This article was downloaded by: [Ariel University Center of Samaria] On: 17 December 2012, At: 09:41 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Cultural Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20 POLITICIZING MEMORY Gal Hermoni & Udi Lebel Version of record first published: 09 Nov 2011. To cite this article: Gal Hermoni & Udi Lebel (2012): POLITICIZING MEMORY, Cultural Studies, 26:4, 469-491 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.622779 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
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This article was downloaded by: [Ariel University Center of Samaria]On: 17 December 2012, At: 09:41Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
Cultural StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20
POLITICIZING MEMORYGal Hermoni & Udi LebelVersion of record first published: 09 Nov 2011.
To cite this article: Gal Hermoni & Udi Lebel (2012): POLITICIZING MEMORY, CulturalStudies, 26:4, 469-491
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.622779
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make anyrepresentation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up todate. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should beindependently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liablefor any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damageswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith or arising out of the use of this material.
This paper argues that hegemonic memorial ceremonies are typically based on thepractice and discourse of de-politicization of the ‘Israeli condition’. Threemechanisms serve such de-politicization: rendering death meaningful; idealizingthe fallen and focusing on their transcendental as opposed to their corporeal sideand the sanctification of time. Ceremonies featuring these mechanisms areparadigmatic events that perpetuate the hegemonic model of bereavement in Israel.Ceremonies deviating from these practices function as an opposition to staticcollective memory by acting as extra-paradigmatic sites of memory (Lieux dememoire). This paper analyzes the Hallal (Hebrew for both ‘fallen’ and ‘void’)ceremony (Tzavta Theatre, Tel Aviv, 2009), that serves as an ‘alternative’Remembrance Day ceremony. Drawing on the ethnography of ceremonies, weclaim that this ceremony is an extra-paradigmatic event on account of itssubversion of the de-politicizing mechanisms.
Remembrance Day for the Israeli Fallen Soldiers and Terror Victims (hereafter�‘Remembrance Day’) is the ‘sacred’ day of the civil-Zionist religion, a daythat reproduces the Jewish command ‘Remember!’ in the Israeli context. Assuch, its aim is to legitimize the paradigm of national identity.1 It refers notsolely to the duty to remember the fallen and their families but also shapes themodes of remembrance implementing the task of transforming remembranceinto an active heritage obligating all citizens (Ralston et al. 2008). The climaxof Remembrance Day is its major ceremony � a ritual practice designed byformal institutions since the earliest days of the Israeli state. The day isformalized in a 1963 law in the Israeli calendar and its contents and modusoperandi have hardly changed over time.2
This article contains an analysis of an alternative ceremony conducted atthe Tzavta theatre in Tel Aviv for the eighth consecutive year on
Cultural Studies Vol. 26, No. 4 July 2012, pp. 469�491
ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis
Remembrance Day, 2009. We will attempt to explain why, in ourperspective, this ceremony is exceptional in nature. It subverts the verypractice of national commemoration and the foundations of Israeli memory,and at the same time politicizes Israeli national memory, bereavement andcommemoration. Accordingly, this distinctive ceremony is presented as an‘anti-ceremony’ that exposes and subverts the political implications aroundwhich Remembrance Day is structured, undermining its very legitimacy.
Israeli remembrance ceremonies
In 1963, Israel legislated the law of Remembrance Day for the Israel DefenseForce (IDF) fallen soldiers after years during which it was observed voluntarily(Lebel 2006). In the course of time the events of Remembrance Dayovershadowed the celebrations of Independence Day (Ben-Amos and Beit-El1999). Remembrance Day ceremonies remained organized and founded on anunchanging tradition, while those related to Independence Day developed anarray of folkloristic customs � staged performances, music and dance shows, aswell as municipal and private productions (Azaryahu 1995). In most cases,Remembrance Day ceremonies in Israel are produced by state agents ofmemory, such as youth movements, schools, local authorities, military and civilassociations. Ben-Amos and Beit-El who studied an assortment of rituals held onRemembrance Day eve found that ‘despite the multiplicity of sources andauthors, no range of voices is featured’ (Azaryahu 1995). The meaning conveyedis that it is the same ritual, referring to the same unending war that producescasualties unceasingly. They do not feature any debate concerning the particularhistorical and political circumstances and contexts of that war, which remainspredestined (Ben-Amos and Beit-El 1999). It is a ceremony that functions as aninstrument of the ‘hegemonic bereavement model’ that promotes a discourse onbereavement awarding validity, legitimacy and normativity to the demand forself-sacrifice in the course of military service. The model counteracts anger andthe outward expression of emotions, and instead stresses submission to fate andconfidence in the military and political elites in whose name soldiers fell in battle(Lebel 2006). To do so, the discourse of bereavement and memory � with itsarsenal of tools � must position itself in opposition to the discourse of politics(the mundane discourse) by detaching itself from the power relations and theinterests associated with them.
De-politicization of national identity and memory
The nature of national identity depends on the congruity of cultural, societaland communicative practices with the narrative that reinforces its imagined
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national discourse, without defying its paradigmatic foundations (Schlesinger1993). It is contingent on the willingness of cultural agents to support it andplace the appropriate discourse according to the hegemonic interpretation atthe centre of the stage and relegate any doubts to the private sphere (Parker1993). That is how a-political memory, distinct from everyday publicdiscourse, is shaped. This is especially true in all affairs pertaining to nationalmemory. While normative separations deriving from the schools of Aristotle,Schmidt and Locke perceive the public sphere � unlike the private � aspolitical (Herzog 2009) national collective memory is perceived as authentic,thus, a political (Olick 1998, Purchel 2000).
