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KILLING MEMORY
Roadside Memorial Removals
and the Necropolitics of Affect
Robert M. Bednar
Abstract This article explores affect and memory at roadside car
crash memorials within the context of what Achille Mbembe calls
“necropolitics”: the performance of power to determine who legitimately
can kill both persons and the memory of persons. By analyzing the
ritualized performance of compulsory compassion in news media stories
about the actual or threatened removal of roadside memorials, I argue that
there is an economy of power circulating in the practice of roadside
memorialization, where some subjects are deemed legitimately
memorable and some are not, where some subjects are legitimately
allowed to memorialize their losses in public landscapes and others are
not, and where anonymous drivers who drive by are supposed to feel a
certain way about it all. Such a complex constellation of territorialized
affect has significant consequences for understanding the politics of
affect and memory in public landscapes.
Keywords roadside memorials; necropolitics; compulsory compassion;
affective landscapes
In April of 2000, a Colorado state trooper noticed a pickup truck
parked with its hazard lights on along the side of Interstate 70
near Denver. Inside the bed of the truck was a collection of
withered flowers and wooden crosses. Loading it into the truck
was Rodney Lyle Scott. Scott claimed to be “removing trash
from the highway,” so the trooper noted his driver’s license and
left him to his work (Associated Press 2002; Tiernan 2000;
Tiernan 2001).
Before long, the family of Brian Rector, an eighteen-year-old
who had died in a car crash a few years earlier, noticed that the
337
Cultural Politics, Volume 9, Issue 3, q2013 Robert M. Bednar
DOI: 10.1215/17432197-2347018
Special Section on Affective Landscapes
roadside memorial they had created on
Interstate 70 had disappeared. Scott,
identified from the trooper’s records, was
charged under a Colorado law making it
a crime to “desecrate an object venerated by
the public.”
In April 2001, the case was acquitted,
essentially ruling in Scott’s favor. In
announcing his decision, Judge Jeffrey
Romero ruled that since the mourning
family’s appropriation of public space
ultimately was unauthorized, the materials at
the site technically were litter, not sacred
objects of veneration. For Romero, no
amount of grief could excuse the family’s
“adverse possession” of public property,
and he resolved the case by reasserting the
state’s exclusive right to control which
objects are allowed to be on the roadside
right-of-way, regardless of their possible
affect. As Romero argued in his decision:
“There is no doubt that these [memorials]
are placed there very lovingly, that it gives
great comfort apparently to the people that
have put them up. But this is a legal issue.
This is not an emotional issue. And the fact of
the matter is, technically, legally, that’s
abandoned property, and it doesn’t matter
whether it’s a cross, a piece of wood . . . could
be a bar of gold ...it has nothing to do with
the intrinsic value of it” (Freedom from
Religion Foundation 2001).
The story of Rodney Scott and the Brian
Rector memorial raises a number of
questions pertinent to the study of roadside
memorials within a larger conversation
about the relationship between affect and
landscape: Why would someone feel
compelled to tear down a roadside
memorial? What is the state’s role in
regulating roadside memorials? Why are
roadside memorials outlawed in most
states but encouraged in others? Why, in
states where they are illegal, do people
still build them and few state agencies
enforce their removal? What happens when
states remove only some memorials and
leave others? In short: What are the cultural
politics of affect and memory at roadside
memorials?
This article seeks to address this last
question. My aim here is not to definitively
characterize a singular cultural politics of
roadside memorials but to analyze the
discursive frameworks within which those
politics are articulated in conflicts over the
right to control memory and affect in
public landscapes. My main focus is on news
media stories that, like the Scott/Rector
case, concern the actual or threatened
removal of roadside memorials, because
removal stories place the contours of the
contemporary discourse surrounding
roadside memorials in sharpest relief. As we
will see, news stories covering memorial
removals narrate a conflict between different
subjects: mostly between mourners who
want their memorials to remain and
state officials responsible for enforcing bans
of memorials, but also between mourners
and private citizens who (like Rodney
Scott) vandalize or remove roadside
memorials without state authorization. It is
important to note that, while these
competing subjects are shown to disagree
about who has the right to place or remove a
memorial in the right-of-way, they all
demonstrate a shared belief in the ability of
the memorials to contain and communicate
affect: both mourners and state officials
act as if roadside memorials naturally place
affect in the public landscape and
communicate affect directly in an “obvious”
way that must be respected, regardless of
whether they believe memorials “belong”
there or not. In short, what people are
shown to disagree about is whether the
memorials should be on public property, not
whether they emplace affect in the
landscape.
Robert M. Bednar
338 CULTURAL POLITICS †9:3 November 2013
This naturalized shared belief in the
power of roadside memorials to contain and
communicate affect is produced within a
larger cultural discourse of memory,
landscape, and affect, which takes a
particular form because it is also embedded
in what John Urry calls the “system of
automobility,” or what Foucault would call
the “discourse” of automobility: a cultural
logic of organizing bodies, objects, and
processes toward some explicit and implicit
cultural value—in this case auotomotive
mobility—that produces subjects, objects,
and practices, and organizes
power/knowledge relations among them all
(Urry 2004; Bednar 2011a). Foucault says
that discourses are manifest in cultural
“practices that systematically form the
objects of which they speak,” as well as the
subjects who are authorized to speak
about them, where speaking includes a
number of enunciations other than literal
speech (1972: 49). Moreover, those
practices and enunciations cohere into what
Jonathan Potter calls an “interpretive
repertoire,” within which public arguments
about roadside memorials legitimately can be
enunciated (quoted in Rose 2012: 218).
My job here is to map out those
enunciations.
