A Politics of Memory

On Adrian Paci’s Interregnum (2017)

By Richard Birkett

Gathering film and televisual footage of national ceremonies held in response to the deaths of Communist leaders, the artist composes a transnational and transhistorical scenography of mourning, emphasizing the political use of memory to build and reproduce fictive pasts, presents, and futures.

Adrian Paci, Interregnum, 2017. Video still. 17:29 mins. Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; and kaufmann repetto, Milan/New York. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

—Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks¹

“Every society is founded upon the adoption of a fictive past that effaces the differences in the origins of individuals and facilitates the identification of a common future through a politics of memory and forgetfulness. . . . The conservation of memory, of the memorable that is itself constituted through selection from within the memorizable, is always already its elaboration as well; it is never the mere reporting of what takes place. What takes place only takes place in not quite actually taking place. One memorizes only by forgetting, by effacing, by selecting what deserves to be retained from all that could have been retained; in the same vein, one memorizes only by anticipating, positively or negatively, that which could have happened.”

—Bernard Stiegler, “Memory”²

In his 1998 book Technics and Time, philosopher and media theorist Bernard Stiegler introduces his reader to the unwieldy term “epiphylogenetic memory.”³ Stiegler’s thesis poses that memory can be articulated in three different forms: genetic memory, programmed within our DNA; epigenetic memory, acquired during our lifetime; and memory, embodied in technical systems or artifacts. This latter “third space” of memory uses external tools to allow for the preservation of an impersonal and collective memory. For Stiegler, it is also crucial to how we create time—our epiphylogenetic memory, passed down from ancestors, is the means by which we conceive of and measure the past, present, and future.

The idea of a collective memory bound up in external objects, from televisual media to Instagram feeds, feels like a familiar contemporary reality as we seek to preserve, order, and make coherent both our personal and our mass histories on a daily basis. Yet Stiegler saw the outsourcing of memory from the organic to the technic (everything that constitutes the exteriorization of the human, from basic tools and communicative gestures to writing and contemporary information technologies) as more than just the character of our modern construction of history—rather, it actively shapes the very nature of the human. In Stiegler’s terms, what we call the human is uniquely “a living being characterized in its forms of life by the non-living.” Our evolution is in fact the evolution of our technical supports.

In this conception, a fundamental friction exists within the binding of living memory with “dead tools” and with our reliance on these systems and their evolution, creating vulnerability to the loss and displacement of memory. The structural displacement formed within an industrialized economy of information renders memory as the defining object of knowledge control and the basis for a society of control. The paradox of the exteriorization of memory as a possible site of social transformation between the “I” and the “we,” as well as one of dissociation and control, constitutes for Stiegler “a combat for a politics of memory”—a struggle over the collective agency held within symbolic practices and communal formations.

THE STRUCTURAL DISPLACEMENT FORMED WITHIN AN INDUSTRIALIZED ECONOMY OF INFORMATION RENDERS MEMORY AS THE DEFINING OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE CONTROL AND THE BASIS FOR A SOCIETY OF CONTROL.

Adrian Paci was born in Shkodër, Albania, in 1969. Between 1987 and 1991 he attended the Art Academy in Tirana, during a period of tumult in the country following the death in 1985 of Enver Hoxha, the de facto head of state and first secretary of the Party of Labour of Albania. Hoxha came to power following the defeat of occupying Italian fascists in 1944 and declared an adherence to Marxism-Leninism and to a Stalinist model of total rule. With the support of first the Soviet Union and then China, Albania was able to industrialize rapidly during the 1960s and implement significant improvements in education, healthcare, and social welfare. Following this period of rapid growth, however, the country became increasingly isolationist and progressively poor, as China and the Soviet Union sought détente with the West in the 1970s and Albanian trade relations with both countries were severed (with Hoxha emphasizing self-reliance). Throughout his rule, Hoxha instigated political repressions to remove dissidents, including forced labor camps, torture, and extrajudicial killings carried out by the Sigurimi secret police. Hoxha’s death after a period of ill health marked the beginning of a period of discontinuity in the Albanian social and political order—an “interregnum”—during which his successor, First Secretary Ramiz Alia, implemented economic reforms and opened diplomatic ties with the West before the fall of the Communist government in 1991, following a period of sustained student demonstrations.

