new york transfixed: noteson the expression of fear york transfixed.pdf · downloaded by: [canadian...

Do

wn

loa

de

d B

y:

[Ca

na

dia

n R

ese

arc

h K

no

wle

dg

e N

etw

ork

] A

t: 1

6:1

8 1

6 J

un

e 2

00

8

New York Transfixed: Noteson the Expression of FearSharon Sliwinski

The question is: What is the genesis of spoken orpictorial expressions, by what feelings point of view,conscious or unconscious, are they preserved in the

archive of memory, and are there laws by which they areset down and force their way out again?

—Aby M. Warburg1

This article is about nine photo-graphs and what may be seen inthem (Figures 1–9). The imagesare part of a much larger collectionconceived of and organized by agroup of four friends—Alice RoseGeorge, Gilles Peress, MichaelShulan, and Charles Traub—shortly after 11 September 2001.Their idea was to document whathad happened and what was stilloccurring on the streets of NewYork City that infamous fall. Thegroup also decided that this make-shift project should be open to‘‘anybody and everybody’’ andthey sent out word as widely aspossible that any photograph sub-mitted on this topic would be dis-played in an exhibition atMichael Shulan’s SoHo gallery.2

Figure 1. Unknown photographer (#3029from here is New York: a democracy ofphotographs).

Figure 2. Unknown photographer (#5032from here is New York).

232

The Review of Education, Pedagogy,and Cultural Studies, 30:232–252, 2008Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10714410802142965

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

Images began pouring in. Overfive thousand photographs weresubmitted in all, taken by somethree thousand (mostly amateur)photographers. A small army ofvolunteers carefully scanned eachsubmission, reprinting the photo-graphs uniformly so they couldbe hung floor to ceiling in the gal-lery without names or frames,‘‘like laundry drying in the alley-ways of Naples.’’3 here is new york:a democracy of photographs eventu-ally opened on September 25,2001. By the second week therewas a long line at the door andthe crowds would continue formonths afterwards. All of theimages have been subsequentlyuploaded to a website, variousexhibitions have toured world-wide, and a massive book contain-ing nearly one thousand imageswas published by Scalo in 2002.

In terms of sheer quantity ofartefacts, here is new york may bethe largest archive in world his-tory devoted to a single event.The construction of the collectionas well as the nature of its specificcontents raise a number of ques-tions for the field of historiogra-phy, or what is sometimes calledhistorical memory. Here the formin which we remember events isthought to have a direct effect onpublic life. Indeed, the very pros-pect of justice may rely on suchconstructions and their associatedpractices of remembrance and for-getting. As Jacques Derrida bluntly

Figure 3. Doug Hamilton (#3240 fromhere is New York).

Figure 4. Jeff Jacobson (#2566 from hereis New York).

Figure 5. Gulnara Samoilova (#5119from here is New York).

New York Transfixed 233

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

declared: ‘‘There is no politicalpower without control of thearchive, if not memory. Effectivedemocratization can always bemeasured by this essential cri-terion: the participation in and theaccess to the archive, its consti-tution, and its interpretation.’’4 Inthis respect, here is new york: ademocracy of photographs lives upto its name, for each of Derrida’scriterion—participation in andaccess to the archive, its consti-tution and interpretation—haveindeed been organized under theprinciple of egalitarianism. Thefriends collected photographsfrom ‘‘anybody and everybody’’and the entire archive is accessibleto anyone with a computer andInternet access.

But the archivists neverthelessbear the authority of whatDerrida calls ‘‘consignation,’’which is assuming the right togather together the signs. That is,they bear the responsibility butalso the authority for putting thearchive together and for puttingit into an order. This authorityinvolves the reproduction of theoriginal documents (as physicalprints and digital files), as well asproviding access and controllingpublication rights, the arrange-ment of the images in the variousexhibition spaces, the editingand ordering of the pictures forthe book, the classification ofimages into fifty odd categorieson the website, and perhaps most

Figure 7. Paula Alya Scully (#1880from here is New York).


Figure 8. Rachel Shaw (#2944 from hereis New York).

234 S. Sliwinski

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

importantly, the initial choice ofwhat to collect, namely photo-graphs. There can be no doubt thateach of these decisions has aneffect on our interpretation of theevent known as 9=11. Or as Der-rida might say, each decisionleaves its own distinct impressionupon historical memory.

But political implications aside,Derrida proposes that we createand preserve archives becausethere is something in them thatdefies understanding but that wedesperately, indeed, feverishlywish to hold onto. These appara-tuses are usually constructed asan attempt to house memory thatwould otherwise be lost. Archivesappear, in other words, precisely at the point of breakdown inmemory; they are the remainders and reminders of the destructionof memory. At the heart of the archive, one could say, lies the prob-lem of trauma. As Sigmund Freud first noticed, trauma profoundlyaffects the very way in which we experience events.5 Its character isgenerally regarded as two-fold: trauma consists of the violent shat-tering of perceptual experience as well as the compulsive drive tocontain or master the incident afterwards. Traumatic stimulusbreaks into the psyche, so to speak, flooding the mind in such away that the shocking event cannot be immediately contained asan experience that occurred in a specific time and place. Some ofthe common effects of trauma can include hallucinations or trau-matic dreams in which the subject is returned to the scene of thetrauma. The individual finds him or herself back within a terrify-ingly literal reproduction of those moments in which they werehelpless. Using Derrida’s thesis, Herman Rapaport suggests thatarchives such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.D.C. can be read precisely within this enigmatic logic: as structuralforms that attempt to replicate or re-present the traumatic events insuch a way that the experience can be mastered retrospectively.6

With its special emphasis on photographic representation, here isnew york no doubt aspires to a similar goal. The archive houses



Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

visual reproductions, ‘‘imprints,’’ which presumably open thepossibility for an engagement with the historical event in such away that the experience can be registered, and indeed, workedthrough. After all, the archivists of the collection have constructeda complex technological apparatus (using computers, scanners,and printers) that is specifically designed to visually reproducethe horrific event through the continuous production and distri-bution of photographic facsimiles. In short, the here is new york col-lection is profoundly circumscribed by the dynamics of trauma.