1
Therefore, after analyzing the
discursive formation itself, the article
performs a brief analysis of news coverage
of state removals of vernacular road trauma
shrines and official state memorial signs
before ending with a more extensive analysis
of a news story about the alleged vandalism
of four crosses maintained by Mothers
Against Drunk Driving (MADD). My purpose
here is to establish how, despite the
typical organization of media stories about
memorial removals into a debate between
grieving advocates for memorials on one
side and state agencies responsible for
regulating them on the other, the politics of
public affect cut across and constrain this
discourse at a different scale. These politics
reinforce the ritualized performance of
what I call “compulsory compassion,” an
affect that must be performed in order to
legitimately participate as a subject in
the mediated public debate about roadside
memorials. Put simply, the only legitimate
way to speak within and to this discourse is
to show compassionate respect to the
survivors who maintain the memorials, even
when (and perhaps especially when) what
you are saying is that the memorials are
illegal and must be removed. Anyone who
does not perform compulsory compassion,
such as the alleged vandal in the final
news story, is positioned as an object of
discourse and as an external threat to
subjects within the discourse.
Landscape, Affect, and Necropolitics
While these news stories perform and
reinforce the discourse of automobility, they
also are shaped by other cultural dynamics,
most notably contemporary discourses of
landscape, affect, and necropolitics.
W. J. T. Mitchell argues that understanding
landscape means thinking of landscape as
“a dynamic medium”—“as a process by
which social and subjective identities are
formed” (1994: 1). In short, analyzing
landscape as a medium asks not just “what
landscape ‘is’ or ‘means’ but what it does,
how it works as a cultural practice” (1 –2).
As with any cultural practice, landscape
as cultural practice involves an economy of
power and control, where subjects compete
with each other to assert the power to
control the spaces they share. This is
particularly the case for sites of traumatic
death, where different stakeholders
must negotiate among one another to shape
which memories are materialized and how.
As Kenneth Foote (2003) argues, the
American landscape is “shadowed ground,”
repeatedly inscribed, erased, and reinscribed
ROADSIDE MEMORIAL REMOVALS and the NECROPOLITICS of AFFECT
339 CULTURAL POLITICS
with acts of violence and tragedy, some of
which are remembered extensively and
many others of which are forgotten—either
through intentional suppression or by the
slow erosion of neglect. The difference
between a tragedy publicly remembered or
forgotten at a particular site is determined
by the culture’s dominant regime of
“necropolitics.”
Extending Foucault’s understanding of
biopower, Achille Mbembe has developed
the term necropolitics to describe the
way decisions about who lives and dies are
“inscribed in the order of power,” where
some bodies and not others are deemed
legitimately human and where some
subjects and not others are empowered with
“the capacity to dictate who may live and
who must die” (2003: 12, 11). Mbembe
argues that the power to define who can
legitimately kill and be killed is the foundation
of state sovereignty: “To exercise
sovereignty is to exercise control over
mortality and to define life as the deployment
and manifestation of power” (12). But
while Mbembe uses the concept of
necropolitics explicitly to theorize the
discursive production of actual bodies that
kill and die, particularly within colonial spaces
and the war on terror, the same thing
happens with the memory of actual bodies
of people who kill and die. This is true not only
in colonial settings and in the war on terror
but throughout contemporary regimes of
public memory and forgetting, where there
is a clear economy of power in which
some subjects are deemed legitimately
memorable and some are not, and where
some subjects are legitimately allowed to
memorialize their losses in public landscapes
and others are not.
With roadside memorials, this move
from bodies to memories is more than simply
a metaphor, however. As I have argued more
extensively elsewhere, privately produced
roadside shrines develop, live, and die
according to the logics of trauma, affect,
mourning, and memory, which are all
radically uncontained and unique to particular
situations (Bednar 2009, 2011a, 2011b,
forthcoming). Once built, roadside shrines
take on a life of their own, serving as a proxy
for the lost victim, keeping them alive
socially long enough for the grieving process
to run its course. Left unregulated or
undisturbed, road trauma shrines exist for
as long as they are necessary in the
mediation of the trauma they both mark and
negotiate. Some last for days; some last for
years. Some shrines are intentionally
removed by mourners, but most shrines
simply live their lives until they decay or
disperse, giving the shrine the privilege of
dying a more “natural” death than the
people they memorialize. Recognizing this
dynamic is key for understanding how
mourners respond to the removal of a
memorial by someone other than
themselves. Because a memorial “keeps
memory alive,” the external destruction of
the memorial is experienced as a
retraumatization. Although on one level,
the two things—the loss of a loved one
in a violent car crash and the loss of a
materialized representation of that person in
a roadside memorial removal—are clearly
not the same, they are both experienced as
intense, unexpected, arbitrary, and
unwanted: a killing of a materialized memory
instead of a body, but a killing nonetheless.
Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics
is important for the study of landscape,
memory, and affect because it helps
conceptualize the way that decisions to
either encourage or deny territorialized affect
are political acts with clear political
consequences. Mbembe writes that
“sovereignty means the capacity to define
who matters and who does not, who is
disposable and who is not” (2003: 27;
Robert M. Bednar
340 CULTURAL POLITICS †9:3 November 2013
emphasis in original). Applied to the
regulation of memorial objects within
territories explicitly controlled by the state,
we can paraphrase Mbembe to say: to
exercise necropolitical sovereignty over
memory in public landscapes involves
deploying and displaying the power to control
those spaces to facilitate some acts of
remembrance and to obstruct or deny
others. In such a regime, some subjects
will be remembered and some will be
disposed of. Likewise, some private subjects
will be allowed to memorialize their loss
and others will not, and some memorial
practices not originated by the state but seen
as congruent with state objectives will be
tolerated and some will not.
You wouldn’t know it from driving by the
many private roadside memorials in the
United States today, but in most states it is
explicitly illegal to maintain one in the
public right-of-way (Dickinson and Hoffman
2010). In these cases, state agencies
assert a sovereign right to regulate crash
memorials as unauthorized intrusions on the
public landscape that they control on
behalf of citizens in the name of “public
safety.” Despite these official bans,
however, memorial removals are rare.