Adrian Paci, Interregnum, 2017. Video still. 17:29 mins. Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; and kaufmann repetto, Milan/New York. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

Hoxha’s death in 1985 was followed by eight days of elaborate funereal ritual and national mourning. His body lay in state for three days, attended by thousands of citizens who waited in lines kilometers long. These commemorations in Tirana were simultaneously broadcast on Albanian state television—the first instance of live television broadcasting in the country—ensuring the promotion of the immediate events to historical status. A film production company was also recruited to document events in each Albanian city, with the field recordings compiled in the space of five days into the documentary film Dhimbje e thellë, betim i madh (A Deep Pain, a Great Oath). The unused footage from A Deep Pain was destroyed due to lack of storage space, and in 1991 the majority of the material shot live in Tirana disappeared from the Albanian Radio-Television archive.⁴ The small proportion of footage that remains circulating in the Albanian media and on the Internet largely centers around coverage that was sanctioned and edited into an official narrative.

Paci’s eighteen-minute video Interregnum (2017) makes use of film and televisual media gathered from a number of archives and online sources. In addition to extant footage of the ceremonies held following Hoxha’s death, Interregnum draws on state-sanctioned documentation dating from the 1920s through the 1980s, from countries other than Albania including China, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, recording the acts of national mourning held in response to epoch-defining deaths of Communist leaders. Paci’s intervention into this collated material is subtle. He adopts an editorial approach that maintains the basic form of the segments, while aggregating and cutting them together into one collective scenography of mourning. However, images of the objects of mourning—the deceased rulers—are absent from Paci’s montage, as are any representations of the apparatus of the state such as military parades or dutiful party officials. The video also notably lacks specific temporal and spatial markers that might distinguish each historical event, beyond visual cues in the quality of the media and the cultural specificities of clothing, architecture, and landscape. Instead, in Interregnum the imaginary of a collective, transhistorical, and transnational subject of the Communist state—“the people”—takes center stage.

In its use of montage to bring together footage from different locations and times, Interregnum emphasizes the reproducibility of a particular form and set of ideological expectations that unite these filmic documents. Both the theatrics of mourning and the formal approach to their capture on film are shown as consistent and shared across the footage, a double staging integral to the signaling of the event in both its immediacy and its wide-reaching and transcendent resonance. The video loosely follows a structure that conforms to a sense of established doctrine: beginning with images of awe-inspiring mountainous landscapes, sequences follow that move from staged shots of families and groups gathered around a radio receiving the news of the death of the leader, to lines of thousands of citizens on the streets stoically waiting to pay their respects to the leader lying in state, to shots of individual and collective grief and hysteria, and finally images of immense crowds standing in unity.

Adrian Paci, Interregnum, 2017. Video still. 17:29 mins. Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; and kaufmann repetto, Milan/New York. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

In the post-Stalinist era, the dominant Western perspective on Socialist and Communist political movements has been of a pervasive ideology of Marxism-Leninism driven by the one-party cult of the leader. In the extremes of totalitarian Communism that litter the twentieth century, the perceived perversity of proletarian revolution distilled into dictatorial suppression and control of the people is perhaps most visibly exemplified in the death of the “great leader.” In the convulsions around these events there exists the paradox of both a crisis of the ideological imaginary and a mechanism for political immortalization. The programmatic suppression of religion and political opponents conjures a sacralization of the head of state as the untouchable repository of ultimate power and authority—in their death there is both the shock of individual physical mortality and the moment of transcendence of a political project and logic of power into an “eternal” order. The act of mass public mourning and its staging for global representation renders the vulnerabilities of grief and trauma as objects of persisting strength. Essential to this is the exteriorization of a collective memory as both inherently of the people and one dissociated from the actual experience and accumulated knowledge of the people; it is the industrial selection of memory in the present in a manner that looks to define the past and the future.

Paci has spoken of the importance of philosopher Simone Weil’s analysis of the Iliad to his own understanding of the images of mourning in Interregnum.⁵ In her essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force” (1939), Weil articulates how the Iliad explicates the nature of force and its reduction of both aggressor and victim to the level of unthinking automaton. Specifically, it offers an understanding of the contradictions within the grief of enslaved people in the Iliad at the death of their master:

And what does it take to make the slave weep? The misfortune of his master, his oppressor, despoiler, pillager, of the man who laid waste his town and killed his dear ones under his very eyes. This man suffers or dies; then the slave’s tears come. And really why not? This is for him the only occasion on which tears are permitted, are, indeed, required. A slave will always cry whenever he can do so with impunity—his situation keeps tears on tap for him.⁶

UNDER A TOTALIZED CONDITION AND A SOCIETY OF FORCE, WEIL REFLECTS ON THE EXPRESSION OF OUTWARD EMOTION AS REGULATED TO THE POINT WHERE AT THE MOMENT IT IS ALLOWED AND EXPECTED, SUCH EXPRESSION IS HARNESSED AS A PROP WITHIN A THEATER OF CONTROL, EVEN AS IT PROVIDES AN OUTLET FOR PENT-UP DESPAIR.

