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Joel McKim
Abstract
Construction has recently begun on Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s
‘Reflecting Absence’ 9/11 memorial in New York. The design, with its
emphasis on traumatic absences and silent contemplation, has moved from
selection to construction with relatively little public debate, an indication of
a problematic creative and critical consensus forming around contemporary
memorial aesthetics. The article seeks to re-open this critical discussion by
turning to the philosophy of aesthetics, poetics and language developed by
Giorgio Agamben. Agamben reminds us of the classical Greek association of
art to poiesis, a passive act of bringing into being, rather than praxis, the
active expression of the artist’s creative will. Taking this distinction as his
starting point, Agamben develops a theory of aesthetics that is neither a
modernist embrace of nihilism nor a conservative call for a return to the
classical pursuit of universal truths. Agamben posits instead an art concerned
not with the transmission of any particular content, but with the task of
transmission itself. For Agamben it is the potentiality of the event of
language, a kind of pure communicability, that is the ground for our
common belonging in the world. Agamben’s theories of poetics and
language may help us imagine a Ground Zero memorial that moves beyond
a strictly didactic or therapeutic role and seeks instead to bring into being
a radical space of communication.
Key words
■ 9/11 ■ aesthetics ■ Agamben ■ architecture ■ memorialization ■ poiesis
O
N 19 NOVEMBER 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development
Committee (LMDC) announced the selection of eight finalists for the
competition to design the memorial at Ground Zero (an open compe-
tition yielded 5201 entries from 63 nations). In comparison to the
■ Theory, Culture & Society 2008 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 25(5): 83–103
DOI: 10.1177/0263276408095217
. . . it is art itself that educates, because it teaches of the power of the infinity
held within the tormented cohesion of a form. Art delivers us from the
subjective barrenness of the concept. Art is the absolute as subject – it is
incarnation. (2005: 3)
German hermeneutics, with Heidegger being its chief proponent, is, Badiou
claims, the 20th-century’s representative of the romantic tradition. The priv-
ileged relationship between art and the unveiling of truth is certainly in
evidence in Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1977), where
Heidegger presents art as the opening and preservation of a ‘world’, one in
which the unconcealment of truth may occur. He writes:
The truth that discloses itself in the work can never be proved or derived
from what went before . . . What art founds can therefore never be compen-
sated and made up for by what is already at hand and available. Founding is
an overflow, a bestowal. (1977: 200).
able to enter this ground while creating a quiet, meditative and spiritual
space.’ The decontextualized aesthetics of healing adopted by the propos-
als allows the Ground Zero memorial to sit comfortably beside such blatantly
patriotic symbols as the Freedom Tower. The Ground Zero memorial seems
destined to waver problematically between the performance of nationalistic
instruction and the public service of alleviating grief.
Art without Will
While the didactic and cathartic mix promised by the 9/11 memorial seems
less than satisfying, it is not from Badiou’s thought that we will find a more
convincing amalgam of the aesthetic and the political or the social. Badiou
remains sceptical of attempts to conjoin the fields of aesthetics and politics,
insisting that these dimensions, along with those of love and science,
produce distinct and immanent truths.1 Badiou suggests, for example, that
the avant-garde movements of the 20th century attempted to provide a
mediating schema that joined the didactic and the romantic, but that their
experiments in marrying art and politics ultimately failed to form lasting
alliances. He writes: ‘Just like the fascism of Marinetti and the Futurists,
the communism of Breton and the Surrealists remained merely allegorical’
(2005: 8).
But what of Badiou’s third, romantic schema of aesthetics, in which
art possesses a privileged relationship to truth? There seems to be little
suggestion in either Carroll’s general study of memorial aesthetics or in
specific references to the Ground Zero site that a memorial could or should
aid us in accessing an otherwise unavailable truth. It is here that we may
begin to consider what Agamben’s philosophy of aesthetics brings to this
discussion. Does Agamben offer any alternative to the prevailing assump-
tions about memorial aesthetics? Might his aesthetic theory suggest a new
memorial function that is neither didactic nor therapeutic? Does Agamben’s
thought fall within one of Badiou’s three schemata or does it instead offer a
fourth modality of art?
Beginning with Agamben’s most sustained reflection on the history of
aesthetics, The Man without Content (1999a), we immediately encounter a
significant complication to Badiou’s positing of a classical schema (which,
as we have noted, assigns art a therapeutic function and removes it from the
sphere of knowledge and truth). Agamben brings forward what he views as
a clear distinction in Greek thought between the concepts of praxis and
poiesis. The former signifies an action, a ‘to do’, motivated by the will, while
the latter, according to Agamben, is conceived as an ‘experience of pro-
duction into presence, from concealment into the full light of the work’
(1999a: 68–9). Far from excluding art from the realm of truth, Agamben
claims that the Greeks distinguished poiesis from praxis precisely through
its essential character as ‘a mode of truth understood as unveiling’ (1999a:
69). Agamben further distinguishes these two modes of production by
linking praxis to motion and therefore to man’s condition as living animal.
