Agamben at Ground Zero

A Memorial without Content

Joel McKim

Abstract Construction has recently begun on Michael Arad and Peter Walkers Reecting 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 artists 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. Agambens 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

N 19 NOVEMBER 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development Committee (LMDC) announced the selection of eight nalists for the competition to design the memorial at Ground Zero (an open competition 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): 83103 DOI: 10.1177/0263276408095217

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Reecting Absence, National September 11 Memorial

Source: Courtesy of Handel Architects LLP.

controversy surrounding the sites master plan, the memorial competition seemed to pass with relatively little argument. Michael Arad and Peter Walkers Reecting Absence design, which turned the footprints of the twin towers into recessed pools of cascading water, emerged the winner. Yet the lack of controversy generated by the memorial competition may represent a failure rather than a success, indicative of the safe approach followed by the designers rather than the innovation of the responses. Indeed, some viewed the short-listed proposals as little more than a collection of clichd elements brought forward from what has become a familiar tradition of contemporary memorial aesthetics. Suzanne Stephens, a writer for Architectural Record, notes that the schemes appeared too similar, emphasizing waterfalls and reecting pools, beams of light, long planar walls with names carved in them and criticizes the reliance on heavy-handed symbolism as justication, water representing tears; beams of light for stars and victims souls (2004: 367). Architecture critic Philip Nobel claims that the memorial design was virtually predetermined by the strict guidelines of the LMDC brief (including the preservation of the tower footprints and the inclusion of the name of each victim) and the restrictions of Daniel Libeskinds master plan. He suggests that Michael Arad had given back to the process that which it had already made (2005: 252). Perhaps more troubling than the limitation of any individual design is the development of what appears to be a creative, institutional and critical consensus concerning the aesthetics of such a memorial site. The recurring tropes and techniques of contemporary memorial aesthetics risk covering over the assumptions that underpin our conception of what it is a memorial and

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this memorial in particular is intended to be and do. What are the presumed social functions of such a site? What kinds of truths, if any, are memorials assumed to reveal? When John C. Whitehead, the Chairman of the LMDC, claims: The memorial will not only recall life, it will reafrm life itself (LMDC, 2003) and the competition guidelines ask designers to [r]espect and enhance the sacred quality (LMDC, 2003) of the site, we must question both the philosophical and aesthetic assumptions at work within these statements. With this context in mind, this article will look primarily towards the thought of Giorgio Agamben in order to reopen some of the questions that have been foreclosed by the Ground Zero memorial competition. The decision to turn to the writing of Giorgio Agamben for an alternative method of thinking aesthetics is motivated by a number of considerations. Agambens recent political writings, such as Homo Sacer and State of Exception, have become key reference points for cultural theorys attempt to think our contemporary global situation. But Agamben is a philosopher who developed his system of thought predominantly by contemplating issues concerning language, aesthetics and poetics. It seems to me that these writings on aesthetics and language are less often discussed in current academic debates, yet they provide the foundations for some of Agambens most radical political claims. Considering the inseparable mix of poetics and politics inherent in the attempt to build a memorial at Ground Zero, it seems an appropriate moment in which to return to the insights on questions of aesthetics provided by a writer who has altered the grounds of political theory. Occupying a position between the social and the aesthetic, memorials and monuments hold an uncertain aesthetic position and this article will begin by attempting to determine what place they occupy within the theory of art. Alain Badious thoughts on aesthetics help expose a prevalent assumption that memorials must either serve a didactic or cathartic function; they must either instruct or initiate a healing process. The fact that the Ground Zero memorial attempts to perform both of these functions simultaneously is an indication of the problematic nature of the current discourse supporting memorial design. The article will then turn to Agambens writings in the hope that they may suggest new paths out of the deadlock of consensus developing around contemporary memorial aesthetics. Agambens philosophical assertions will be explored primarily through his writing on art, poetry and language contained in books and essay collections such as The Man without Content (1999a) and Potentialities (1999b). What emerges from these readings is the possibility of a memorial aesthetics founded not on instruction or catharsis, but on the radical potentiality of language and the kind of community without predetermination it may be capable of initiating.

