Deceptive Affect

 Final Project: Deceptive Affect

    Affect is powerful in its potential to absorb and distract the audience into a whirlpool of hyper-realistic experience. Affect absorbs by fostering a sense of sympathy and proximity that slips one into the shoes of another’s memory. Affect also distracts by distancing one through photography, sound, or ambience, reminding him that the memory is not actually his. Such witnessing becomes a therapeutic experience that “can create the conditions in which past atrocities can become part of a usable past” (Landy). This unique twofold way of affective engagement has surged with the technological advancement and “obsessive memorialization” (Huyssen 18) through mediums of museums, marketing, and media. In fact, Landsberg specifically quotes Walter Benjamin, “Reception… which is a symptom of profound changes in apperception- finds in film its true training ground” (Landsberg 14). Then if such powerful affect “prod(s) us to think and make sense of that experience” (Landsberg 15), is there such a thing as “good” affect or “bad,” or “productive” or “unproductive” affect? 

    Before delving into the ethics of memorial productivity, I wish to lay the grounds upon which I attempt to answer this question. First and foremost, Caruth defines trauma as a delayed “response… to an overwhelming event, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, (or) thoughts” (Caruth 4). Its crushing magnitude possesses the individual and distorts the memories, paralyzing any “witnessing,” presence of the “other,” or the restoration of the “thou” (Laub 69). In fact, the victims “not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories; they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive” (Laub 63). 

    However, the structure of trauma is further complicated by the verity of memory. Such complication is best illustrated by the little boy separated from his parents with only a photo of his mother. As the vagabond boy ages, the photo is entrenched within as an icon, a safe haven, and a first witness that helps him to cope with his loss and his trauma during wartime (Laub 70). In other words, the truth of whether the real mother resembles the picture does not matter; What matters is that his memory, projected on the medium of a photo, resides and adjusts to fulfill his own needs and desires. 

    Thus, trauma is unspeakable of, yet necessitates the speaking and comprehension of, and is constructed of fragmented or customized memories. Upon such complex structure is our ironic desire for a full narrative when there exists none. Such compulsive craving for a perfect “Truth” augments with the current societal trends: Memorialization through media, fueled by the swift advancement of technology and the fear or danger of forgetting (Huyssen 18), recommends a distinct narrative of beginning, middle, and end, alike typical Hollywood blockbusters. Further, the bloom of dark tourism, including Oswiecim’s Auschwitz and New York’s National 9/11 Memorial & Museum, necessitates such narrative for touristic, economic, and educational purposes. Thus, in search for a complete storyline, one pieces the puzzles of own desires, preconceptions, educational knowledge, and cultural memories to complete a neatly concocted “Truth” map which one utilizes to base future judgements. This tool is strengthened or threatened by new external information but would always remain to seem “complete.” 

    Although incomplete and flawed in its construction, this desire for “Truth” unveils our responsibility for constant inquiry to tune and reconstruct our memories. In fact, Hirsch urges for post-generational inquiry for truth as trauma is “transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right… at the risk of having one’s own stories and experiences displaced” (Hirsch 107). Thus, post-generational engagement unravels the compressed or unfathomable memories to revitalize active participation. Such revitalization is epitomized within Maus, where Art Spiegelman, a post-generation of a holocaust-survivor father, survives a nervous breakdown and decides to unpack his emotional burden into a 296-page graphic novel. Through lighter strokes of mice and cats, Spiegelman rummages through his own trauma, distinctive from his fathers, highlighting his responsibility to resolving not only his but also his father’s trauma in order to survive. Even when one is not a direct post-generation, Rothberg further urges the implicated subjects, or the indirectly involved, for justice to “lead to new versions of collective politics that build on alliances” (Rothberg 21). Thus, our collective responsibility as post-generations and implicated subjects illuminate a clear objective as to why we must strive to constantly inquire, orchestrate, and adjust upon for an academically refined and comprehensive “truth.”