While there is much to be said about this relationship betweenthe structure of the archive and the structure of trauma, I havenot yet come any closer to the nine photographs themselves, thosefragile paper inscriptions that appear to depict witnesses’ immedi-ate reactions to 9=11, indeed, which seem to show the traces of theevent right on the surface of their bodies.

These nine photographs can all be found in the category on thehere is new york website called ‘‘onlookers.’’ As I browsed throughthe tiny thumbnails one morning, I began to notice the repeatedgesture, what I came to think of as a state of being transfixed. In pic-ture after picture, this strange posture in which one or both handsare placed over an opened mouth or grasp some part of the headstarted appearing with an unnerving regularity. What made thediscovery particularly uncanny was not simply seeing this expres-sion repeated on the streets of New York on that clear Septembermorning, but also the fact of its recurring documentation. Whatwould possess so many people to turn their cameras away fromthe spectacle and to point them at spectators? The first part ofthis problem involves the mystery of the expression itself: Whatis the significance of this extraordinary shared gesture? How canwe interpret its genesis and how is it preserved in that other archivecalled the unconscious? And what can this particular expressiontell us about the nature of the event known as 9=11, what JeanBaudrillard called ‘‘the ‘mother’ of all events, the pure event unit-ing within itself all the events that have never taken place’’?7 Thesecond aspect of the problem involves the mystery of the recurringimage, the curious, or indeed, compulsive rendering of this parti-cular expression into another visual impression, namely, a photo-graph. Given the repeated appearance of such records in thearchive, perhaps the images should be read as a kind of sympto-matic sign or as an artistic motif. But what does it mean to foldthe psychology of human expression into a history of visual

236 S. Sliwinski

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

images? Or put another way, what is the nature of the relationshipbetween individual and collective memory, between expressionand impression?

My proposition is that these traces—both the bodily gestures andtheir photographic documentation—represent ‘‘visual testimony’’of the event known as 9=11. History is not only a narrative form thatis recorded some time after the events it seeks to represent. Historyis first written with the stylus of the body. This thesis immediatelyruns aground, however, because such emotive gestures are almostalways performed unconsciously. The history written with themedium of the body is expressed in a language that no one speaks,or, rather, in a language that few are aware they speak. We do,however, possess a fairly good translation machine, a device thatcan record this unconscious language and help render it intelligible.I am speaking, of course, of the camera and its photographic pro-ducts. The camera is itself caught up in the enigma of trauma forthis device helps reveal the astonishing and paradoxical fact thatour bodies receive traumatic stimulus in a time and form other tothat in which it may be perceived. These images register that whichcould not be seen at the time.8 This thesis follows directly fromShoshana Felman’s argument that trauma does not only involvethe enigma of a human agent’s unknowing acts but also the enigmaof historical transmission.9 Trauma has a strange way of calling othersto witness events that the agents involved cannot fully know.According to Felman, this bewildering aspect of trauma is trans-mitted principally through verbal testimony, a special kind ofspeech act composed of bits and pieces of experience that havenot yet settled into understanding. ‘‘To testify’’ is to vow to tellwhat one has experienced—even though the experience has notbeen fully assimilated into understanding. Felman suggests thatfar beyond its usual legal context, testimony has come to the forein the contemporary cultural narrative. In this article I try todecipher this discourse as it functions in the visual realm. In collec-tions like here is new york, the human experience of the event is notcommunicated verbally. Here the impact of the incident isexpressed through bodily action and relayed through the mediumof photography. In this case testimony is a ‘‘visual language’’ madeup of empathetic signs. But like all testimony, the aim of thisstrange address is to express the impact of an event that wasfelt—indeed, which produced real terror—and simultaneouslyexploded conceptual reification.10


Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

THE FACE OF TERROR

My thesis calls for a relatively short theoretical tour since the analy-sis of gestural expression has a very long history. In ancient Rome,Quintillian advised young men on the art of chironomia: how to userecognizable hand gestures to good effect in traditional oratory (apractice that continues in politics and theatre today). In 1832Andrea de Jorio published what is considered to be the first treatiseon gesture entitled La Mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napo-letano (gestural expression of the ancients in the light of Neapolitangesturing).11 The book sought to show how the expressive practicesof antiquity have been preserved among the ordinary people ofNaples. De Jorio was among the first to show that gesture is nota universal language but also the product of social and cultural dif-ferences. More recently, the analysis of gesture has begun to drawmuch scholarly attention, serving as the basis for studies on the ori-gin of language and language development, symbol formation, andthe history of the culture of everyday life.12 Anchoring one cornerof this interdisciplinary field is Charles Darwin’s massive 1872 vol-ume, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The bookaims to provide a systematic account of the expression of emotionand moreover attempts to show that many of these physical expres-sions are a product of evolution. The tome was a bestseller inVictorian England; some 9,000 copies flew off the shelves in the firstfour months. As the title suggests, Darwin proposes that neitherour expressions nor our emotions are uniquely human; many ani-mals have the same emotions and some of their expressionsresemble our own.

