Remembrance Day with Walter Benjamin and PJ Harvey

Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.

~ Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Leading up to Remembrance Day, I've spent a lot of time with Let England Shake, PJ Harvey's Mercury Prize-winning release from earlier this year. For me, it invites the kind of reflections on memory and history that were made by Walter Benjamin. Such an awareness of historical representation seems all the more necessary on a day when we are constantly met with the imperative to "remember." Much of the media recites this platitude as though the task at hand is self-evident, but I think Harvey's album, like the work of Benjamin, draws such rituals of remembrance into question. Remember how? What's at stake in such practices? How do they help construct and inform our current condition?

The celebrated war photographer Seamus Murphy shot a video for each of the album's twelve tracks. Each one is quite remarkable. I've posted several here, but I'd highly recommend searching out all of them.

 

it's remembrance day; go read some hauerwas

Or just listen to him.

Does Remembrance Day treat war with enough ambivalence? The ritual of remembrance is ultimately a question of identity and collectivity. Is there a way of remembering war that doesn't participate in the the sort of political allegiance required by the nation state?

St. Augustine saw that war arose from disordered desires and ambitions but he understood that it could also be used, in some cases, to restrain evil and protect the innocent. Mass support for current war efforts, Christian or not, (formally) projects a similar view (though if any major military states actually followed St. Augustine's conditions for just war, our last century would have looked entirely different). For theologians like Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder, Christian pacifism is not just an abstract attitude about war; rather it entails the belief that God through Jesus Christ has inaugurated a history that frees all people from the assumption that there is no alternative to war.

For Hauerwas and Yoder, the debate between positions of pacifism and just war theology is a debate between differing assumptions about history and the performance of political allegiance.  The just war view of history demands that we must compromise ideals of peace because of our sinful condition, while the Christian pacifist believes that peace is not simply an ideal destined for compromise, but is rather a present alternative within the suffering body of Christ.

For many, war is the only way to preserve our common history and properly remember the sacrifices of our forefathers. To participate in warfare and to engage in certain styles of remembrance that validate the nation is to claim for ourselves the power to determine our meaning and choose our destiny. For Hauerwas, to protect ourselves against our enemies from a position of individual sovereignty is to protect a state-sanctioned version of history that is incompatible with the manifest weakness of God in the person of Christ.