Much has been written about the non-spontaneous and undemocraticnature of national memory, which is meticulously structured by agents of theestablishment who shape notions of the past in a rational and selective way(Schwartz 1972, Halbwachs 1980). Public memory helps to preserve thecommunity identity and enables us to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them’(Steel et al. 1992). It grants prominence to public actors defined as havingcontributed to the founding of the nation and its survival, opts forinterpretations confined to their legacy and furnishes the primary legitimacyfor the political paradigm on which the community relies (Halbwachs 1980)and the practices constituting it (Foster 1994). Remembrance ceremonies, aspart of those practices, are arenas comprising monuments and militarycemeteries and so on (i.e. static memory). In these rituals, memory isdynamically personified � in body, voice and movement � via the transferredemotional experience, through the convening of the audience observing them(Connerton 1989). From their very beginning, these ceremonies wereintended to respond to individual/overall needs: commemorating the fallenand preventing their ‘death’ within the social fabric � a kind of ‘socialresuscitation’ � as well as conscious use of them and their ‘legacy’ inconsolidating national identity and social solidarity. Morin (1970) maintainsthat the ceremonies embody an exchange between citizens prepared to risk,even sacrifice, their lives for the good of society, which promises them eternallife in the collective memory in return.
How can we characterize the national Remembrance paradigm? And howare Remembrance ceremonies used as a practice that preserves the nationalhegemony? We suggest that de-politization is the main function of the nationalmemory project, that contributes to national bereavement and memory as amodel of solidarity, uninvolved in social and cultural fractures and ‘sacred’ inthe public sphere. Bourdieu (2002) holds that by means of a strategy of de-politicization, institutions effectively impose themselves on individuals and gaincontrol of social forces. He maintains that researchers must ‘bring politicsback’ and expose the power structures that shape what is perceived in theliberal discourse as sporadic, spontaneous or extra-national (Bourdieu 2002).
De-politicization is not necessarily a unique trend of totalitarian orrepublican arenas. In fact, democratization and liberalization processes can
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coexist with it. This leads to ostensibly pluralistic political behaviour thatvirtually reproduces the national core and structure (Maghraoui 2002,Keranean 2007). Maghraoui defines de-politicization as marginalizing issuesthat might subvert the legitimacy of the sovereignty of the state, bytransferring the focus to those elements that do not interfere with thedominant ethos (Maghraoui 2002). In his opinion, these phenomena go hand inhand with processes of democratization and pluralization. Ferguson (1994)maintains that de-politicization affirms the power of the bureaucraticestablishment, and every phenomenon occurring in its vicinity is influencedby it. The power of the bureaucracy is perceived as a universal servicemechanism that leads its clients not to think about the organizing valuesshaping it. Therefore he terms it the ‘anti-politics machine’.
Apparently this is one of the practices enhancing the effectiveness of‘governmentality’ in the words of Foucault (1991), since Remembranceceremonies, as Handelman (2004) has noted, are actually shaped by what hecalls the ‘bureaucratic logos.’ As such, they signify the space that differentiatesbetween the public and the official, and thus between the ‘political’ and the‘non-political.’
From this perspective, we maintain that Sites of memory in general, andRemembrance ceremonies in particular, cannot provide an ‘alternative’ as longas they are based on practices of de-politicization. When something is a-political, as Ophir writes, it is not recognized as part of the statist social order(Ophir 2009). He argues that ‘political’ is ‘a quality awarded from outside’that imposes on the issue a discussion of what is presented ‘. . . in its affinity tothe regime, and through it, presents the regime, or one of its aspects, asproblematic’ (Ophir 2009).
The Remembrance ceremonies de-politization mechanisms
We suggest that three mechanisms generate de-politicization in Remembranceceremonies.
Attributing meaning to death
In the national sphere relying on republican rhetoric and citizenship � of thekind that encourages exchange between the contribution to the nation-stateand the social-cultural-civil status deriving from it (Levy 2008) � the fallen andtheir families gain public-moral status (Lebel 2007). As long as the ceremonypreserves that perception, the de-politicization of the nation-state and itscultural militarism is present (Adelman 2003).
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Idealizing the fallen, by highlighting their transcendental as opposed to theircorporeal side
The transformation of the fallen into a societal ‘ideal type’, considered bysociety as embodying the summit of patriotism and loyalty to ‘the generalwill’, is expressed, among others, by the way they are remembered. This caninclude what Ben-Ari has defined as a ‘good military death’: it is a discourse ofaesthetic death that does not focus on the mangled, bleeding organs of thedead, but concentrates on their spiritual, ideological and military aspects. Thiscontributes to remembering them as perfect, attractive youths withoutassociating them with the carnage of war that they embody in reality (Ben-Ari 2005).
Sanctifying time
As noted by Eliade (1971), separation between sacred and mundane, asbetween political and a-political time, is an essential contribution to notions ofbereavement as part of de-politicizing the circumstances that caused it and thenational mechanisms responsible for it. By definition, conducting Remem-brance ceremonies signifies the public discourse of bereavement as extra-political, and thus provides time to engage with private and collective traumas,not in the setting of everyday divisive political discourse � but within a‘sanctified’ setting, not intended to provide a locus for a critical examination ofthe constitutive ethos (Ziolkowski 2002).
‘Hallal’ � politicizing memory
Since the last decade of the previous century, alternative Remembrance Dayceremonies differing from the canonic ones have been conducted in Israel. Theprocess evolved in tandem with, though not as a result of, a range ofphenomena � social (protest movements), cultural (post-national film andliterature) and research based (known as ‘the New Historians’). They ignited acritical and anti-establishment discourse regarding the policy of governance itsfundamental perceptions and values, as well as its constitutive myths, includinga renewed debate about the Holocaust and national bereavement in Israel(Laurence 1999, Hazony 2000a).3
The aim of this paper is to present an inductive study of an alternativeceremony produced as part of that process, and discuss how it defies andundermines the hegemonic practices of memory. The ‘Hallal’ event is analternative Remembrance Day ceremony held in 2009 at the Tzavta Theatre inTel Aviv. That year was the eighth time it was produced by Avishai Matia,cultural and media critic, musical producer and editor who was involved in
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producing the central, hegemonic Remembrance ceremony in Tel Aviv �‘Singing in the Square’� held each year at the Rabin Square.4 We will try toexamine why and in what way this ‘alternative Remembrance Day ceremony’is indeed alternative, and what is its exact purpose. This was done byaddressing the mechanisms that we suggested as enabling de-politicization ofthe event, or to be more accurate, illustrating the lack of compliance of theceremony with them. It should be noted that it was not our intention to studyother ceremonies held at the same time and to what extent they containedalternative elements; they too can be studied according to the mechanismsmentioned above.
