Memory Fragments

Visualising Difference in Australian History

Marita Bullock

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781841506739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Power Resources
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Taking as its starting point four contemporary visual artists whose work utilizes the conventions of museum display and collecting practices, Memory Fragments examines how these artists have reconfigured dominant representations of Australian history and identity, including viewpoints often marginalized by gender and race. Echoing Walter Benjamin's reflections on history and time, this interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to scholars working in the arts as well as modern and postmodern cultural studies.

Chapter 1

The Trash of History: The Timeliness of Benjamin’s Dialectical Images

The history of the reception of Walter Benjamin’s writings is a history of academic fashions, and since the late 1980s it has become fashionable to include, inter alia, Benjamin in the canon of postmodernism. In recent years, Benjamin’s writings on the trash of history have been appropriated by postmodern/post-structuralist scholars as early examples of the disintegration of the founding principles of modernity, including the logic of assimilation, the tyranny of sameness and the ideological limitations of ‘great’ art.¹ Trash has been cited as the building blocks for an alternative historiography – one that acknowledges the erosion of historical objectivity and the reconfiguration of history as text.² Benjamin’s work is often cited as a precursor to the postmodern claim that history is not the seamless, objective, teleological tranche of time that it claims to be, but rather, history is a series of temporal shards – a stockpile of forgotten junk and detritus that can be reconfigured in the image of those forgotten or trampled by the victors of history.³ Susan Buck-Morss’ The Dialectics of Seeing argues that by the early 1990s, Benjamin’s writings have been couched within a postmodernism that claimed to be both anti-ideological and philosophically radical in its attempt to fracture the certainties of modernity, and to finally unhinge history’s belief in referentiality (339).⁴

This interest in Benjamin as a ‘postmodern’ scholar was confirmed by the publication of The Arcades Project (first published in 1982 and then in English in 1988), which also established this emerging interest in Benjamin as a literary and textual scholar aligned with the post-structuralist interest in the contingency of meaning (McRobbie 149). Benjamin’s writings on trash, fragmentation and allegory in The Arcades Project were taken to prefigure the postmodern fragmentation of history as progress and development, in addition to the erosion of ideology and the blurring of boundaries between high art and mass culture, image and text (151–2).⁵ The Arcades Project, and Benjamin’s interest in the trash of history specifically, has continued to garner much interest amongst scholars throughout the 1990s and 2000s, culminating in Kevin Laughlin and Philip Rosen’s special edition of boundary2 in 2003, titled Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project, Beatrice Hanssen’s edited collection Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project (2006), and Pierre Misac’s Walter Benjamin’s Passages (1996), in addition to numerous other projects that have drawn inspiration from Benjamin’s interest in waste and the textual and fragmented nature of history as ruins.⁶

This chapter contends that it is imperative to wrest the critical potential of Benjamin’s writings on trash and fragmentation from these postmodern celebrations of textuality. While postmodern appropriations of Benjamin’s work have held critical purchase in the 1980s for the way they once wrested Benjamin’s writings away from deterministic Marxist readings centred around ideology (situating his thought within textual open-endedness, indeterminacy and fluidity as the celebrated terms of post-structuralist literary theory), it is important to recognise that a different range of issues regarding the political efficacy of Benjamin’s figure of trash haunts the contemporary context. This is because the meaning and function of ‘trash’ and ‘fragmentation’ has changed in contemporary culture. For theorists like Hal Foster (1996 107) and Fredric Jameson (1994 81), trash may no longer simply operate as a radical form of deconstructed history – prising open reified notions of modernity and progress – because fragmentation (as a symptom of postmodernism) is now part and parcel of the dominant logic of late capitalism.⁷ Insofar as postmodern culture is the dominant logic of late capitalism, trash (as its symptom) also embodies postmodernism’s redundancy of history as spectacle, over and above depth. In Jameson’s words, trash embodies the logic of posthistoire or the disappearance of the weightiness of history. The incapacity of society to “retain its own past,” prompts the perpetual amassing and aestheticisation of past fragments that Jameson otherwise terms ‘pastiche.’ In this account, history has become little more than a dusty set of spectacles, a series of perpetual presents or a nostalgic desire for ‘retro’ fashions (1991 xii, 17–18, 4–5; 2002 18–19, 25–6, 85–94). History is not disrupted by trash, but rather, history is stalled by trash − reduced to the endless recycling, ‘pastiche’ or ‘bricolage’ of outdated objects (1991 96).⁸ Trash ushers in the perpetual repetition/recycling that immobilises and stalls history within an endless postmodern present. This form of history-as-trash is therefore a highly conservative historical force because the resuscitation and renovation of aesthetics and styles from the past gives illusion of historical depth, even as this fetishisation of history’s images stalls any real sense of change or futurity. Hence, the resuscitation of outmoded forms does not help to displace history, as Benjamin argued the appropriation of trash could do. It merely confirms the dominant late capitalist system that gives the surface appearance of change to allow society and culture to remain the same (17–18, 4–5). Or as Jameson notes in The Seeds of Time “what begins to emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity […], at least in its temporal dimension – is that henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, nothing can change any longer” (81). Late capitalism is not displaced by trash, but rather, it is perpetuated by the recycling of outdated styles and forms – the very forms that Benjamin once celebrated for their potential to rupture modernity’s stagnant forms of commodity-time as perpetual sameness.