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Three Schemata of Art and Truth The difcult aesthetic questions that arise around the proposed Ground Zero memorial are reective of the uncertain status memorials and monuments hold generally within art theory. Nol Carroll suggests it is the fact that memorials are specically designed to perform social functions, and not simply to provide a disinterested aesthetic experience, that produces a reluctance to acknowledge their status as art. He writes that aesthetic theory holds precious the idea that something is an artwork if and only if it is designed with the primary intention of affording or having the capacity to afford experiences valuable for their own sakes (2005: 1). Social and political demands are viewed as unwelcome intrusions into the realm of artistic experience. Yet, as Caroll recognizes, works possessing a social and specically memorial function (from religious art to political portraiture) are arguably more the norm than the exception in the history of art. If the memorial function of art remains an unacknowledged secret within aesthetic theory, then how may we begin to situate a contemporary memorial at Ground Zero within this tradition of thought? What currents of art theory does it draw from and what aesthetic assumptions implicitly justify its social role? In his meditation on the relationship of art and philosophy, the Handbook of Inaesthetics (2005), Alain Badiou provides a concise history of aesthetic thought that, although certainly polemical, offers one starting point for a consideration of the place of contemporary memorials within this history. Badious study opens with an attempt to plot arts changing relationship to truth in Western thought. He claims that there are essentially three distinct schemata depicting this relationship that recur throughout Western thought under different guises. The rst is the didactic schema which, beginning with Plato, holds a deep distrust of the persuasive character of art. It maintains that art, while appearing to provide access to an immediate or naked truth, is in fact incapable of truth. Within this representation art becomes a dangerous and seductive simulacrum of truth, capable of diverting us from its actual pursuit in slow and disciplined thought. Badiou suggests: The heart of the Platonic polemic about mimesis designates art not so much as an imitation of things, but as the imitation of the effect of truth (2005: 2). Art then must be controlled either through censorship, as in Platos insistence on banishing the poet from the polis, or strict surveillance wherein its persuasive immediacy is placed in the service of a truth that is prescribed from outside (2005: 2). The goal of art becomes education, but an education that is strictly policed by truths derived not from art itself but from philosophy. Badiou presents Marxist aesthetics as the 20th-century exemplar of the didactic schema in which arts purpose becomes to transfer to the masses the truth of class struggle, a truth that is not immanent to art but comes instead from dialectical thinking. For Marxist aesthetics, Badiou argues, art left unmonitored by this philosophical truth is at risk of descending into bourgeois hedonism.

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Badiou places in polar opposition to this didactic formation what he names the romantic schema. Its thesis is that art alone is capable of truth (2005: 3). In the romantic schema, art provides a privileged point of access to a truth that philosophy grasps for, but ultimately fails to attain. Art is therefore assigned the task of redeeming both an incoherent world and the inadequate concepts of philosophical thought. From this romantic perspective, Badiou argues:
. . . it is art itself that educates, because it teaches of the power of the innity 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-centurys representative of the romantic tradition. The privileged relationship between art and the unveiling of truth is certainly in evidence in Heideggers 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 compensated and made up for by what is already at hand and available. Founding is an overow, a bestowal. (1977: 200).

Finally, Badiou adds to the polarity of the didactic and romantic schemas a position that suggests a relative peace between art and philosophy. He names this the classical schema and attributes its formation to Aristotle, who eases the discomfort of the Platonic recognition of art as the dangerous semblance of truth by claiming that the purpose of art is not truth at all. Aristotle, according to Badiou, maintains that art involves the deposition of the passions in a transference onto semblance (2005: 4). Aristotle therefore consigns art not to the realm of knowledge, but to that of catharsis. Its purpose, according to Badiou, is neither cognitive nor revelatory, but therapeutic. For Badiou, this evacuation of truth means that the criterion for the judgment of art becomes liking, not in terms of a rule of opinion, but in terms of its ability to engage the spectator in an identication that organizes transference and thus in a deposition of the passions (2005: 4). In other words, art must correspond to our imaginary assumptions of reality, unperturbed by intrusions of the truth of the Real, as what is likely is not necessarily true. The register of art is therefore shifted from the realm of truth to that of verisimilitude. According to Badiou, the 20th centurys upholder of this classical model of art is clearly psychoanalysis. While the object of desire remains for both Freud and Lacan beyond symbolization, art provides a threshold in which this object of desire subtractively emerges as an excessive Real at the limits of the symbolic. Art therefore serves as

