The Steel Stacks
Benjamin’s article, “Theses on the philosophy of History”, discusses the narrative of history and how a story of a culture or community can be present through the remains of a building or town. I found this article very applicable to my steel stacks visit as I believe that by maintaining and re-using the space where the stacks are is an effective way of keeping the history of bethlehem alive.
“History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.” (Benjamin, 261)
I found this quote particularly applicable to the Bethlehem Steel stacks as when I was visiting, I remember reading that the stacks are now dedicated to bringing the arts, family and community events to Bethlehem, and that the site has been reborn through the use of music concerts, and large festivals that are hosted there every year. I was surprised to learn that, during the years the plant was open, before it was permanently closed in 1995, the stacks themselves employed tens of thousands of people, and that the metal they were producing was even used by the US Navy during both World Wars. For me, these facts were crazy to learn, as I had never imagined how important these stacks actually were. My roommate and I have a tradition every year where we go to the “Christkindlmarkt” festival hosted at the Stacks that encompasses lots of local crafts and foods along with live music and art displays. I knew of a vague history behind the Stacks, but until now I had no idea just how important they are to the history of Bethlehem and the impact it had on generations of families. Relating to memory, I think that the town of Bethlehem have done a fantastic job of keeping the memory of this select historical narrative alive: the maintenance of the stacks has allowed for the space to be used by families and events that bring not only the community together but also members from outside of the city in, and this allows for the story to be shared past just the natives of Bethlehem. I believe the best way to make people remember history is through visual cues, and the stacks light up at night and stand out so clearly in the downtown of Bethlehem.
9/11 Memorial Museum
Although I was not able to physically go and see the memorial museum, I found the online audio of the tour to be very interesting. That being said, I struggled to keep up with what was being said as I could not physically see what the tour guide was referring too. Because it was often hard to follow what was being referenced, I felt that through this medium it took away the extreme emotional reactions I would have had had I been there in person. This got me to thinking about how I perceive horrible events like 9/11, and the impact that sight has over our other senses in context of memory. Although I could hear what the audio was explaining, I felt detached from the experience, and therefore I struggled to deeply connect with what was happening. However, had I been standing there seeing the pictures and witnessing the sources the museum had, I can only imagine how overwhelmed with emotion I would have been. Is there a difference in the way we not only experience emotion through which sense we are using to understand it, but also does having other people with you influence how your emotions respond? I can imagine that had I been standing in a room full of people listening to someone explain all of the exhibits, hearing the sighs of people next to me and seeing their body language would have brought on even more emotions towards the event, in comparison to if i had been there alone. This thought kept coming back to me during the duration of the audio, and it clearly tied together the concept of “collective memory” and how a society and community of people create a memory that they share with one another.
Bringing my own personal views into this, a question that kept coming to my mind during this assignment was why are we so caught up on one event? Why are humans so focused on the what and not the why? Every event like this is awful, but why are we so content on remembering one event instead of changing our behaviour to not let it happen again?! I fully support memorialising the innocent people who lost their lives, but I feel like we have fallen into this culture that once an event occurs, we make a monument or a memorial and then we move on from it like nothing happened. And the events that are memorialised are only the ones with some sort of political agenda. All over the world every day people are suffering through genocides and civil wars, yet we are so caught up in certain historical pasts that we don’t seem to see the bigger picture: we need to stop hurting each other! We need to stop using these memorials and horrible incidents for political propaganda and focus on the fact that innocent lives are being lost for extremely poor reasons. I am not saying that memorials are bad, I fully support them and love that people want to honour the lives of those who died. However I am tired of these public memorials only being created when it fits into the political realm. We need to stop repeating history!!!!!!!!
Mengele’s Skull
The main point of this article was that after investigations surrounding Josef Mengele’s supposed skeleton, the new field of forensic crime studies emerged. Now, human bodies and specifically bones were able to be used to confirm pieces of history and add to historical narratives.