Imagining the future � the significance of the productivity ofdeath and bereavement
As noted, canonic ceremonies sought to imbue a meaning into the extinct livesof the fallen. The central product in the ceremonies engenders the sense of animagined future, made tangible in the motto ‘in their death they bequeathedlife.’ In this way they serve as a therapeutic tool providing relatives of thefallen with a meaning for the loss inflicted on them (Ronel and Lebel 2006).The ceremonies are rife with stories of the contributions of the fallen to thebattles in which they fought, and with accounts by soldiers and civilianstestifying that they owe their lives to them. The emphasis is on the socialendeavors of the fallen and their families, since the former are regarded as the‘silver platter’ that made the state’s founding and survival possible (Bilu andWitztum 2000). Over the years, faced with processes of politicization andindividuation in the public discourse and with a vivid civil society, the messagesconveyed at ceremonies were modified, as they were in the general discourseof bereavement. However, it seems that the families have preserved theirspecial status on account of their being the bearers of the ‘legacy of the fallen’imparting meaning to their death. Parents were still ‘enlisted’ following thedeath of their sons (Azaryahu 1995, Lebel 2007). The sons remained a centralelement in the discourse of bereavement and memory, continuing to embodythe legitimization of their death.
However, in the ceremony to be discussed below, a positive future is notfeasible, since it is governed by an oppositional rhetoric. This rhetoric is foundin the read/sung texts themselves and in the dialectic relationship betweenthem and in the modes and context in which they are performed. It is adialectic impeding the progressive movement of time towards the futureleaving it as a concrete present, unable to offer a bridge to a future. Anexample is the text read by Avishai Matia, the master of ceremony: ‘Now, whenspeaking about Gaza.’ As the title implies, it is organized by concretizing thepresent, signified by the word ‘now’, with which each line begins:
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Now when we talk about Gaza. Now when we warn Iran, Now when wethreaten Damascus. Now when there’s no other choice. . . . Now I’mthinking about him. About the next young man. Now I’m terribly afraid.Now I’m flying ahead, to that night. A night with no dreams.
The final line, ‘A night with no dreams,’ inherently obstructs the future becauseit negates one of its major metaphors � the dream. The act of dreaming is usedmetaphorically as a resource for a potential future, like a ‘mental working-plan’ according to which it can be fulfilled. Even when the speaker shifts to thefuture tense, it is devoid of expectations, only negation and nullification� theantithesis of meaningfulness and productivity:
Before dawn, they’ll knock on your door. A mortified soldier will bestanding there, someone from the Medical Corps, and a shrinking femaleCasualties Officer. The room will start revolving. Ghostly voices flyabove. Then nothing. No more. Your heart seals up for ever. The light inher eyes dies away eternally. His sister falls to pieces. His brother breaksdown in tears.
The text is not satisfied with those poetic hints, but emphasizes the vanishing ofexpectations, death and the negation of the hoped-for future, at the end.
And you mother and father, his brother and sister, you’ll be left withouthim. Alone. Without a family. Without a future. Without a purpose,Plunging slowly into a gaping chasm. Kicking at the darkness, while thedarkness laughs. Eternally.
Yonatan Yavin’s poem ‘He who died in war’ uses similar rhetoric to nullify andnegate the future and by the same token�the productivity of death. Its secondverse is arranged by joining the negating word ‘no’ to a list of verbs in thefuture tense:
Someone who died in war will not do an MBA will not get stuck in trafficwill not talk to the suppliers and no one will say he’s gorgeous and laterbreak his heart to bits and no one will say to him yes, let’s get marriedwhen he goes down on his knees and he will not go on maybe / more orless dates with a divine programmer. He will not fake sadness onRemembrance Day and will not pay the check because, let’s face it, whatfor? That’s someone who died in war.
In addition, the speaker also expresses the lack of meaning and expectations bylinking the question ‘what for?’ to the speaker’s own reply: ‘That’s someone whodied in war’.
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Not only does the rhetoric frustrate the productive meaning of death asembodied in the various texts but it is also generated by the text’s inter-relationship with the modes and context in which it is performed, by theconflict created between a text known beforehand, and a performance inconcrete time and space. The choice of the singer Hadara Levin-Areddy toperform a well-known song, a translation into Hebrew of a Portuguese song (OQue Sera A Flor da Terra) � ‘Mah Yiyheh?’�Where will it end?’ Originally it was alove song ranging from pessimism to optimism, in which the speaker asks hislover questions about their (apparently) shared future: ‘Oh where will it end withyou and me they promised us wonders but we got nothing of what was promised’. Atfirst the song seems to cancel the imagined future promised to the speaker; itcould join the textual rhetoric described above, but it complicates the questionof the future, because it is also interwoven with lines implying optimism:
Yet in my heart I still hope not all is lost, that we may yet live in happinessand joy . . . despair and abandon are forbidden, we must persevere andlove.
These lines ostensibly ‘impede the impediment’ as the song progresses and arelikely to imbue the future with meaning and productivity. Moreover, the verymotif recurring throughout the song is already implied in its title ‘Where will itend?’ embodying the existence of that future, as it is left open by grammaticallyphrasing it as a question not answered conclusively.
