S0618 Post-history, Memory and Visual Narrative

The course starts with Walter Benjamin\'s critique to historicism, and his argumentation that history is written in a deferred time, in a dynamic of anticipating the future by reconstructing the past. Following this line of thought, the first series of sessions will show how critical materialist history has focused on the analysis of the systems of production, distribution and consumption of images to reflect on the relation between the visual and the real, the visual and the historical. In words of photographer Allan Sekula this reflection involves asking questions like the following: \"How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? (...) How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted, and obliterated by photographs? What futures are promised, what futures are forgotten?\" (1999: 182).\r\n

Later on the course will focus on discussing the concept of post-history, which includes a debate on seeing history as a discourse, as a practice of emplotment. Focusing in the relation between form and meaning in historical discourse, White (1999) reflects on how history, cinema, TV, and literature construct historical events. White defends the use of literary and filmic experimental forms to represent the complexity of modernist events. The modernist event has no closure, it incorporates fragmented and non-linear temporalities, and requires of narrative strategies that can represent what can not be brought to meaning or representation.

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In The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Walter Benjamin (1936,1999) already foresaw the possibilities of filmic and photographic apparatuses \"to reveal new structural formations of the subject\", their dependence on a time structure (e.g. the speed of the shot or the number of frames per second) revealed photography and cinema as a new extension of our understanding and representation of the world, introducing ourselves to \"unconsciouss optics\", to see the invisible in our everyday lives and common worlds (p. 78). Following the idea of intersecting film and history, we will discuss how cinematic discourses have changed the practices of reading/writing history, and how a history that is filmically written modifies our understanding of modernity and our understanding of ourselves. In this discussion we will pay special attention to Godard\'s project Histoire(s) du cinema.

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For historians like LaCapra a catastrophic history like modern history, requires of a self-reflective practice, and a new inclusion of fields of study, which are strange to most historians; opening a dialog between cultural history, psychoanalysis and critical history. Studying representations of the Holocaust, Lacapra uses psychoanalytical concepts like transference, acting-out, or working-through to explore how witnesses and witnesses of witnesses build critical distance and become ethical and political agents, which involve moving from victim to survivor, making the past reappear in the present status quo, etc. For Agamben (2000), this ethical act is neither identified with the commemorative monument, nor with the proliferation of explanations and documentation that try to give a closure to the event. It rather consists on writing/staging the impossibility of making sense of what happened, situating the undecidable problem of memory in the space of address inhabited by the listener/reader/viewer (Felman & Laub, 1992). Even though the mass media repeat day after day the images of different catastrophes occurring in real time all over the world, there is no time in the media to represent the living and the experience of those events, because a traumatic experience has a different time, and cannot fit in the time of hegemonic visual narratives. Focusing in the representation of the Holocaust and its memory we will discuss films like Night and Fog (Resnais, 1956) and Shoah (Lanzman, 1985) that confronted and narrated the assassination of the witness and the impossibility of testimony.

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The course will end exploring the problematic connections between memory and biography. Because biography is always written in the deferred time of memory it might become a mystified fiction of the self. Focusing in poststructuralist and postcolonial examples of autobiographies, the relation between experience, and subject constitution will be discussed. According to Scott (1991), the subject does not precede the experience, on the contrary it is in the narration of experience, in its transformation into something to be explained, in something to be known, that subjects are constituted. Even though an autobiography does not provide the reader with an objective understanding of the relation between the author, the text, and the historical and cultural processes, it can highlight the trouble to narrate a subjectivity that is located in multiple positions and cultural texts, with the aim to look for identification for social and political purposes.

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Goals
To define the concept of post-history through its theoretical lineages with poststructuralism and psychoanalysis.
To study and imagine alternative representations of modernity based in the visual narrations of \"the traumatic event\".
To construct intertextualities and intergraphicalities between art, literature, life and history that allow the inscription of memory and autobiography in history through the exploration of dialogic and discursive (visual) narrative styles.

\r\nMethodology
Lectures based on bibliography will be combined with seminar classes, which will include: Analysis of cases (films, collections of images, graphic novels, CD-ROM), and student\'s presentations.