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a point of transference in which the work leads to the dissipation of the unspeakable scintillation of the lost object (2005: 7). Badiou suggests that the price for the classical schemas removal of truth from the domain of art, with the psychoanalytic version being no exception, is the reduction of art to the level of public service measured by its effective utility in treating the human soul or psyche. Badiou maintains that all three schemas limit arts potential to seek truths that are immanent and unique to art. They do so by relegating art to a subsidiary role in the promotion of a truth imposed from outside (didactic); making art a privileged path to a return of the absolute (romantic); or by reducing art to a conservative mechanism of relief (classical). He claims that our current aesthetic eld is polluted with saturated versions of all three of these schemas. Yet, despite his dissatisfaction with these dominant conceptions of the role of art, Badious short history of aesthetics gives us a framework for beginning to think through the aesthetic position held by monuments and memorials. Badious categories may in fact provide a ground for distinguishing between those two, sometimes interchangeable, terms for sites of remembrance. The art historian Arthur Danto, writing on Maya Lins Vietnam Veterans Memorial, does make a distinction between memorials and monuments, claiming that the former seek to initiate a process of healing and reconciliation, while the latter present a triumphalist reference to past events (in Rowlands, 1999: 130). Carroll (2005) likewise claims that monuments have historically been celebrations of heroic nationalism, serving as a mode of transmitting cultural assumptions and preserving social order. The traditional monument would seem to fall rmly within Badious didactic tradition, seeking to promote an ofcially sanctioned version of historical events. As Danto notes, contemporary memorials have shied away from this explicitly didactic role. The subtle form of Lins Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with its minimalist black stone walls, maintains an ambiguous view of the events to which it refers, certainly refusing an outright characterization of them as heroic. The aesthetic discourse of the memorial shifts from the didactic register of the monument to a therapeutic one; the language used to describe these memorials is increasingly psychoanalytic rather than nationalistic. These sites of remembrance become envisioned as locations for working through the traumatic events of the past and can therefore be said to participate in the aesthetic schema of classical catharsis. The connection of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to this therapeutic role is made explicit by the name given to the half-scale replica of the memorial that travels throughout the US, The Wall That Heals. Carroll suggests that this cathartic mode has become the norm for contemporary memorials and writes that these sites give articulate focus to the unease the loss has caused and allow for the reassessment of the event in retrospect; this enables mourners to manage their emotions, to move from shock to healing (2005: 9). Upon rst appraisal, the contemporary memorials shift from a didactic to cathartic aesthetic schema would seem an unquestionably productive

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movement. Lins Vietnam Veterans Memorial, for example, is generally praised for its ability to accommodate multiple experiences of the war and for its healing qualities. Carole Blair claims that Lins memorial initiates a rhetoric of enactment that brings to life the events commemorated with their complexities and contradictions intact (Blair and Michel, 2000; Blair et al., 1991). Jenny Edkins claims that successful memorials, like Lins, arrest the ow of linear time and initiate a trauma time, in which the ethical moment, the moment of decision, the moment of the political becomes possible (2003: 84). Yet Badiou is suspicious of the movement of art into the register of catharsis and psychoanalysis, where it is no longer concerned with the production of shared generic truths and is limited to the role of assuaging personal pain or despair. The contemporary memorials unquestioned emphasis on an internalized and individual response to past events would seem to dampen the collective and political potential of these sites. We must ask whether contemporary memorials are actually capable of initiating the moment of the political sought by Edkins, or whether they occupy instead the position of public and state service, as Badiou fears. Even the muchpraised Vietnam Veterans Memorial appears to encourage an isolated act of healing rather than more collective processes. Maya Lin writes in her artists statement: death is in the end a personal and private matter, and the area contained within this memorial is a quiet place, meant for personal reection and private reckoning (in Edkins, 2003: 79). The proposals for the Ground Zero site highlight the potential problems of this cathartic memorial aesthetic in several ways. Most apparent is the emergence of a series of recurring design tropes whose references to traumatic absences and healing processes verge on the mechanical. Commentators have noted Lins inclusion in the selection committee and have remarked on the similarities of these proposals to her acclaimed memorial designs. The inscription of names on a reective surface used in her Vietnam Veterans Memorial is present in nearly all of the design submissions and the running water featured in her Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama is also a frequent inclusion. The language of absences and voids employed in many of the design descriptions borrows heavily from the recent German tradition of building countermonuments in memory of the Holocaust and would certainly be familiar to James E. Young, who coined the term and who is also a member of the selection committee. Contemporary memorial design would appear to be a prime example of the aesthetic saturation identied by Badiou. Further problems arise from the LMDCs intention that the memorial occupy both a didactic and a cathartic position simultaneously. The mission statement accompanying the submission guidelines makes the didactic ambitions of the site apparent: May the lives remembered, the deeds recognized, and the spirit reawakened be eternal beacons, which reafrm respect for life, strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom, and inspire an end to hatred, ignorance and intolerance (2003). Yet Daniel Libeskind alludes to the sites therapeutic function elsewhere in the guidelines: We have to be