What is interesting for our discussion is how that future mentioned in thetext maintains a relationship with the contextual and performing space inwhich it is conducted. When performing the song, Areddy chose to refer tothe repetitive nature, of the text, interpreting its content as negative andpessimistic. She exploits that repetitiveness � reflected both in the text and inthe recurring melody as a series of verses without a chorus � and transformsthe song into a dynamically intensifying crescendo. Each verse is renderedmore aggressively than the preceding one. The aggression is inherent both inthe velocity of the piano accompaniment and in the lead vocal and the staccatothat takes over the performance as the verses proceed; and also by theperformer’s corporeal and vocal gestures evoking rage. From one verse to thenext, Areddy contorts her face and body more and more, sitting at the piano ina manner that reveals her physical dissatisfaction as she plays. These formativeelements seem to clash with the lyrics and prevent interpretations from hintingat any optimism with regard to the future.
The disparity between the performance and the text confuses the audiencewith question marks and an unresolved dissonant experience, as they askthemselves ‘Why is she so angry when she’s singing about an optimistic futureand hopes for love?’ A possible answer is found in the temporal context of theperformance � Remembrance Day. Originally the song is a romantic love songunconnected to this occasion, but the audience cannot ignore the fact that they
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are witnessing an event taking place on this significant day. In other words, theissue of the loss of life in the war resonates in the background and the audiencemust take it into account when processing and construing what they areexperiencing. This integration of text, performance and the context in which itis performed can produce a specific interpretation for the audience: the reasonfor Areddy’s dissatisfaction with the future is that no future is discernible onthe horizon. The implied speaker of the song is positioned as a soldier fated todie in war. The fictitious speaker is indicated both through the temporalcontext of the performance (Remembrance Day) and through and referring tohim as masculine by using a male pronoun (Hebrew is a gender-basedlanguage).
The discursive combination between a male speaker pondering his futureand Remembrance Day places him as a soldier in the present and a fallensoldier in the future, suitable to the prior expectations of the audienceattending this particular performance.
Under these circumstances what remains is to understand that the questionof the future is completely irrelevant to the subject at hand and thus engendersdissonance (between the speaker and the future) as part of rhetoric of ironythat creates a relationship between the text and the performance. The irony isevoked by the gaps of knowledge produced by the different points of viewconcerning the event.5 On the one hand, the speaker wants to regard his futureas optimistic and productive, but in temporal terms, the audience enjoys astrategic advantage over him. It is as if the audience reflects the speaker’sfuture from a privileged position, knowing something that he does not know:that the future is not part of the course of his life. As noted, this point of viewweaves Areddy’s performance together with the context in which it takesplace.6
A similar ploy is found in the song ‘Sleep, my child’, also performed at theceremony; it was taken from the Israeli rock opera ‘War’ written by KobyWhitman as an act of protest after he participated in the 2002 Defensive Shieldoperation, which was conducted by the Israeli military in the occupiedterritories. The song is a lullaby that a mother sings to her child:
One day when you grow up, only if there’s no choice, you’ll be a soldier/ you’ll run, crawl, fall, you’ll think you have it all. / Let’s hope you’relucky. / I wanted a son who would study, marry, raise a family here / inthe meantime there are laws, a constitution, a government cabinet / sosleep now my child, you’ll see that one day we won’t be afraid.
But as its lyrics reveal the future in the lullaby is not rosy at all, because thechild’s fate is to become a soldier. Combining the rhetoric of a lullaby with thesober disclosing of the future awaiting the child produces a certain ironyresulting from those gaps. And here too, as in Areddy’s case, there is aperformable element which intensifies the irony. The line ‘so sleep now my child,
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/ you’ll see that one day we won’t be afraid’ acts as a kind of chorus that serves as aleitmotif. The chorus is sung by the performers with pathos expressed in vocalharmonics, staccato and velocity. Their accompanying physical gestures areinfluenced by those associated with military pageants and national ceremonies�raised arms, gazes towards the horizon: the future. These corporeal and vocalgestures place the song in a national context, and appropriate the child’s futureto the national project. Here too, the contrast between the lyrics of the chorusand the way it is performed creates a gap between two points of view: that ofthe written text and that of the audience. Furthermore, in the context of theRemembrance Day, the words ‘so sleep now my child, / you’ll see that one day wewon’t be afraid’ acquire a different significance thwarting the serenity that themother attempts to impart to her infant son. Not only is the son’s life‘nationalized,’ but apparently it will not last long, since he is destined to be awar casualty. Is it possible to sleep quietly and not be afraid, when thatknowledge about the future is revealed? Again, these disparities cast an ironiclight on the text and its subject, ridiculing the question of the future byimpeding and annihilating it, and replacing it with a barren present.
Getting rid of the body� idealization of the dead
At this point it is worth noting that even canonic texts, sung and recited atofficial Remembrance Day ceremonies use the semantics of loss that can beconstrued as lack of productivity and meaning. But that construction is tenableonly because it relies on a significant disparity between them and the texts wehave reviewed. This disparity is modified by the way the canonic texts portraydeath as the ‘other place’, open�even potent: productive, not nullifying. Forexample, a well-known canonic Israeli commemoration song by Didi Manussiand Yohanan Zarai, ‘He who dreamed’ (‘Mi She-halam’) links a fallen soldier to adream that has not vanished and to a memory that produces eternal life:
He who dreamed, and his dream endured, he who fought and never forgotwhy: . . . He won’t believe that the fallen are forgotten . . . They will bearwitness that we remembered them all.
This text produces an alternative space for the dead, a space that does notaccept the absolute nature of death and the obliteration of the dead. Thefrequent use in the song of the verb ‘to go’ in its various inflections whendescribing the dead, as well as the use of the verb ‘to return’ (‘He who set outbut will never return’) places the fallen not as someone who no longer exists,but as one who simply resides ‘elsewhere’. He is capable of moving withinspace by ‘going’. His ability or inability to ‘return’ also prove that he existsalongside the living, but in a place that renders him ‘distant’ from us. Thesesemantics seem to soften and saturate the rupture that war creates between the
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living and the dead, between being and nothingness, and they are quitedifferent from the texts that obliterate life which we described above.
