Abstract
The major objective of this article is to elaborate on the new materialist philosophical framework as a useful analytical perspective for approaching contemporary artistic memorials. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (designed by Eisenman, 2005) and The Garden of Exile (designed by Libeskind, 2001), both situated in Berlin, serve as illustrative examples for theoretical investigations developed in this contribution. Relying on Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of art, the article argues that these sites heighten our awareness of materials, compositional structures, or the process of encountering the work. By weaving together the representable (narrative/symbolic/semiotic) and the unrepresentable (traumatic/bodily/material), the sites deny a purely representational logic, producing instead intensive singular events that are never fixed or unwavering. The memorial character of these sites is therefore always emergent and contingent on the complex dynamic material-semiotic assemblages of different bodies. As such, it only exists in the encounter. Relation is its onto-epistemology.
[I]n reading we miss … what art does best: the aesthetic
Prelude
When bodies collide, they, for a relatively short time, exert forces on each other. In physics, the term “collision” refers to an even infinitesimal, almost imperceptible, meeting of particles or bodies in which each of them exerts a force upon the other, resulting in the exchange of energy or momentum. Importantly, the use of the term “collision” implies completely nothing about the magnitude of forces, although the transmission of energy is always involved. Derived from Latin collidere, the term connotes togetherness, as the word-forming element com- (an archaic form of classical Latin cum and assimilated to col- before l) is typically translated as “with, together.” To collide is to dash with, to form an assemblage, to (inter-/intra-)act. Although the forces exchanged in a collision can be minute, they are always involved; the collision never leaves the participating bodies unaltered. All sides taking part in the event are engaged and their trajectories change. Having their movement affected by the collision, bodies bear imprints and traces, or memories, of these intensive encounters.
Matter, representation, memory—an introduction
In his Die Zeit review of Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe erected in Berlin in 2005, Agamben distinguished between what is “memorable” (Erinnerbares) and what is “unforgettable” (Unvergessliches). Whereas the former refers to what can be conveyed by texts, photographs, numbers, maps, and documents, that is, to what can be represented and read/recognized, the latter is a part of memory of the Holocaust that could not be so contained—that which is unspeakable and illegible. While most memorials function through the provision of texts and images (representations), according to Agamben (2005), in his memorial Eisenman offers a “book of stone” whose illegible pages “can neither be inscribed or read.” Therefore, in a way, Agamben speaks about two forms of memory—one grounded in recognizable narratives and structures and one situated beyond the representational realm. Such a response to the memorial corresponds well with the recent research on the concepts of memory and trauma, especially taking into consideration that most of contemporary commemorative sites refer to traumatic events, with the Holocaust being the most obvious example thereof.
Several studies on trauma 1 (significant contributions were offered by Caruth, 1995, 1996; see also Van der Kolk and Van der Hart, 1995) have indicated that we should think of memory in corporeal terms and that trauma could be considered an assemblage of embodied experiences, often eluding the processes of signification. Such a perspective, nevertheless, demands a non-representational approach to memory. As Bennett explains, if trauma resists representational framing and if memory is constituted in the process of transforming experience into a representation, then we need to make a distinction between narrative and traumatic memory. Whereas the narrative memory can be consciously referenced and represented in figurative terms, the traumatic one can be activated only through mobilization of affects. Unlike the former, the latter mode of memory cannot be narrativized in any straightforward ways, yet it can be experienced and felt (Bennett, 2005: 22–26).
A similar problem is present in current debates about (un)representability of traumatic experiences in memorial art. If trauma eludes representational signification, how can these experiences be passed to others? The issue of realism in representation of traumatic events has been a salient topic in trauma studies (e.g. Rothberg, 2000; Van Alphen, 1997). The field has been rather dominated by an anti-representational paradigm as it has been maintained that no representation is capable of transmitting the “truth” of the trauma. Although this position has recently been challenged (e.g. Guerin and Hallas, 2007), and although Caruth’s (1995) work on trauma as precluding representation (p. 152) inspired substantial critical considerations (e.g. Hungerford, 2001; Kaufman, 1998; LaCapra, 2001; Wolfreys, 2002), the view about traumatic experiences being unspeakable still pervades the field. It seems then that the issue of representation/unrepresentability of trauma is constructed as a binary. Grounded in a new materialist framework, “collision approach” that I advocate for in this article should be perceived as a refusal to participate in such dualism. Instead, it offers its productive reformulation, focusing on the complex, entangled nature of mnemonic processes. “Collision” should be here understood as a procedure of forming assemblages relying on a co-constitutive relationality of different forces and agents, where any kind of straightforward divisions are no longer possible. Moreover, such a perspective may possibly lend itself to remembering histories that resist purely figural representation.