Critics like Foster and Jameson are right to acknowledge the way trash, obsolescence and fragmentation signify the utter crisis of time in post-industrial/postmodern culture. However insofar as they relegate trash to postmodern theories of ‘pastiche’ – a figure that embodies the ‘end of history’ thesis wholesale – they also overlook the profoundly critical aspects that remain dormant within Benjamin’s writings on trash, history and fragmentation. While postmodern theorists confirm this relationship between Benjamin’s trash and postmodern time (either by celebrating it or condemning it), the critical potential lying dormant within Benjamin’s figuration of trash needs to be wrested from the open-endedness and indeterminacy of postmodern fictionalisation, in which the past is reduced to textual fragmentation and deferral. This is possible when Benjamin’s writings on trash are read in tandem with his passages on the dialectical image. Benjamin’s dialectical image enables a new appraisal of the critical potential within trash and fragmentation, which, in turn, refute charges of post-historicism and pastiche. This is because the dialectical image brings into relief Benjamin’s long-held interest in the tensions between textuality, fragmentation, fluidity and indeterminacy on the one hand and materiality, history, unity and stagnation on the other.

This necessity of reading Benjamin’s interest in trash and fragmentation in light of his related interest in materiality and history is discussed in Esther Leslie’s cultural-materialist appraisal of Benjamin in her text Overpowering Conformism (2000). Leslie argues that the postmodern dimensions of Benjamin’s thought (that have been over-elaborated in the textualist readings of his work) need to be supplemented with his related interest in materialist concerns. Benjamin’s thought needs to be wrested from postmodernism’s interest in indeterminacy and fluidity because these threads threaten to overwhelm and limit the contradictory aspects of Benjamin’s writing and its critical potential (22). While Benjamin’s allegorical fragment (and its associated indeterminacy of meaning) has enabled post-structuralist theorists to locate Benjamin’s critical efficacy “in the arbitrariness and intentionlessness of representation,” Leslie claims that this privileging of linguistic deferral has tended to marginalise the materialist aspects of Benjamin’s thinking (22).⁹ She claims that many of the post-structuralist appropriations tend to overlook Benjamin’s interest in Marxism and historical materialism and the gravity of history within cultural representation.¹⁰ In “Ruin and Rubble in the Arcades” Leslie makes a related claim that those attempts to yoke Benjamin’s researches into the postmodern urban scene end up assaulting Marxist historical materialism “via a fascination with consumption, which necessarily endorses consumption as a type of freedom and self-expression” (2006 89). Leslie therefore argues that Benjamin’s interest in the role of materiality and history in commodity culture and fragmentation are of utmost concern to contemporary cultural politics. The very problematic of history and materialism has not been entirely liberated in the free play of postmodern textual indeterminacy and fragmentation, but has come to “weigh” on the present as unresolved questions (2000 22). She cites Benjamin:

All historical knowledge can be represented in the image of balanced scales, one tray of which is weighted with what has been and the other with knowledge of what is present. Whereas on the first the facts can never be too humble or numerous, on the second there can only be a few, massive weights.