    Thus, we have defined the qualities of affective engagement, trauma, and truth, and our desires and responsibility to satisfy such volatile “truth.” Upon such tenets, I argue that an audience’s resentment molded by deception or betrayal also becomes a powerful and ethical means to achieve affective engagement. In other words, when an audience sensuously encounters (Landsberg 15) mediums such as novels, films, or documentaries, later to learn that they are incorrect or distorted, is shocked into action. Thus, this deceptive affect becomes one of the many channels to act upon the perceived “truths” and ultimately to work through trauma. Such deceptive affect is not to encourage a competitive measurement as to which form is more ethical and less ethical means of engagement. Rather, it is to reevaluate the dismissed literatures, films, and events of Wilkomirski’s Fragments.

Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski 

    Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood and our engagement with the work epitomizes the power of deceptive affect. Wilkomirski drafts an achingly beautiful “autobiography” that perfectly juggles absorption and distraction: It absorbs by prodding maternal or human instincts to protect the innocent eyes of a cluelessly traumatized child during war. It further distracts with the hazy and choppy recalls and distressing violence:

"In a shadowy corner, the outline of a man in hat and coat, his sweet face smiling at me. Maybe my father… The transport starts to move… heading for us … He looks down at me and smiles… From down below, against the bright sky, all I see is the line of his jaw and his hat falling backward off his head" (Wilkomirski 6).

    Such heart-wrenching affect effortlessly slips the reader into the shoes of the child in Auschwitz: They, too, must brave numbing sleet and sleepless nights. They, too, must apply a different emotional mastery to the notion of futility. And they, too, survive it all.

However, Fragments was soon debunked as a literary fraud and was withdrawn from official publication and multiple book awards. Literary scholars jeered in betrayal, commenting, “Once the professed interrelationship between the first-person narrator, the death-camp story he narrates, and historical reality are proved palpably false, what was a masterpiece becomes kitsch” (Maechler 281). Yet the publishers, audiences, and scholars fail to recognize that this very stupefaction arouses from the overwhelming affect that placed us within the whirlpool of the child’s experience, and the fact that we have become so infatuated with it as to adjoin the child’s memory to our existing “truths.” This means that the audience is absorbed and distracted in so as to, to a certain extent, understand the unspeakable and unfathomable trauma. Thus, the betrayal from such powerful immersion signals various actions, whether this be inquiry for more extensive research, direct challenging of the source, or a complete reconstruction of own “truths.” This precise ignition from betrayal, in some times, prevails over mere affective engagement: When the ultimate goal of memory studies is to understand the crushing trauma to relocate it back into the realms of the normal, and when deceptive affect precisely succeeds to do so, we must warrant a reevaluation. 

Thus, through this essay, we have built upon the notions of affect, truth, and trauma, and our desire and responsibility for “truth,” and illuminated the core reason as to why deceptive affect becomes a “good” and “productive” affect. Deceptive affect thus allows a substantial understanding of trauma and ultimately gears the audience into productive action. Such recognition alarms the urgent need to reevaluate Fragments and many other mediums and events, including The Last Princess or Duk-hye Ong-ju, JFK, and brutality during the Korean War committed in Vietnam (Griffin). Thus, a tolerant warrant of deceptive affect brings us a step closer to a comprehensive understanding of memory and trauma.

 

 

Works Cited

Griffin, Jo. Women Raped by Korean Soldiers During Vietnam War Still Awaiting Apology. The Guardian, 19 Jan. 2019.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. Columbia University Press, 2012. Print.
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford University Press, 2003. Print.
JFK, Dir. Oliver Stone. Le Studio Canal+ Regency Enterprises, Alcor Films, 1991. Film.
Landsberg, Allison. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. Columbia University Press, 2015. Print.
Landy, Marcia. Marcia Landy Reviews Engaging the Past, 2016. https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/marcia_landy_reviews_engaging_the_past/
Laub, Dori. Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Print.
Maechler, Stefan. The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth. Schocken, 2001. Print.
Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford University Press, 2019. Print.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus. Pantheon Books, 1980. Print
Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. Schocken, 1996. Print.