The practices of memorialization of trauma proliferate in contemporary world. Important in this context is, as Macdonald (2013) underlines, “materialisation of memory in heritage,” that is, “the complex and particular coming together of a mix of agents (human and non-human)” as well as its “unpredictable—though not unpatterned and random—effects” (p. 6). This should be seen as a compound process, which Macdonald (2013) calls a “memory complex” understood “as an assemblage of practices, affects and physical things, which includes such parts as memorial services, nostalgia and historical artefacts” (p. 6). What surfaces in recent investigations within memory studies, heritage studies, and cultural studies is an increased attention to issues of matter and materiality: traumatic memory is seen as a corporeal form of memory inscribed in the organic matter/flesh of our bodies; mnemonic and commemoration practices are considered to be about materialization of memories in forms of, for instance, memorials, museums, artistic installations, which all have some material existence; the encounter with memorial art is conceptualized in terms of a bodily transaction which engages senses and sensibilities and produces sensations or affects, and so on. This preoccupation with matter and materiality deserves a more insightful examination, especially in the context of matter having been almost completely crossed out from critical investigations undertaken within the so-called “linguistic turn” (e.g. Grosz, 1994, 2008; Massumi, 2002, 2011).
Taking the above into account, in what follows, I will elaborate on the new materialist framework, which inserts investigations on materiality into the cultural theory. To illustrate my argumentation, I will critically approach through these lenses the two Holocaust memorials situated in Berlin—the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005, designed by Peter Eisenman) and the Garden of Exile (2001, designed by Daniel Libeskind). Being aware of the specificity of the socio-politico-cultural contexts, in which these memorials are located, in my analysis, I will prevailingly rely on Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of art, which pays particular attention to its materiality. Both of these sites, I argue, heighten our awareness of materials, compositional structures, or the process of encountering the work, which are all important for a new materialist account of art.
This contribution is primarily theoretical. My objective is to point to the usefulness of the new materialist framework, or new materialist onto-epistemology, 2 to studies on contemporary memorial art in general, and architectural memorial sites in particular. It is worth mentioning that the theory-informed examination of art from a new materialist perspective and inspired by works of Deleuze and Guattari is still not extensive, although fascinating theorizations have already been developed by such scholars as Bolt (2004a, 2004b, 2006), Grosz (2005, 2008, 2011), Bennett (2005), or O’Sullivan (2006). However, the academic reflection on architectural memory sites effectuated from such theoretical position has not yet attracted attention of researchers, even though contemporary memorial art provides perfect examples of how art operates on and affects us at an immediately bodily level and through its material dimension. This article aims at filling in this gap and at offering a more-than-representational approach to memorial art.
There is a fundamental difficulty in approaching art through the theoretical framework that does not have roots in the mechanism of representation. Hence, it is crucial to clarify that my intention here is not to contend that the work of representation should be omitted in a critical study of memorial artifacts. Neither do I claim that we are supposed to focus solely on the material dimension of art. Rather, we should carefully look at how the semiotic and the material co-constitute each other. Accordingly, in new materialist terms, I consider memorial art a complex assemblage, interweaving the natural and the cultural, the matter and how it matters, the sensation/affect and the complex work of signification processes. Such an approach offers a critical insight in the ways in which contemporary memorial sites absorb and transform us. It also reveals volumes about the work of embodied perception and about how we incessantly and intensively become with the world as well as how this becoming is a series of bodily encounters, or collisions, in which we constantly (sometimes involuntarily) participate.
Beyond representation—new materialism and the arts
The term “new materialism” (DeLanda, 1996, 2006), or “neo-materialism” (Braidotti, 2000, 2002, 2006), 3 entered the dictionary of cultural theory in the second half of the 1990s. It puts emphasis on what Haraway (1988) originally referred to as the “material-semiotic” and calls for a detailed examination of matter as lively, processual, and transformative. Matter’s most significant quality is, in new materialist terms, its capacity for “metamorphosis” (Braidotti, 2002) or “morphogenesis” (DeLanda, 1996, 2002). The typical for this philosophical tendency interest in a mutual co-constitution of nature and culture has also been present in works of other scholars, although they have not used the label “new materialism” (or “neo-materialism”) in reference to their approaches. Among them, Latour (1987, 1993) talks about “hybrids” and “collectives” dwelling at the intersection of nature, culture, and discourse and proliferating in the contemporary world. Haraway (2003) offers a concept of “natureculture” meant to grasp the necessary entanglements of the natural and the cultural, or the material and the semiotic, beyond the traditional dualistic logic of either/or. Barad’s approach, called “agential realism,” assumes that matter is as active as our interpretative frameworks. We do not simply give meaning to matter, she argues, but rather matter and meaning co-form each other (Barad, 2003, 2007). Matter is implicated in all (sometimes imperceptible) processes of meaning-making, whence an increased interest in its vibrant and continuous movements expressed recently by a significant number of scholars (e.g., Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Bennett, 2010; Bolt and Barrett, 2013; Coole and Frost, 2010; Grosz, 2005, 2008, 2011; Massumi, 2002, 2011).