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able to enter this ground while creating a quiet, meditative and spiritual space. The decontextualized aesthetics of healing adopted by the proposals 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 Badious thought that we will nd a more convincing amalgam of the aesthetic and the political or the social. Badiou remains sceptical of attempts to conjoin the elds 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 Badious third, romantic schema of aesthetics, in which art possesses a privileged relationship to truth? There seems to be little suggestion in either Carrolls general study of memorial aesthetics or in specic 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 Agambens philosophy of aesthetics brings to this discussion. Does Agamben offer any alternative to the prevailing assumptions about memorial aesthetics? Might his aesthetic theory suggest a new memorial function that is neither didactic nor therapeutic? Does Agambens thought fall within one of Badious three schemata or does it instead offer a fourth modality of art? Beginning with Agambens most sustained reection on the history of aesthetics, The Man without Content (1999a), we immediately encounter a signicant complication to Badious 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 signies an action, a to do, motivated by the will, while the latter, according to Agamben, is conceived as an experience of production into presence, from concealment into the full light of the work (1999a: 689). 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 mans condition as living animal. What is more, praxis is a movement whose end is contained within itself

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the desired effect or result is present from the beginning but not yet actualized. 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 fullment 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 Agambens account of classical aesthetics blurs considerably the conceptual boundaries between Badious classical and romantic schemas. Agamben clearly establishes a strong line of relation between classical conceptions of poiesis and Heideggers hermeneutic perspective on art, which emphasizes arts role as the unconcealment and preservation of a truth. Absent so far in Agambens 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 arts particular unveiling of truth. He closely associates this ` concept of rhythm to the Greek verbword, epovg, meaning a kind of pause or suspension. Rhythm introduces into the eternal ow of time and matter a stop; it is an interruption in the otherwise endless ow of instants.3 Agamben describes the force of rhythm acting when we nd 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 nd again his present truth in the unstoppable ow 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 overcomes 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

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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 dened 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 arts 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 reected in Balzacs 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 judgments reection of it (1999a: 11). The fracture of modern art between the creative genius and the detached spectator is reected in the emergence of a different philosophy for each side of the divide. On the side of the spectator, Kants aesthetic theory of the beautiful as disinterested pleasure nds its distorted materialization in the gure of the man of taste. And in reaction, Nietzsche, rmly 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 mans 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 innite 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 reecting on his own artistic

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subjectivity. The museum, removed from the ow of life and time, emerges as the only place where the alienation of artist and spectator is articially 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. The Event of Language Thus far we have seen Agamben identify a forgetting of the Greek conception of poiesis as a bringing into presence, it being replaced to alienating effect in the modern period by the centrality of the creative will of the artist. Should we then assume that Agambens thoughts on aesthetics amount to a call for a return to a classical conception of art, one that is not afliated with Badious schema of catharsis but instead with a romantic unveiling of truth? If so, what truths should we expect the process of poiesis to unveil? Is this a conservative call by Agamben for a re-establishment of the worthy content of tradition or religion? Agambens thought moves in exactly the opposite direction from any such return to tradition and here I think a break with Heidegger is made calling instead for a direct confrontation with the implications of a contentless communication. The Man without Content concludes by describing a modern condition in which the transmissibility of culture guaranteed by tradition, a system of beliefs transferred directly from past to present without residue, is irrevocably lost. Agamben claims that without the assuredness of this transmission the past begins to accumulate and burden the present, a reservoir without meaning or sense (a condition described by Walter Benjamin [1999] through Klees image of the angel of history). In such a situation, unable to decipher what is meaningful and what is not, man keeps his cultural heritage in its totality, and in fact the value of this heritage multiplies vertiginously (Agamben, 1999a: 108). This accumulation of pure culture, culture alienated from life, is redeemed only negatively through the act of aesthetic judgement and in the space of the museum. Agamben makes reference to Kafkas castle upon the hill, which houses this accumulated culture and hangs over the villagers below:
. . . 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 mans action and knowledge. (1999a: 110)

