. You can cooperate with the Media which is running a movement for peace and the constitution. They will definitely air the right issues to the populace with a reasonable emphasis. Meanwhile, you can appeal the civil society for backing or write a status on Facebook. You will get bedazzled by the magic it creates. I believe social networkings will be the most helpful tool for you.

We also know it is a theoretically difficult decision. But you must materialize the paradigm shift for the greater good. We are aware of the fact that the external butting-into is at the acme besides hunger, dearth, poverty and uncertainty. In this sense also, there are equal numbers of opportunities. Cash on them. Unite all the people committed to the welfare of the country. It is time to be a hero if you want the visibility. If not, give up the leaderism and stand on the earth we are standing now and feel our pains. This will not make you a villain either.

I’m sending this letter to you because you don’t know any other trustworthy young leaders. You know many of them. Besides, I still feel that you are someone beyond your party. There is a personal reason for it as well. I’ve carried UML’s flag, supported the ‘wild’ people so much that I didn’t choose you when I was asked to choose between them and you although I am more or less an apolitical person.

True enough, a principle blinds us. Don’t point at your principles. It is the time for the change. Get ready for it. Lead us. Hundreds of thousands people including me will back you backhandedly because we know there is an alternative to a party, to everything. But there is none to the welfare of the people, nor is there one to democracy.