Although drawing a critical attention to matter, by no means does this approach imply matter’s independence from socio-political conditions or contexts. Nevertheless, the emerging of new materialism is also connected to the growing dissatisfaction with the existing cultural studies approaches, and especially with social constructivism, which does not allow us to go beyond the analysis of the ideological structures of power and meaning. It does not signal, however, that the poststructuralist analytical framework should be disregarded. Quite the contrary—to a certain extent, new materialism builds on the accomplishments of discourse theory, at the same time calling for more empirical investigations of the material processes and structures that coexist with the discursive and make the meaning/mattering possible. Crucially, new materialism does not privilege matter over meaning or culture over nature, fostering instead a monist perspective. Its non-dualistic orientation also manifests itself in its refusal of the politics of sketching distinctions between mechanistic and vitalist, or inorganic and organic, understandings of matter.
Transdisciplinary, or “transversal” (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin, 2010, 2012), by its very nature, new materialism is generated in the whole range of research areas, from hard sciences, through environmental and bio-sciences, to social sciences and the humanities. Recently, there have also emerged new materialist theories of art aimed at exposing its material-semiotic operations. If we look at art through such lenses, we have to acknowledge that the experience of art is one of both matter and meaning: the materiality of art creates and gives form to the discursive and vice versa—the discursive makes sense of matter, that is, it makes it matter. Aligning herself with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas, and with an aim to understand both the importance and agency of matter in art, Bolt (2004a, 2004b) offers a concept of a work of art that she differentiates from that of an artwork. She claims that whereas a more traditional notion of an artwork is a noun and denotes a passive object or a vehicle for artist’s ideas, the term work of art refers to a verb, that is, to the work of art. Bolt (2004a) then pays attention to the processual character of a work of art and points to its so-called “work-being” (p. 8) as opposed to the “instrumental-being” of an artwork (which suggests that art is a medium for conveying meanings). Focusing on the agency of art allows us to approach a work of art in material terms, as a fundamentally material process and to appreciate matter as a movement capable of creation. This lets us shift attention away from art’s solely representational functions and zoom in on art’s creative potentials as well as its material becomings. Importantly, the fact that art is seen as productive offers an opportunity for its affirmative renditions. This fuels new positive politics, so alien to those of representation. As Bolt (2004a) explains, representation is a concept and practice that signals an absence or a gap. Something represented is not here and not now (p. 171); representation denotes non-presence and is therefore a negative concept. Differently from that, and acknowledging an active status of materiality, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) offer a non-representational theory of art,
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where art is defined in terms of sensations rather than of what it represents. Sensation, in such an account, makes the thought possible. As Deleuze (2011) writes, “[s]omething in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter” (p. 176). This encounter functions as a trigger for critical inquiry. He advises, Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to rise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think. (Deleuze, 2011: 176)
For Deleuze (2011), [w]hat is encountered … may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition. … The object of encounter … gives rise to sensibility with regard to a given sense. (p. 176)
Fascinated by philosophies primarily concerned with the body and its multiple and complex entanglements with the world, new materialism is not principally interested in representation or signification, but is rather preoccupied with affect and movement. This is also due to the fact that whereas the object of recognition (i.e. representation) offers the already known meanings or symbols, the object of fundamental encounter invites the new and encourages a serious reconsideration of our perceptual routines (O’Sullivan, 2006: 1). In such an account, art is about sustaining sensations. As Grosz (2008) clarifies, “sensation requires no mediation or translation. It is not representation, sign, symbol, but force, energy, rhythm, resonance” (p. 73). Accordingly, art creates affective assemblages which involve immediate material interactions. This invites a processual understanding of art—art is defined in terms of a constant material unfolding.
Certainly, art is not solely about sensations; it does also have symbolic dimension. Therefore, my intention here is not to disavow the work of representation, cultural context, and meaning in art. Rather, in a new materialist spirit, I want to focus more extensively on those aspects of art that have hitherto been disregarded, yet without which the meanings would not exist. The process of interpretation (or recognition of the already known) is simply not enough to grasp the creative potential that art offers nor does it allow us to entirely comprehend the ways in which it operates. Art simultaneously affects us indirectly (through its symbolic means) and directly (through its active materialities); these levels are always “entangled” (see Barad, 2003, 2007). Hence, it is necessary to look at the material world with its flows, movements, and forces in a more detailed way.