In a late chapter, Darwin focuses on the expressions pertaining tosurprise, astonishment, fear, and horror. He notes that normalattention may quickly graduate into what he calls ‘‘stupefiedamazement,’’ which is a frame of mind ‘‘akin to terror.’’13 Thisparticular emotion finds outward expression in the raising of theeyebrows as well as opening the eyes and mouth. The degree towhich the eyes and mouth are opened, Darwin argues, correspondsdirectly to the degree of surprise felt. To establish the universalityof the expression, he quotes examples from literature (Shakespearegets particular mention), draws from psychological research, andrelies on an enormous number of correspondents to provide anec-dotal evidence from around the world. One other source that can-not go without mention is photography. As a Victorian enthusiast

238 S. Sliwinski

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

of the camera, Darwin acquiredhundreds of photographs of facialexpression from portrait studiosas well as from the photographerOscar Rejlander, who furnishedhim with more than seventyimages specifically designed forthe book. Darwin also looked tothe work of French neurologist G.B. Duchenne de Bologne, whowas conducting experiments withelectricity, galvanizing the musclesof the face in order to studyexpression. Darwin had several ofDuchenne’s photographs renderedinto engravings so they could beincluded as illustrations in thebook (Figures 10 and 11). Thisinclusion, however, was not with-out a subtle editing. Darwin bothpromotes Duchenne’s artificiallyproduced expressions as evidenceand illustration of natural historyand moreover mutes their con-structedness by giving specificinstructions to his engraver to‘‘omit galvanic instruments andhands of operator.’’14

Midway through his chapter onfear, Darwin pauses to mentionanother little gesture, ‘‘expressiveof astonishment, of which I canoffer no explanation; namely, thehand being placed over the mouthor on some part of the head.’’15 Heprovides no visual illustration for the gesture, but this shortdescription could serve as a caption for any one of the nine trans-fixed photographs taken in New York. Darwin further notes thatthe gesture has been ‘‘observed with so many races of man that itmust have some natural origin.’’ In the scientist’s terms, this meansthat the expression of this particular emotion is not learned but

Figure 11. G. B. Duchenne de Boulogne.‘‘Fright’’ from Mechanics of HumanPhysiognomy 1862.

Figure 10. ‘‘Terror, from a photographby Dr. Duchenne’’ Heliotype from TheExpression of the Emotions of Man andAnimals, 1872. Reproduced with permis-sion from Darwin Online.


Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

rather a direct action of the nervous system.16 When the mind ispowerfully affected, nerve force is generated in excess and issubsequently transmitted into a variety of directions. FollowingDuchenne’s work, Darwin speculates that the character of the parti-cular expression is dependent upon the connections of the nervecells as well as the development of the muscular system. He spendsseveral pages trying to distinguish the differences between fear andterror by entering into a debate with doctors about the importanceof the platysma myoides muscle (which stretches over the frontal sur-face of the neck). In Darwin’s view, therefore, our emotions—thosemost intimate affective states of mind—are made evident throughthe subtlest gestures of the body.

The English scientist walks a fine line with this thesis. On onehand, he is deeply indebted to the pioneering anatomical researchof doctors such as G. B. Duchenne and Charles Bell who laid thefoundations for the study of physiology as a scientific discipline.This debt is evident visually (aside from reprinting reproductionsof Duchenne’s photographs, Darwin also uses one of Bell’s dia-grams as his opening figure, indeed, one could say that the modernpsychology of expression is completely underwritten by the newtechnologies of mechanical reproduction). But on the other hand,Darwin’s book poses a direct challenge to these doctors’ mutualbelief that man’s expressions held a transcendental purpose. Likemany in their day, Duchenne and Bell believed that expressionswere given by God to serve as a kind of natural language forcommunication between the souls of men. Of course, Darwin madeit his life’s work to reject such origins. To the Englishman, expres-sions were not the designs of a grand Creator but rather products ofevolutionary processes. Outward appearance was an amalgam ofphysiology, habit, and inherited responses—including thosederived from animals.17 The expressions that fleetingly pass overour faces are daily living proof of our archaic inheritance. Thebeauty of a simple smile is not a gift from above, but a profoundhuman work that has been thousands of years in the making.

Although one cannot help but be in awe of the reach and charac-ter of Darwin’s project, he offers remarkably few words about theinner world of feelings. The psychical nature of emotion is so scar-cely discussed that one gets the sense his book should simply havebeen called The Expressions of Man and Animals. However, less thana generation later a young Viennese doctor would take up this gap.Sigmund Freud famously began his scientific training as a zoologist

240 S. Sliwinski

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

studying the gonads of eels. To Freud, the English scientist wasalways ‘‘the great Darwin’’ and one finds traces of his admirationeven in the last of his writings.18 Moreover, Freud initially builthis theory of emotion as Darwin did, using a neurological model.In the beginning of his psychoanalytic research, Freud was preoccu-pied with describing the psychical apparatus as a conductor for theexpression of the emotion. And even as he elaborated his StructuralTheory in the 1920s (which posits psychical life as dominated by theconflict with three masters: the outside world, the super-ego, andthe instincts), Freud continued to view emotion primarily in termsof its ‘‘quota,’’ that is, in terms of quantity rather than character.However, psychoanalysis offers a crucial component to our think-ing about expression, for here the body’s surface is not merely amechanical apparatus, an amalgam of ancient hardwiring, butrather a sculpted convergence between the impress of the externalworld and the express of subjective feeling.19 To Freud, the expres-sions that fleetingly pass over human faces were not only a dailyliving proof of our archaic heritage, but also an externalization ofthe drama unfolding in our internal theater.

