TAILIEUCHUNG - MEMORY THEATERS, VIRTUAL WITNESSING, AND THE TRAUMA-AESTHETIC

Simple objects of sensation: individual colours, tones, tastes, smells, etc. (objects of outer sensation), and als the constituent qualitative elements of . feelings and emotions (objects of inner sensation). Clearly, such objects of sensation can themselves be aesthetically pleasing to different degrees, and their power to please is in some sense basic, not capable of being accounted for in terms of other, more primitive phenomena. Sensations will therefore constitute the first class of elementary aesthetic objects in Witasek's taxonomy | Project Mv E http MEMORY THEATERS VIRTUAL WITNESSING AND THE TRAUMA-AESTHETIC ALLEN FELDMAN Gernet describes customary law in ancient Greece as a system of conventions in which the signifier tends to absorb the signified Gernet 1981 226 . By this he means that the construction of proof does not lie in the recovery of a referential situation in an inquiry rather truth lies in the dramatization and ritualization of gestures and discourse that establish the authority of the witness as a guarantor ibid. 229 . In this customary legal system the act and role of witnessing is structured as ritual passage as an ordeal. According to Gernet the demarcated space of witnessing is characterized by oath taking which involves proximity to a polluting yet sacrilized substance. C. Nadia Seremetakis 102 1 The production of biographical narrative life history oral history and testimony in the aftermath of ethnocidal genocidal colonial and postcolonial violence occurs within specific structural conditions cognitive constraints and institutional norms. As Hayden White has taught us biography emerges as a narrative media within state structures 2 and within the cultural requirement for jural and political Historical inquiry must attend to the conditions under which such narratives arise the political agency that such narrations refract replicate and authorize and yet also account for the wide-ranging circuits that filter and consume the biographical artifact. As I shall briefly discuss below in reference to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission TRC this tension between the scene of testimony production and the sites of narrative screening and consumption can encompass not only a single testimony but also an entire archive. The dissemination of biographies and testimonies of political terror whether in the context of human rights violation inquiry or commodified Biography Winter 2004 Biographical Research Center 164 Biography Winter 2004

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