Indeed, many states have legislation
banning private shrines but explicit
nonenforcement policies. For example, in
2003, after the Virginia legislature passed a
ban but did not fund its enforcement, the
Virginia DOT adopted a policy of what
they call “compassionate tolerance”
toward private roadside memorials
(Madigan 2003).
Partially in response to the continuing
desire of citizens to memorialize road trauma
in the right-of-way, many states have
developed official ways of articulating crash
memorials to larger public safety efforts to
control “impaired driving,” particularly
driving while intoxicated (DWI) or driving
under the influence (DUI). For example,
several states now offer survivors the option
of purchasing an official state-produced
sign that memorializes crash victims (see
fig. 1).
2
Most of these states do so while also
banning vernacular road trauma shrines,
reserving official state signs as the only legal
way for individuals to memorialize road
trauma in the public right-of-way.
3
These
memorials have clear governmental motives
and effects and are situated within larger
dynamics of power, knowledge, and control
of both mobility and citizen access to
public roadscapes as well as the larger
discourse of safety (see Packer 2008).
4
In between these official state signs and
private vernacular shrines are others that are
officially endorsed by states but produced
and maintained by nongovernmental
organizations. The most prominent example
is the MADD memorial cross program
(see fig. 2). MADD uses roadside memorials
not only to commemorate victims of drunk
driving but to forward their larger political
goal of changing cultural ideas and practices
involving drinking and driving (see Lerner
2011). MADD has lobbied to secure their
right to maintain these crosses as an
exception to state policies banning other
roadside memorials in a number of states,
establishing for their crosses a special status
in the necropolitics of memory and affect
within automobility (Everett 2000: 93).
The MADD memorial crosses are white
Roman crosses with a rectangular red plastic
placard fixed where the two pieces of the
cross intersect. The placards all contain the
following text: In Loving Memory of / [name] /
Born [date] & Killed at / This Location
[date] / By a Drunk Driver. Most MADD
memorial crosses stand alone on the
roadside, but many, like state memorial
signs, are the location of ongoing shrine work
(see fig. 2). Unlike official state memorial
signs, which usually contain an explicit public
ROADSIDE MEMORIAL REMOVALS and the NECROPOLITICS of AFFECT
341 CULTURAL POLITICS
safety message targeted at anonymous
drivers, such as “Drive Safely” or “Don’t
Drink and Drive,” the MADD crosses are
focused entirely on remembering the victim
and are even more direct in their description
of the cause of the trauma they mark.
5
The grammar of the inscription reinforces the
fact that, in this form, victims are the
subjects of a necropolitical discourse and
perpetrators are the objects: instead of
saying that “a drunk driver killed a person,”
the crosses say that the “victim was killed by
a drunk driver.” In short, a MADD cross
marks the spot where a person—one who is
explicitly named as someone legitimately
worthy of being remembered—was killed by
atype of person, an object, with no name
other than “drunk driver.”
As this example makes clear, the
necropolitics of road trauma in contemporary
societies explicitly determine who can be
legitimately remembered and how, and, in
policy and in practice, such a regime implicitly
(and often explicitly) favors victims over
perpetrators. In terms of Mbembe’s
argument, we would say that such a
discourse discredits perpetrators because
they have illegitimately challenged the
state’s sovereignty with an improper and
unauthorized decision about who should kill.
Figure 1 Robert M. Bednar, Sign/shrine, NM-518 North, near Las Vegas, New Mexico, USA, December 2010.
Photograph courtesy of the author
Robert M. Bednar
342 CULTURAL POLITICS †9:3 November 2013
By reinforcing the sovereign right not only to
ban private memorials in general and to
authorize only memorials that
commemorate victims of impaired driving,
the discourse actively denies perpetrators
any place within the economy of public
landscape memory other than their role as
perpetrators, while victims can be celebrated
and grieved as full persons. The discourse
also produces victims’ survivors as subjects
who are legitimate in their grief, while, at
the same time, denying perpetrators and
their survivors a legitimate place within
economies of public grief and
memorialization. Finally, in the current
necropolitical regime within automobility,
not only is there is no public space for
memorializing perpetrators, but there is also
none for those ordinary citizens who die
in accidents that just “happen.” That
excludes from the category of legitimately
memorable in death not only those defined
as perpetrators of impaired-driving
accidents but also those who are simply
the victims of more literal “accidents”
due to careless or inattentive driving,
misjudgments, “acts of God,” or simply bad
luck, who also are never recuperated within
official memorial programs or advocacy
memorials.
6
In short, the decision to discourage or
encourage the memorialization of lost bodies
is a governmental prerogative with political
origins and consequences, whether acted
upon intentionally in the case of state-
sponsored memorialization programs,
through enforced exceptions for some kinds
of memorials and not others, or through
“compassionate tolerance,” as is the case
with the common phenomenon of
nonenforcement of roadside memorial bans.
Of course, the opposite is also true: whether
done by a state official or a “vandal,”
removing an existing memorial is clearly a
necropolitical act, as well.
Roadside Memorial Removals and the
Culture of “Public Feelings”
Roadside memorials are places of feeling—
landscapes where affect collects and is
encountered.
7
However, to say that affect is
collected and encountered in a landscape
is not the same as defining which varieties
of affect are collected, encountered, and
performed there, and how they are
communicated to witnesses, if at all.