What is more, praxis is a movement whose end is contained within itself –
the desired effect or result is present from the beginning but not yet actu-
alized. When I begin to walk across the room to fetch a book, I already have
the wanted outcome in mind. The completion of the act is a fulfilment of
this predetermined desire. The essential characteristic of the work of art,
on the other hand, is that something passes from non-being into being, or,
as Aristotle writes: ‘every art is concerned with giving birth’ (Agamben,
1999a: 73). In the Greek conception, poiesis brings something into being
that is outside itself and also outside the sphere of man as living animal. It
is only in the work of art that universal truths emerge from singular forms.
According to Agamben, this intimate relationship to the unconcealment of
truths elevates poiesis above praxis in the Greek hierarchy of production.2
We can already see that Agamben’s account of classical aesthetics blurs
considerably the conceptual boundaries between Badiou’s classical and
romantic schemas. Agamben clearly establishes a strong line of relation
between classical conceptions of poiesis and Heidegger’s hermeneutic
perspective on art, which emphasizes art’s role as the unconcealment and
preservation of a truth. Absent so far in Agamben’s account are both the
didactic and cathartic conceptions of art discussed by Badiou.
Agamben further elaborates the particular spatial and temporal
workings of poiesis through a deliberation on the Greek concept of rhythm.
It is the dimension of rhythm, Agamben maintains, that opens a space for
the work of art’s particular unveiling of truth. He closely associates this
concept of rhythm to the Greek verbword, èpovǵ, meaning a kind of pause
or suspension. Rhythm introduces into the eternal flow of time and matter
a stop; it is an interruption in the otherwise endless flow of instants.3
Agamben describes the force of rhythm acting when we find ourselves before
a work of art and ‘we perceive a stop in time, as though we were suddenly
thrown into a more original time’ (1999a: 99). Through rhythm the mode of
temporality belonging to praxis, a linear one of causal action and reaction,
is put on hold. Agamben continues:
By opening to man his authentic temporal dimension, the work of art also
opens for him the space of his belonging to the world, only within which he
can take the original measure of his dwelling on earth and find again his
present truth in the unstoppable flow of linear time. (1999a: 101)
Man attains in the poetic act a suspension of the endless movement of time
that allows him to be a historical being (and not simply a living animal) for
whom the past and the future are at stake. Rhythm opens up the space of
the present for man to act and is thus not unlike the ‘now time’ put forward
by Walter Benjamin in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, which over-
comes empty, homogeneous time and succeeds in blasting the past ‘out of
the continuum of history’ (1999: 253).
Crucial for Agamben is that the truth process of rhythm and poiesis is
precisely not the expression of will, but is instead a power of production
into space that is a prerequisite of praxis; it opens a space that allows for
willed and free activity to occur. Poiesis thus entails a kind of passivity, a
giving oneself over to the original productivity of rhythm that requires a
suspension of will. Modern aesthetics, according to Agamben, forgets this
classical notion of poiesis and the centrality of creative will becomes a
virtually unquestioned assumption in contemporary notions of artistic
production. A large part of the task set forth in The Man without Content is
the interrogation of this assumption. Agamben suggests that modernity
produces a conception of art defined by a fundamental schism. The notion
of art as poiesis, the process of revealing a shared space of living for all
men, is dissolved in the divide between the creation and the reception of
the work of art, each side fostering its own breed of alienation. The modern
artist on one side of this split is characterized by his isolation and removal
from society, while on the other side the spectator is entirely alienated from
the creative act of production. The artist, driven by art’s ‘promesse de
bonheur’, enters into a harrowing encounter with his powers of creation –
his spiritual health and indeed his very life are dependent on the outcome.
For the disinterested spectator, incapable of creative genius, the work of art
is increasingly inoculated and removed from the sphere of life, becoming
simply an opportunity for the exercise of good taste. Agamben sees this split
reflected in Balzac’s tormented painter Frenhofer in the story ‘The Unknown
Masterpiece’. For Frenhofer, his painting is irreconcilably divided: ‘The side
that faces the artist is the living reality in which he reads his promise of
happiness; but the other side, which faces the spectator, is an assemblage
of lifeless elements that can only mirror itself in the aesthetic judgment’s
reflection of it’ (1999a: 11).