That difference between those two semantics of death leads us to anotherattribute of the paradigmatic ceremonies�concealing the corporeal factuality ofthe dead testifying to their absolute and finite condition, by transforming theminto an abstract, transcendental idea. This is an idealization that encapsulatesthe essence of commemoration and memory. As Weiss has termed it, the bodyof the fallen may be ‘the chosen body’ or ‘the mirror of society’ but never theconcrete body. From the moment a soldier is killed, his body in fact becomesthe political discourse itself, the cultural representations appropriated to thesocial legacy that perceives him as an imagined military ‘spirit’ rather than as acorpse (Weiss 2002). Memory in fact ‘preserves’ the dead, ‘nails’ him inabstract time and appropriates the past (the object of memory) in order torender it productive again and again in a kind of eternal future.7 Mosse (1990)illustrates this in terms of representations of the body in European warmonuments; they represented the young sturdy body of the fallen as an idealnational perfected body.8 In order to do so, it was necessary to ‘get rid of thebody.’ The dead body � an object emptied out of a subject � is excluded fromthe official discourse of Remembrance Day, by a tenacious clinging to the pastof the fallen, before they became corpses, without the battle injuries thatincapacitated the sturdy, healthy body (Neeman 2005). The discourse ofmemory ‘celebrates’ the lost subjectivity of the dead by conjuring up theirliving past, as if they had never died. Their dreams, hopes and plans arebroadly discussed in a constant chatter aimed at disguising the painfully simplefact: all that remains now, in the present, is ‘flesh’, nothing more. Without a‘body’, without matter, the past can transcend itself and function as future.But the ‘Hallal’ event is aimed at returning the concrete body to theRemembrance Day discourse. Its return is manifested literally by the textschosen and performed and through the space where the ceremony isconducted. This is also one of the strategies by which the event politicizesIsraeli bereavement and challenges its ethos.
In Avishai Matia’s text, ‘Now when talking about Gaza’ the body is radicallybeing present by the line . . . ‘But all you want to do is puke’ . . . . Vomit, like allbodily discharges, is what Julia Kristeva calls ‘abjection’, following MaryDouglas’s concept of ‘defilement’ (Kristeva 1982). The bodily discharge,Kristeva claims, is a component inside the body displaced out of it thussubverting the categories of inside and outside. The ‘abject’ something long-repressed, returns to consciousness � the inter-dependence between theinternal and the external, between subject and object, mind and body. In otherwords, bodily excretion � vomit, in our case � brings back the body as a body,the sum total of its material products.
Another line in the text presents the concrete materiality of the body, aswell as its imperfectness and its openness to the world: ‘they’ll clean up thebullet wounds’. Cohen-Shabot (2008) links the open body, whose boundaries are
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blurred, to the concept of grotesqueness. Following her reading of Bakhtin’scarnivalesque and Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, Cohen-Shabot showshow this kind of corporeality ridicules, and thus undermines the tradition ofwestern thought that always ranked the transcendental higher than thetangible. As Matia’s text reveals, the bleeding, punctured, excreting bodyridicules and undermines the attempts of the hegemony to attribute atranscendental nature, devoid of corporeality, to death and bereavement.
Another text embodying that physicality is ‘Two Recipes’, written by actorand director Amir Orian, and taken from the satirical cabaret User Name:General. The text demonstrates ‘How to produce rabble’ and ‘How to produceblood’,
This is how human blood is made:Nine months in the womb,
Three years at home,Three more years in kindergarten.
Six years in elementary school,Two years in junior high,
And another four years in high school.Recruit to the army�and the blood is ready.
It can spurt, spray and spill.
Orian reads the text after ‘teaching’ the audience how theatrical artificialblood is made. He shows the audience how various materials (water, instantcoffee, raspberry syrup, ketchup) are mixed to obtain the desired effect.Eventually, Orian pours the result onto papers in a file placed on a table. Sothe open, bleeding and excreting body is made manifest both symbolically bythe written text and through performance by Orian’s body which ‘produces’and ‘sheds’ the ‘blood’ in the form of a concrete matter, facing thedisconcerted audience.
Corporeality � embodied by the performance of the actors onstage � isalso manifested through gestures differentiated from those used in the officialceremonies. In the latter, the bodily movements of the performers (whetherreading, singing or playing musical instruments) are restricted and reduced bya narrow, limited space, even when it is imagined and discursive. Notconnected to the actual size of the space itself (usually a stage), the performers‘choose’ not to exploit all the potential it offers, and comply with a whole ofset of regulations and expectations shared by all ‘actors’ in the event withregard to the handling of the body on such occasions. Lomsky-Feder definesthe canonic ceremony as characterized by restraint, order and control,asceticism and minimalism, reflecting the normative nature of the communityand the national hierarchy (Lomsky-Feder 2002). With the consent of theaudience it is predicated that their mission is to honour the fallen and theirfamilies, to assure the latter � the object of the ceremony of their support and
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to express solidarity with them by commemorating their loved ones(Rosenheim 2003). Bodily movements made by performers in those ritualstend to be slow and measured, as if they ‘don’t want to wake the dead’. Theystand planted in a single, specific geometrical locus, generally dictated by theplace of a microphone, and no physical gesture on their part may challenge anyspatial aspect. In other words, the body that appears at an official ceremony is abody making efforts to nullify itself, make itself ‘transparent’ a vessel of atranscendental idea, devoid of corporeality.