Roadside memorials are like touchstones—
powerfully affective to most, but in
unpredictable, undetermined, and
uncontained ways, and in different ways to
different people. Affect itself is always
radically uncontained and only obliquely
related to the cultural frames of reference we
use to make sense of it. Patricia Clough
argues that affectivity is “a substrate of
potential bodily responses, often autonomic
responses, in excess of consciousness”
(2007: 2). This is particularly the case in the
experience of affect associated with death,
that ultimate apotheosis and negation of
affect, and even more the case with the
way death is placed. As Avril Maddrell and
James D. Sidaway argue, “experiences of
death, dying and mourning are mediated
through the intersections of the body,
culture, society and state, and often make
a deep impression on sense of self,
private and public identity, as well as
sense of place in the built and natural
environment” (2010: 2; emphasis
in original).
In Death, Memory, and Material Culture
(2001), Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey
argue that material memory objects,
sites, and practices are “attempts to counter
loss caused by death, making connections
with the absent individuals and bringing
them into the present” (181). Critical to this
process is the territorialization of affect at
what Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian
Ott (2010) call “places of public memory.”
ROADSIDE MEMORIAL REMOVALS and the NECROPOLITICS of AFFECT
343 CULTURAL POLITICS
Places of public memory are “implacably
material” and rooted in a particular
geography, topography, and architectural
context. The contemporary landscape is
embedded with affective objects and spaces
built by ordinary people to memorialize
ordinary lives. They are part of a larger trend
in contemporary society toward an increase
in vernacular (as opposed to institutional)
memorial practices in the everyday built
environment, as well as an increase in the
spatial and temporal separation of memorial
practices from the material disposal of
bodies (see Kellaher and Worpole 2010; see
also Santino 2006).
Regardless of any state claim of
sovereignty on the right to control road
trauma memorialization in the public right-of-
way, roadside memorials proliferate, at
least implicitly defying state authority to
regulate and control them and materializing
what Jennifer Clark and Majella Franzmann
(2006) call roadside memorial builders’
claim to “authority from grief.” As Clark and
Franzmann argue, a “roadside memorial is a
private expression of grief that turns a
public space into sacred space; its
sacredness [is] directly constructed and
controlled by people who would ordinarily
make no claim to civil or religious authority”
Figure 2 Robert M. Bednar, MADD crosses incorporated into larger shrine, Airport Blvd. at MLK Blvd., Austin, Texas, USA,
February 2010. Photograph courtesy of the author
Robert M. Bednar
344 CULTURAL POLITICS †9:3 November 2013
(595–96). Claiming authority from grief
“enables ordinary, law-abiding citizens to
take authority in their own hands and
challenge, even disregard or openly defy,
elements of the normal, official process of
dealing with the dead, physically, spiritually,
and emotionally” (582).
Such claims take shape within a larger
culture characterized by publics formed
around what Ann Cvetkovich (2007) calls
“public feelings,” where more and more
people claim the authority to speak to, and in,
the mediated public sphere from a place of
grief and trauma (see also Berlant 1997;
Warner 2002).
8
Like other suffering subjects
visible in the mediated public sphere,
roadside memorial builders speak to and
from a culture that, as Erika Doss argues, has
shifted “toward public feeling as a source of
knowledge” (2010: 50). Often, trauma is
claimed as what Jill Bennett (2005) calls
“primary experience”—as the source of a
truth claim based on an authentic voice born
of trauma that has a certain authority to
speak. In this, trauma as truth claim is allied
with other contemporary modes of public
affect, where personal experience forms
the basis for a nonnegotiable claim to
authority (Bennett 2005: 6).
In states where vernacular memorials
are banned, memorials last as long as the
state allows them to last, and this time
period, even when explained to mourners,
tends to feel more arbitrary than what
they would consider the “natural” life span of
a private shrine, which is generally figured
as a powerful affective force beyond the
control of any specific person or organization.
For some mourners, a memorial might
stay too long—for others, not long enough.
The removal stories covered by the news
media almost always show mourners
who consider the state’s time frame to be
too short, which places the two different
kinds of authority most pertinent to roadside
memorials—authority from grief and
necropolitical state sovereignty—on a
collision course.
This collision is at the heart of news
coverage of regulatory controversies over the
official removal of roadside memorials.
These stories often create a sympathetic
portrait of mourners victimized twice: first
by the loss of their loved one in a crash, and
then by the insensitivity of the state as it
denies them their asserted right to grieve
in public. There are two main iterations of the
state vs. citizen roadside memorial
removal story: cases in which the state
enforces a ban by removing a vernacular
shrine and cases in which the state enforces
the time limits for its official signs.
9
In both iterations, the news stories usually
privilege the mourner’s “authority from
grief,” which aligns viewers and readers with
grieving survivors and not with the state
that regulates them. The outcome is a
particular politics of affect that pits
the manifestly personal needs of grieving
survivors, who are represented as being
“like us,” against the manifestly arbitrary and
bureaucratic needs of state departments
of transportation, who are not.
However, although mourners take an
adversarial relationship to law or policy,
private roadside memorials themselves are
politically relatively mute. They assert an
authority to grieve but are rarely attached to
some explicit political goal beyond that.
This distinction becomes clear when
compared to more demonstrative examples
of the political potential of roadside
memorials: the memorial crosses built and
maintained by MADD, and the phenomenon
of “ghost bikes,” a variety of politically
explicit “grassroots memorial” focused not
only on commemorating cyclists killed in
car crashes but also protesting the
differential of power between cyclists and
drivers within contemporary car culture
ROADSIDE MEMORIAL REMOVALS and the NECROPOLITICS of AFFECT
345 CULTURAL POLITICS
(Margry and Sa
´nchez-Carretero 2011; Dobler
2011) (see fig. 3). In general, however,
while some roadside memorials generate
movements to change road conditions, most
only mobilize political action when
threatened with removal. And, importantly,
when they are threatened, the political
action is apparently not focused on any larger
goal beyond reasserting the right to grieve in
public at a particular spot, which further
reinforces the fact that, for most roadside
memorial builders, authority from grief is an
end in itself.
