To Think What We Have Done

04-23-2017

To Think What We Have Done

[caption id="attachment_18862" align="alignleft" width="300"] Stelae, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, Germany - By N0TABENE - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0[/caption] Alex Cocotas worries about the culture of Holocaust memorialization. He is particularly bothered by Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe that has become a tourist destination in Berlin. " Visitors arrive, take photos, take a little stroll, take some more photos and leave. Popular poses include: wedged body in between stelae; stacked bodies wedged in between stelae; solitary subject sitting on a stele, back to the camera, looking out on the monument—all those murdered Jews, so sad—in stilted reflection; the album cover, for groups of four to six, one on each stele, arms and expressions spread wide, intimating a moment of spontaneous excitement, photographed seven times. According to the Israeli sociologist Irit Dekel, who had studied the memorial, many visitors don’t even know they are at a Holocaust memorial, which is believable. It is, for them, an Event, spreading from Instagram to Instagram, an item on the itinerary, somewhere between currywurst and the East Side Gallery, tethered to intention by a geotag." Cocotas is not only worried by the commercialization of the Holocaust, however. He also argues that Holocaust memorials today are misdirected in their focus on the victims instead of the perpetrators.

"In fostering identification with the victim, Holocaust memorials and exhibitions also foster identification with victimhood. This is particularly true in Germany, which has used identification with victimhood as a unifying principle for confronting its history, not only for the Holocaust but for all victims of war and tyranny. This approach, however, entails serious risks and unforeseen ramifications, especially in our current environment. It is all too easy to become a victim. Not only how we commonly understand the word, someone who is a victim of crime, discrimination, state violence, and so forth; that is, as a victim of history, incident, and acute societal circumstance, entailing a relatively clear demarcation of perpetrator and victim, a relatively clear apportionment of culpability. This is the victimhood we associate with minorities, those who are most vulnerable to its threat. But many others, whole communities, sometimes whole countries, are falling victim to intangible economic forces, no less calamitous, that are so swift and severe they would have once required theological exegesis; the human reality behind unhelpful terms like outsourcing, austerity, shock therapy, systemic risk, secular stagnation, financialization; unfathomable suffering caused by circumstances beyond the narrow realm of personal efficacy, what formally marks out those affected as victims. The problem is that very few people can cogently explain exactly who or what, in our absurdly complex economic system, is to blame for their misfortune, and even if the metonyms we use—“Wall Street,” “elites,” “Brussels”—are broadly correct, it is rather difficult to be mad at a metonym; the rage can easily drift or be directed onto less-savory targets, turning victims into perpetrators. The dangers of the prevailing approach to popular Holocaust education and memorialization is exemplified in the way we speak about victims. Victimhood is now a hereditary attribute. Descendants of Holocaust survivors often identify themselves as such or are identified as such in the press, as though this confers extra moral weight to their statements, reveals some inherent and inherited virtue of character. I recently read an article that went out of its way to identify its subject as the great-grandchild of Holocaust survivors. This widespread practice points to a broader truth: A victim can never be anything but a victim. This is why some in Poland—among the worst victims of WWII, a tragedy amplified by the world’s general ignorance of its scale—have a difficult relationship with the work of Jan Gross, whose book, Neighbors, documents an appalling, unprovoked massacre of Polish Jews by their, yes, neighbors. Or why some in the Jewish community seem incapable of understanding that Jews can inflict harm on others. A victim is cognitively incapable of being, or becoming, a perpetrator. When everyone is a victim, no one is a perpetrator. “What victims have in common is a lack of responsibility for their fate,” the historian Brian Ladd writes in The Ghosts of Berlin. When the most notorious crime of recent history becomes a prism to primarily identify with its victims, when its collective memory is staked on victimhood, it subtly inculcates the idea that we are passive observers of history; that our actions are fundamentally ineffectual; and, ultimately, it obscures the perpetrators. It is easy to imagine yourself powerless; it is much more difficult and not a bit disquieting to imagine why “ordinary men,” not all rabid anti-Semites, volunteer to shoot thousands of Jews in the head from close range. The purpose of Holocaust education is to imagine yourself the perpetrator, not the victim, lest the culprits become a perversely comforting parable of pure evil, detached from history and humanity, closed to our comprehension; and the Holocaust a mere tragedy, a fatal inevitability."

Cocotas is not against Holocaust memorials. In fact, he celebrates a different kind of memorial to the Jews of the Holocaust, the Stolpersteine, those brass bricks inserted throughout the streets of Europe in front of houses where Jewish victims of the Holocaust once lived. Began by the German artist Gunter Demnig, there are now more than 50,000 "stumbling stones" across Europe. Cocotas writes:

"Every time I pass a Stolperstein—sometimes one, sometimes a family of two, three, or four—I stop and linger on the sparse information, the immensity of the lives that lay behind a handful of letters and numbers. Which apartment did they live in? How long had they lived here? And did Alfred Rosenberg whistle a tune every night (the same tune, perhaps) as he fumbled for his keys, anticipating the comforts of home? I have often seen others do the same, suddenly seize up from a meandering pace and hover over a plaque, momentarily dissipate into involuntary confabulation. And this is the true power of these brass cobblestones: They force you to think. Not just the production of a superficial thought—wow, dead Jews—but a basic philosophical definition of intellectual thought: to experience that sparse information from another’s perspective."