However, some of the performers at the ceremony we are analyzing donot obey those conventions, and embody corporeality instead in a way thatchallenges and even undermines them, for example, the appearance ofmusician Doron Eyal, known by his stage name of ‘Schultz the Terrible.’ Eyal,whose physical proportions are well above the ‘average’ (his height,particularly) chose to go onstage wearing a suit several sizes too big Theway his clothes hang on his body give him a clumsy, weighed-downappearance. His clothes are ridiculing his body in a way that reminds us ofthe characteristics of the punk movement in the late 1970s.9 Through hisclothing and comportment onstage, Eyal creates another connotative meaningfor that of the present body, and links it to a subculture with counter-hegemonic values.10 Eyal himself was one of the founders of Israel’s punkmovement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was renowned for his stageperformances and the fictive persona with eccentric physical traits such as‘robotic’ and ‘machinelike gestures’. Those were the kind of gestures Eyalmade onstage during the ‘Hallal’ ceremony � sudden random pauses, brusquemovements emphasizing the body that made them. In addition, Eyal recited thetexts in both speech and song, and his vocal range was vast: when he ‘shouted’a text, he demonstratively sprayed saliva (spat). Like Matia and Orian, Eyaltalked about bodily excretion, in a way ostensibly ‘unsuitable’ for the event inwhich he appeared.
A performance borrowing body gestures from another performableparadigm and no less challenging, was that of vocalist Yuval Gurevichwho accompanied the female singer Bat Nataf with guitar and vocals.Particularly conspicuous was the way Gurevich held and played his guitar.Hung low on his body, the guitar caused his whole posture to lean overdemonstratively. Occasionally, he leaped in the air while playing. Whenhe ‘landed’ on the stage, he lost his balance somewhat, and that physicalconstellation imbued his performance with an ‘erratic flavor’, as if hewere challenging the law of gravity. Unlike the spatial restraint that suchoccasions call for, Gurevich exploited the entire ‘potential’ that the stagespace allowed him, in all dimensions � height, width, and depth. That is,his body with its corporeal presence, filled the entire space of the stagealmost to its bursting-point, and did not restrict or obliterate itself.Physical excess of that kind, breaking through the ‘customary’ spatial
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boundaries in the given context, subverts the delicate balance betweenbody and space in which it is expected to comport itself according towestern tradition of subject/object dichotomy (Bakhtin 1965, Merleau-Ponty 1969, 1989, Bataille 1985). This tradition strives to maintain clearboundaries between the body and the world, and transgressing them isconsidered a violation of the social order. Therefore Gurevich’s physicality(like that of Eyal) becomes an act of defiance against the body’s exclusionfrom the discourse of memory.
The discourse from which Gurevich drew his physical movements is that ofrock music performances. The aesthetic of rock concerts creates an intensiveand excessive bodily presence, culturally associated with power, sexuality andviolence (Reynolds and Press 1995, Frith 1996, Waksman 1998). This isopposed to the ‘softening’ that Remembrance ceremonies seek to achieve. Butbeyond the movements themselves, the discourse of rock is inherently physicalin another way, also reflected in the ceremony. Rock makes structured andideological use of the acoustic phenomenon of noise, expressed by highamplitudes and frequency clashing Attali (1985) argues that noise is actually aform of violence that violates and disturbs both the social and auditory orders.Noise can be literally painful, and in extreme cases can even injure and kill.The body cannot disregard noise when it penetrates and impacts on itphysiologically. Therefore noise is a physical presence that requires self-awareness on the part of the people experiencing it. In other words, beingexposed to noise means being physically present. At the ceremony in Tzavtatheatre, the rock group ‘Hardal’ performed the song ‘Requiem.’ It wasaccompanied by a particularly noisy feedback produced by guitar playing. Theaudio-technological phenomenon of the feedback masked and interfered withthe ‘proper’ performance of the song. The acoustic disturbance embodied theaudience’s experience of listening. It was impossible to disregard it: itbreached the auditory structure and order known as ‘music.’ Thus not only thephysicality of the performers was present but that of the audience as well.Noise brought the body back to the Remembrance Day ceremony, somethingthat hegemonic ceremonies attempt to marginalize. The event became aconscious corporeal experience.
The presence of bodies, both onstage and in the auditorium, was enhancedby another difference distinguishing this ceremony from those that itundermines � the difference in the physical space where it takes place. Spaceis not neutral, asserts Lefebvre (1991), but a social � and therefore ideological� product. Space is an apparatus by which the hegemony employs power andcontrol that shape people’s endeavors and awareness. One of the ‘technol-ogies’ establishing the transcendental dimension of official Remembrance Dayceremonies is its spatial aspect. Usually the ceremonies are held in large openspaces such as squares or public plazas. The size of those sites also allows theconstruction of broad open platforms that ‘swallow’ the actors. Moreover,
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these sites create a large distance between performers and audience. Therestricted presence of the performers in these surroundings, and their distancefrom the audience makes it hard for the latter to be aware of the bodies facingthem. In fact, because amplification systems are used, these spaces produceabstract subjects, devoid of bodies, represented exclusively by voice. Incomparison, the alternative ceremony was held in a different type of space �closed and rather small. The distance between the stage and the seatedaudience was so small that every physical movement performed onstage gainedpresence and significance. The very ability of the audience at our ceremony toidentify the entire range of physical movements described, is the directoutcome of the small, enclosed space of the Tzavta theater hall where it washeld. The two ceremonies ‘spatialize’ the bodies in opposing ways. While thespace of official ceremonies excludes the body, the alternative ceremonypermits its presence, and even endorses it.
Verbally, performably and spatially, the ‘Hallal’ ceremony returns textual‘corporeality’ to the Remembrance discourse, from which it was excluded inthe first place. This is because the soldier’s dead, shattered, punctured andbleeding body, is the main evidence which is the essential linkage between life,death and the power of the sovereign and therefore must be concealed inFoucault’s (1990) terms ‘bio-politics.’ This concept maintains that the centrallocus in which power relations between the citizen and the state are realized isthe concrete body of the subject. Culture in general, and the sovereign state inparticular, manage their subjects by means of different agents, who exercisepower over their bodies. Such power is expressed in several discursive ways,and its ultimate result is the regulation and disposal of the body by keeping italive and/or by killing it. War is one of the instruments designed toaccomplish this. Through warfare, and through the law as well, the state guidesand disposes of the body of the citizen, either by protecting it � that is, byallowing it to remain alive � or by abandoning it � sending it to its death.