(The Arcades Project 468 [N6,5])

The few heavy weights that impress themselves on the present are questions pertaining to the gravity of the matter of representation in and of post-structuralist/postmodern theories, which too readily celebrate the fleeting, the indeterminate and the fragmented. Following Leslie then, this chapter argues that the time has come to wrest Benjamin’s figures of trash and fragmentation from the canon of postmodernism in order to glean the critical potential of his writings in and for the contemporary cultural context. To use Benjamin’s own words, trash and fragmentation must be “ripped out of context” (473 [N9a, 3]) in order to resuscitate any of the critical weight they may hold for the present. Benjamin’s writings on ‘the trash of history’ need to be placed under close scrutiny, alongside his theory of the dialectical image, in order to allow us to extract them from the limitations of postmodern textual hermeneutics.

Herein lies the critical purchase of this chapter. The following discussion contends that Benjamin’s dialectical image enables a more nuanced engagement with materialist politics and history than what postmodern/post-structuralist critics have been understood to stand for, in the misguided view that there is no outside of textuality and no material referent to speak of. The complexity of Benjamin’s figure of trash allows us to see how these readings of post-structuralist/postmodern methodologies are limiting readings of Benjamin’s writings, and that the complexity of the basis of history and/or materialism is a consideration that needs to be reworked in terms of the demands of the present. This reworking of materiality is critical, not only because it addresses the short-sightedness of the continuing application of post-structuralism’s textual claims in light of the complexity of the materialist politics of the 1990s, but because it nuances the nostalgia for cultural grounds and the referent that are at play in some ethnographic art projects, or what Hal Foster has otherwise termed the uncritical longing for the object, or the ‘return of the real’ as he puts it.¹¹ Benjamin’s figure of trash comes into legibility within the cultural politics of the 1990s, as it effectively straddles the division between the eradication of the referent and the nostalgia for the ‘real.’ That is to say, Benjamin’s dialectical image offers a nuanced account of materiality that exceeds the attempt to fictionalise history and the referent in and through postmodern theory, even as his figure of trash holds the potential to direct criticism beyond a reactionary, nostalgic attempt to locate the material ‘grounds’ of history, or the longing for authenticity, location and materiality that has been identified as an aspect of some practices associated with the ethnographic/archival turn of the 1990s.¹² Therefore, Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image is a highly loaded and complex theoretical concept that holds critical purchase for its capacity to address the polarity that divided cultural theory and aesthetic practices at the end of the 1990s. The dialectical image is the key figure that ensures the potential of trash as a ‘timely’ category in the way it allows for a chiastic relationship between the object and discourse – neither returning us to a notion of the referent, nor unmooring its gravity.

Leaving the question of ethnographic art practices aside, the following discussion outlines the significance that Benjamin’s trash had within his own cultural context in order to garner the timely impetus of trash ripped out of this context − for the cultural politics of the 1990s – beyond postmodern theories of textual indeterminacy, deferral and empty pastiche. While Benjamin’s theory of trash played a pivotal role in his critique of the concept of modernity and historiography during the inter-war years in Europe; the following discussion charts the way that Benjamin’s appraisal of trash as a critical and disruptive category still holds a critical purchase for contemporary cultural politics, albeit in a revised form. By tracing Benjamin’s concern with the detritus of the nineteenth-century, we can gain a better understanding of the potential that trash holds in addressing contemporary debates about history, representation and the politics of alterity, as these debates are relevant to visual arts practice during the 1990s.