Whether the state is removing a private
shrine to enforce a ban or an official state
memorial sign at the end of its scheduled
existence, most protesting families
characterize the state decision to remove
their memorials as a revictimization or a
retraumatization: “like reliving some of the
horror” of the original crash, as one
reporter hyperbolically put it (Pelt 2012; see
also Morgan 2012; Hernandez 2009). In
television coverage specifically, mourners
are identified in terms of their relationship to
the victim and are usually interviewed on site
Figure 3 Robert M. Bednar, Ghost Bike, Loop 360 at Bee Cave Road, Austin, Texas, USA, November 2012.
Photograph courtesy of the author
Robert M. Bednar
346 CULTURAL POLITICS †9:3 November 2013
at the shrine, sympathetically conveying
their feelings and pointing at physical objects
that the camera shows us directly. In
contrast, state officials are usually pictured in
or in front of their office, showing that their
authority is derived from their office and
not their embodied affective claim or their
relational connection to the shrine. This has
the effect of abstracting their appeal, as
well, ensuring that viewers stay aligned with
the mourners. Ultimately, however, while
these stories align viewers with mourners,
they ask viewers for little more than
empathy. As is common in the news media’s
framing of personal tragedy, viewers are
reminded of their duty to care for grieving
subjects but not encouraged to act on their
behalf or in alliance with them.
10
This
stance is not that different from the one
taken by most experts and reporters in these
stories, who show that they “feel for” the
mourners but do not express interest in
doing anything themselves to change their
material conditions.
Because these news stories are
constrained by the discourse within which
they are produced, they narrate a surface
conflict between the bureaucratic control of
public landscapes and the refusal of
a mourner to comply with those controls
because they curtail what the mourner
asserts is a more primary right. However,
both the bureaucrats and the mourners
enunciate from within the necropolitical
discourse of road trauma, memory,
and affect, which generates taken-for-
granted discursive positions (grieving family
member, compassionate but firm state
spokesperson, expert, reporter) within an
interpretive repertoire that provides
foundation for the explicit statements, which
are themselves organized as a narrativized,
binarized, and personalized conflict that
remains entirely self-contained within the
discourse itself.
MADD and the Politics of
Righteous Indignation
As we have seen, the dominant response to
the removal of a roadside memorial is to see
it as a doubling of the initial trauma of the
crash mediated by the memorial. That
doubling of trauma figures even more
strongly in media coverage of the alleged
vandalism of a MADD memorial, which
is presumed to be in place legitimately and
indefinitely. Unlike official state memorial
signs, which often have a definite time
limit, and vernacular road trauma shrines,
which have a precarious existence, MADD
crosses are installed with the presumption
that they will be there indefinitely. As
fixtures on the roadside, their removal is
even more disruptive.
I would now like to turn to an analysis of
one such news story titled “No Respect
for the Dead” (see video clip in “Roadside
Memorial for Victims” 2012).
11
The
story covers a recent instance in which
family members discovered that four MADD
memorial crosses that had been in place for
years in Austin, Texas, were damaged,
leaving four short, white, wooden stubs (see
figs. 4–5). While news stories about official
state removals of roadside memorials
narrate a conflict between opposing but
equally legitimate groups—mourning
families vs. state agencies—and usually only
subtly privilege mourners over bureaucrats,
this news story about the vandalism of a
memorial makes no attempt to balance
its framing at all. The anchor and reporter are
righteously indignant about what they
presume is not only a crime against property
but a crime against common sense. The
story charts out a world where “us” and
“them” are clearly separated: it creates an
“Other” of the presumed perpetrator—
someone who is not only disrespectful
but does things that do not make sense—
while gathering viewers into a collective that
ROADSIDE MEMORIAL REMOVALS and the NECROPOLITICS of AFFECT
347 CULTURAL POLITICS
would perform that condemnation and also
show compassion for the victims’ families.
It distances viewers from the person or
persons who presumably vandalized the
crosses and aligns viewers with the victims
of both events: the crash and the vandalism.
It builds a sympathetic portrait of the four
people killed in the crash and their grieving
families. Along the way, it creates slippage
between the two types of victimization:
trauma at the hands of a drunk driver and
trauma at the hands of a vandal.
The anchor sets up the story
dramatically, saying, “Our Top Story tonight:
No Respect for the Dead. Someone has
desecrated roadside memorials for victims
of drunk drivers.” As he says this, a
photograph of a set of four damaged crosses
next to him appears with the caption,
“WHO WOULD DO THIS?” in all caps. The
archived web version of the story makes
the frame of the piece more explicit: “In the
place of one heinous crime is another.” To
equate the vandalism of four crosses to the
death of four people is problematic, to say
the least, but to call even the drunk-driving
death a “heinous crime” is problematic
as well, reflecting an implicit acceptance of
MADD’s victim/perpetrator necropolitical
discourse discussed above.
This discourse continues to operate as
the story unfolds, further solidifying the
presumed similarity between the figures of
the “drunk driver” and the “vandal” as
objects of the discourse operating in the
story. When the reporter comes on and
points to the broken crosses, it is clear that
she presumes our affective response: we
are supposed to be dismayed. The reporter
narrates the story of the crash from
within the car: the two couples are
innocently going about their business, when,
out of nowhere, they are hit by an out-of-
control external force—a drunk driver whose
name is not ever uttered aloud in the story,
and someone clearly identified as being as
Figure 4 Robert M. Bednar, Damaged MADD crosses, MoPac Expressway North, North of Parmer Lane, Austin, Texas, USA,
November 2012. Photograph courtesy of the author
Robert M. Bednar
348 CULTURAL POLITICS †9:3 November 2013
guilty as the two couples were innocent. The
segment closes with a split screen featuring
both the reporter and anchor; the anchor
is shown shaking his head while the reporter
looks directly into the camera, pursing her
lips, shaking her head a bit, and blinking, as
she says: “And Mike, it sure is sad.”