Similar to Darwin, Freud’s notion of affect includes feelings andemotions as well as somatic responses that we commonly regard asthe expression of emotion (shortness of breath, a racing heart).What distinguishes psychoanalytic thinking about emotion isFreud’s innovative notion that affect may come undone from itscorresponding idea or representation. In other words, one’s (con-scious) feelings may be cut off from their object of association:one may experience sadness without knowing exactly what onehas lost. While we think of emotion as a recognizable state, as‘‘ownable’’ so to speak, Freud argued that affect may also remainunconscious, become displaced, or even transform into its opposite(love into hate and vice versa). Indeed, he suggests one of the mostcommon ways in which unconscious affect is expressed is throughbodily sensation.20 In one of his last essays, ‘‘An Outline of Psycho-analysis,’’ Freud compactly describes one of the ‘‘fundamentalassumptions of psychoanalysis,’’ which simply put, is to disregardthe traditional philosophical and scientific division between mindand body. Rather than regard consciousness as belonging to onedistinct ‘‘place’’ and bodily processes as belonging to another,Freud argues that: ‘‘the allegedly somatic ‘accompanying processes’are the really psychical things.’’21 In other words, the body and itsmechanisms are not simply subject to the external laws of biology.


Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

Rather, the body is the pre-eminent conductor of psychical reality,serving as a kind of canvas to express our emotions. Or as JoyceMcDougall has proposed, the body can be thought of as a kind oftheatre, a stage upon which some of our most dramatic psychicalconflicts are played out.22

In the early psychoanalytic archive, Freud encounteredthis mind-body dynamic in his hysterical patients’ medicallyunexplainable symptoms: Dora’s nausea and difficulty breathing,Elizabeth von R’s leg pains, the conductor Bruno Walter’s briefbut devastating arm paralysis.23 In each of these cases Freud sur-mised that the individual had mobilized a physical symptom as away to express feelings that were deemed consciously unaccept-able. The physical symptoms served as surrogates, a way to expressthe dangerous feelings in disguise, so to speak. In this way Freudread his patients’ physical symptoms as retroactive signs: uncon-scious outcomes of the patient’s history of affect and experience.This interpretation echoes Darwin’s theory of the expression ofemotion in which specific physical gestures represent the outcomesof an evolutionary history, diminished traces of events thatoccurred in the past. Both Freud and Darwin read our statesof affect—and the state of fear in particular—as directly shapedby history.

With these theories on the expression of emotion in mind, let usreturn to the here is new york photographs in an attempt to providean interpretation of the witnesses’ strange, transfixed expression.From Darwin we can surmise that the people on the streets ofNew York were, in some sense, predisposed to react in this particularway. As his archive of expression shows, the bodily expression ofaffect is the older, the more ‘‘primitive’’ way of conveying emotion.Using the body as a medium is an archaic form of functioning thatis reminiscent of both animality and infancy—states in whichemotion is primarily expressed with the body (in Latin infansmeansthose who cannot speak). The fact that Darwin describes the trans-fixed expression in 1872 suggests that 9=11 was immediately recog-nized as a familiar danger, or at the very least, perceived asreminiscent of something familiar. The re-enactment of this gestureon the streets of New York on September 11th means that the eventwas immediately (if unconsciously) ‘‘classified.’’ Indeed, despitethe ideological attempts to frame the incident within a history ofterrorist assaults (the Pearl Harbor analogy was briefly floated bythe media for instance), the shared gesture among the witnesses

242 S. Sliwinski

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

seems to suggest that the event resonated with something more likea genealogy of disaster: the Hindenburg explosion, the sinking ofthe Titanic, the great Lisbon earthquake, and perhaps even thedestruction of Pompeii.24

As Jean Baudrillard proposes, the event also evokes a history of‘‘all the events that have never taken place,’’ a history of all the‘‘wished for’’ events, all the disasters we have ever dreamt.25

This step into the world of the imaginary returns us to Freud, fromwhom we learn that physical responses are, in fact, ‘‘really psychi-cal.’’ That is, the transfixed gesture can be seen to represent oneof the first significations of the traumatic event. Indeed, traumacan be defined as that which resists the symbolization of lan-guage and is therefore confined to bodily expression. Freud himselfmight have described the nature of the gesture as an instance of‘‘identification’’ that is the original form of emotional tie withothers, a primitive way of taking in or introjecting the object. Identi-fication is a derivative of the first, oral phase of life, which perhapssheds some light on the movement of the hands to the mouth(Figures 5–9): a sign of where the violent spectacle penetrated intothe internal theater of the psyche. Indeed, although the attackswere principally designed to be a visual assault—a spectacle forthe eyes, so to speak—for those individuals who were on the streetsof New York that morning, the disaster was actually ‘‘taken in’’through the mouth.