Benjamin’s Trash

Benjamin’s interest in trash and detritus, along with its potential to disturb modernity’s foundational tenants of historical progress, was to become one of the central aspects of his unfinished manuscript, The Arcades Project. For over 13 years, between 1927 and 1941, Benjamin thought about, and prepared in note form, what was to become one of his major pieces of work. The Arcades Project (otherwise known as The Passagenwerk) was to be a theory of modernity, a philosophy of history, and a reflection on the meaning of consumer culture generated from a close analysis of the dilapidated shopping arcades of nineteenth-century Paris (McRobbie 156). Trash – the trivial phenomena and scraps of urban life – was one of its central metaphors, and the dialectical image – the fleeting syntheses of these fragments into frozen, crystallised, yet fleeting images – formed the basis of its structural cohesion.¹³ Taken together, ‘trash’ and the ‘dialectical image’ were to provide the basis for a thoroughly different historical methodology – a large-scale project that would change the way history was represented and understood.¹⁴

Benjamin began his enormous treatise at the beginning of the twentieth-century. He was intrigued by the obsolescent commodities in Paris’ outdated shopping arcades and he saw this trash and detritus of modern urban culture as allegorical of the failure of history under nineteenth-century industrialism. Outdated commodities were vital runes of modernity at large: telling for the way they undermined the foundational tenets of modern development, illuminating in their exposure of the contradictions inherent in nineteenth-century conceptions of progress. This analysis was possible because Benjamin understood the arcades as iconic of the birth of modern consumer culture in the nineteenth-century. Paris was once considered the “capital of the nineteenth century,”¹⁵ and its arcades once epitomised its spirit of development. The ideals of modern civilisation were built into the arcades with a sense of grandiosity previously unseen, and the vast abundance of commodities displayed inside the arcades were used to visibly support the founding principles of historicist logic that dominated Europe at the time: the notion of technological progress, the mastery of nature and the illusory promise of the always-new as continuous improvement.

By the early twentieth century these arcades had fallen into disrepair, only to be replaced in grandeur by new, luxurious department stores, lit by electric light. These dilapidated arcades embodied something other than the zenith of Western civilisation in Benjamin’s view. The ruined arcades (and their obsolescent commodities) were emblematic for Benjamin, in their illumination of the failure of modernity’s dreams of utopian social fulfillment − highlighting the redundancy of modernity’s illusory ideal that more groups of people would benefit from the fruits of technological progress. In their dilapidated and outdated forms, the objects and arcades could reveal modernity’s principles of development and progress as illusions or phantasmagoric ideals: modernity’s “dream houses” (405 [L1, 3]). Modernity could no longer be viewed as an ongoing march towards a utopian world of abundance, but rather, it could be seen as an increasingly homogenised and standardised cultural system regulated by misleading illusions propagated by the ruling elite. The definitive experience of this metropolitan environment was the perpetual experience of the ‘nothing new,’ the endless production and consumption of the ‘always-the-same,’ and this, according to Benjamin, was the fundamental basis of modernity’s mythic character. Far from inaugurating the much needed designs on social progress, the arcades and their detritus stood as cathedrals of the commodity fetish, offering the appearance of a long-awaited better world in order to still any real sense of historical change (101–19).¹⁶

The outmoded clutter within these arcades not only captured modernity’s stagnation, but they also disturbed modernity’s phantasmagoric illusions of development and change. If these outmoded objects were unhinged from within the safe context of the arcades, and if they were apprehended as the ‘outdated’ fashions that they were, then they could potentially destabilise the logic of progress underpinning modernity and history. The ruined arcades (and its outmoded clutter) could reveal the faltering nature of modernity and its fleeting promises. Derelict objects could offer a radical critique of the myth of universal progress, driven by the supposedly innovative power of capitalism and technology. They could illuminate modernity’s parade of ever-new objects as nothing more than instant obsolescence and recurring sameness. Modernity’s seemingly new was nothing more than the already and always outdated and old; its dreams of innovation harboured ancient and Ur-historical myths and symbols for social betterment and unification that remained unrealised. These ancient myths and symbols bore the weight of utopian dreams (for real social change and fulfillment) dre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Collecting Junk/Collecting Memory
• Chapter 1: The Trash of History: The Timeliness of Benjamin's Dialectical Images
• Chapter 2: Fossilising the Commodity: Ricky Swallow's Art of Crafting Time in Postmodern Culture
• Chapter 3: ‘China China‘: Autoethnography as Literal Translation in Ah Xian's Porcelain Forms
• Chapter 4: Melancholy Debris: Black Humour and Colonial Memory in Work by Julie Gough
• Chapter 5: Australian Modernity: The Metaphorics of Mining in Donna Marcus' Compositions
• After-Images: Visualising Difference
• Works Cited