But instead of lamenting the loss of this poetic capacity or perpetuating a nihilistic aesthetics, Agamben claims that Kafka indicates the potential for an art that takes as its content the act of transmissibility itself, regardless

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of the content that is to be transmitted. Kafkas writing, according to Agamben, intensies rather than redeems negatively the contentless transmissibility of art. It therefore points to an art that, [renounces] the guarantees of truth for love of transmissibility and:
. . . succeeds once again in transforming mans inability to exit his historical status, perennially suspended in the inter-world between old and new, past and future, into the very space in which he can take the original measure of his dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of his action. (1999a: 114)

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 Agambens theory of aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) links to his overarching 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 specic ritual of memory. He writes: The tradition of transmissibility is therefore immemorially contained in every specic tradition, and this immemorial legacy, this transmission of unconcealment, 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 nds 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 revelation 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 innitely transcends 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 nal revelation. The universal truths sought by the Greeks are thus replaced by

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the potential of the pure event of language conceived as immediate mediation (1999b: 47). Agambens concept of pure language and his displacement of the creative will of nihilism come together precisely in his thinking of the relationship between potentiality and impotentiality. Here Agamben makes reference to Aristotles somewhat unexpected conclusion that the mode of existence as potentiality involves the possession of a faculty that is potential precisely in so far is it is not in use. To possess potential then is to be in a state of suspension, to posses the faculty to build or to write, for example, without actualizing this potential. In other words: It is a potentiality that is not simply the potential to do this or that but potential to notdo, potential not to pass into actuality (1999b: 17980). In a discussion of Derridas philosophy of inscription entitled Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality, Agamben makes the related claim that: Between the experience of something and the experience of nothing there lies the experience of ones own passivity (1999b: 217). This is not the experience of potentiality passing into actuality, but rather the experience of the writing tablet prior to form being impressed on its surface. It is the self-affection we experience when temporarily deprived of our senses, our eyes in darkness made aware of their incapacity to see. It is through this impotentiality, this suspended potential, that we enter into the open space of rhythm and experience the radical potential of pure language. This leads Agamben to the initially strange assertion that, Other living beings are capable only of their specic potentiality; they can only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality (1999b: 182, italics in original). Whereas the actualizing of this or that potential is an expression of will and thus an act of praxis, the impotentiality Agamben speaks of is the experience of potential itself. Only through this experience, an experience of poiesis, can something come into being which is not predetermined by the will or conditioned by a presupposition: in other words, something radically new.5 But how does Agambens radical passivity and idea of potential manifest itself? There are several gures in Agambens work that point to a possible manifestation of the potentiality of language. In Herman Melvilles character Bartleby, the scrivener who has stopped writing, Agamben nds an example of potentiality recognized as always also a potential not to do. Through his unwavering I would prefer not to response to any request, Bartleby the scribe becomes the embodiment of the writing tablet before any mark has been made. Agamben describes him as the extreme gure of the Nothing from which all creation derives . . . pure, absolute potentiality (1999b: 2534). Barltebys act of verbal suspension has its precedent in the Skeptics use of the expression no more than as noted by Diogenes, as when they refute an argument by saying, Scylla exists no more than . . . a chimera (1999b: 256). As Daniel Heller-Roazen notes, this suspension . . . marks the point at which language retreats from actual predication into a