Perhaps it helps to think of this emotive gesture as a form ofmimesis. This is to say these transfixed expressions may be read aspart of a powerful human compulsion to become similar and tobehave mimetically. Certainly this is evident in the mirroringbetween spectators (and especially where spectators mime each otherwithin the frame of a single photograph almost like a hysterical infec-tion [Figures 1, 2, and 13). However, as Walter Benjamin points out,the realm of mimesis is ‘‘by no means limited to what one personcan imitate in another. The child plays at being not only a shopkeeperor teacher but also a windmill and train.’’26 Following Benjamin, thistransfixed expression can perhaps be read as an expression of attach-ment to theWorld Trade Center itself, a kind of painful miming of thespectacle, a way of becoming the towers. ‘‘From time immemorial,’’Benjamin says, ‘‘the mimetic faculty has been conceded someinfluence on language.’’27 Indeed, the word ‘‘transfixed’’ has twoprincipal meanings that share a mimetic relation: (1) to root (a person)to the spot with horror or astonishment, to paralyze the faculties


Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

and (2) to pierce with a sharpimplement or weapon.28 Weshould keep in mind the seconddefinition—the action—is the olderof the two definitions. So ‘‘trans-fixed’’ may refer to the actualaction of impaling an object or per-son, or, to the imaginary sensationof feeling as if one were impaled,paralyzed with horror. In this lighttoo, the transfixed gesture can beseen to mimetically reflectthe event itself—namely,the impaling of the twoWorld Trade Center towersby United Airlines Flight175 and American AirlinesFlight 11 (Figure 12). In thisway the emotive gesturecan be read as indicator ofsimilarity, a powerfulassimilation of the subjectto the object in its mostintense form. All this tosay, the transfixed gesture that was fleetingly recorded on the streetsof New York offers a remarkable example of our capacity to symbo-lize, to visually testify to traumatic experience using the medium ofour own bodies.

VISUAL CULTURE AND TESTIMONY

It bears pointing out that there is a difference between the ges-tures themselves and the two-dimensional photographs of them.Gestures have duration and movement; they are embodiedexpressions that occur in a specific time and space. Perhaps weshould be wary of conflating the images with the actions they pur-port to represent. After all, theorists from Walter Benjamin toRoland Barthes have consistently argued that the most commonjudgment about photography is not one of aesthetic quality butidentity. In exhibitions such as here is new york the images are

Figure 12. Unknownphotographer (#2087from here is New York).

Figure 13. Unknown photographer (#5112 fromhere is New York).

244 S. Sliwinski

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

valued less for their aesthetic treatment than for their ability toprovide material traces of the event. That is, the photographsare thought to bear an imprint of the trauma, as if some invisibleline connected these representations to phenomenological reality.All we can say of them is: This happened. I saw it. These aresymbolic representations, in other words, that have lost theirsymbolic quality.

And yet a similar dynamic appears to be at work in verbal testi-mony. Shoshana Felman describes testimony as ‘‘a point of con-flation between text and life . . . which can penetrate us like an actuallife.’’29 For Felman, literature is an ‘‘alignment between witnesses’’and reading certain literary texts is inherently related to ‘‘facingthe horror’’ itself. There is a certain paradox in this notion, for liter-ary testimony rarely seeks to represent the traumatic event. Moreprecisely, testimony testifies to the witness’s inability to representthe traumatic event, to the subject’s struggle to give the experiencesignificance in the time of afterwards. In Michihiko Hachiya’sremarkable journal about the bombing of Hiroshima, for example,the bomb never appears. The journal begins on August 6, 1945:

Clad in drawers and undershirt, I was sprawled on the living room floorexhausted because I had just spent a sleepless night on duty as an air war-den at my hospital.

Suddenly a strong flash of light startled me—and then another. So welldoes one recall little things that I remember vividly how a stone lantern inthe garden became brilliantly lit and I debated whether this light wascaused by magnesium flare or sparks from a passing trolley.

Garden shadows disappeared. The view where a moment before all hadbeen so bright and sunny was now dark and hazy. Through swirling dust Icould barely discern a wooden column that had supported one corner ofmy house. It was leaning crazily and the roof sagged dangerously.

Moving instinctively, I tried to escape, but rubble and fallen timbersbarred the way. . . . To my surprise I discovered I was completely naked.How odd! Where were my drawers and undershirt?

What had happened?30

The next two hundred pages detail the injured physician’s strug-gle to make his way through the devastated city to his hospital aswell as the hospital staff’s collective struggle to understand the hor-rors that begin to assault the bodies of the survivors. There is nosuch thing as an atom bomb or radiation poisoning yet. Significancemust be made out of these terrible phenomena. Pikadon becomes theaccepted new word in their vocabulary (pika: bright flash; don: loud


Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

sound), although those who were near the center of the city simplycall it pika. For those like Hachiya who were nearest to the epicenterof the bomb, there was no sound, only a flash. This paradoxical factcalls for pause. For those closest to the bomb, there was no bomb.The doctor’s remarkable journal is, then, a testimony of his grap-pling with this event that occurred but which eluded his capacityto register it. This bald struggle to understand that which hasexploded human comprehension brings the reader face to face withthe horror.

Can we bring these insights about testimony to the visual realm?Is testimony merely a literary form, a speech act set down in litera-ture or can it be articulated in bodily gesture and transmittedthrough pictorial images? What kinds of images testify to trauma?

