Oppositional memory practices: U.S. memorial spaces as arguments over public memory.

AuthorMcGeough, Ryan Erik
PositionReport

On a windswept hill in Wyoming, a cairn lamenting that "there were no survivors" now stands corrected by historical plaques recognizing 1,500 Indian survivors. On the high plains of eastern Montana, a sea of white marble tombstones now is interspersed with red granite warrior markers. In bustling Chicago, a tall, bronze police officer, removed from his original location, loses a century-long standoff with a nearby sculpture of Justice placing a wreath on a fallen laborer. The monuments that occupy sacred sites make arguments about who is worthy of mourning, honor, and remembrance. The monuments themselves endure, but their arguments often are controversial and judgments of worthiness have proven far less permanent.

In his influential work, The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade (1959) offered an understanding of the sacred that still resonates within scholarship of sacred space. The sacred, he wrote, "reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world" (p. 31). Nowhere are these functions more apparent than in sacred spaces: spaces set apart from their surroundings, ritually dedicated to the memory of a particular event, hero, or victim, and frequently adorned with enduring markers-often for those who lost their lives there--that offer seemingly eternal narratives of origin and orientation (Foote, 2003, p. 8). By enshrining particular narratives on a sacred site, monuments suggest what is worthy of remembrance at a site and solidify the history of a community. In so doing, they fix the limits and establish the boundaries of that community. Because of the perceived permanence of sacred sites, visitors often attach special significance to the civics lessons carved in stone and cast in bronze on the sites' monuments (Rosenzweig & Thelan, 2000, p. 105).

Although scholars have attended to the construction of narratives at memorial sites, and the conflicts that often accompany such constructions (e.g., Blair, Jeppeson, & Pucci, 1991; Gallagher, 1995; Gallagher & LaWare, 2010; Hubbard & Hasian, 1998), the question of how these narratives are argued for or against-particularly after a monument is dedicated-is under-theorized. In this essay, we explore how argumentation works at sacred sites, and how arguments about the past, once carved in stone and cast in bronze, may be countered. We suggest that attempts to stabilize memory in monumental form may be countered through several argumentative strategies, including dissection, transformation, and substitution. Each of these strategies destabilizes memory and opens up sacred spaces to alternative articulations of the past by expanding the lives deemed worthy of remembrance and grief. We believe that traditional understandings of refutation as linguistic negation (answering the claim "x" with the response "not x") cannot account for the unique strategies that excluded groups have used to argue at these sites. Recent work on visual argument has elaborated new modes of nondiscursive countering and we, in turn, extend these modes into three-dimensional experience by analyzing three highly-contested sacred spaces: Fetterman Battlefield, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and Haymarket Square.

These three sites invite comparison. Each was consecrated by the blood of the fallen, each was marked with a monument enshrining a particular narrative of its history, and each has been the site of sustained argument over who should be remembered. Therefore, each enables us to explore the visual argumentation of monuments, the functions of argument in sacred space, and the use of sacred space to expand communal boundaries. Although monuments compete at numerous other U.S. sites (e.g., the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, Arthur Ashe in Richmond's Monument Avenue, Albuquerque's Cuarto Centenario Memorial), these three permit exploration of the relation between mourning and blood consecration, and of the ways in which visual argument may open, or close, consideration of who is human and worthy of remembrance.

Our guiding question is: How can the challenge of contested memories be reconciled with the promise of effective, enduring memorials that help to democratize public memory? Here, we follow Morris's (1997) distinction between cultural memory and public memory:

Whereas cultural memory reflects the particularized world view and ethos of the members of a particular culture, public memory is perhaps best conceived as an amalgam of the current hegemonic bloc's cultural memory and bits and pieces of cultural memory that members of other cultures are able to preserve and protect. The struggle to obtain and retain public memory being constant and constantly a signifier of the possibility of cultural transformation, significant shifts in the character of public memory thus point sharply to the actualities of such transformations, (p. 26)

By focusing on attempts to rebut specific arguments made by existing monuments, we uncover the possibilities of memory technologies designed to correct, expand upon, or contradict previous monuments. We reveal oppositional memory practices by demonstrating how public arguments, made on/with particular sacred spaces and in particular times, evolve.