The anchor replies: “It certainly is. I hope
somebody comes forward with some
information.”
The story asks for somebody to come
forward, but it is clearly not an invitation
for the perpetrator to come forward to
explain himself or herself. While the other
people represented in the story, from
reporters and anchors to interviewed family
members and supporters, are all presented
as sympathetic and reasonable, even as
they express extreme emotions, the
“vandal” is figured as an object for the
discourse to speak about, but never to be
listened to. The perpetrator of the crime of
vandalism is external to viewers, just as
the drunk driver was to the four victims in the
car that night. The story mobilizes affect to
interpellate viewers both as righteously
indignant witnesses to the story and
as possible eyewitnesses of this “heinous
crime” of vandalism; in doing so, it reveals a
necropolitical discourse of roadside
memorialization that not only produces
(some) performances of compassion but
naturalizes them by marking the failure to
perform compulsory compassion as
inexcusable and, in fact, incomprehensible
within the naturalized discourse of the
news story, which further naturalizes the
discourse itself.
“Who Would Do This?”
I have shown how the vandalism news story
aligns viewers with the victims by placing
viewers inside their world twice: first as
victims of a drunk driver, and then as victims
of a “desecration.” This makes the story
not that much different from news stories
Figure 5 Robert M. Bednar, Damaged MADD crosses, Close-up, MoPac Expressway North, North of Parmer Lane, Austin,
Texas, USA, November 2012. Photograph courtesy of the author
ROADSIDE MEMORIAL REMOVALS and the NECROPOLITICS of AFFECT
349 CULTURAL POLITICS
about state removals, which also conflate
the trauma of the accident with the trauma of
the removal, but here the frame places
viewers in a much more extreme position in
relation to the removal. Within this
placement, the only response offered is
righteous indignation, which is not only
a moral response but a presumed affective
response. Viewers are “supposed to feel”
outraged (where “supposed” means
both presumed by others and compelled
internally). And throughout, the images of
the broken crosses are presented as if they
are self-evidently poignant, which serves as
the foundation both for the segment’s
compulsory compassion and its righteous
indignation: how could someone possibly
desecrate something like this? The
story does not expect an answer to this
provocation. It’s as if the required response
is to do just as the anchor and reporter
do: shake your head in disbelief, pronounce it
sad, and move on to the next story.
However, while there is no way to
imagine someone “who would do this”
within the frame of the story, anyone familiar
with roadside memorials would know that
there are many potential candidates. The
most obvious here is someone like Rodney
Scott, who not only “would do” something
like this but actually did do something
like this. Throughout his trial, Scott
maintained that he was within his rights to
remove the memorial because he was
offended by its presence, which he saw as
an unwelcome intrusion on his own sense of
well-being as a passer-by: “I had gone
through a lot of personal turmoil myself,”
Scott said. “I didn’t appreciate somebody
else throwing their hurt and sorrow out there
for the public view, as if it was more
important than someone else’s hurt or
losses” (quoted in Doss 2010: 86–87).
Critics, like Scott, of roadside memorials may
understand mourners’ desire to grieve in
public and may take it for granted that road-
side memorials contain and communicate
affect, but they do not accept the claim that
survivors’ “authority from grief” trumps their
own desire not to witness public grieving
and, possibly, their desire not to be
compelled to feel a particular emotion.
12
Of course, making an argument and
supporting someone else’s action are not the
same thing, just as both are not the same
thing as doing something yourself to remove
memorials from public landscapes. The
more prevalent method is to challenge
roadside memorials through litigation, which
is the tactic of several advocacy groups,
including Freedom from Religion and
American Atheists. But while these groups
focus their work in the courts, there are
other organizations and individuals that
advocate direct action to remove memorials
from the roadside. Most prominent here are
Austin Cline, an atheist activist, and the
organization called Atheist Activist. Cline has
a web page on About.com that encourages
atheists to remove roadside memorials
and provides instruction on how to do it.
13
Atheist Activist takes an even more
explicit approach, including links to online
retailers selling the tools necessary to
cut down roadside memorials.
14
And at the
bottom of the Atheist Activist “How To”
page is a link to a website run by another
person, Jason Curless, who clearly does not
buy into compulsory compassion: for over
ten years, Curless has worked to ridicule
roadside memorials on his porkjerky.com
website, titled “Roadside Crosses: God’s
Way of Saying ‘A Shitty Driver Was Here.’”
15
Finally, there are critics of MADD,
specifically, who advocate removing MADD
crosses as part of their larger criticism of
what they see as MADD’s dominance of the
cultural discussion about drinking and driving
in the United States—particularly the way
they mobilize affect in advocating for their
Robert M. Bednar
350 CULTURAL POLITICS †9:3 November 2013
goals.
16
My point is not to accuse these
individuals and groups of vandalizing the
Austin MADD crosses but to denaturalize a
discourse that makes such an act appear to
be incomprehensible. For all of these
critics of roadside memorials, who are not
included within the dominant interpretive
repertoire about roadside memorials, it
would not be difficult to imagine an answer to
the question: “Who Would Do This?”
Conclusion
Just weeks after their initial destruction, the
four Austin MADD crosses were rebuilt by
MADD and reinstalled by family members
while the news camera rolled. Their quick
restoration revealed the most persistent
truth in the necropolitics of roadside
memorialization in the contemporary United
States: that while both private shrines and
state memorial signs are subject to removal
by state agencies, MADD memorial
crosses endure (see fig. 6).