Similar to the long history of gesture studies, such questionsabout the nature of pictorial images do not so much open a newprogram of research as return us to an old one. At the turn of thelast century, German cultural historian Aby Warburg embarkedon a similar project in his visual culture studies. Today, Warburg’sname is usually remembered in connection with his uniqueresearch library—the Library for the Science of Culture that laterbecame the Warburg Institute—which he set up in Hamburg andwas subsequently evacuated to London in 1933.31 Occasionallyone may find his name cited in connection with the art historicaldiscipline called iconology.32 But like the writings of WalterBenjamin, which slowly filtered back into the intellectual conscious-ness of the post-war world, interest in Warburg’s work is slowlybeing renewed for its detailed observations and interdisciplinaryapproach to the interpretation of cultural phenomena. Warburgdrew indiscriminately from a range of disciplines to construct aninterdisciplinary method whose aim, as he put it, was to studythe ‘‘historical psychology of human expression.’’33 At the heartof this project was the attempt to grasp the significance of visualimages as something more than mere artwork, indeed, as some-thing closer to a psychological necessity. Anchoring this methodof research was an overriding concern with gesture. Working witha remarkably wide range of visual material, Warburg organizedvisual images by emphatic expression. Particular gestures arearranged into topoi, groupings for which he coined the phrasePathosformel (‘‘pathos formula’’). One of the key inspirations for thisunorthodox classification system was Charles Darwin’s book on theexpression of emotion.34 Following Darwin’s lead, Warburg

246 S. Sliwinski

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

gathered certain works of art together on the basis that they pos-sessed a common expressive purpose (rather than a formal simi-larity). In an early article, for instance, he draws attention to asculptural detail from a Roman sarcophagus housed in the PalazzoDucale in Mantua. The small relief sculpture depicts a partiallyrobed woman whose right arm is raised in distress. Warburg bringsthis ancient work into conversation with a sixteenth century Titianpainting that depicts an altogether different historical figure who isalso in the throes of grief.35 Some sixteen centuries separate thesetwo works but the similarity of gesture is unmistakable: twowomen caught mid-stride, arm raised to the heavens, fingers out-stretched to their limit, mouth open in shattering cry of anguish.Even to our modern eyes, this gesture of lamentation expressesan unambiguous state of emotion through the cracked pigmentand marble in which it is rendered.

In Warburg’s view, visual images are vehicles of ‘‘emotionalrelease’’ designed to provide expression for profound human suf-fering.36 In this unique way of apprehending history, pictorialimages offer a record of our cultural dilemmas and can be placedinto relation to one another in ways that burst the traditional linearnarrative of cultural progress—a prototype of the method WalterBenjamin would later call the ‘‘dialectical image.’’ By gatheringimages together based upon their sheer intensity of expression,Warburg diffracts traditional notions of temporality, opening upmultiple extraordinary relationships between objects and imagesall in an effort to find a path—or rather to make visible all theexisting paths—between the present and the past.

The re-enactment of the transfixed gesture on September 11th isperhaps but one stop in ‘‘the international migration of images,’’37

but this singular expression—spectators standing transfixed, eyesstaring at a spectacle in the distance, hands held protectively overgaping mouths—marks the way in which this trauma impresseditself upon the bodies of the spectators, returning them to their mostprimal, mimetic relationship to the world. The photographs serveas vehicles of transmission, carriers of the visual act that functionsas a historiographical report. Even without verbal narrative—history’s traditional form—viewers of these photographs are ableto receive the message that, simply put, is something happened.38

Indeed, if such disastrous, traumatic events affect our capacity tonarrate history, creating a gap in discursive understanding, thenperhaps we may look to the pictorial record for unconscious traces


Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

of these human experiences that have become lost. As MichaelShulan presciently suggests in his introduction for the here is newyork collection: ‘‘Seeing is not only believing. Seeing is seeing.’’39

NOTES

1. Aby M. Warburg, ‘‘Memories of a Journey through the Pueblo Region’’ (unpub-lished notes) (1923) reproduced in Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and theImage in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 313.

2. Michael Shulan, ‘‘Images of Democracy,’’ Available online: hereisnewyork.org=about=democracy.asp, accessed September 3, 2006.

3. Shulan, ‘‘Images of Democracy,’’ Ibid.4. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4.5. As is well known, Freud’s key grappling with the problem of trauma appears in

his 1920 essay ‘‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’’ in ed. Adam Phillips, trans. JohnReddick Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2003),43–102. There is now an enormous field of ‘‘trauma studies’’ that is comprised ofpsychiatrists and psychologists who study the impact of violent events that pro-duce a series of symptoms known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) aswell as those who engage trauma primarily as a theoretical concept that affectsrepresentation, narration, and memory. Among the most influential of these psy-choanalytically influenced theorists are Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience:Trauma, Narrative, History (Baltimore: John’s Hopkins Press, 1996); and JeanLaplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis trans. Jeffery Mehlman (Baltimore:John’s Hopkins Press, 1976); Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999).

6. Herman Rapaport, ‘‘Archive Trauma,’’ Diacritics 28:4 (Winter 1998): 76.7. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers trans.

Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 4.8. In his book on the Rwandan genocide, Philip Gourevich describes a similar para-

dox involving traumatic disavowal and the deferred registration provided by thecamera. When visiting the memorial at Nyarubuye, he describes taking photo-graphs of the skeletons that have been left where they fell because he was unsurewhether he could really see what he was seeing while he saw it. Later he quotesAlexandre, a Greek journalist who witnessed a massacre at Kibeho, one of therefugee camps that housed both perpetrators and victims. Alexandre exclaims:‘‘I experienced Kibeho as a movie. It was unreal. Only afterward, looking atmy photographs—then it became real.’’ We wish to inform you that tomorrow wewill be killed with our families (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 19, 196.

9. Shoshana Felman, ‘‘Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,’’ inShoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing Literature,Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1–56.

10. One of the undeveloped questions here is about the affective difference betweenfear and terror—terms that I use somewhat interchangeably throughout the arti-cle. In ‘‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’’ Freud suggests that surprise is a keyelement of trauma—what he describes as ‘‘the fright’’ experienced by the victim.To this end he distinguishes between the words ‘‘fright,’’ ‘‘dread,’’ and ‘‘fear’’:

248 S. Sliwinski

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

‘Fear’ represents a certain kind of inner state amounting to expectation of, andpreparation for, danger of some kind, even though the nature of the dangermay well be unknown. ‘Dread’ requires a specific object of which we are afraid.‘Fright,’ however, emphasizes the element of surprise; it describes the state thatpossesses us when we find ourselves plunged into danger without beingprepared for it. I do not believe that fear can engender traumatic neurosis; thereis an element within fear that protects us against fright, and hence also againstfright-induced neurosis (51).Freud has railway accidents in mind (and perhaps the shell-shocked soldiers ofthe First World War). Certainly the events that fall under the metonym of 9=11possess an element of surprise and therefore represent an instance of ‘‘fright’’rather than ‘‘fear.’’ Etymologically, ‘‘terror’’ comes from the Latin terrorem mean-ing great fear or dread.

11. Andrea de Jorio, Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity: A Translationof La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano, trans. Adam Kendon(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

12. Keith Thomas offers an overview of the field in his introduction to A Cultural His-tory of Gesture: From Antiquity to the Present Day, eds. Jan Bremmer and HermanRoodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). I should note that ‘‘gesture’’ is oftenreserved for those bodily expressions that are considered to be voluntary or wil-ful to some extent, while involuntary gesticulations such as laughing, crying,blushing, and the like are usually referred to as ‘‘expressions.’’ Moreover, whilesocial historians beginning with de Jorio have shown that (voluntary) gesture islargely the product of social and cultural differences, scholars and scientists sinceDarwin have argued that those (involuntary) expressions pertaining to emotionare universal—shared not only among human communities around the globe butalso with many nonhuman animals. In some respects, the present article issearching for a middle ground in this polarity by sketching a metapsychologyof the specific (involuntary) gesture I call ‘‘transfixed.’’

13. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), thirdedition with commentaries by Paul Ekman (London: Oxford University Press,1998), 278.

14. See Ekman’s notes in Darwin, Expression, 302.15. Darwin, Expression, 288.16. In fact, Darwin posits three principles to explain the nature of innate expressions:

(1) ‘‘serviceable habit’’ by which he meant that some expressions originated inmovements useful to our progenitors and were adopted through natural selec-tion; (2) ‘‘antithesis,’’ which means that some expressions are used because theyvisibly appear opposite from the opposite emotions; and (3) as a ‘‘direct action ofthe nervous system,’’ which is explained above.

17. Although he would rail at the thought, Darwin’s measured insistence upon ouranimal lineage is rather reminiscent of the popular social science of physiog-nomy—at least in his comparison of the facial forms (if not the character) ofanimals and man.

18. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 36. Freudmentions Darwin throughout his oeuvre and he raises the question of nonhumanpsychology as late as ‘‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’’ (1940), in ed. AdamPhillips, The Penguin Freud Reader (London: Penguin, 2006), 4.


Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

19. I owe my phrasing here to Susan Buck-Morss, ‘‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics:Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,’’ October 62 (Autumn 1992):14–15. Buck-Morss very briefly describes how ‘‘three aspects of the synaestheticsystem—physical sensation, motor reaction, and psychical meaning—convergein signs and gestures comprising a mimetic language. What this language speaksis anything but the concept. Written on the body’s surface as a convergencebetween the impress of the external world and the express of subjective feeling,the language of this system threatens to betray the language of reason.’’

20. There is some debate in the psychoanalytic literature about ‘‘unconscious affect’’as Freud describes it in his early metapsychology. Andre Green compactlydescribes the central problem as an issue of ‘‘how to make the unconscious begin-nings of affective transmission conscious?’’ (See ‘‘On discriminating and Not-Discriminating between Affect and Representation,’’ International Journal ofPsychoanalysis, 80 [1999], 285). And yet I think these nine photographs offer evi-dence of the way in which unconscious affect may be transmitted through pre-verbal, nondiscursive forms such as gesture.

21. Sigmund Freud, ‘‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’’ (1940), in The Penguin FreudReader, 13.

22. Joyce McDougall, Theaters of the Body: A Psychoanalytic Approach to PsychosomaticIllness (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989).