Focusing on materiality and affectivity of art lets us acknowledge that in fact matter never simply is; it rather creates and produces, that is, it becomes. It is, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) claim, “a molecular material, not dead, brute, homogenous matter, but a matter-movement” (p. 512). Matter is entirely relational for it relates bodies to each other. Its generative movement is productive of assemblages as it bears in its folds singularities and their encounters with other singularities. Consequently, matter’s affectivity (defined simply as ability of a body to affect and be affected (Massumi, 2002)) stands for its faculty to enter into virtual relations with others. In such context, the term “body” has to be understood in entirely inclusive ways. For Deleuze (1988), “[a] body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind, or idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity” (p. 127). They all have some sort of material existence. Consequently, the body is defined through its potentials, or in reference to what it can do or what it can become. This approach does not privilege any specific bodies (e.g. human); it rather argues that all bodies evince certain capacities and agencies to enter into relations with others. Accordingly, the function of art is not to reflect or reproduce the world but it rather works to evoke intensities. What truly matters is the sensation arising from the affective encounter with it (see Bennett, 2005)—a movement of becoming and a transformation that this encounter triggers. Affects, understood as qualities of all matter, are then about the capacity of bodies to collide, that is, to combine, connect, and dash with each other; they are potentialities or the imperceptible forces of constant metamorphosis.
Synesthetic perception
Certainly, the understanding of matter in terms of assemblages or collisions relies on an enlarged idea of perception, which has to be conceived of as a non-linear and extended process of “seeing” that synesthetically enlists other bodily senses and sensibilities. Synesthetic nature of perception signals the fact that it always involves a simultaneous and conjunctive work of all senses, which translates into compound sensations. As Merleau-Ponty (1968) explains, “My perception is not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being … which speaks to all my senses at once” (p. 48). Thusly conceptualized, perception is embodied and relational; it is not solely about recognition of the already known but also about bodily affective assemblages and sensuous inter-/intra-actions. To clarify, in physics, the terms “intra-action” and “intra-activity,” employed by Barad (2003, 2007) in a new materialist context, refer to any relationship between organisms and matter (human or non-human) that are understood as not having any clear boundaries. In such instance, agency does not belong exclusively to the human who exerts power and acts upon the non-human, but rather it is distributed among all bodies and forces involved in the process. The intra-action is about a co-constituting nature of the liaison, or about a mutual correlation understood as a condition for existence of natural-cultural entities. As Barad (2007) explains, “[d]iscursive practices and material phenomenon do not stand in a relationship of externality to each other; rather the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity” (p. 152), they are “entangled” (p. 185).
Such understanding of perception offers a departure from what Massumi (2002) calls a “mirror-vision” (where eyes tend to freeze movement to produce extended static images) toward a “movement-vision,” that is, “sight turned proprioceptive” (p. 59). Proprioception stands here for the “sensibility proper to the muscles and ligaments” (Massumi, 2002: 58). It is a way of sensing with the body—a mode of perception that “opens exclusively onto the space and registers qualities directly and continuously as movement” (Massumi, 2002: 58–59). An affect, in such an account, is what results from a coupling together of visceral and proprioceptive sensibilities, although “the dimension of viscerality is adjacent to that of proprioception, but they do not overlap” (Massumi, 2002: 61). Affect, therefore, is born out of a bodily collision and necessarily involves a sensuous dimension of the encounter. As such, this collision is always already material-semiotic; it involves a corporeal material sensing, that is, physicality of the encounter, as well as a semiotic procedure where materiality becomes equipped with meaning which, at the same time, it makes possible. This is how matter matters (Barad, 2003, 2007). Importantly, sensing is also individual-collective—a singular event that is forever different, yet always situated in specific material-semiotic contexts. As Howes (2013) aptly notices, “‘the facts of sense’ are always a product of con-sensus—that is, of sensing along with others. Perception is a social activity in that it is conditioned by culture …” (p. 9). Hence, the sensorium also needs to be historicized (Classen, 2012; Classen et al., 1994). In sensing the cultural/social and the material/bodily collide.
To sum up, synesthetic perception refers to both a conjunctive use of senses and a process involving an entanglement of the material and the semiotic. It favors relationality and connectivity within a multidimensional encounter of differently understood bodies; a collision that never leaves them completely unchanged. This compound process is not biased in favor of any single modality but rather, as Ong (1991) suggests, focuses on their interplay or dynamic co-constitution. It means that, in Howes’ (2013) words, “the essence of the aesthetic experience lies in the union and/or transposition of sensations, rather than their separation” (p. 15). In a new materialist spirit, synesthetic perception should therefore be understood in terms of a series of material-semiotic intra-actions. As I explain in the following sections, such is the nature of the visitors’ encounter with the spaces of the two memorials providing a brief illustration for my argumentation.