Under a totalized condition and a society of force, Weil reflects on the expression of outward emotion as regulated to the point where at the moment it is allowed and expected, such expression is harnessed as a prop within a theater of control, even as it provides an outlet for pent-up despair. The definition of force for Weil “is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing”—this transformation into a “thing” echoes the “organic to the technic” of Stiegler’s epiphylogenetic memory.⁷ In this formulation, the people subjected to force themselves become technical vessels, or in Stiegler’s terms, “mnemotechnical organs,” and their “memory has passed into the gesture-reproducing machine that the proletarian no longer has to know about, but that [they] must simply serve.”⁸

In Interregnum, there lies a doubling of this thingness. We see hundreds of bodies, across time and nationalities, serving as “mnemotechnical organs” in their reproduction of gesture and impersonal mourning; we also become conscious of the historical media objects that Paci has amassed behaving as specific and reproducible technique. Yet Paci’s work, despite its portrayal of a transnational and transhistorical Communist polity, does not itself result in a sense of concretization of a unified collective memory. As its title suggests, Interregnum treats the in-between, the state of suspension of what is normalized or solidified, as a methodological device. While the footage Paci selects is materially “of” the machine of official image production, the accumulative acts of deconstruction and reorganization conducted across these numerous film artifacts bring attention to what lies between the real and the staged, and to this condition as interiorized within the people, as much as it is exteriorized as technique. Many of the shots that comprise Paci’s video involve a lateral movement across the faces and upper bodies of mourners, either as they walk past the camera or the camera scans past them. While suggesting the orderly formality of a line of people, a collective body, these images also reveal a complexity of individual emotional expressions, from hysterical and body-shaking grief to faces frozen in apparent resignation. As viewers observing the video from a historical distance, we are faced with the intractability of a set of images of emotional states, deemed officially correct for the gravity of the moment and potentially telling of deeper states of personal and collective trauma.

Adrian Paci, Vajtojca, 2002. Video still. 9 mins. Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; and kaufmann repetto, Milan/New York

The absence in Interregnum of images of the bodies or coffins of the deceased leaders constitutes a destabilizing intervention by Paci into the official documentation’s immortalization of the dictator. Yet perhaps a more significant intervention by the artist is the compression of any sound attached to the original sequences of footage into an underlying and at times barely noticeable hum. This sonic recomposition creates a continuous thread across the combined images while also drawing attention to the absence of the vocalization of grief—the weeping, lamenting, patriotic declamations, and siren wails that surely would accompany the death of the “glorious commander.” These outpourings are visually present, as we see faces convulsed in exclamation, but any recordings of corresponding aural expression are reduced and abstracted within the tremulous low-frequency soundtrack. In an article focusing on Hoxha’s funeral, anthropologist Bledar Kondi highlights the importance of “culturally patterned sounds” as tools of social control within dictatorial regimes. He describes how following the death of Hoxha, “the musical landscape of ‘pain until shock for Enver Hoxha’ was shaped by a constellation of diverse sonic events, [including] natural sobbing, verbalized crying, funeral singing, [and] folk instrumental crying.”⁹ Albania has a strong folk history of ritual funeral crying that emphasizes a form of reckoning in the moment of burial, rather than hope for an afterlife. As Kondi describes, “Ritual funeral crying constitutes an unwritten liber vitae of every individual, a sum total of significant words and deeds itemized in collective memory and projected via symbols of morality and human destiny.”¹⁰ In the tradition of “crying with words,” typically performed by women, “each lamenter should ‘converse’ with the dead.” In the video work Vajtojca (Mourner) (2002), produced fifteen years before Interregnum, Paci documents an action in which he paid a professional Albanian mourner to perform “crying with words” over his own live body. As a transaction that ends with the shaking of hands, the ritual is seemingly revealed as a form of emotional fakery; yet the totality of the performance, abstracted from actual death, instead emphasizes the embodiment of a continuing set of both communal and personal social relations within intertwined physical expression and language. In Vajtojca, Paci constructs a scenario wherein the lament (“crying the fate of the dead”) draws out his own self-critical guilt at leaving Albania five years previously, alongside a familial critique of the abandonment and loss his imagined death would cause for his wife and daughters.

drian Paci, Vajtojca, 2002. Video still. 9 mins. Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; and kaufmann repetto, Milan/New York