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mode in which it appears as pure potential, capable of expression precisely by virtue of actually saying nothing (1999: 20). Bartlebys enactment of pure potentiality through language nds a physical counterpoint in the gure of the gesture, a concept that Agamben returns to frequently in his writing. Agamben suggests that the functioning of the gesture can neither be understood within the logic of production in which a means leads to an end (he gives the example of marching seen as a means to move from point A to point B), nor within the logic of praxis in which the means is itself the end (he gives the example of dance seen as an aesthetic dimension). He argues that the gesture breaks with the false alternative between ends and means that paralyzes morality and presents instead means that, as such, evade the orbit of mediality without becoming, for this reasons, ends (2000: 57). Dance, then, can be interpreted as gesture not because it represents an end in itself, but only in so far as it exhibits the media character of the human body in movement. He stresses: The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such (2000: 57, italics in original). Ultimately for Agamben the gesture is a communication of a communicability. It has nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality (2000: 59). Agamben points to Walter Benjamins reading of the Oklahoma Nature Theatre (a theatre in which everyone is welcome and what is performed is life itself), which appears in the last chapter of Kafkas America. Benjamin writes of Kafka:
One of the most signicant functions of this theatre is to dissolve happenings into their gestic components. . . . Kafkas entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no denite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset; rather, the author tried to derive such a meaning from them in ever-changing contexts and experimental groupings. (in Agamben, 1999b: 80)

In The Coming Community (1993a), Agambens concept of potentiality emerges in the strange form of the coming whatever being, which Agamben states does not simply signify an indifference to any form of identication, but rather an insistence on being such as it is (1993a: 1). Agamben asks us to think:
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)

He nds a potential response in the demonstrations of the Chinese May and their culmination in the occupation of Tiananmen Square. What was signicant about these events, Agamben claims, is that despite various attempts to characterize the protest as a confrontation between communism and an emerging desire for democracy, the movement refused to identify itself in

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any such terms. He writes: What the state cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without afrming 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 something, but the fact of communicability.6 He states elsewhere:
There can be no true community on the basis of a presupposition be it a nation, a language. . . . What unites human beings among themselves is not a nature, a voice, or a common imprisonment in signifying language; it is the vision of language itself. (1999b: 47)

Such a community, Agamben claims, will always meet violent opposition by the state, which refuses to allow access to the potentiality of language itself. A Memorial of Pure Mediality? At this point it seems appropriate to ask whether Agambens thought on aesthetics and language can truly be brought to bear on the memorial task at hand at Ground Zero. How might Agambens consideration of the pure potential of language, which after all amounts to a kind of anti-aesthetics, translate into an actual memorial design? What kind of material form can a thinking of pure mediality assume? Agamben of course offers no simple prescription in response to these questions. His theory calls for a consideration of how public spaces might activate the potential of language without

Reecting Absence, National September 11 Memorial

Source: Courtesy of Handel Architects LLP.

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a prescribed outcome or predetermined role. Agambens challenge is for architects and artists to incorporate a productive passivity into their designs, one that suspends the willed activity of praxis and allows something new and unforeseen to come into being. These spaces would rely not on a representational aesthetics, but on the prompting of gestural responses with initially uncertain meanings. The design of such spaces would be necessarily risky ventures, envisioning new forms of social relations and allowing for unpredictable results. Agamben calls for the creation of spaces of communication that would be unlikely to sit comfortably within the calculated planning of mayoral ofces and city development committees. Yet the coming aesthetics alluded to by Agamben is arguably not without precedent amongst recent experiments in memorial design. The public works of the German artist Jochen Gerz often attempt to replace the materiality of art objects with immaterial spaces of communication. The artists projects are important examples of what James E. Young labels countermonuments due to their self-conscious questioning of the very role of the memorial within a post-Second World War Germany. The Monument Against Fascism in the Hamburg suburb of Harburg, completed by Jochen and Esther Gerz in 1986, is perhaps the most frequently discussed contemporary memorial in Germany. The work involved a monumental column that was to be lowered into the ground as its surface was gradually covered with the engraved signatures of local inhabitants, a gesture signifying their commitment against fascism. In reality the memorial was imprinted with both signatures and unanticipated racist grafti, becoming a non-verbal expression of the conicting memory of the Harburg community But it is an unrealized proposal by Gerz, one for Berlins now completed Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe designed by Peter Eisenman, that best represents an attempt to materialize some of the central tenets of Agambens philosophy. The proposed design was entitled Warum? German for Why? (Young, 2000: 14751). It called not for a therapeutic contemplation of traumatic events or a didactic warning against the possibility of recurrence, but instead asked visitors to engage in conversation, discussion and debate on the topic of why the Shoah could have occurred. The central focus of the proposal was a building designed by the Iranian architect Nasrine Seraji, a discussion centre entitled the Ear, in which these encounters would take place. Gerzs proposal does not seek to materialize an aesthetics of trauma or loss, but instead calls for the formation of a temporary community, one with no other presupposition than a desire to engage, through language, a set of historical events and their impact on the present. Implicit in Gerzs design is a realization that something must emerge from the memorial site that goes beyond a willed act of memory or the acquisition of knowledge about an event. The artist seems to share Agambens conviction that it is only our common belonging-in-language that presents the grounds for the kind of coming community capable of responding to an event like the Holocaust. Gerzs memorial seeks to create a space that elicits a moment of poiesis, a suspension of the ow of common time,