“It was during the Mengele investigation that a variety of procedures and techniques in the forensic identification of human remains were professionally tests and publicly displayed, later to become available as methodologies in investigating war crimes and human rights violations.” (Page 55)
Prior to the readings this week, I had never thought about the importance that human bodies can actually play in history. When I think about sources that allow for information on the past, I automatically think of written documents, photographs, and objects. Due to the fact that the human body appears to be something that is redundant once the individual has passed, I had then assumed that once their life is over the actual importance of their body also faded. These readings, and specifically the one on Josef Mengele, have shown me that so much can be discovered just by looking at the biological features of someone, and the physical changes that a body will experience during exposure to different treatments and acts of violence.
Bodies of Lenin
Alexei Yurchak’s article on Lenin’s body was extremely interesting. The authors main argument was that the Soviet Union used Vladimir Lenin’s body as a representation of the political values that were present during that time, and as the country developed and changed, so did the supposedly ideologies that had been put forth by Lenin while he was alive. Yurchak refers to Lenin as the “immortal body of the sovereign” (page 147), meaning that in the nations eyes, they saw Lenin to be the figure of Sovereign power, and therefore the ongoing practice of constructing, reconstructing and manipulating Lenin’s body was linked to political regime, with certain aspects of the body being hidden from the public- much like how his real letters and thoughts towards leaders in the party were hidden from them.
“This secret approach allowed the truth of “Leninism” to appear to be the source rather than the produce of the party’s actions and policies. It also made it possible to present every new version of “Leninism” as the same, unchanging, consistent teaching of a genius, and to represent the party, to itself and others, as its unwavering implementer- not its arbitrary creator.” (Page 147)
This quote summarized the whole article for me, that his body was used as a source of power, and the context around it dictated how people reacted. While reading this piece, it made me think of Trouillot’s article on “Silencing the Past”, where sources of history are often hidden or manipulated in order to fit into a certain perspective or belief. As for Lenin, his history was being rewritten in correspondence to the political regimes in place at the time, and his true beliefs and opinions were silenced through erasing the documents of his past. I found this article extremely interesting, and it made question how I interpret every source I have access to. All information given to us is based on the context around it, which forces to interpret it in a certain way.
Identifying the Self through IDs
In the third chapter of her book, Karen Strassler discusses the role of the identification photograph and how this impacted Java and its culture and history. Not only did the governments obsession with identification cards cause an expansion in the photography realm, but they also impacted the local communities and created a new form of history whereby people could use the photos in family rituals and to have a closer connection to the past. “But as these projects were generalised and normalised, I argue, the identity photograph became a widespread idiomatic shorthand for citizenship or legitimate belonging in the state-authorised national community.” Here, the author is showing that as this process became normalized throughout the culture, a new historical narrative was being created and the concept of identity was now largely embraced and maintaining through photographic evidence.
While reading this, I was reminded of the lecture our class attended by Professor Lyon Barco on “Capturing the Sacred: American Photography and Mexican Farmworkers”. His lecture showed how the use of photography was able to depict how life was for many people, but also the ways in which photographs can display a certain image that the photography wanted his audience to see. Strassler’s book linked to this notion of heritage and historical narrative by emphasising the important role of visual history and how this sense allows us to have a personal attachment to a photograph and how we perceive it. Reflecting on these experiences, I began to think of my own interactions with identification cards. I am not an American citizen, but on a daily basis if I am asked to show some from of identification, I will always present my American driving license over my British one. Both are just as valid as the other, but I have assumed a new identity by coming over to this country, and I almost feel more comfortable presenting the American license over the British as I am less likely to be questioned about it and have to reveal personal information. I had personally never even thought about why I value the American one over the British, but now i can see that each identification card holds a different identity, made up of different experiences and interactions with people. It is interesting to see the relationship between my identity, and a government mandated form of identification, as before I had never thought about how the cultural influences of my daily and personal life could shape the ways I think about and use photography.
No idea should be silenced
Kirsten Weld describes the events that occurred in Guatemala after the war, where documents were found and released showing that the government had only released data that backed up their beliefs, and shunned any evidence that showed their cruel and naive treatment of its citizens. Weld shows that through a shift in the way archives were treated and maintained, the people of Guatemala were able to show their side of the historical events, and they were able to keep their story and memories alive through expressing their own interpretations of the events and making sure that people had access to multiple different narratives. “Memory is less a filing cabinet that we open to examine a pre-selected file (my childhood, the war) than a book we are waiting and editing.” (Weld, 48) Although the people of this nation had suffered a horrific loss, they pushed for people to fight for different ideas and not to just follow the thoughts of people in higher positions that were being dictated to them.