Some of the texts performed at the ceremony also engage directly with thebiopolitics of war. For example, that of Amir Orian discussed above, and thesong by Yehoshua Sobol, ‘Render unto Caesar’ from the play Jerusalem Syndrome;the song was performed by Yuval Zamir:
Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s! And unto God thethings which are God’s, but let people live their lives, because they haveno other lives. . .
Notable here is the idea that the very fact of life itself is not ‘natural’ butdepends on permission given either by God or by his representative on earth �the sovereign.
The ceremony at Tzavta, that forces us to look directly at the corporealbody, reveals the power relations between the state and the body � a
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connection between the body and political life which the hegemony strives toconceal by the discourse of state-memory.
Sanctifying time � Remembrance Day as ‘other’ time
Mircea Eliade maintains that society is constituted by separating the sacredfrom the profane, presenting the sacred as a hegemonic arena, whose contentsand nature must not be touched or subverted (Eliade 1971). Following inEliade’s footsteps, Rachel Elior’s pioneering analysis makes it clear thatrendering the calendar sacred, reflects the desire to ‘sanctify’ Sites of memory inthe civil religion (Elior 1996). This act makes use of the national calendar as atool by which the state supervises and channels civil emotions (Dominguez1990).
Entering Remembrance Day time, like leaving it, is marked byceremonies. The ceremony on the eve of Remembrance Day is a transitionfrom the civil everyday life to the holy of holies of Zionist nationalism. Aceremony of lighting torches on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem signifies itstermination and endorses the beginning of Independence Day celebrations. Thetime passing- between the two ceremonies gains a dimension of sanctity. Overthe years, an array of customs and rituals were added to it, aimed atmaintaining the effect of sanctity and separateness.11
Among others, the societal sanctity of Remembrance Day in general, andthe ceremony on the preceding evening in particular, lies in its being what AdirCohen defines as ‘together time.’ Communing with the fallen duringRemembrance Day is now becoming more and more an individual experience,conducted privately and subject to media-watching patterns, but theRemembrance Day ceremony remains a consistently collective experience12
performed in a distinct time and space (Levy 2008). The ceremony compels itsaudience to undertake a spiritual accounting, to experience togetherness, anassociative-historical-national state of mind complying with preordainedpatterns (Schweid 1982), with special focus on distinctive figures (the fallen,bereaved families, warriors) and on the discourse of their legacy.13
However, the idea of sanctification relies on practices of exclusion fromthe social space, that in ancient societies were manifested in the act of sacrificeand arbitrary scape-goating that functioned as a linguistic signifier uniting theentire group (Girard 1979). In other words, the very idea of society requires aviolent act against some of its members, who are excluded and cast out fromthe group and thus demarcate its boundaries. Sacred time is a time of violence.The Remembrance Day for Israel’s Fallen is a type of ‘sacred’ time thatdemarcates the borders of Israeli society by the modern configuration ofsacrification of the fallen soldiers (Handelman and Katz 1990). The fallen areactually the linguistic signifier on which the language of national identity is
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based, and the ceremony held on that day, is the cultural practice thatengenders that signifier.
National ceremonial practices make a distinction between everyday eventsand those that happen only ‘Today’. They sever the continuum of daily,routine time and positions ceremonial time as ‘different’, a time-out-of regulartime. But the alternative ceremony held in Tzavta undermines the sanctity ofthat Day and secularizes it by creating a temporal continuum that saturates thisdisruption of time, and reconstitutes it as part of the mundane. Secularizationis performed here by diverting the aesthetics of the event from the national tothe civic.14 Beyond the absence of canonic texts as mentioned above,expressions of appreciation, such as applause � which are not ‘appropriate’in the hegemonic bereavement discourse � took place at the Tzavta ceremony.At first, the audience was not sure if applause was ‘permitted’, though thefeeling was that it was appropriate. After the first performances, hesitant andsporadic applause broke out and was ‘spontaneously’ hushed, but after a whilethe applause between performances increased until it became a collective and‘legitimate’ gesture. Its legitimacy generated the discursive space of an‘everyday’ artistic event. For example, the presence of musical styles andgenres, like rock and punk, not in accord with such an event, along with thevisuality of the performers differing from that prevalent at hegemonic nationalceremonies � white shirts and/or special pins or stickers for RemembranceDay. Hadara Levin-Areddy for example, went onstage wearing a fashionableflashy pink jumper suit. The Hardal group wore suits, bowler hats andsunglasses. Other performers, such as Segol 59 and Yuval Gurevich, wore‘everyday’, not ceremonial outfits in the Israeli cultural context of memorialdays (checked flannel shirts, jeans and faded tee-shirts). Although such artisticevents are also a kind of ‘different’ time, they are still regarded as part of thecollective secular routine. One may attend this kind of cultural performanceaccording to an individual calendar not dictated by the national one. There isno uniform cultural decree that links going to the theatre or to a concert with anational or religious mission. Thus the temporal disruption that the officialRemembrance Day creates on the time continuum, rendering it sacred, iscorrected in a manner that both secularizes and undermines it.
Summary: how to commemorate blood? The politicization ofmemory
The differences that distinguish the ‘Hallal’ event at Tzavta from officialceremonies, vitiate its very existence as a ceremony. It is a secularized anti-ceremony that allows and creates politicization of memory and bereavement,whose ‘sanctity’ conceals it.15 Defying the holiness of Remembrance Day,
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actually implies defiance of the sacrifice it requires, thus eroding thefoundations on which Israeli social identity is constructed.