Kondi’s research into the archives of the Institute for Folk Culture in Tirana pinpoints one hundred and twenty tape recordings made by folklore researchers around Albania of individual and collective laments in the aftermath of Hoxha’s death. He goes on to highlight: “Though folk music was a powerful medium in which political language was installed and ideological messages were transmitted, the folklore researchers were mostly focused on the verbal content of the funeral crying . . . mostly ignoring the performative situation, emotional behavior, and musical expression of grief, pain, anguish, and denial of death.”¹¹ Interregnum performs the inverse distillation to a degree, by removing any audible words of lament or exclamation, and focusing the viewer’s attention on performative, emotive behavior. The recurrence of certain gestures becomes heightened—from the raised bent right arm and clenched fist of the Hoxhaist or Maoist salute, to a multitude of downturned eyes and bowed heads. In the extraction of language, Paci articulates the presence of power not merely in the textuality of ideology, but within the individual and collective body. We not only come to see the media objects that comprise Interregnum as tools in the “politics of memory,” engaged in the construction of past, present, and future, but also understand in these same terms the exploitation of physical bodies, nervous systems, and social gestures. The temporally unbound threads of sociality and meaning that are contained within the ritual lament are instrumentalized through force, yet retain the capacity to mediate between the individual and collective psychic experience.

Stiegler poses a theory of memory in which “technicity is constitutive of life as ex-sistence,” wherein the notion of “ex-sistence” frames human consciousness as a constant process of projecting outside, rather than an interior life.¹² He attempts to move away from the foundational Platonic opposition between the human possession of innate knowledge (“anamnesis”) and the rendering of memory in a technical object (“hypomnesis”). Memory that is epiphylogenetic is at one and the same time the product of individual experience and the supports that enable knowledge to be accumulated across generations. But for Stiegler, this integral relation is troubled by industrialization and the separation of producers and consumers. The advent of analogue machinery as an intermediary displaces “grammatization”—whereby “the currents and continuities shaping our lives become discrete elements” through speech, writing, and reading—as a process of interwoven coding and decoding—and installs it instead as one of repetitive physical gesture. To be part of the production of a commodity the worker doesn’t need to know how it is made or used, just what bodily motions are required to operate the machine. But equally, industrialization requires mass consumption, and the production of consumers requires the ongoing conditioning of behavior toward consumable novelty, a process enabled by mass media. In both the moments of production and consumption, what is lost is the opportunity for anamnesis, for the possession of innate knowledge, and what ensues is the dominance of memory’s containment in the technical object. This short-circuiting of the interlocution between hypomnesis and anamnesis is for Stiegler a rupture in “the social milieus in which psychic existences individuate themselves, and along with them the groups in which they exchange and transform themselves in the very course of these exchanges.”¹³ If we are not engaged in the coding and decoding of memories, and “society is separated into the producers and consumers of symbols,” then we lose access to a process of memory that is “transindividual,” where both the “I” and the “we” are transformed through one another.¹⁴

Adrian Paci, Interregnum, 2017. Video still. 17:29 mins. Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; and kaufmann repetto, Milan/New York. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

Through Interregnum, and within his practice more broadly, Paci seeks to reopen a space of transformational collective memory in opposition to coercive force and the “gesture-reproducing machine.” Vitally, the video is therefore not a narrow critique of Communist totalitarianism and oppression but a window into a wider understanding of the politics of memory within industrial society, under both socialist and capitalist ideologies as well as within contemporary digital societies. The title of Paci’s video and its reference to Antonio Gramsci’s formulation of “interregnum” within his prison notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935, takes on additional significance here. Gramsci reflected on the “crisis” of the Great Depression and the weakening of consent within a capitalist hegemony as ostensibly an opportunity for anticapitalist ideology and for global worker-led socialism to take hold. Yet Gramsci foresaw how the weakness and lack of readiness of the international working class to lead instead presented space for the twin “morbid symptoms” of far-right, populist, and nationalist Fascism and an ultra-left Communism, based on Stalinist “socialism in one country” directives, to ascend to prominence. The “interregnum” is a moment of possible transformation, one in which the politics of memory is a primary battleground between coercive force and an intertwined individuation between the citizen and the polity. Paci’s production of Interregnum in 2017 articulates the stakes in a current moment of global interregnum, wherein the rise of populist nationalisms and the ever-extending reach of cognitive capitalism reasserts a dislocation and manipulation of externalized memory in language, symbols, technical objects, and fictive pasts. In its very form, as a montage of media objects enabled by the integrated coding and decoding of digitization, and in its locating of unmediated affect within the staging of memory, Interregnum looks to the reconstitution of the “circuits necessary for transindividuation” and for meaningful communal formation.¹⁵