17
This indicates
that their special status as sanctioned
memorials within the current regime of
necropolitics of memory and affect in
American automobility allows them to
continue to have a dominant public
presence. Replacing broken, rotten, or
vandalized MADD crosses and maintaining
the crosses indefinitely thus not only “keeps
memory alive” in the public landscapes of
automobility but also keeps MADD’s
presence as a cultural force alive there,
ensuring MADD’s ongoing influence in the
necropolitics of affect and memory within
automobility.
MADD crosses will thus become further
naturalized not only as part of the American
public landscape, but as part of the
materialization of the necropolitical
discourse of compulsory compassion, where
some who are killed in and by automobiles
are presumed to be legitimately memorable
and others are not, where some survivors
are allowed to legitimately grieve and
memorialize their loved ones and others are
Figure 6 Robert M. Bednar, restored MADD crosses, MoPac Expressway North, North of Parmer Lane, Austin, Texas, USA,
December 2012. Photograph courtesy of the author
ROADSIDE MEMORIAL REMOVALS and the NECROPOLITICS of AFFECT
351 CULTURAL POLITICS
not, and where the rest of us who drive by are
supposed to feel a certain way about it all.
Notes
1. A detailed analysis of the interpretive repertoire
within which media coverage of roadside
memorials operates is beyond the scope of this
article. A good place to see the range of
enunciations is in the New York Times blog Room
for Debate, in which an entry titled “Should
Roadside Memorials Be Banned?” on July 12,
2009, generated 370 comments in less
than twenty-four hours before being closed down.
2. For example, the Texas Department of
Transportation has a Memorial Sign Program that
allows survivors of victims of “impaired driving”
fatalities to pay $300 to have an official “Please
Don’t Drink and Drive” sign installed at the site of a
fatal crash for a period of two years. The survivors
must apply to be considered for such a sign, and
program guidelines require that the people who
will be memorialized are “victims” of impaired
driving and not perpetrators; indeed, the guidelines
explicitly stipulate that “an impaired driver is not
eligible for a Memorial Sign.” See Texas
Department of Transportation, “Memorial Sign
Program—Victims of Impaired Driving,” www
.txdot.gov/inside-txdot/division/trafficsigns
/memorial-vehicle.html. Accessed November 11,
2012. The official administrative code for the signs
is posted online, as well, at info.sos.state.tx.us
/pls/pub/readtac$ext.ViewTAC?tac_view¼5&
ti¼43&pt¼1&ch¼25&sch¼N&rl¼Y.
Accessed November 11, 2012. California and
Florida, which, significantly, are usually grouped
with Texas in the top three states for traffic
fatalities and thus have similar institutional drives
to control crash deaths, have similar programs.
California’s signs are almost identical to the Texas
signs in wording, design, and cost structure.
See California Department of Transportation,
Victims Memorial Sign Program, www.dot.ca.gov
/hq/traffops/signtech/signdel/victims.htm.
Accessed July 18, 2011. Florida’s are white and
round and avoid the victim discourse of the other
two states; they simply say “Drive Safely, In
Memory of [name].” The Florida signs are “part of
an effort to increase public awareness of highway
safety,” and not about impaired driving, in
particular, so the signs are available to anyone who
wants to memorialize a car accident death on roads
the state controls. Unlike Texas and California,
Florida also “absorbs all the costs . . . to offer them
free to the public.” See Florida Department of
Transportation, “Highway Safety Memorial
Program,” www.dot.state.fl.us
/statemaintenanceoffice/memorial%20markers
.shtm. Accessed July 18, 2011. Texas has more
recently developed a related Motorcycle Crash
Memorial Sign Program that “serves to
commemorate loved ones while raising awareness
of motorcycle safety.” See www.txdot.gov/inside
-txdot/division/traffic/signs/memorial-motorcycle
.html. Accessed November 11, 2012. While the
motorcycle crash sign program is similar to the
impaired driving sign program, there are important
differences. For one, instead of saying “Please
Don’t Drink and Drive” as the impaired driving signs
do, the motorcycle crash signs feature a red
Roman cross (a cross that is taller than it is wide,
like the MADD crosses and unlike the logo for Red
Cross, which is symmetrical), which is likely to
invite a future challenge to their constitutionality.
More important, the program makes no distinction
between perpetrators and victims in its rules on
purchasing the signs and has no requirement that
the crash be caused by impairment. This implies
that the motorcycle itself is figured as the problem
to be controlled through the discourse of public
safety, which maps directly to the larger
pathologizing of motorcycles and motorcyclists
within the discourse of automobility. See Packer
2008: 111–60.
3. In New Mexico, the state has taken a different
approach. The state has a program offering an
official Department of Transportation road sign to
memorialize drunk-driving victims, but even here
some of their signs include large photographs of
the victim that render the sign much more
personalized than their counterparts in other
states. More important, the state has embraced the
practice of roadside trauma shrines, not only
allowing the shrines to proliferate throughout the
state, but also accommodating them more than any
other state does. New Mexico regularly protects
shrine sites with orange plastic fencing, so road
Robert M. Bednar
352 CULTURAL POLITICS †9:3 November 2013
construction can proceed around them, or publicly
notifies shrine builders when road construction
will necessitate moving shrines. Other states have
a practice of leaving notes or business cards at
shrine sites warning builders that their shrine is
illegal and giving those who maintain the shrine an
opportunity to remove it before it is discarded.
However, this is very different from giving someone
the opportunity to save a shrine from being
discarded so that it can be rebuilt later, after road
construction has been completed, as is the case in
New Mexico. Local public safety agencies also
use shrines in billboards and other official public-
media DWI messages. There is even a shrine at the
edge of the parking lot at the state police
headquarters in Taos, New Mexico.
4. Interestingly, many state-produced memorial
shrines are themselves decorated by individuals
with flowers and other shrine objects. This
indicates that instead of substituting one
vernacular memorial for a more official one, many
mourners have simply adopted the signs as the
central element of a relocated or replaced
vernacular shrine.