The fracture of modern art between the creative genius and the
detached spectator is reflected in the emergence of a different philosophy
for each side of the divide. On the side of the spectator, Kant’s aesthetic
theory of the beautiful as disinterested pleasure finds its distorted materi-
alization in the figure of the man of taste. And in reaction, Nietzsche, firmly
on the side of the artist, presents the production of art as the ultimate vital
human act. Agamben writes that: ‘Art is the name [Nietzsche] gives to the
essential trait of the will to power: the will that recognizes itself everywhere
in the world and feels every event as the fundamental trait of its character’,
and Nietzsche is thus able to say that ‘art is worth more than truth’
(Agamben, 1999a: 92). Agamben traces a lineage from Novalis through
Nietzsche and Marx that equates man’s essential being to the exercise of
this free, vital will expressed as pure creativity. As a consequence of this
freedom, the artist becomes superior to any content. ‘If the artist now seeks
his certainty in a particular content or faith’, writes Agamben, ‘he is lying,
because he knows that pure artistic subjectivity is the essence of everything’
(1999a: 54). The artist emerges in the incarnation of the man without content
who has no other identity than his own powers of creation, the infinite
transcendence of the artistic principle. Having freed himself from the
contingencies of the world, the content of which is unworthy of his focus,
the artist enacts the self-conscious process of reflecting on his own artistic
subjectivity. The museum, removed from the flow of life and time, emerges
as the only place where the alienation of artist and spectator is artificially
overcome. It is the site in which the aesthetic judgement of the man of taste
and the artistic subjectivity without content of the artist refer back and forth
to each other endlessly. The original time and space opened to man by poetic
rhythm, in which artist and spectator experience a common ground, have
been replaced by the nihilistic space of the museum.
. . . on the one hand, the wealth of the past, in which man can in no way
recognize himself, is accumulated to be offered to the aesthetic enjoyment of
the members of the community, and, on the other, this enjoyment is possible
only through the alienation that deprives it of its immediate meaning and of
its poietic capacity to open its space to man’s action and knowledge. (1999a:
110)
The recovery of the rhythm and opening of poiesis for modern man
is thus dependent on the relinquishing of its guarantee of truth in favour
of a recognition of the potential of pure transmissibility. It is here that
Agamben’s theory of aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) links to his overarch-
ing concerns with the pure communicability of language, apart from any
contents of communication.4 In his essay entitled ‘Tradition of the
Immemorial’, Agamben maintains that it is an openness to language itself,
apart from the preservation of any particular truth, that remains the
constant that runs through every specific ritual of memory. He writes: ‘The
tradition of transmissibility is therefore immemorially contained in every
specific tradition, and this immemorial legacy, this transmission of uncon-
cealment, constitutes human language as such’ (1999b: 105). It is this
immemorial foundation of all tradition, rather than any particular tradition,
that Agamben seeks to bring into thought. Again pursuing his interest in
the conditions of this pure transmissibility, in his essay entitled ‘The Idea
of Language’, Agamben considers the meaning of the word ‘revelation’ in
Christian and Jewish religious traditions. He finds that the theological
usage of the term ‘revelation’ always corresponds to an unveiling of not
only something we do not know, but the very possibility of knowledge in
general. This possibility of knowledge is the revelation of the ‘word of God’,
the presupposition of all being, but that which human reason cannot know
on its own. For Agamben, this mystery of the word of God is equivalent
to the concealment of language itself. He writes: ‘The meaning of revela-
tion is that humans can reveal beings through language but cannot reveal
language itself. In other words: humans see the world through language
but do not see language’ (1999b: 40). Language for Agamben is a source
of bringing into presence that which never fully reveals itself in the act of
creation. The pure potentiality of language is always in excess of the
particular speech and knowledge that it brings to light. As Agamben states:
‘The proper sense of revelation is therefore that all human speech and
knowledge has at its root and foundation an openness that infinitely tran-
scends it’ (1999b: 41). The task of philosophy, according to Agamben, is
to think the openness of language without recourse to the meta-language
posited by religion or to the nihilistic claim that Nothingness is the final
revelation. The universal truths sought by the Greeks are thus replaced by
What could be the politics of whatever singularity, that is, of a being whose
community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being
Italian, being Communist) nor by the simple absence of conditions (a negative
community, such as that recently proposed in France by Maurice Blanchot),
but by belonging itself? (1993a: 85)
any such terms. He writes: ‘What the state cannot tolerate in any way,
however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an
identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of
belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition)’ (1993a: 86).
Tiananmen was, then, a manifestation of belonging itself, a kind of passive
willing into existence of a community based on no other grounds than the
common humanity of being-in-language. Tiananmen returns politics to the
logic of the gesture, where what is communicated is not a particular some-
thing, but the fact of communicability.6 He states elsewhere:
Agamben’s moment of poiesis that would see the event not as a fixed moment
of history, but as the catalyst for the generation of a space of radical partici-
pation and exchange in the present. By enacting the magnitude of the event
it memorializes, the Ground Zero design actually suggests the impossibility
of language in response to such a disaster. The memorial fails to acknowl-
edge the potential of communication itself and as such misses an oppor-
tunity to create a space for the kind of open community Agamben insists is
both possible and necessary.
Agamben’s thought does not fall within the three saturated schemas of
art described by Badiou, but nor does it adopt Badiou’s strategy of severing
the connection between politics and aesthetics. For Agamben, the space of
communication made possible by art is inherently political, but it is
precisely this political potential that the majority of state-sponsored memo-
rials attempt to manage and codify. Agamben encourages us to re-evaluate
the aesthetic assumptions that present memorial sites as locations for either
initiating private healing processes or re-establishing national unity. The
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