Closing words:
This is my last piece on memory studies, as it is my final year at Yonsei. It's been five long and arduous college years, and I'm glad and also somewhat melancholic it's over. Whoever is out there reading this, thank you for your interest. 
Best regards, Chrissy

Narrative Reenactments

    Memory narrativizes through reenactment; Reenactment is the sole “solution to a problem... of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are human.” (White 5) As true reenactment “cannot repeat itself in vacuo, … the new context” that the historian meticulously replicates “must be just as appropriate as the old,” (Landserg 5) earlier experience. The three mediums, The Murmuring, The Act of Killing, and Dunkirk, strive to facilitate reenactment through intense affect. Such sensuous encounter thus requires absorption and distraction (Landsberg 16) to welcome the audience into an “active interpretative mode” of “historical reenactment.” (Landsberg 6) 

    Absorption parts into two distinct faucets of experience: one must understand the evidence through “immediate consciousness,” then extend into a virtual imagination by “putting oneself in the position” (Landsberg 5) of the original experiencer. In this sense, The Act of Killing, a 2012 documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer, falls short to fulfill the latter experience. In fact, the two-hour long reenactment is unique in that it succeeds to humanize Anwar, the notorious perpetrator of the Indonesian mass killing of 1965 that fervently swept over one million civilians: We are involuntarily exposed to scenes where he adores his grandchildren with pure affection, protects a group of injured ducks, and heartily dances around to trip. However, when we connect these childlike and humanized aspects back to his psychotic crimes, we lose all empathy and fail to position ourselves within his shadows. Thus, we are withheld from the absorption only to be left with an eerie friendship with Anwar.

Anwar and his grandkids

    Distraction, on the other hand, reenacts history through an objective mode of external shock that “provokes the awareness that one is thinking.” (Landsberg 6) Byun Young-ju’s 1996 documentary The Murmuring, tailors these shocks into various forms: raw and abrupt transitions, the director’s sheer interruptions, and the habitual lamenting and murmurings absorb the audience in full experience. However, it dwindles in its effort to fully distract: The precarious imagery (Butler 38) exploits the barren halmonies, the clueless young girls, and the overbearing han and shame thus creating a subjective, culture-specific, and Korean trope. Such tropes take away from full historical reenactment, leaving little inquiry by post generations and implicated subjects (Rothberg 1) for distraction, let alone political remediation.

From the scenes of The Murmuring

    Thus, we turn our heads to Dunkirk as an epitome of effective narrative in historical reenactment. The beautifully and ambitiously executed blockbuster by Christopher Nolan both absorbs and distracts: It absorbs by extracting the most personal emotions of shattering fear, despairing betrayal, and nostalgic hope that not only humanizes but also pleads for empathy: It further distracts with the unfamiliar yet trustworthy faces, episodic plotlines, and frenzied collisions. Thus, the audience effortlessly slips into the shoes of soldiers and braves through a war they have never before experienced. Such synthetic experience exploits the “fissure that opens up between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation” to become a “powerful stimulant for cultural and artistic creativity.” (Sturken 9) 

Tommy in war 

Citation

Dunkirk. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2017. Film.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: the Power of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006. Print.

Landsberg, Allison. Engaging in the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. Columbia University Press, 2015. Print.

Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford University Press, 2019. Print.

Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. University of California Press, 1997. Print.

The Act of Killing. Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer. Final Cut for Real DK, 2012. Film.

The Murmuring. Dir. Byun Young-ju. Docu-Factory Vista, 1995. Film.

White, Hayden. The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality. Critical Inquiry, vol.7, no. 1, 1980: 5-27. Print.

Nostalgia of History

Quick Precis : Watchmen

  

  Watchmen, an immaculately executed television series, adopted from the 1986 DC comic series, exceeds its genre merely as a superhero drama. It bravely zeroes in on historical racism and volatile identities mainly through the eyes of Angela Abar and Will Reeves. For a short recap, Angela’s alternate America is one where the police conceal their identities with masks and code names to protect themselves from the Seventh Cavalry, or the racist and white supremest terrorist groups. Within the search for her roots and investigation of Will, or Angela’s grandfather, who supposedly lynched her best friend, her leader, and a respected man, Judd Crawford, she discovers the pill, “nostalgia.” When consumed, Will and Angela’s memories interweave, where she experiences Will’s past in real time. 