5. The explicit reference not only to death but to
killing also makes these crosses different from the
majority of vernacular shrines, which are
considered by most practitioners and researchers
to be “last alive” sites, instead of death sites,
and which, in fact, rarely mention death. For
instance, in Roadside Crosses in Contemporary
Memorial Culture (2002), Holly Everett quotes a
mother of a teen car crash victim who maintains a
shrine on the roadside rather than the cemetery
site because the accident site was, she says, “the
last place that Nathan was” before going “straight
to heaven” (95). The mother says she visits the
site frequently not only to maintain the memory of
her son but to talk to her son; she says the shrine
serves this purpose well because “that’s kind of
where I felt his spirit was last” (quoted in Everett
2002: 96). Similarly, Charles Collins and Charles
Rhine noticed that many people who leave written
messages to those who have died address victims
as if they are “departed” instead of “dead” or
“deceased”—as displaced, disembodied, or
transformed, but not “ceasing to exist” (2003: 234).
The identification of the embodied agent of the
death realizes a point only incipient in the state
memorial signs: that both forms memorialize only
victims. But while the MADD inscription implies
that an agent caused the death, the MADD
memorial format also implicitly works to discredit
that agency by denying the personhood of the
perpetrator.
6. This necropolitical sorting is also naturalized by the
fact that the same dynamic operates in the politics
of public memory and affect in relation to
nonautomotive public tragedies as well. For
instance, Gillian Rose makes a similar point in her
analysis of necropolitics and the British media
coverage of the July 7, 2005, bombings in London,
where she discovers an “uneven distribution of
grief” reflected in representations of those who
died in the bombings, where news media
celebrated the lives of victims and actively
distanced readers from the perpetrators (2009: 47).
Likewise, Judith Butler, in her analysis of post-
9/11 memorial culture in New York City, argues
that the dominant US response to 9/11 revealed a
“differential allocation of greivability,” which
worked to determine “what kind of subject is and
must be grieved and what kind of subject must not”
(2004: xv). Sylvia Grider (2007, 2011) also has
analyzed this phenomenon of “differential
allocation of grievability” in the way shooters and
victims have been memorialized at the sites of
mass shootings at Columbine High School, Virginia
Tech, and Northern Illinois University. A similar
process of sorting was apparent more recently in
the media coverage of the school shooting in
Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012.
7. A word about terminology. My larger project in this
area has been focused on vernacular car crash
shrines, which I call road trauma shrines. In the
present study, I use the more general term roadside
memorial throughout because it contains all three
kinds of memorial forms I write about here:
vernacular road trauma shrines, state memorial
signs, and MADD crosses. I then reserve the term
shrine for those memorial sites that include the
material evidence of ongoing memorial practices,
such as the placing of flowers, stuffed animals, and
written messages to the victim. In short: all road
trauma shrines are roadside memorials, but not all
roadside memorials are road trauma shrines.
8. The most prominent US example is the group of
“9/11 families,” who have asserted a central
ROADSIDE MEMORIAL REMOVALS and the NECROPOLITICS of AFFECT
353 CULTURAL POLITICS
authority in the necropolitics of memory at Ground
Zero (see Bean 2009; Donofrio 2010).
9. See especially “Mom Upset at Loss of Memorial”
2008. See also Madden 2008; Schneider 2011;
Schmidt 2000.
10. As Gillian Rose characterizes this dominant subject
position offered by the contemporary news
coverage of suffering individuals: “The photos
were looked at, something was felt, a certain
caring happened, but nothing, it appeared, needed
to be done. We can leave the action to others”
(2009: 51; see also Rose 2010; Ott and Aoki 2002;
Zelizer 2005).
11. This story was featured as the Top Story for FOX 7
News Austin on September 27, 2012.
12. This is something many people say about roadside
memorials in public forums, indicating that,
despite the vandalism news story’s projection of a
clear cultural consensus, such a consensus is, in
fact, complicated and unstable. See especially
“Should Roadside Memorials Be Banned?” (2009).
Some see roadside memorials as inappropriately
public displays of grief, which they think should be
“kept private where they belong,” in private
homes and in institutional settings like cemeteries.
Others extend this, as Rodney Scott does, to an
argument about resenting the fact that only a
few people presume to use public space for
performing their grief. Both positions continue to
assume that, as Scott puts it, a roadside memorial
“throw[s] their hurt and sorrow out there for the
public view.”
13. Located at atheism.about.com/od
/ideasforatheistactivism/a/RoadsideCrosses.htm.
Accessed November 12, 2012.
14. Located at www.atheistactivist.org/Roadside
.html. Accessed November 20, 2012.
15. Located at www.porkjerky.com/rip/ and accessed
June 30, 2006.
16. For example, there is a post on Modern Drunkard
Forum advocating vandalizing “neoprohibitionist”
MADD crosses. Located at www.drunkard.com
/bbs/viewtopic.php?f¼11&t ¼38151. Accessed
November 11, 2012.
17. The restoration process was documented by the
same reporter and anchor at the local FOX affiliate,
giving narrative closure to the story of disruption
they had reported a few weeks earlier. See “Family
Replaces Vandalized Crosses” 2012.
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Robert M. Bednar is associate professor and chair of communication studies at Southwestern
University in Georgetown, Texas, where he teaches courses in media studies, visual
communication, critical/cultural studies, and automobility. His work as an analyst, photographer,
and theorist of critical visual communication focuses on the ways that people perform identities
visually, materially, and spatially as they negotiate public landscapes. He has published a number of
scholarly and popular articles on roadside trauma shrines and US National Park snapshot
photography practices and currently is completing a book on roadside shrines titled “Road Scars:
Trauma, Memory, and Automobility.”
Robert M. Bednar
356 CULTURAL POLITICS †9:3 November 2013