23. Dora’s case can be found in ‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria,’’ in ThePsychology of Love, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2006): 1–110. Elizabethvon R’s case is in Studies on Hysteria, trans. and eds. James and Alix Strachey(London: Penguin: 1991): 202–258. Bruno Walter writes of his own condition inTheme and Variations: An Autobiography, trans. James Galston (New York: AlfredA. Knopf, 1966). I should note that Darwin, too, recognized the body as a ‘‘con-ductor’’ for emotion. Early in his book he includes this remarkable, proto-psychoanalytic passage:The most striking case, though a rare abnormal one, which can be adduced to thedirect influence of the nervous system, when strongly affected, on the body, isthe loss of colour in the hair, which has occasionally been observed after extremeterror or grief. One authentic instance has been recorded, in the case of a manbrought out for execution in India, in which the change of colour was so rapidthat it was perceptible to the eye (Expressions, 69–70).

24. This classification of 9=11 as a ‘‘disaster’’ (as opposed to terrorist assault) has beenconfirmed by verbal testimony. Mary Marshall Clark, who has conducted an oralhistory project with approximately four hundred individuals in New York Cityand the surrounding area, found that the Pearl Harbor analogy (offered by themedia) was largely rejected: ‘‘The sinking of the Titanic was an analogy usedfar more frequently by many we interviewed, drawing people’s attention to themyth of invincibility, which was difficult to reject as a reality in both cases.’’See ‘‘The September 11, 2001, Oral History Narrative andMemory Project: A FirstReport,’’ The Journal of American History, 89:2 (2002). With regard to what I am call-ing ‘‘visual testimony,’’ I think one could fruitfully compare these photographs tothe newsreel footage of the Hindenburg explosion, the engravings of the Lisbonearthquake (which show people with arms thrown above their heads in terror),and perhaps even the sculpted ash remains at Pompeii.

25. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, 4.

250 S. Sliwinski

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

26. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’’ in eds. Michael W. Jennings,Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Selected Writings Vol-ume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934 (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press, 2005), 720.

27. Benjamin, ‘‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’’ 721.28. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, eighth edition, ed. R. E. Allen (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1990), 1296.29. Felman, ‘‘Education and Crisis,’’ 2, emphasis in original.30. Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician August

6-September 30, 1945, trans. Warner Wells (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1955), 1.

31. With the rise of the Nazis, the Warburg Institute moved to London where it waseventually incorporated in the University of London’s School of AdvancedStudy. See Fritz Saxl, ‘‘The History of Warburg’s Library,’’ in Ernst H. Gombrich,Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute andUniversity of London, 1970).

32. Some scholars argue that Warburg is the true inventor of the discipline of icon-ology, although Erwin Panofsky is usually cited as the founding father. Thesesame scholars are quick to point out that iconology no longer means what itmeant to Warburg in the German context of Kulturwissenschaft, and more point-edly, that Warburg’s project is fundamentally distinct from the positivist disci-pline of iconology that has developed in American art history departmentsthrough Panofsky’s influence. A short list of those scholars interested inrecovering Warburg’s project include Giorgio Agamben, ‘‘Aby Warburg andthe Nameless Science,’’ Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans.Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); George Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante: histoire de l’art et temps des fantomes selon AbyWarburg (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2002); Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburgand the Image in Motion (New York: Zone, 2004); and Matthew Rampley, TheRemembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin (Wiesbaden:Harrassowitz, 2000).

33. This is Warburg’s phrase taken from his 1912 lecture ‘‘Italian Art and Inter-national Astrology in Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara’’ in The Renewal of PaganAntiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans.David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Center, 1999), 585. He resuscitatesthe phrase a decade later in his ‘‘Notes for the Kreuzlingen Lecture on theSerpent Ritual,’’ 313.

34. Gertrude Bing, ‘‘A. M. Warburg,’’ Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28(1965): 310.

35. Warburg describes the ‘‘tragic scenes’’ of funeral rites in ‘‘Francesco Sassetti’sLast Injunction to His Sons’’ (1907), republished in The Renewal of PaganAntiquity, 245. Gertrude Bing, Warburg’s assistant makes this connection moreevident and reprints images not included with the original essay in ‘‘A. M.Warburg’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 28 (1965): 306, 310. War-burg’s unique practice of the comparative gaze would become more developedin his final project, the Mnemosyne Atlas (which remained unfinished at the timeof his death in 1929). The Atlas—which has been described as a symphony, anassemblage of constellations, and a laboratory of the history of images—is reallythe best example of unique Warburg’s style of Kulturwissenshaft, however, thereis simply not the space to discuss this complex project in any detail here. Ernst


Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Can

adia

n R

esea

rch

Kno

wle

dge

Net

wor

k] A

t: 16

:18

16 J

une

2008

Gombrich describes the Atlas in the last chapter of Aby Warburg: An IntellectualBiography (London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1970) andCharlotte Schoell-Glass takes it up in ‘‘‘Serious Issues’: The Last Plates ofWarburg’s Picture Atlas Mnemosyne,’’ in ed. Richard Woodfield, Art History asCultural History: Warburg’s Projects (Amsterdam: G&B Arts International, 2001):183–208.

36. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans.Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 38.

37. Warburg, ‘‘Italian Art and International Astrology in Palazzo Schifanoia inFerrara,’’ in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 585.

38. This phrasing follows from Barbara Hernstein Smith who defines narrative as‘‘verbal acts consisting of someone telling someone else that something hap-pened.’’ See ‘‘Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories,’’ in ed. W. J. T. Mitchell,On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 228.

39. Shulan, ‘‘Images of Democracy.’’ Ibid.

252 S. Sliwinski

new york transfixed: noteson the expression of fear york transfixed.pdf · downloaded by: [canadian...

Documents