Abstract
This chapter shows how Walter Benjamin’s 1929 critique of the nationalistic obsession with ruins can unsettle an especially powerful element of the Armenian diaspora’s discourse on genocide: what in German is called Ruinenlust, or the melancholic love of ruins and the manic efforts to recognize, restore, and repair them. The diaspora’s fascination with the ruins of Armenian culture’s distant past scattered throughout Turkey, Armenia, and the wider Mediterranean world carries a capacious presumption about Being in the wake of a catastrophic history: that one can only be fully human once what was shattered by genocide is made whole. One can see this fascination in Armenian cultural representations from the elite to the kitsch as well as in well-funded international efforts aimed at generating cultural tourism. In turn, the chapter shows how Karen Andreassian’s experimental, web-based artwork “Ontological Walkscapes” enacts the Benjaminian critique, taking the viewer into the ruins of Soviet Armenia’s brutalist public spaces, where the romantic ideal of Ruinenlust is replaced by a cinematic stroll through neglected concrete spaces that have been repurposed by activists opposing the Armenian state’s authoritarian rule.
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Notes
- 1.
Walter Benjamin, “The Return of the Flâneur, 1929,” in Selected Writings II 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press Benjamin 1999), 263–265.
- 2.
Benjamin, “Return of the Flâneur,” 265.
- 3.
I would distinguish the flâneur of “The Return of the Flâneur” from that of Benjamin’s other famous account of flânerie, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” although I will not be able elaborate this distinction here. One would need, at the very least, to consider the pride of place Benjamin assigns to Baudelaire’s poem “Á Une Passante”: “Amid the deafening traffic of the town,/ Tall, slender, in deep mourning, with majesty,/ A woman passed, raising, with dignity/ In her poised hand, the flounces of her gown;/ Graceful, noble, with a statue’s form./ And I drank, trembling as a madman thrills,/ From her eyes, ashen sky where brooded storm,/ The softness that fascinates, the pleasure that kills./ A flash … then night!—O lovely fugitive,/ I am suddenly reborn from your swift glance;/ Shall I never see you till eternity?/ Somewhere, far off! Too late! never, perchance!/ Neither knows where the other goes or lives;/ We might have loved, and you knew this might be!” To the extent that the Arcades Project was envisioned as itself a kind of flânerie, it is perhaps closer to the “The Return of the Flâneur,” though an elaboration of that connection is also beyond the scope of the present chapter.
- 4.
I want to acknowledge important, critical work being done by scholars of pre-modern Armenian architecture. See for instance Andrzej Piotrowski, “Heresy, Hybrid Buildings, and a Geography of Architectural Traditions,” TDSR 27, no. 1 (2015): 7–19. See also Christina Maranci’s insightful study, Vigilant Powers: Three Churches of Early Medieval Armenia (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015). Important groundwork for this recent critical scholarship was also set by Nina Garsoian and Sirarpie Der Nersessian. For a brief assessment of the comparative and cross-cultural dimension of scholarship on Armenian art and architecture, see also Sebouh Aslanian’s chapter in this volume (Chap. 5).
- 5.
From http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/P-L-U-C-K-lyrics-System-of-a-Down/080717695055ECE8482568B000295763. Accessed July 18, 2017. System of a Down played a famous concert in Yerevan in 2015, where many of these themes of loss, mourning, and nationalism converged.
- 6.