The canonic Remembrance ceremonies perpetuate the sanctity of thisparticular day, attributing productivity and meaning to loss and death; itvalidate the regulations of the biopolitics of Israeli bereavement, by convertingthe body of the fallen to a myth, associated with a social legacy and culturalproductivity (and attributing social legacy and cultural productivity to it).
The ceremony analyzed here contradicts all these, and offers an extra-paradigmatic alternative to the Israeli commemoration project. Therefore it isnot a ‘left-wing’ ceremony, but a post-national one,16 that presents the entirenational endeavor, including its commemoration strategies � as devoid ofvalue. Drawing upon Bourdieu (1988), it is an alternative that does notattempt to compete for a place in the field or to provide ‘correct’interpretations and practices perpetuating its existence, but rather underminesits very being. Thus the ‘Hallal’ ceremony politicizes the national discourse ofmemory, by exposing its perceptions and practices as concealing the politicalinterests disguised as sacred and ceremonial rituals and reveals the politics ofIsraeli memory.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the editorial board of the Journal and the anonymous judgesfor their useful and enlightening comments that helped us to improve thearticle, to Miriam Kraus for her fruitful editing comments and especially toAvishai Matia for sharing his visions, concepts and ideas with us. This researchexamines cultural and ideological consequences of Avishai Matia’s culturalinitiative.
Notes
1 A day destined to commemorate the victims of the holocaust. Another dayof commemoration in the Israeli calendar is ‘Holocaust Day’ designed tocommemorate the holocust of the Jews of Europe murdered by the Nazis.This day has a victimologic character, commemorating the ‘Old Jews’ of theDiaspora. The Remembrance Day for the fallen soldiers as an instrument ofthe Zionist narrative, strives to celebrate the ‘new Jew’ who is the exactopposite of the passsive victims from the pre-state era (Bilu and Witztum2000). The Zionist contribution to the Hebrew calendar is full ofceremonies shaping identity and memory. For ceremonies as a practicefor shaping memory and identity, see Bloch (1980).
2 In recent decades, some ceremonies self-defined as ‘alternative’ haveemerged in the public sphere which expressed voices and identities in the
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discourse of bereavement and memory that formerly were excluded.Although this article is not intended to be comparative, we note thatresearchers of those events maintain that they are not alternatives to thenational paradigm, since they draw on the canonic Remembrance Day (Ben-Amos and Beit-El 1999, Lomsky-Feder 2003).
3 See, in particular, Eyal Sivan’s film ‘Yizkor: Slaves of Memory,’ that for thefirst time engages with the politics of Israeli memory as producing aninterface between the Exodus from Egypt, the Holocaust, the wars of Israeland the independence of the state, defining them, as a teleological ploy toshape hegemonic-establishment memory (Sivan 1991).
4 On Matia’s work, see: http://bidur.index.co.il/siteFiles/1/23/324117.asp?gate_id�239893
5 On irony that generates tension between different discursive positions in atext (such as between that of the narrator and that of the text’s object), seethe discussion of Perry and Sternberg (1968�1969).
6 Irony likely to create a division between the literal statement and thecontext in which it is spoken (Gibbs 2002, pp. 357�486).
7 This attitude to the dead can be positioned according to Freud’s distinctionbetween ‘mourning,’ melancholy, ‘working through’ and ‘acting out’.While ‘mourning’ and ‘working through’ acknowledge the finite and totalabsence of the lost object, ‘melancholy’ and ‘acting out’ insist on seeing it asif it still exists (Freud 1909). In this sense, Remembrance Day for the Fallenin Israel’s Wars acts out melancholy via a ritual of commemoration andmemory. Originally it was meant to be an anti-mourning practice, althoughmelancholy has taken over the representations of the bereavement in thepast three decades (Bilu and Witztum 2000).
8 See also representations of the wounded body of the Israeli soldier in film, inYossef (2001); he notes that representing that body on the screenundermines the hegemonic Zionist narrative that sought to imbue the‘New Jew’ with new body: stronger and invulnerable, appropriated by thenational project (particularly in the physical imaging of the Zionist pioneers).
9 Both David Byrne, lead singer of Talking Heads and Johnny (‘Rotten’)Lydon, lead singer of The Sex Pistols, often performed onstage dressed insimilar style.
10 On punk as a sub-counter-culture, and its distinctive semiotics, see Hebdige(1988) and Laing (1985).
11 A process resembling the ‘Tosefet HaShabbat’, intended to add sanctifyingindicators that distinguish ‘Sabbath time’ in Judaism (Farbstein 2006).
12 A concept aimed at structuring and sanctifying shared time for parents andchildren that becomes rare with adolescence, and social careerism (Shalit-Avni 2003).
13 In this, civil Zionist religion imitated Judaism. See for example, the day ofMoses’ death (Ephraim 2005) and in comparison, Herzl Day (Floersheim1994).
14 On the distinction between national esthetics that preserve a pro-hegemonicsocial structure and civil esthetics, striving to reduce the presence of thestate in the public space, see Harrington (2004).
15 In Israeli media discourse, it is commonly stated ‘You can’t argue withbereaved parents’ and that ‘bereavement is not a place for politics’,resembling the proverb ‘when the guns roar, the muses are silent’.
16 And some have defined it as ‘post-Zionist’ (Hazony 2000b).
Notes on contributors
Gal Hermoni is a PhD student in the Department of Film and Television atTel-Aviv University, where he teaches several courses in film theory and filmsound, as well as at the Sapir Academic College. His research interests include:film theory, sound studies, cultural and critical theories, phenomenology,semiotics and popular music. Email: [email protected].
Dr. Udi Lebel is a senior lecturer in political psychology and civil-militaryrelations in Ariel University Center and Samaria and Jordan Rift R@D Center,Israel. His research interests include bereavement studies, death and dying,commemoration and memory. Email: [email protected]
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