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that might allow such a community to emerge, if only temporarily. Such a space would be as much a zone of risk as a place of comfort, and it is perhaps unsurprising that the Berlin selection committee deemed the memorial unsuitable, opting instead for a memorial that engenders a safer and more predictably solitary and meditative experience. Unfortunately, the building projects at the Ground Zero site seem equally closed to the kind of communication without predetermination that Agamben seeks to encourage. Security has won out over openness in the design of the Freedom Tower centrepiece. A 200-foot blast-resistant concrete pedestal has replaced the glass entrance hall envisioned in Daniel Libeskinds original design (Dunlap and Collins, 2005: A1). The recently unveiled designs (by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki) for three skyscrapers to accompany the Freedom Tower fail to compensate for the armature of their taller neighbour. Described by the New York Times as conservative and coolly corporate (Ouroussoff, 2006), the towers are models of efcient design, but add little to the sites potential for noninstrumental communication. While the security and commercial emphasis of the Ground Zero skyscrapers may seem inevitable, even more disturbing are the results of the mandate for the inclusion of culture at the site. The Drawing Center, an art gallery currently located in SoHo which was to move to the site, has been banished due to protests by families of 9/11 victims over formerly exhibited unpatriotic artwork (Feiden, 2005: 1). The proposed International Freedom Center, an educational and cultural centre with the directive to nurture a global conversation on freedom in our world today, held some promise to initiate a form of dialogue, but it too has been removed from construction plans after victims families protested that the centres global historical outlook would take focus away from the sacred ground of the site (Fisher, 2005: B4). The potentially innovative methods of remembering, forms of discussion and types of relations that may have emerged at the Ground Zero site are quickly being curtailed, channelled and codied. The possibility for the inclusion of a space of open communication at the site appears to fall entirely on the memorial itself, yet as was the case in Berlin, the selection committee has shied away from any proposal that questions the typical didactic-therapeutic role of the memorial. The selected Reecting Absence design, with its beneath ground walls engraved with victims names and its chamber of contemplation, also encourages solitary and silent meditation. The sheer enormity of the cascading walls of water owing from the reecting pools that cover the footprints of the collapsed towers into two central voids seem intent on overwhelming both visually and aurally any possibility of communication between visitors to the site. With its references to the impressive scale of destruction, Arad and Walkers design attempts to provide the visitor with an experience, however partial, of the tragic gravity of the 9/11 event itself. The emphasis, therefore, is on remembering the event as it occurred and ensuring its place within an ofcial national history. The memorial makes no attempt to generate

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Reecting Absence, National September 11 Memorial

Source: Courtesy of Handel Architects LLP.

