“Radicalization as Reclamation: How the Haunted Self Continues to Grasp at Polarization in an Attempt to Exorcise its Indeterminacy.” Zachary Waters, Rhode Island College
In Jacques Derrida’s 1993 work, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, he introduced the term Hauntology in response to certain ideological deaths proclaimed by political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book, The End of History and The Last Man. Derrida claimed that our current experience of being is constantly haunted by the memories of the past and the future. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher seized upon this concept in his 2012 essay, “What is Hauntology.” Yet, in the course of defining the concept, Fisher chose to build upon Fukuyama’s theories —a decision that I believe results in a theoretical instability. I propose, therefore, to reorient the base of Hauntology towards Fredric Jameson’s belief that the postmodern era lacks adequate forms to articulate the present in conjunction with Rob Nixon’s claim of a turbo-charged capitalism that is quickly eroding the present. Examining how this loss of the present gives rise to the Hauntological condition is integral for understanding the concept as a whole. Hauntology reframes Hegel’s classic Master-Slave dialectic in temporal terms: substituting “Master” for Future and “Slave” for Past. In this sense, the dialectic becomes Future-Past, regulating our present, “-,” to a mediating position that is equally dominated by the future and enslaved to the past. I believe it is from this present indeterminacy that the current trends towards radicalization and polarization derive. Rather than evidencing a mass ideological regression, these trends expose a desperate desire for the present self to be realized; that is, to be exorcised from the over-idealized past(s) as well as the forever-impending future(s). It is only through an examination of how the present became lost and possessed by memory that these trends become fully comprehensible.
Zachary Waters is a poet, printmaker, and philosopher who is currently a graduate student at Rhode Island College pursuing a master’s degree in literary studies, after which he plans on pursuing a PhD focusing on global traditions of underground literature. He recently published an honors thesis titled, “Between the Axe and the Anvil: Modern (Re)constructions of Subjectivity in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin, Alexanderplatz” which considered the struggle of the urban individual in the modern metropolis. Zachary followed this publication by continuing his research and presenting on the same topic at the 2021 Macksey Undergraduate Symposium. His academic interests revolve around Central, Eastern European literature and how their lesser known authors participate in global conversations. Lately, he has begun research for his master’s thesis which will examine the art of the extended monologue. In addition to the Stony Brook Graduate Convention, Zachary will be presenting at the annual NeMLA conference on the intertextuality of Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double.
“The Ruined Archives of Sebald and Frisch.” Paromita Patranobish, Independent Researcher.
This paper wishes to examine the relationship between debris and memory in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1998; originally published in 1995 as Die Ringe des Saturn) and Max Frisch’s Man in The Holocene: A Story (1981; originally published in 1979 as Der Mensch Erscheint im Holozän: Eine Erzählung) to argue that mnemonic practices, including acts of autobiographical anamnesis shape and are shaped by material forms of decay and their presence in both texts as a set of constellated conceptual and figurative articulations comprising dust, ash, rubble, waste and compost. A corporeal entanglement with debris– either through the mode of travelling in and a corresponding literary ethnography of damaged topographies “a sea of stone or a field of rubble” in which empirical observation merely clears the ground for the operations of memory’s associationist logic and nested structure to perform an elaborate excavation of a transhistorical continuum of destruction, or a reconfiguration of the narratorial self as a subject exposed to and unravelled by the entropic and aporetic forces that constitute the temporal dynamic of planetary ecology– generates an excremental poetics in which any claims to epistemic coherence, autonomy, and univocity are undermined by the twinned assertion of the fragmentary metaphysics of detritus on the one hand, and the contingent structure of private retrospection and public memorialization, on the other. In both works a hauntological imaginary informed by the genocidal and ecocidal legacies of post-Enlightenment liberal humanist anthropocentrism sets the stage for reading the material ecopoetics of cultural memory through enabling critical strategies of ruptures, amnesias, gaps, ellisions, accidents, digressions, overlaps, and contradictions that are at once emblematic of the ontology of mnemonic retrieval as well as a reference to the geopolitically and socially engineered histories of archival erasure and decimation.
Material indices of destruction in both texts constitute an extensive reliquary. They serve as the primary trope through which multiple sites of violence, attrition, and metamorphosis, in their varied but interrelated geological, climatic, meteorological, cultural and geopolitical registers, are relocated from their sympotomatic status within discrete epistemic enclosures created by insular strategies of reading offered by cultural historiography and ideology critique, and brought into overlapping, interextual, intermedial encounters, even as their structural isomorphism emerging from a shared participation in modernity’s biopolitical (and necropolitical) formations, is made apparent. Acts of recall are simultaneously assertions of a fraught resistance to these pulverizing impulses, as well as the connective tissue that in its suturing of disparate spatiotemporal fields unpacks trauma’s intimate and subliminal seepages and residues at a transnational, cosmological, and planetary scale beyond specific locations and isolated or singularizing frames of interpretation. Memory, especially in its close conjuncture with place, becomes a tool of narrative cartography that deviates (from) the path of linear history and brings other worlds and times into potential cosmopolitical exchanges.