Material-semiotic entanglements: remembering the Holocaust in Germany
The complex relation between public memory of the Shoah, politics, and representation in different national, gendered, or generational contexts has recently been widely explored (e.g. Hirsch, 2012; Hirsch and Spitzer, 2011; Kantsteiner, 2006; Reading, 2002; Rothberg, 2009). Memorialization of the Holocaust in Germany, as Young (1992) argues, “remains a tortured, self-reflective, even paralyzing preoccupation” (p. 269). How should a nation remember the victims of crime it has perpetrated? How should it commemorate its own barbarity? Since the shock of the unspeakable done to victims haunts and disquiets perpetrators’ descendants and is embedded in memory as a constant reproach, the Holocaust remembrance in the German context embodies intractable questions rather than answering them. The indeterminate nature of this memory has produced specific strategies of remembrance. A shift toward “countermonumental” aesthetics (Young, 1992), or invention of ambiguous memorial formats, counts as an important characteristic of this memorial genre. The two sites analyzed below belong to this category.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Eisenman’s memorial evoked mixed reactions. It was described as open to interpretation (Carrier, 2005), a narrative without continuity (Till, 2005), a memorial offering opportunities of civic engagement of visitors with themselves rather than history (Dekel, 2013), a site refraining from “imposing memorial etiquette” (Dekel, 2009: 82) and “imploding existing systems of memorialization” (Dekel, 2009: 173). On one hand, it was critiqued for its size and scale and referred to as a “monumentalization of shame” (Walser, 1998: 15). On the other hand, Assmann expressed hope that because of its centrality and extensiveness, the memorial would serve as “a kind of replacement cemetery for the cemeteries that do not exist” (Assmann and Frevert, 1999: 69–72).
The irresistible material organization of the site is striking. The memorial field, situated in Berlin in an immediate neighborhood of the Brandenburg Gate, comprises a grid of approximately 2700 rectangular-sectioned gray pillars. Spreading over a vast urban territory, the space can be approached from different sides, as neither is there a single point of entrance to the memorial nor one premeditated route through it. A journey would imply directions from one place to another, a trajectory to follow, a narrative to decode, but none of these has been traced within this site of memory. Consequently, the memorial has no center or point of focus; the space emerges as inexhaustible.
The actual appearance and structure of the site is a result of a carefully planned designing process. Godfrey explains that the form of the field was determined through the procedure of inventing two abstract topographies, each a plane like a wavy sheet, each undulating differently, yet none having any original reference. As he continues, [e]ach topography was then divided into an identical grid of rectangular sections, with narrow pathways between them. One topography was placed above the other … The columns simply joined the rectangular sections in the top grid to these in the bottom grid. The columns vary in height and tilt because the two topographies were not parallel sheets, but differently irregular. (Godfrey, 2007: 244)
The rational, geometrical process of designing the space invites unexpected, geometrically violent results for the moving visitor when the pillars suddenly lurch and lean at different angles while the ground tilts and undulates. Noticeable, at the same time, is the arresting regularity of the grids (both below and above) and uniformity of navigational options left to visitors.
The persuasiveness of the memorial does not rely exclusively on how its materiality appears to the public. Rather, its operation is contingent on the spatial movement of the visitor’s body through the field; the qualities of the site emerge in motion. The walk within the seemingly regular and structured space is likely to make the visitor conscious of the ostensibly random nature of the navigation as well as reveals a superficial standardization of the directional choices offered to the visitor. From every recurrently encountered crossroads, one can move forward, backward, turn to the right or to the left—the choice is always the same (yet also always new!) and the decision must always be taken by the visitor. It seems that the steering through the field is rather predictable and easy, but after taking the first choices regarding the navigation within the memorial, the visitor may become disoriented while the lack of a more general spatial perspective turns the walk through the field into a discomforting and unsettling experience.
Although apparently monotonous and repetitive in its organization, the field is not homogeneous. As Godfrey (2007) notices, “arranged on the grid the pillars differ in height and while most of the pillars rise up perpendicular to the ground, some lurch at unexpected angles, tipping into the corridors or away” (p. 241). And he further clarifies that when facing east or west, the corridor’s ground seems to be constant and the space oppressive; when facing south or north, there is more of a sense of disturbance because the ground undulates (Godfrey, 2007: 241). The irregular undulations of the soil turn the explorations of the field into a physical activity strikingly more demanding than a regular walk. Different trajectories, dictated by visitors’ decisions, involve varied undulations, sometimes more and sometimes less regular. The bodily sensation of interacting with such a wavy ground can be unsettling and disquieting—there is a lot of physical fickleness and volatility in this seemingly ordered and systematic architectural space. It suggests that this hyperrational, geometrical designing procedure generates surprising and discomforting material results.
