Alissa Boguslaw
The New School for Social Research
Graduate Student, Department of Sociology
MA, Sociology; The New School for Social Research (2010)
B.A. summa cum laude; Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature; The University of Minnesota (2003)
Research Interests: collective memory and identity; politics of space; diaspora; 20th century Balkan Jewry; critical theory
Images of Inheritance: Spectacle, Witnessing, and ‘Posts’ of Memory
This essay examines the relationships among collective and public Holocaust memory, and the productions and performances of such memory in our current, globalizing milieu. More specifically, such memory is filtered through lenses of what I would call ‘retro-spectatorship,’ and the experience of postmemorial and prosthetic witnessing occurs in the presence of absence. Always negotiating this experience is the interplay of witnessing and the filial pangs of collective memory. It is through this lens, this sort of spectacular frame, that we read Holocaust photographs—the “icons of destruction”— as objects of memory and historical testimony. Such imagery—generated by the repeated images—constitutes a specific lieu de mémoire. Both seeable and knowable, this space blurs the lines between collective and public, between witness and spectator. What mediates this space of memory—that is, what enables us to negotiate what we see and what we know, what allows us to testify before the past about the past, and what authenticates the events that happened before—is the very “media” which construct it. In other words, media is the medium through which we witness, or as Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski call it, “media witnessing.”
Media witnessing, I argue, is marked by the transformative power of reproduction (pace Benjamin), enabling the dissemination—the spreading and spilling the seeds of memory. As the accessibility and nearness of memory sites continually enter, exit, and cross publics, a memorializing reality is created. Different memory projects and exhibitions are the very media in which we perceive—witness—and testify to this reality. A space of absence, a simulacrum—wherein an already mediated space becomes a space of already-mediated, inherited memory. Of memory’s memory. Yet photographic inventory, online archives, television reportage, and film—reach across a multiplicity of borders. This sort of media witnessing involves more than the repeated shocks of looking, the interplay between seeing and knowing, visibility and virtuality—but the absence of presence is simultaneously disseminated through the experience of prosthetically witnessing; and all that is present within this absence comes to light. Media witnessing transforms spectatorship into witnessing, collectives into publics.