In both Sebald and Frisch, the production of this memorial cosmopolitics takes place in relation to an extinction imaginary conceptualized either as a pyrohistory of industrial and capitalist modernity’s metabolization of planetary reserves of energy through exorbitant cycles of combustible consumption and exhaustion of organic, inorganic, minerological strata (and certain lives and bodies) marked as fungible matter, or as what Marc Rickenbach using Sloterdijk’s philosophy describes as the cognitively “incompressible” dimension of geological deep time and material phenomena that defy attempts at linguistic and conceptual abstraction and instead call for the engagement of memory, affect, and attention as forms of corporeal attunement (“stimmung“) that open up the “possibility of enchantment…as the basis for ethical life.” (2020, 207)
What are the specific configurations of memory afforded by ruination, where the category of the ruin refers not only to the temporal alterity of a petrified past appropriated through further ossifying dispositions of nostalgia and commodification, but also to what Ann Laura Stoler describes as the persistent and lively endurance in certain bodily, psychic and material sites, of the corrosive depositions of modernity’s imperialist and colonial formations? What is the historical value of a record when spectral and speculative modalities of absence, amnesia, illness and disability, sensory exhaustion, cognitive dissonance and expressive inaccuracies become dominant interpretive frames through which recollection and memorialization are prefigured? How does the emphasis on the excremental limits of anthropological finitude– the saturation of textual semantics with the liminal testimony of remainders, either as the physical remnants of catastrophic events, human and nonhuman, or conversely as forms of abject, virulent, contagious and polymorphous vitalities that emerge in and populate sites and subjectivities under duress– destabilize both the santized notion of bounded personhood as the epistemic centre of historical knowledge, as well as the anthropocentric lens through which narrative production is predominantly construed? How does this excremental explosion of historiographic and narrative margins alert us to the play of other agencies and expressivities beyond the human through which alternative nonhuman, nonpersonal, planetary, and distributed registers of memory are mobilized? Focusing closely on the status of ruination and decomposition as material phenomena, epistemological and narrative resource, and archival indices of the displacement of the anthropogenic subject by other instantiations of memory-making and transcription, what Richard Crownshaw in the context of Post-Holocaust literature calls memory’s “interruptive force” (2010, 42) my paper wishes to interrogate Sebald’s and Frisch’s exploration of the ruin as a productive conceptual intervention into the complex and unstable terrain of private and public memory in the context of Anthropocene’s multiple entanglments with trajectories of extraction, depletion, and extinction.
Dr. Paromita Patranobish is an independent researcher currently based in New Delhi, India. Her work focuses on the intellectual history of the body in modernity, engaging primarily with Continental and Post-Continental philosophy and studying 20th and 21st Century aesthetic articulations of nonhuman embodiment in relation to globalization and multispecies planetary ecologies. She has a PhD on Virginia Woolf’s literary phenomenology from Delhi University and has previously designed and taught courses on gender studies and postmodernism at Shiv Nadar University and Ambedkar University Delhi. Her writing has been published in Fields of Play: Sport, Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2015) and Studies in Travel Writing (Taylor and Francis, 2019).
“The (Un)bearable Lightness of Instagram Memories.” Ana Isabel Galván García de las Bayonas, University of Murcia.
The advent of the Internet and digital media, preceded by the arrival of media such as photography or cinema, has opened new and interesting paths in the complex relationship between image, memory and history. Photography, which had been traditionally linked to the preservation of one’s life, seems to spread and mutate in the context of digital culture, developing new and diverse ways of expanding its mnemonic function. The Internet stands, thus, as the great archive of the world, encompassing both the personal stories shared by its users, as well as the collective memory, composed not only of life narratives, but also of social interactions and commercial interests, mediated by algorithmic dynamics that are ultimately economical.
This proposal aims to analyse the peculiar way in which image and memory intertwine in the context of social media. These platforms are massively used for different purposes of an autobiographical nature, which include journaling, interpersonal communication, activism or new online varieties of family album; practices all of them mediated by the postphotographic image. This presentation will address, specifically, the case of Instagram and its features (feed, archive and stories), reflecting on how each of these features is conceived for a concrete type of visual narrative, implying a particular temporality as well. This way, content policies and online engagement become an active part of life stories, while issues widely debated around photography (such as presence, permanence or remembrance) acquire a new consistency. Consequently, the presentation will reflect on the multifaceted nature of memory, that becomes an even more elusive entity within the multiple layers that compose the digital medium.
Ana Isabel Galván García de las Bayonas (1992) is a PhD Fellow at the University of Murcia, where she teaches seminars on contemporary art and visual culture. She holds a BA in Art History and a Master’s Degree in Education. During her studies, she completed two Erasmus stays in Leeds (United Kingdom) and Livorno (Italy). Her current research project on post-photographic self-portraiture is being sponsored by Seneca Foundation (21477/FPI/20), as part of the research group of excellence “Visual Studies: Images, Texts, Contexts”. Her research interests comprise digital culture, identity, body studies and new media.