Even though the massive materiality of the site is itself physically overwhelming (which is synesthetically sensed while moving through the field); in fact, the space operates through an intra-action of the material and the semiotic. At the moment of entering the memorial, visitors’ bodies rise high above gray stony blocks but while continuing explorations of the space, the pillars become higher and tower the bodies of those visiting to the point that they may feel completely immersed in the stony environment; at that time, they are no longer able to see anything that surrounds the memorial. Consequently, while finding themselves in the center of a very busy town, visitors are at the same time completely removed from it, which is achieved by means of oppressive and irresistible physicality of the space. The transition from the point when a visitor sees everything around the memorial site to the point when nothing can be discerned is amazingly immediate. On one hand, this stunning effect is achieved by an architectural organization of the materiality of the space, that is, by lowering the level of the ground and simultaneous heightening of the pillars. This move of perspective, or the removal of the visitor’s body from the urban space, is strikingly unexpected. The shift is likely to be sensed bodily. On the other hand, when the memorial space and the body of the visitor enter into a physical relation, they form a field of emergence for the meanings that the memorial conveys. The spatial organization of the site works as a material-semiotic agent where certain interpretations are both produced and sustained materially, yet also the nature of this materiality itself emerges out of these interpretations.
The site seems to work in terms of vibrant, intensive intra-actions involving the physicality of the memorial space as well as that of the visitor’s body, which dash with and perform together to produce a material-semiotic event or a singularity. The logic of operation of this space relies on the process of immersion of the visitor in the stony, repelling landscape of the field of concrete pillars. This produces affects, made of a series of visual, acoustic, olfactory, and haptic micro-collisions that incessantly feed and inform each other. When vision encounters the gray and shiny surface of the stellae, it is immediately informed by touch and the bodily memory of how textures feel—sleek and chilly memorial walls become repellently unfriendly and alienating, ferociously cutting off the visitor from the familiar urban surroundings. These meanings emerge in an amalgam of visuo-tactile assemblages in which the materiality of the space and the cultural meanings ascribed to its physical qualities jointly produce entangled sensations and emotions.
The site operates also through its acoustics. Dulled sounds generated by the visitor’s steps taken within the space reverberate from the stony walls and physically reenter the visitor’s body in a form of sonic waves, causing other vibrating movements. Both the materiality of the space and the visitor’s body are constantly micro-bombarded with sounds born out of their physical and dynamic encounter, remaining in constant movement and transformation. A feeling of a dramatic solitude that the overwhelming material organization of the memorial is likely to evoke is further complicated by anxious sonic vibrations, jointly produced and received by the assemblage of bodies, and leaving almost imperceptible, yet memorable, traces on the materialities involved in the process. The experience of the stony landscape is also co-created by the meeting of volatile chemical compounds of the site (i.e. its odor molecules) with the visitor’s nostrils. Logically, the sensation of stony smell is born out of this series of productive micro-collisions. The smell, as sensed, exists only in the encounter. Its onto-epistemology is analogous to that of other senses; it should be conceived as an intra-activity or an assemblage, a dynamic performance of molecules that emerges in contact with the sensorial apparatus. The culturally motivated meanings of the dry smell both emerge out of these collisions, yet at the same time shape this very sensation; the materiality and the idea coexist in sensation. Here again, the material and the semiotic co-constitute each other. These various effects of the terrain generated in its encounter with visitors’ bodies produce and sustain disconcerting memorial character of the site.
The Garden of Exile
The artistic space of the Garden of Exile is a part of the Jewish Museum in Berlin designed by Libeskind and acclaimed as a manifestation of deconstructivist architecture. The whole site has been approached as an “embodiment of absence” (Libeskind, 2000: 28), “a critique of the historiographical apparatus” (Stead, 2000), an “antiredemptive” memorial (Young, 2000: 154) offering participation in “a traumatic affect” and “distinctly material experience of trauma” (Heckner, 2008: 63–65). The Garden itself consists of a set of pillars, planted on a regular grid. The columns, filled with soil, support olive trees growing on top of them and physically unreachable for visitors. Their branches seem to offer a garden-like snug shadow to sightseers and create an ambiance of coziness, but the whole space—as seen from a distance—looks wildly crooked and strikingly disturbing. Surprisingly, the columns are not diagonal but are placed at a 90° angle to the ground. The ground itself is tilted in two angles which produces a weird effect of contortion, so physically discomforting. This can only be sensed upon entering the memorial space. Once in the Garden, the visitors feel that the ground violently bends; they also notice that it is composed of varying sizes of stones, which makes walking through the memorial space uncomfortably demanding. Steps are taken unsteadily; the march becomes uncertain; the perspective gets shaky. If humid, the ground becomes slippery and the moving through the memorial might turn even more arduous. The materiality of water or moisture affects the materiality of the ground and the materiality of the visitors’ walking. Every time the foot clashes with the irregular surface of the ground, walkers may become less certain of their physical steadiness.