For kindred efforts to pose this question, and accounts of cultural and historical texts that offer their own, heterodox answers, see: David Kazanjian, “Kinships Past, Kinship’s Futures,” Getuigen: Tussen Geschiedenis en Herinnering/Testimony: Between History and Memory 120, no. 1 (April 2015): 103–111; Kazanjian, “
restoration: Aikaterini Gegisian’s A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas,” Armenity, Catalogue of the Armenian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale (Milan: Skira Editore, 2015), 60–63; Kazanjian, “recognition: Nina Katchadourian’s Accent Elimination,” Armenity, 72–75; Kazanjian, “reparation: Sarkis’s ‘Respiro,’” Sarkis: Respiro, Catalogue of the Turkish Pavilion for the Venice Biennale (Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts and Yapı Kredi Publishing, 2015), 50–66; Kazanjian, “Re-flexion: Genocide in Ruins,” Discourse 33, no. 3 (2011): 367–389; Kazanjian, “On Sound and Silence, ‘in a place I’d never been before’”, Agos (Istanbul), May 2011. See also: Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) [originally La Perversion Historiographique: une réflexion arménienne (Paris: Editions Lignes et Manifestes)]; Nichanian, “Catastrophic Mourning,” trans. Jeff Fort, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 99–124; Nichanian, Writers of Disaster, Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, the National Revolution (Princeton: Gomidas Institute, 2002); David Kazanjian and Marc Nichanian, “Between Genocide and Catastrophe,” in Loss, 125–147. Additionally, see Anahid Kassabian and David Kazanjian, “From Somewhere Else: Egoyan’s Calendar, Freud’s Rat Man, and Armenian Diasporic Nationalism,” Third Text 19, no. 2 (March 2005): 125–144; Kassabian and Kazanjian, “Melancholic Memories and Manic Politics: Feminism, Documentary, and the Armenian Diaspora,” in Feminism and Documentary, ed. Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 202–223; Kassabian and Kazanjian, “‘You Have to Want to Be Armenian Here:’ Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Problem of Armenian Diasporic Identity,” Armenian Forum 1, no. 1 (1998): 19–36; Kassabian and Kazanjian, “Naming the Armenian Genocide: The Quest for Truth and a Search for Possibilities,” in Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, ed. Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993), 33–55. - 7.
Denis Diderot, Diderot on Art, II: The Salon of 1767, trans. John Goodman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 196.
- 8.
For a recent argument in praise of the aesthetic experience of the ruin, which differs significantly from my approach here, see Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2004).
- 9.
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1983]), 1.
- 10.
This kitsch is elaborately challenged by Atom Egoyan’s brilliant film Calendar, which I have discussed at length elsewhere. See Kazanjian, “Re-flexion: Genocide in Ruins;” Kazanjian and Kassabian “From Somewhere Else.”
- 11.
As Michael Pifer pointed out to me, the totalizing and homogeneous past this narrow selection of ruins constructs leaves little room for the ambiguous complexity of Armenian history, and certainly evades any account of the contemporary ruination of spaces in which Armenians are implicated, either as residents or as citizens of countries whose militaries are making more ruins every day. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/15/world/middleeast/aleppo-destruction-drone-video.html. Accessed November 11, 2016.
- 12.
See http://blog.usaid.gov/2010/08/usaid-supports-armenian-governments-tourism-efforts-to-boost-economic-growth/. Accessed November 11, 2016.
- 13.
See http://www.armenianmonuments.org/en/2012proposal. Accessed November 11, 2016.
- 14.
For the phrase “historiographic perversion,” see Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson. 3–67. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 60.
- 15.
Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, 1.
- 16.
Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, 2.
- 17.
Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, 7.
- 18.
For his 1930s work, before coining the word “genocide,” see Raphael Lemkin, “Acts Constituting a General (Transnational) Danger Considered as Offences against the Law of Nations,” trans. Jim Fussell, www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/madrid1933-english.html, originally published in French as “Les actes constituant un danger general (interétatique) consideres comme delites des droit des gen,” Expilications additionelles au Rapport spécial présentè à la V-me Conférence pour l’Unification du Droit Penal à Madrid (14–2 O.X. 1933), Librarie de la cour d’appel ed de l’order de advocates (Paris: A. Pedone, 13 Rue Soufflot, 1933), and in German as “Akte der Barbarei und des Vandalismus als delicta juris gentium,” Anwaltsblatt Internationales 19, no. 6 (Vienna, November 1933): 117–119. For his 1940s work, in which he coins the word “genocide,” see Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 69–95; Lemkin, “Genocide—A Modern Crime,” Free World 4 (April,1945): 39–45; Lemkin, “Genocide as a Crime under International Law,” American Journal of International Law 41, no. 1 (1947). For a more recent return to Lemkin’s work, see Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007).
