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Denying denial: Trauma, memory, and automobility at roadside car crash shrines
... 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). ...
... 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(Bednar , 2011a(Bednar , 2011b. 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. ...
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.
... Researchers struggle to definitively say because, like all rhetoric, the purpose depends on the audience and context of the encounter, features that constantly change in memorial sites. Scholars argue that this lack of agreement has led to a dichotomy over expressions of remembrance where official memorials sanctioned by institutions are often pitted against more democratic or vernacular expressions of commemoration represented in grassroots memorials (Margry and Sanchez Carreterro;Santino;Bednar, 2012 and2013), temporary memorials (Blair & Michel, 2007;Haskins;Morris), digital memorials (Hartelius; Hess; Hessler), and items purposefully left at permanent memorials (Hass; Helmers). Put simply, this literature indicates that the voices of institutions sometimes speak against (or drown out) the individual voices who have a personal stake in the memory text. ...
This essay describes the commemorative response to shootings that occurred at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 and draws attention to the liminal stage between the appearance of the temporary April 16th memorial and its permanent replacement. Analysis reveals that the “place-dictates” used by those granted place-making authority over the construction of the permanent memorial provide important clues concerning the intended ideologies and subject positions prescribed through the site and the extent to which the public accepted such prescriptions. Attention to these “place-dictates” reveals the ways in which the institution aimed to camouflage its intentions by mimicking the vernacular design of the temporary memorial.
... 475), especially as pertain advertising and populism. Studies of affect, trauma, and memory in rhetorical scholarship are varied, including witnessing Black Lives Matter social movement rhetoric (Hoyt, 2019), lynching reenactments (Owens & Ehrenhaus, 2014), "aftermath events" like school shootings (Alexander & Rhodes, 2010), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Bernard-Donals, 2016), roadside traumas and place/space (Bednar, 2012), and global and local journalists' proximity to catastrophe (Al-Ghazzi, 2021), among others. ...
Critical affect theory continues to hold promise for rhetorical theory and criticism. This article revisits the so-called affective turn in rhetoric and addresses subsequent critiques of the idea of a turn. Accounting for scholarship published since 2010, this article then groups critical affect work into six subareas of research in rhetorical studies: feminist, queer, trans, and crip affects; race and affect; Black women's affective labor; affective publics and counterpublics; new materialism, materiality, and affect; and affective economics. This article outlines affective methodologies in rhetorical studies and highlights the affective dimensions of "theories of the flesh" in rhetorical inquiry. It ends by considering what is critical about affect theory in rhetoric.
If visuality is understood broadly as the practices, performances, and configurations of the appearances, then the relationship between rhetoric and visuality is as old as the art of rhetoric itself. The ancients tied rhetoric to the world of mimesis , or the appearances, rather than to the realm of philosophical truth; this relationship often unfairly relegated both rhetoric and the visual to subordinate status in the Platonic regime of knowledge. Yet in the ancient tradition the visual is constitutive of rhetoric in a number of ways (→ Rhetoric, Greek). Aristotle's notion of phantasia references the ability of rhetoric to create → images in the mind and cultivate affective grounds for judgment (Hawhee 2011; → Pathos and Rhetoric → Rhetoric, Epideictic). Latin rhetorical theory and practice similarly framed sight as a powerful influence on persuasion (Lamp 2013; → Rhetoric, Roman).
The era of the early diffusion of the motor car seems to have been linked with a European culture of violence and aggression which is underestimated in automobile-related research. ‘Road battles’, racing, aggressive driving and class arrogance on the road were not aberrations
from a peaceful norm but essential to the cultural positioning of automobiles. A pattern of metaphors for driving-related aggression evolved. Thus automobilism had a place in the cultural as well as in the practical preparation for the First World War. Further research into the ‘dark
side’ of car culture is proposed.
The erection of roadside memorials in Sweden is commonly considered a novel practice. However, it bears certain similarities with earlier traditions, especially, the so-called offerkast, a pile of sticks or stones thrown on the site of a death on the road.
Roadside memorials are frequently visible in the Netherlands. Such a memorial marks a previously anonymous roadside, which is transformed into a place with special, even sacred, meanings to the bereaved, as it is the place where their loved one has died. We look at these memorials from a geographical point of view, i.e. we discuss the memorials as meaningful places. How do these places look, how do they function and what do they mean? We created a database consisting of information on more than 300 memorials, including photographs of about 150 of these and we interviewed 24 bereaved who established a memorial. The exact geographical location of the fatal traffic accident turns out to be crucial as it marks the ultimate transformative event that has taken place: from life to death. Temporary memorials are mainly established by friends, whereas parents construct more permanent ones. We argue that roadside memorials are part of wider communication networks. They provide a place for the bereaved to communicate not only with the deceased, but also with the outside world about what they consider a ‘bad death’. Consequently, the establishment, maintenance and communication possibilities of roadside memorials constitute a way to give meaning to an otherwise senseless death.