Such a material organization of the space obviously prevents any sustained degree of comfort and stability for the visitors as they slowly move through The Garden and meander among the pillars. The semiotic qualities of the memorial emerge out of the physical contact of the visitor’s body and the architectural space. The fact that it is difficult to hold balance in the Garden of Exile stimulates the feeling of precariousness that might facilitate realization of vulnerability of life. Hence, the character of the site is generated through the corporeal experience, the enfleshed sensation of its materiality, and how it acts on visitors’ bodies. At the same time, however, the materiality of this space is constituted culturally, through meaning-making structures and symbolic connotations. As such, operation of this memorial can serve as an illustrative instance of how matter and meaning are entangled. As Barad (2014) writes, “[m]eaning is not an ideality; meaning is material. And matter isn’t what exists separately from meaning. Mattering is a matter of what comes to matter and what doesn’t” (p. 175). Certainly, the sensorial material-semiotic apparatus is an inseparable element of the whole multifaceted encounter of the visitor and the memorial space.
The complex intra-action of the visitor’s body and the unfamiliar terrain of the Garden of Exile invites displacing sensations, so different from what gardens usually offer. It seems that nothing is as it should be here: the ground does not provide any stability, the shadow of the unreachable trees is discomforting, the perspective nauseates, and the walk through the space is exhausting. The unexpected, physical effects of the place could translate into visitors’ uncertainty, disrupting any sense of their well-being as well as depriving them of the feeling of secure predictability and comfort. The encounter with the memorial seems to be fraught with alienation and insecurity. Again, the seemingly regular and systematic physical organization of the space produces disturbing effects, forcing a more proprioceptive response to the disruptive nature of this material-semiotic encounter.
The materials used for the erection of the memorial sustain the culturally constructed meanings of unfriendliness and isolation; the bodily solitude triggers production of the feelings of alienation and despair. These sensations are connected to, or even generated in, a set of physical inter-/intra-actions of bodies. Here, collisions involve visitors’ bodies, the pillars separating visitors from the familiar surrounding as well as visitors’ encounters with the astonishing geometry of the site, whose pebbled ground unexpectedly tilts. They, however, also involve the cultural meanings ascribed to (and sustained with) the materials used in the construction of the place, the spatial organization of site, the assemblages of sensory impulses, the physical movement of the body through the site, and the discomfort this navigation possibly incites. Hence, the memorial character of the place emerges out of a number of relationalities and bodily transactions and it is itself a relation consisting of a multiplicity of micro-collisions or micro-perceptions involved in the event of the encounter. Therefore, the knowledge that visitors bring with them to the site (including the meaning-making structures, the previous bodily encounters, the sensory memory, the knowledge of the Shoah, their more immediate national, ethnic, or racial contexts, etc.) actively participates in the process of generating the memorial event. These experiences are never identical or even similar to each other. The composition of the material-semiotic elements is always vibrantly moving and undergoing constant metamorphoses as bodies are different and incessantly experience new collisions. The process of generating the memorial character of the space is therefore a matter of both con-sensus and a matter of singularity—a procedure which is both social/collective and singular/always different.
The mattering of matter
The two artistic memorials can be considered, in Rauterberg’s (2005) words, “performance landscapes,” which in a way deny the purely representational logic. Importantly, the new materialist approach applied in my analysis lets us engage more deeply with the “how” question of their performance as well as it helps us realize the entangled, material-semiotic nature of memory itself. Relying on the minimalist abstraction rather than figurative design, intentionally ambiguous and inviting a singular bodily-intellectual response, these memorials testify to the indeterminacy of the ways the Holocaust is remembered (in Germany). The memorial character of these sites is always emergent and contingent on the complex dynamic material-semiotic assemblages of different bodies—mutually co-constitutive and imbricated in one another. By weaving together the representable (narrative/symbolic) and unrepresentable (traumatic/bodily), the sites produce intensive events that are never fixed or unwavering. Their spatial/material configuration reinforces the “content” without resorting to literal, figurative representations or explanations of the experience. Instead of clear symbols and meanings, they offer sensations, generated conjointly in intra-actions of visitors’ bodies and the materialities of the memorials. As such, the memorial operation of the sites only exists in the encounter. Relation, or a series of collisions, is its onto-epistemology. This brings to mind the words of Borges, so relevant for the new materialist account of (memorial) art: poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading. (Quoted in Thurell, 1989: 82)
Various composite types of sensuous intra-actions are all different forms of touching as they rely on physical contact (past, present, or future), materially-semiotically shaped. Such an approach to the operation of art returns therefore to the original meaning of the term aisthetos denoting “perceptible to the senses,” “sensitive,” or “sentient.” Accordingly, aesthetics is about materiality and tactility as well as about dynamism and transformation—never a stasis, always a movement. Approaching memorials from a new materialist perspective lets us grasp “[h]ow the form of content (the material condition of the artwork) and the form of expression (the sensations as they come about) are being produced in one another” (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin, 2012: 90).