    Like the implications of the pill, “nostalgia,” Watchmen plays with the pillars of historical romanticization, especially in relations to identity. In fact, the exaggerated, lurid, and racially biased light shone through the medium of the mask and costumes undeniably distorts identity to ultimately conceal and reveal. 

Will Reeves as Hooded Justice

    Will’s heroic costume of hood and noose reveals his trauma against the insatiable desire for social justice. From the opening scene, we see Will’s infatuation with Trust in the Law, a propagandized movie where a police badge guarantees the power to reinstate justice within the bigoted society and even as to console him for the loss of his parents during the Tulsa Massacre. His overbearing past trauma leaks into his present; When Will walks home and denies Officer Gourguin’s offer to join for a beer, he sees dead African Americans dragged behind the car driving away. The garish streaks of blood mirror his crushing trauma and alarm the urgent need for its termination. However, the police badge of reality does nothing but display him as an exquisite pawn. Thus, his costume also conceals his identity and justifies his frenzied rage against such frustration. In fact, Reeves, the protagonist in Trust in the Law romanticizes lawful rule and condemns mob justice. However, Will relies on this very means to fulfill his desires of justice: When he faces near death lynching, violence bubbles within, thus he later burns down a warehouse full of mercilessly shot Cyclops members. His fractured identity, like how he wears the heroic mask along with the police outfit, walks a fine line between crime and a heroic odyssey, protagonist and antagonist, and police and vigilante. Such slippery mishmash, alike memory, projects his desires, but at the same time, becomes a vice: Neither does such violence undo his childhood trauma nor bring justice. Rather, it drowns him further within his fantasies of Hooded Justice and poisons those around him. Thus, the relics of trauma and identity are inherited by his granddaughter, Angela, who is also left powerless within the encumbering search for her own identity.

Angela Abar in the crime scene where Crawford is lynched

Note to self: Explain relation between the fractured identity, inherited trauma, and historical romanticization

Linear Victimization

Quick Precis: Austerlitz

 

   So often are we conflicted when dealing with trauma: The crushing magnitude of the “event without a witness" (Laub 66) makes it impossible to tell (Laub 62), yet the “survivors … not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories; they also need to tell their stories in order to survive." (Laub 63) Jacques Austerlitz of Austerlitz similarly struggles to deal with his post-generational, or intragenerational trauma (Hirsch 103) as a child survivor of the Holocaust. Austerlitz is a seemingly ordinary middle-aged architectural historian working in England, assumed to be a Czech Jew. However, melancholic narration of his life through the unnamed non-Jewish German author reveals Austerlitz as a vulnerable, repressed, and traumatized individual with no childhood memory as an orphan and an insatiable desire for fathoming and confirming his own identity and coherence with life. 

 

   The trope of linear and inseparable space and time, including past, present, and future, are important ones throughout the novel. It breaks with the “traditional realism (White, 18),” a literary style most seen within Western film culture, in which there exists a precise beginning, middle, end, and a sympathetic victim versus an evil perpetrator. In fact, the narrative prose digresses onto arbitrary yet chronological, distant, dryly academic, and excessively visual descriptions and pictures of military fortifications, railways, flora and faunas, and architecture. Such accounts parallels how our fragmented memories are morphed into questionable video segments, and we can only thereafter replay or taint parts of these films. It further proves ironic in that Austerlitz’s meticulous details for fine architecture seem to seek for perfect remembrance and even disclose a subconscious search for a structured life, yet none are achieved. Even when he attempts to work through the previous trauma, he is bombarded with panic attacks and schizophrenic delusions of his dead parents. Thus, Austerlitz’s linear time and space leads to a destruction of present and future by the past, ultimately to annihilate his existence. The anticlimactic and depressing ending leaves us to wonder: if time, space, facts and identities are always converging, is Austerlitz just an alter-ego of the unnamed narrator? In other words, whether Jewish or German, do all populations become equal victims of the event? And finally, is annihilation the only possible ending for the linearly traumatized individuals? 

Note to self: Explain more on how converging time and space relates to Austerlitz