Automobility, or the myriad institutions that foster car culture, has rarely if ever been put under the lens of liberal political theory, even though driving is one of the most common and widely accepted features of daily life in modern societies. When its implied promise of guaranteeing both freedom and equality is examined more closely, however, it appears that the ethical implications of driving may be darker than initially supposed. Automobility may indeed be in violation of both the Kantian categorical imperative and Gewirth's principle of generic consistency, even though there has thus far been remarkably little ethical analysis to reveal these possibilities. It is conceivable that liberal political theory has turned a blind eye to automobility precisely because the latter has naturalized us into accepting what Roberto Unger has called a routine of false necessity, so that driving is now virtually imperceptible as a social fact worthy of critical analysis.
The comparative study of roadside memorials in New South Wales, Australia, and Texas, United States, raises questions about the consistency in memorial form and practice between societies with diverse ethnic and religious profiles and different historical backgrounds. This article compares roadside memorials in two societies, and suggests that ethnic and sub-group affiliation accounts for local and individual differences in what is essentially an international phenomenon powered by developments in motoring culture, postmodernism, and globalization. The roadside memorial reclaims public space for the celebration of the individual in a period and place of overwhelming technological and cultural change.
This article explores the problem of fixing ethnicity in a politically violent national context, among a population generally overlooked in the anthropological literature, Northern Ireland's border Protestants. Focusing on narratives of violence and intimidation, it shows how Protestants articulate their identity through a reading of the Irish border landscape that stresses the atrocities carried out there over the last thirty years or so. Place is central to their atrocity narratives and knowledge of the violence associated with specific sites—a particular field, farm building, or country lane—both constitutes and reflects their sense of themselves in the escalating cultural war precipitated by wider political transformation in Northern Ireland since the late 1990s. The emphasis on the materiality of landscape and place, this article argues, is crucial both to the credibility of Protestant claims for social justice, as well as a central element in the passage from personal to public memory.This article was first presented in Belfast in May 2002 as part of a public lecture and subsequently at a seminar in the University of St. Andrews and as a lecture in the Centre for Border Studies in the University of Glamorgan and at Charles University, Prague. I am grateful to all of those who offered comments on these occasions. I am most especially grateful to Suzel Reily, who assisted with the images and sound that accompanied the lectures; to Graham McFarlane and Fiona Magowan, who both commented in detail on various drafts; and to the editors of Identities and three anonymous referees for suggestions on how to strengthen the argument. Figure 8 is reprinted from Murray 1982: 315, with permission from Elsevier.
Jennifer Clark first explores the idea of heritage and how it is becoming more inclusive. This presents an interesting perspective for motoring heritage, which has always focused on the modern and the progressive while pushing into a subtext the reality of death on the road and the suffering that goes with it. The building and decoration of memorials express the individualism and humanity of road travellers and make visible the grief associated with road trauma. She examines the trend towards the erection of roadside memorials and explores the possibility that their proliferation invites us to reconsider our ideas about motoring heritage. This interpretation of road travel adds a different dimension to the heroic and romantic image that has fed our ideas of motoring heritage for so long.
Who, and what, is worth mourning in the United States of America? Who and what "counts" in the American national imaginary and is, hence, deemed especially worthy of mourning and memorialization? Increasingly widespread commemorative practices such as roadside shrines, pregnancy loss memorials, organ donor memorials, and spontaneous memorials erected at sites of tragic and traumatic death—such as the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999—suggest new social and cultural understandings of who is valued as a person worth mourning and remembering in America. Challenging Freudian understandings of mourning as something to be "worked through" quickly and privately, new modes of mourning are public and continuous, embodying growing beliefs in the inseparability of life from death and the endless, although not pathological, presence of grief. Centering on spontaneous memorials, this essay considers what such seemingly impromptu public rituals of commemoration suggest about contemporary American attitudes regarding material culture, grief, death, and a national legacy of violence. It further considers the affective conditions, and possibilities, of grief in contemporary America.
Roadside shrines marking sites of death along the road increasingly seek our attention. These sites, the materials that mark them, how it is that people come to build them, the messages that those who build them hope to convey, and the accumulative force these sites bring to bear in various contexts offer unique insighst into our complex, fragmented, and often agonistic relationships with death and living memory. Combining critical theory, ethnographic methods, and performative writing affords investigators wishing to study roadside shrines as performance and by means of performance the opportunity to work with, within, and against the multiple discourses and practices that crisscross and surround the objects of their investigations. This essay attempts to tease out a performative space on the page that evokes the sometimes audacious and often poetic stance that cultural performances of and at roadside shrines so often take.