The work of (memorial) art—a conclusion
If, following Bolt’s (2014) distinction, we approach artistic memorials in terms of “productivity” rather than “production,” we will be able to focus on what they do and not on what they are (p. 29). Whereas “artwork can be defined as production … [the] work of art … is the movement … that arises in and through the vehicle of art and the artworks.” As Bolt further explains, “The work that art does is its performative quality. … This can relate … to the effects that the artwork may generate in the world” (Bolt, 2014: 30). The close examination of the culturo-materiality of an artistic object as well as of how it intra-acts with the culturo-materiality of the visitor exposes both the agency and the constant (often imperceptible) transformation of matter as well as its generative potentials. Such a perspective underlines assemblage-like connectivity of the bodies (rather than their separateness) as well as their constant dynamic movement (rather than stasis).
The work of these artistic memorial spaces is about a synesthetic production of new knowledges, new qualities, and new subjectivities emerging from the creative intra-actions. This newness, or singularity, is generated without resorting to solely representational means. Contingent on always unstable assemblages, the effects of the encounters with the memorials bear potentials for disturbing, subverting, or transcending the well-established institutionalized frameworks for cultural remembrance, opening them to more singular negotiations as well as exposing numerous vulnerabilities and susceptibilities of mnemonic processes. This is especially salient in the context of remembering the trauma of the Holocaust in Germany, taking into consideration the discourses and political prescriptions that have translated into the counter-monumental memorial aesthetics. In such an account, the knowledge is not given to visitors but it rather arises from the plentitude of material-semiotic micro-encounters or collisions. This resonates with the precarious and fragile nature of (traumatic) memory, that is, the complex, dynamic assemblage of meanings and affects, or bodily-intellectual experiences. And assemblages, as Grosz (1994) underlines, “are essentially in movement”; “[t]hey are the consequences of a practice” (pp. 167–168).
The physicality of the encounter with the memorial space as well as its jointly generated material-semiotic qualities engraves invisible (sometimes unrepresentable) micro-traces on the bodies involved in the process. This encounter is what might trigger production of critical thought. As Barrett (2014) underlines, “[p]raxical knowledge is not a priori, there to be discovered, but is knowledge as action or ‘knowing’ that emerges from both thought and biological or sensory interaction or … from aesthetic experience” (p. 5). “Knowing through action … is tacit, intuitive, sensuous, and personal,” 5 it is therefore about the knowledge that we become. As such, this knowledge is always partial, always plural, and always different.
Thusly conceptualized, the new materialist approach to these generative encounters allows us to grasp the ways in which artistic memorials operate. In these cases, the “reading” of their organization and symbolic meanings is simply not enough. Instead, we need to focus on the aesthetic aspects of these spaces, that is, on those qualities that actually emerge in the direct, bodily contact. The aesthetic is not a matter of representation, but of a material-semiotic collision, often including unreadable and unrepresentable dimensions, yet still present and still active. Accordingly, the memorial is not merely a physical space functioning solely within the representational structures of meaning. Rather, it is an agent whose qualities emerge out of the encounter.
Coda
“Beings do not pre-exist their relatings” (Haraway, 2003: 6). The bodies emerge from material-semiotic collisions with other bodies, or from events in which they incessantly and actively participate. They are, as Grosz (1994) explains, “series of flows, energies, movements, strata, segments, organs, intensities—fragments capable of being linked together or severed in potentially infinite ways others than those which congeal them into identities” (p. 167). These tactile (micro)encounters produce effects. What emerges out of the collisions is both their final product and a new point of departure, a potentiality of new becomings, and a prospect of new collisions. There is a lot of materiality in our becoming with the world, the becoming of the world as well as in our becoming-other. And there is a lot of tactility in the encounters in which we participate: they move us, they touch us, they impress us.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on a previous version of the manuscript. My warm thanks go to my colleagues and friends Dr Aleksandra Różalska and Dr Marek M. Wojtaszek, for always being my critical readers and discussants.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Science Centre (Poland) (grant number 2012/05/B/HS2/04032).