- 19.
Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, 7.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/magazine/07lives-t.html. Accessed November 11, 2016.
- 23.
Personal Communication, November 8, 2011. For a video recording of part of this event, see https://media.sas.upenn.edu/watch/123181; for an audio recording, see https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Balakian/Balakian-Peter_A-Poetry-Reading_KWH-Upenn_11-08-2011.mp3. Accessed November 11, 2016.
- 24.
Nanor Kebranian has also spoken eloquently about the horrors of Balakian’s grave-robbing (unpublished paper delivered at the International Conference on the Armenian Diaspora, Boston University, February 2010).
- 25.
Thanks to Dillon Vrana for offering me the phrase “the arrogance of suffering.”
- 26.
http://www.ontologicalwalkscapes.format.am/text.php?text=t8&image=s11. Accessed November 11, 2016. The project has also been assembled into a book with an attached CD showing the videos: Karen Andreassian, Ontological Walkscapes (Istanbul: 11th International Istanbul Biennial, 2009). For the Biennial’s description of the project, see http://11b.iksv.org/sanatcilar_en.asp?sid=7. Accessed November 11, 2016.
- 27.
http://basekamp.com/about/events/ontological-walkscapes. Accessed November 11, 2016.
- 28.
On factography, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October 30 (Autumn, 1984): 82–119. Devin Fore, “Soviet Factography: Production Art in an Information Age,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 3–10; Natasha Kolchevska, “From Agitation to Factography: The Plays of Sergej Tret’jakov,” The Slavic and East European Journal 31, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 388–403; Elizabeth Astrid Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (Northern Illinois University Press, 2008).
- 29.
See Fore, “Soviet Factography” and https://chtodelat.org/b8-newspapers/12-48-1/soviet-factography-production-art-in-an-information-age/.
- 30.
For Andreassian’s account of his relationship to factography, see http://www.ontologicalwalkscapes.format.am/text.php?text=t2&image=s10. Accessed November 11, 2016. Andreassian references Fore “Soviet Factography.” The Viktor Pertsov reference is unclear to me, but one may turn to his first book, written at the height of New LEF’s influence, Tomorrow’s Literature (1929), as well as The Writer and the New Reality (1958).
- 31.
Benjamin, “The Return of the Flâneur,” 264–265.
- 32.
Benjamin, “The Return of the Flâneur,” 264–265.
- 33.
Benjamin, “The Return of the Flâneur,” 264.
- 34.
Oxford English Dictionary Online.
- 35.
Were there space, I should also like to consider another video linked to the “Ontological Walkscapes” project, one shot at a Yerevan bicycle race track. This video runs for 3 minutes and 14 seconds, and shows the banked race track and its grandstands with four shots from four different angles. Toward the end of each of the first two shots, the camera moves just slightly to the left; during the last two shots, people ride bikes along a flat, narrow, asphalt path that loops around the inside of the race track, separated from the track by a narrow strip of grass.
- 36.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Joan Wallach Scott, Massimiliano Tomba, Fadi A. Bardawil, and Linda M. G. Zerrilli for their remarkably generous and refreshingly challenging comments on an early draft of this chapter. I also thank Michael Pifer and Kathryn Babayan for their interest in and encouragement of this work. An early version of this work was given at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at the conference “Surviving Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation,” organized by Fazil Moradi, Maria Six-Hohenbalken, and Ralph Buchenhorst, to whom I am also grateful for their extended interest in this work at an early stage. Dillon Vrana has offered me singular and ongoing discussions about this chapter and the issues it addresses, for which I am so very grateful.
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Kazanjian, D. (2018). Diasporic Flânerie: From Armenian Ruinenlust to Armenia’s Walkscapes. In: Babayan, K., Pifer, M. (eds) An Armenian Mediterranean. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72865-0_11
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