Our examples of oppositional memory practices are drawn from sites of contested memories, fluid spaces in which diverse groups have sought to articulate differing perspectives on the past. Erection of an original monument can be understood as an attempt to stabilize memory, to issue a particular and authoritative narrative of the history of a space, and to explain what this history means. In the face of multiple articulations of the past, a monument literally carves some aspects of the past into stone or bronze while leaving out other aspects. As Blair, Dickinson, and Ott (2010) noted, "those statements that are uttered, those things that are actually made ... come to be seen as important, correct, normal and so forth. That renders their far more numerous unmaterialized counterparts as perhaps not so important, correct, or normal" (p. 4).

Monuments' attempts to stabilize particular histories, however, can be refuted in diverse ways, including: interpretive plaques that access counterhistories and punctuate a space with interruptions; subsequent counter-monuments (1) that "answer back" to the original; and even destruction and/or replacement. Our examples demonstrate that, often, monuments' arguments are answered by expanding the lives that count as grievable. This expansion of grievability is a powerful means to renegotiate public memories. Judith Butler (2004) asked: "Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? ... What makes for a grievable life?" (p. 20). In contemporary controversies over memorialization we find claims and counterclaims that answer Butler's questions differently, thereby opening a space in which public grief may be made more inclusive.

OPPOSITIONAL MEMORY PRACTICES AS VISUAL REFUTATION

For most of its long history, argumentation has been ill-suited to our purpose because it has understood refutation exclusively as a discursive process of negation:

In the venerable tradition of reasoning begun by Aristotle, refutation is possible because certain propositions logically deny the truth of certain other propositions. Thus, statements of the form, "All A is B," are denied by "contrary" and "contradictory" statements of the form, "Some A is not B" and "No A is B." In short, refutation of opposing claims is possible because propositions may negate each other. (Lake & Pickering, 1998, p. 80)

Of course, argumentation is not reducible to formal logic. However, neither ancient nor modern approaches to rhetorical reasoning-including enthymematic, informal logic, narrative, and pragma-dialectical approaches- have repudiated this understanding. Whether it is explicit or tacit, and whether it tells a different story or maneuvers strategically in order to reach agreement, refutation is understood to be a discursive process ultimately made possible by propositional negation. Speech acts, after all, are speech acts.

Visual images, however, are not propositional and so cannot "employ the logic of negation upon which refutation traditionally relies" (Lake & Pickering, 1998, p. 80). Foundational here is Susanne Langer's (1957) distinction between discursive and presentational forms. Langer suggested there are forms of "articulate symbolism" other than the discursive. The discursive refers to language having a

form which requires us to string out our ideas even though their objects rest one within the other; as pieces of clothing that are actually worn one over the other have to be strung side by side on the clothesline. This property of verbal symbolism is known as discursiveness', by reason of it, only thoughts which can be arranged in this peculiar order can be spoken at all; any idea which does not lend itself to this "projection" is ineffable, incommunicable by means of words, (pp. 81-82)

In contrast, presentational symbolism is "a direct presentation of an individual object" (p. 96) that "widens our conception of rationality far beyond the traditional boundaries, yet never breaks faith with logic in the strictest sense" (p. 97). She explained, "The symbolic materials given to our senses, the Gestalten or fundamental perceptual forms which invite us to construe the pandemonium of sheer impression into a world of things and occasions, belong to the 'presentational' order" (p. 98). Like verbal symbolism, presentational symbolism "has its own characteristic development," moving from the single word/static image to complex vocabulary/successive images (p. 145). And just as language can create a title of titles, so can presentational symbolism "telescop[e]" many concepts into a single image, what psychoanalysts call condensation...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT