Schneider 2011
Notes on Schneider (2011) Performing Remains.pdf.
Argues for gesture repeated and reenacted through time as a record and evidence of its own repeating existence, and bodies as sites for located spatiotemporal memory. Needs further, detailed unpacking for its possibilities in philosophy, but is very promising as a keystone for branching out an analysis of gesture and memory.
events, like wars, are never discretely completed, but carry forth in embodied cycles of memory that do not delimit the remembered to the past. For many history
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July’s epigraph tells us that reenacting “straight things” – common things that at first pass as natural or accidental – becomes reenactment when recognized as composed in code, as always already a matter of reiteration. July reminds us that
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witnessed by those of us in bleachers at the National Military Park. The past, replayed, was not necessarily given to be seen. Rather, it was given to be experienced, or “felt,” by those who reenacted. Our witnessing was a kind of attention
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That is, our witnessing was laced with a belatedness that felt strangely true to the efforts. We were witness, in this instance, to belatedness and a lack of clear images
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precede the present. And yet, the quote might also suggest that it is the very pastness of the past that is never complete, never completely finished, but incomplete: cast into the future as a matter for ritual negotiation and as yet undecided interpretive acts of reworking. In this way, events are given to be past, or to become past, by virtue
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inside the archive or out, times touch.
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Sedgwick, “the sense of touch makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity.”7 Reenactors who claim to experience a physical collapse, or
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touching time.”
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past in the present. 8 Alexander Cook agrees, erecting, as if unproblematic, the classic mind/body split to suggest reenactment’s “persistent tendency to privilege a visceral, emotional engagement with the past at the expense of a more analytical treatment.”9 By this account, touch (“visceral”), and affective engagement
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???
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atmosphere, some longer lasting. In other words, the transmission of affect, if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry and neurology of the subject. The “atmosphere” or the environment literally gets into the individual.14
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Ahmed, preferring the appellation emotion to affect, writes of emotion as sticky. A viscosity that does not sediment in a body as singular nor exist as completely contained, stickiness is a leaky, even fleshy descriptor suggestive of touch (and being
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that tend to sediment “identity” into solid-state positionalities. To be touched and to be moved indicates a level of libidinality in affective engagements in the social,
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surround.17 Indeed, jumpiness and stickiness are words that undo the step-by-step linearity of Enlightenment plots for autonomous, unfettered progress in an unimpeded forward march.
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“remain.” Time, engaged in time, is always a matter of crossing, or passing, or touching, and perhaps always (at least) double. In the two examples above (the
i don't know quite what exactly this means but I think I like it
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threat that it might disappear. 19 Such preservation is pitched toward a future in which the past might be engaged in a future present as a site of concern – recalling Benjamin’s famous aphoristic claim that “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear alive,” as irretrievably.”20 At reenactments, participants fight to “keep the past
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preserved? An action repeated again and again and again, however fractured or partial or incomplete, has a kind of staying power – persists through time – and even, in a sense, serves as a fleshy kind of “document” of its own recurrence.21
!!! RITUAL ACROSS TIME
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the living practices of indigenous peoples in North America and Australia. Such geopolitics played out as chronopolitics complicates the socially constructed site of “the past” as ever only temporal, as Johannes Fabian has argued. It is always also
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physical acts are a means for knowing, bodies are sites for transmission even if, simultaneously, they are also manipulants of error and forgetting. Bodies engaged
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If we have become somewhat comfortable with the notion of bodily memory (if not bodily history), and comfortable reading bodies engaged in ritual or repeated actions as carriers of collective memory, we are not entirely comfortable considering gestic acts (re)enacted live to be material trace, despite the material substance that is the body articulating the act. We do not say, in other words, that a gesture is a
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for the war’s affective imprint (not just its impression) on the social imaginary. This is perhaps because the words “document” and “evidence” and “record” are, by the repetitively assumed force of convention in cultures privileging literature over orature25 (or archive over repertoire, to use Diana Taylor’s words), habitually understood in distinction to the bodily, the messily, the “disappearing” live. That
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