Hannah Arendt understood her lifelong effort to be "To think what we are doing." In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, she twice describes her aim to comprehend the novelty and horror of totalitarian government, by which she means the attentive and unpremeditated facing up to, and resisting, of reality, whatever it may be. Towards that end, she sought to understand both the victims of totalitarianism, and those who carried it out. Which is why she read, and cited, texts by antisemites and by Stalinists. To think what had happened meant facing up to the reality of totalitarian and racist thinking. When Arendt came to write about Adolf Eichmann, she again sought to understand those who carried out the Holocaust, an effort for which she was, again, roundly criticized. Her argument, that Eichmann was thoughtless, that he never stopped and thought from the perspective of those whom he was sending to their deaths, suggested, as she later speculated, that thinking may be the one activity that could prevent the doing of evil in modern mass societies. Cocotas may be too critical of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a memorial I have always found deeply provoking. But Cocotas is right to insist that we judge memorials not simply on their celebration of victims. Public memorials can and should do more, they should make us think about what happened and why. —Roger Berkowitz

Form more information visit: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/230085/memorials-yom-hashoah

Charging Girl

[caption id="attachment_18864" align="alignright" width="196"] By Source (WP:NFCC#4), CC BY-SA 4.0[/caption] Greg Fallis has an exciting discussion of the controversy surrounding the Fearless Girl statute facing down the bull on Wall Street. His effort to understand and evaluate the opposition to the statute by Arturo Di Modica, the sculptor of Charging Bull, is thoughtful and well worth considering. But so too is his preliminary argument, that even if one disagrees with Modica and wants Fearless Girl to stay, Modica's argument is meaningful and worthy of respect.

"I got metaphorically spanked a couple of days ago. Folks have been talking about the Fearless Girl statue ever since it was dropped in Manhattan’s Financial District some five weeks ago. I have occasionally added a comment or two to some of the online discussions about the statue. Recently most of the Fearless Girl discussions have focused on the complaints by Arturo Di Modica, the sculptor who created Charging Bull. He wants Fearless Girl removed, and that boy is taking a metric ton of shit for saying that. Here’s what I said that got me spanked: The guy has a point. This happened in maybe three different discussions over the last week or so. In each case I explained briefly why I believe Di Modica has a point (and I’ll explain it again in a bit), and for the most part folks either accepted my comments or ignored them. Which is pretty common for online discussions. But in one discussion my comment sparked this: Men who don’t like women taking up space are exactly why we need the Fearless Girl. Which — and this doesn’t need to be said, but I’m okay with saying the obvious — is a perfectly valid response. It’s also one I agree with. As far as that goes, it’s one NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio agrees with, since he said it first (although, to be fair, probably one of his public relations people first said it first). But here’s the thing: you can completely agree with the woman who responded to my comment AND you can still acknowledge that Arturo Di Modica has a point. Those aren’t mutually exclusive or contradictory points of view."

Form more information visit: https://gregfallis.com/2017/04/14/seriously-the-guy-has-a-point/

Hearing Together, Listening Apart

Eric Harvey considers the way that the iPhone has changed personal listening habits, which in turn is transforming how we understand what it means to be alone:

"Privacy can be defined in many ways — as a moral concept, a state of being structured by varying notions of “public,” or a legal claim for the self or property — but in all these forms, it manifests itself through the material practices of everyday experience, like listening to music. However defined, the idea of privacy has also always reciprocally structured the experience of listening. A primary “phonograph effect” (to use Mark Katz’s coinage for the ways recording has shaped the impact of sound on our lives) is to constantly shift the idea of the sanctity of domestic space, the possibilities for public social communion, and the sense of what is pleasurable and morally acceptable with respect to sound recordings. New means of playing and circulating recorded music have always modulated our understanding of publicity and privacy, whether we’re spinning a record at home, tuning in a radio broadcast, or downloading mp3 files through a peer-to-peer network. Listening, purchasing, collecting, downloading, streaming and sharing all entail opting into a vaster sociotechnical system and forging connections to others engaging in the same activity, whether through co-presence or via the metaphysics of imagination. As digital-music commerce is now being re-routed from the chaotic global swap meet of mp3 files to neatly tiered and deeply curated streaming services that collect vast amounts of personal data about their users, a new scenario of networked listening has emerged, changing the publics we might imagine and the privacy we might seek in what we hear."

Form more information visit: http://reallifemag.com/networked-listening/