While reading this, I thought back to Trouillot’s article where he argues that the past is a particular “bundle of silences”. History is made up of select pieces of information that people wish to remember, and the narratives are created through the lenses in which one wants to perceive a particular event. We must be careful not to shun people for expressing their opinions on something, and instead embrace the different points of view and challenge the existing order of a historical event and create a more realistic depiction of what happened.
Everyone is a critic
Benjamin’s argues in the exert from his book “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that throughout history, each sources gives us a different perspective of the event that occurred and enables the viewer to interpret the past from the eyes of the creator.
“For example, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision.” (Benjamin, 220)
However, although technological advancements such as cameras allowed people to truly depict a scene of what happened in the past, each source is again subject to how the viewer wishes to perceive it. I believe this reading neatly connects to Halbwach’s argument that our immediate environments have the ability to influence and manipulate our memories. Our social context control, too, the ways in which we perceive an event to have happened and to draw conclusions from different sources such as paintings, photographs, and visual performances. Each source is subject to some form of bias, either from the creator themselves, or those who are viewing them. With the multitude of sources that are available for us to narrate the past, the beholder now become a ‘critic’, where he/or she is able to create a narrative from which they believe is what was occurring in a specific source. We hand the responsibly of maintaining history away from those who actually experienced it themselves, to instead every person in the modern era, allowing them to critique and analyse the sources as they will, creating their own conclusions.
Pondering the Past
Trouillot raises the interesting problem of how history is produced, and he argues that any historical narrative is a particular “bundle of silences”. The four silences involved in history are: the sources (the moment of fact creation), the archives (the moment of fact assembly), the narratives (the moment of fact retrieval), and the history (the moment of retrospective significance). All of these aspects of historical narratives demonstrate the relationship between power and history, and that power does not enter a story once and for all, but instead it comes in at different times and different angles to each historical narrative. Each ‘silence’ shows the multitude of ways where elements of history are forgotten or dismissed in favour of promoting a certain image of a time or place.
I found this reading very applicable to the education system I have received growing up. In history classes, we were always taught by focusing on literature and documentation that was produced by predominantly white males with some form of authority. This makes me question my own understanding of history and what truly happened in the past. Is there ever a way to fully understand what event have occurred? Each narrative of a certain historical issues has a different perspective. All that historians can do is try to find as many perspectives on the one event and attempt to piece together both sides of the argument in hope that they can present enough facts to describe the actions that occurred. What is taught in the classrooms is never the fully story, but is there even a real way in which we can understand history? Every narrative is subject to bias in some shape or form. Trouillot’s words have pushed me to further question my perceptions around historical readings, and to ponder what arguments truly reflect the events that took place.
Halbwachs Collective Memory
Halbwachs main argument appears to be that memory is a social product and that the individual memory is dependent on society. He argues that our ‘collective memories’ are influenced by the environment around us and that the collective (i.e. family, class, nation, religious identity) decides for us what is valuable to remember. “We find ourselves to be part of a group where our position is determined not by personal feelings but by rules and customs independent of us that existed before us.” (Halbwach, 55) Here, he is suggesting the collective memory not only tells the members of its community or society what they can remember, but that it is also controlling how an individual recalls a certain event and the details involved.
I agree with Halbwachs argument that our immediate environments have the ability to influence and manipulate our memories. Humans are innately social creatures whose primary objective is to find a group or community where which they feel a sense of belonging. This neatly ties into his theory of the “collective memory” whereby our memories are a social product that depend on our relationships with other humans to be constructed in a certain way. Social interactions deeply fascinate me as I the human personality is so intricate and we are always so concerned nowadays with our identities and how we see ourselves, yet we also adjust our characterises and behaviours often depending on the group of people we are with. Do core value systems truly exist? Can something be said to represent your belief system when we can’t even be sure that we have one? Why does the construction of our identity become so fluid over time? All of these questions deeply intrigue me, and I look forward to learning more about them.