Agambens moment of poiesis that would see the event not as a xed moment of history, but as the catalyst for the generation of a space of radical participation 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 acknowledge the potential of communication itself and as such misses an opportunity to create a space for the kind of open community Agamben insists is both possible and necessary. Agambens thought does not fall within the three saturated schemas of art described by Badiou, but nor does it adopt Badious 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 memorials 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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possibility exists for a memorial that is neither conservative nor cathartic, but instead permits the radically new to pass into being.
Notes 1. Peter Hallward contrasts Badious isolation of the sphere of art to Adornos investment in a materialist aesthetics. He suggests that Badious conception of art deliberately invites the Adornian accusation that he capitulates before the problem of the relationship between art and the social (2003: 3878). In recent public lectures, Badiou seems to suggest there is the potential for a more productive relationship between art and politics, claiming that contemporary event-based art may provide a model for the creation of new subjects something contemporary politics no longer seems capable of achieving. 2. Agamben reminds us that, for the Greeks, the sphere of work as required for the maintenance of life was undertaken by slaves and thus could not even be considered within the poiesispraxis hierarchy. He makes a compelling argument that all production (artistic or otherwise) is now conceived of within this sphere of work and is therefore connected to the domain of the maintenance of animal life an association that would have been unthinkable for the Greeks. ` 3. For Agamben, rhythm also carries the double sense of the Greek verb epevx, meaning both an offering and a holding back. Rhythm thus holds both the promise of this access to an original time and the possibility of the fall into calculated time. Whether rhythms gift is granted or withheld seems contingent on our method of approach. 4. Agamben could hardly be more specic about his overall concerns when he writes in Infancy and History: In both my written and unwritten books, I have stubbornly pursued only one train of thought: what is the meaning of there is language; what is the meaning of I speak? (1993b: 5) 5. Agambens return to the Greek distinction between poiesis and praxis, and his critique of the modern prioritization of will, invite comparisons to the work of Hannah Arendt, another philosopher poised between the thought of Heidegger and Benjamin. For Arendt it is not poiesis, but the concept of action (as distinguished from labour and work the reproductive and economic modes of praxis) that must be recovered from Greek thought. Action, closely associated with speech, serves a similar role for Arendt as the concept of poiesis does for Agamben. Its revelatory quality she writes, comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against them that is, in sheer human togetherness (1958: 180). But Agamben ultimately rejects as no longer tenable the clear divisions Arendt maintains between bare life and political life. Rather than isolating political speech from all other forms of language, Agamben highlights the political potential inherent in the event of language itself. 6. Indeed Agamben claims that true politics is the sphere of pure means, that is, of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings (2000: 60). References Agamben, G. (1993a) The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G. (1993b) Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, trans. L. Heron. London: Verso.

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Agamben, G. (1999a) The Man without Content, trans. G. Albert. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (1999b) Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2000) Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arendt, A. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Badiou, A. (2005) Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. A. Toscano. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, W. (1999) Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, trans. H. Zorn. London: Pimlico. Blair, C. and N. Michel (2000) Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics: The Rhetorical Performances of the Civil Rights Memorial, Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30: 3155. Blair, C., M.S. Jeppeson and E. Pucci Jr (1991) Public Memorializing in Postmodernity: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Prototype, Quarterly Journal of Speech 77: 26388. Carroll, N. (2005) Art and Recollection, Journal of Aesthetic Education 39(2): 112. Dunlap, D.W. and G. Collins (2005) Redesign Puts Freedom Tower on a Fortied Base, New York Times 30 June: A1, B2. Edkins, J. (2003) Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feiden, D. (2005) Violated . . . Again: Kin Slap Art Centers 9/11 Pieces, New York Daily News 24 June: 1. Fisher, J. (2005) Relatives Protest Plan for Museum at 9/11 Memorial Site, New York Times 21 June: B4. Hallward, P. (2003) Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Heidegger, M. (1977) The Origin of the Work of Art, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell. London: Routledge. Heller-Roazen, D. (1999) To Read What Was Never Written, pp. 124 in G. Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. LMDC (Lower Manhattan Development Corporation) (2003) World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition Guidelines, URL (consulted June 2008): www.wtcsite memorial.org/about_guidelines.html Nobel, P. (2005) Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero. New York: Metropolitan Books. Ouroussoff, N. (2006) At Ground Zero, Towers for Forgetting, URL (consulted June 2008): www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/arts/design/11zero.html Rowlands, M. (1999) Remembering to Forget: Sublimation as Sacrice in War Memorials, in A. Forty and S. Kchler (eds) The Art of Forgetting. Oxford: Berg. Stephens, S. (2004) Imagining Ground Zero: Ofcial and Unofcial Proposals for the World Trade Center Competition. London: Thames and Hudson. Young, J.E. (2000) At Memorys Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Joel McKim is a lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) and a PhD candidate at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London. He is currently writing on aesthetics and architecture in post 9/11 New York and has recently contributed to the collection Informal Architectures (Black Dog Publishing).