this book is dedicated to my sister, Vanessa Pine, and her two beautiful children, Elena Jane and Alexander. Thank you, Vanessa, for sharing your wonderful children with me, and for allowing me to watch over them with you; it is the great joy and privilege of my life.
THE MEMORY
MARKETPLACE
THIS BOOK IS INSPIRED BY my observation that public performances of painful stories are not simply formed, and told, and watched, and listened to, but are imagined, produced, and consumed in a cultural, social, and economic sphere that I call the memory marketplace. More than that, this book argues that in order to fully understand not just when and why we publicly tell stories about our pasts but how we perform as witnesses to painful pasts in general we have to consider the market dynamics of trade, which underpin how these stories are told, mediated, received, and re-mediated. In other words, we need to consider that stories of painful pasts are not just told but sold, not just received but bought, not just mediated and re-mediated but commodified.
The memory marketplace operates like any other form of market: in order to reach an audience and therefore to accrue value, public performances of pain require material and immaterial investment, labor, and a consumer willing to buy and promote them. And, just like items a consumer buys in the supermarket, the economic foundations and ramifications of memory performances are often invisible because they happen out of sight, or because we simply take them for granted. Though invisible, however, these economic factors determine not just how a performance happens, but whether it happens at all. Mirroring the economic dimensions of the memory marketplace, moreover, the symbolic functions of the marketplace are also key. In fact, I am most interested in the ways that reading performances of painful pasts through this framework can help us to interpret the performances themselves as transactions. For example, in reading how the producer’s and performer’s awareness of the audience as consumers influences the kinds of emotional engagement offered by a performance.
Why is it so rare that analyses of painful stories raise questions of commodity, value, and trade? Is it that we imagine the meaning of cultural performances exists in opposition to commercial evaluations, such as box office earnings? Are we afraid of confusing, or conflating, different forms of value? Memory and performance critics are sophisticated analysts of the material, historical, and political contexts and effects of memory, yet often critics stop short of interpreting memory performances themselves as commodity transactions. But in not pursuing the value of mnemonic capital to a reading of cultural memory, critics are missing an important part of the picture. My investigation of the memory marketplace is driven therefore by two major impulses. First, it is only by placing cultural memory in the context of the marketplace that the hierarchical and competitive structures guiding the production and consumption of cultural memory can be made visible. Second, in ignoring the engines of the marketplace we also ignore the material and immaterial labor (and the laborers) that actually produce mnemonic, symbolic, and social capital. My ambition in this book is to begin to make these necessary shifts in perception.
To ignore the marketplace for memory is to also disregard what the witnesses of painful pasts are telling us—these witnesses know there is a market for their memories, and they also know that they have to enter that market if they want to be heard. In Land Full of Heroes (UK/France/Spain, 2019), Carmen-Francesca Banciu, a Romanian writer based in Berlin, narrates for an audience the history of her life, in particular her involvement in the 1989 Romanian revolution and her escape to Berlin. In describing her migratory journey, Banciu considers the commodification of her emotions by others—and, given that she has no financial resources of her own, she knows that the expression of her feelings is her only form of currency:
In March 1990 the world is no longer okay. Or it’s just now on its way to being okay. I’m allowed to leave Romania. . . . From Romania to Hungary we drive across the Pusta. Across never-ending expanses that make the transition between one country and the next barely discernible. Dieter is also a writer and wants to write about me. About my experiences on this journey. He wants to capture the moment at the border with all of my emotions. But I don’t feel anything. Or don’t want to reveal my emotions to him. I feel mute and numb.
They will pay the bills during the trip. This is a part of our deal. I should talk. Disclose. I’m not even aware that I’m selling my impressions. That I’m practicing for the first time for life in the market economy. In Capitalism.1
In this theatrical moment, there is a striking contrast between Banciu’s historical reluctance to tell, and lack of awareness of the transaction, with the present moment in which she shares her feelings not with Dieter, but with a much larger audience. In both timeframes, Banciu’s feelings are a commodity she trades. In the past, this trade secured her freedom from Bucharest and the socialist past; in the present, her articulation of her memories secures another valuable commodity—the audience’s interest. Both Banciu and La Conquesta del Pol Sud (the company producing the show) acknowledge the voyeuristic, potentially exploitative nature of the audience’s interest. They appear to give us what we want (the emotional content of Banciu’s memories) while illustrating the knowingness of this performance by deliberately linking the selling of memory to capitalism. Despite this knowingness, however, Banciu’s status as a controlling agent in the memory marketplace is debatable as, though she intentionally trades her mnemonic capital, in doing so she no longer owns it exclusively. This is the paradox that recurs throughout this book: that witnesses know what they trade—their memories for the value of being heard—but that the process of performing their testimony of painful pasts delivers them only temporary power in the marketplace. The fluctuations of witnessing can thus only be understood if we consider the “deal” that is being made between performer and audience; in other words if we recognise that cultural memory is a performance happening within a marketplace.
This book takes its cue from theatrical moments such as these, moments when the literal and symbolic memory marketplace becomes visible, moments when the commodity trading of performance becomes undeniable, moments that allow us to consider the power plays underlying different forms, and mobilizations, of mnemonic capital. The memory marketplace is particularly visible in testimonial “witness theatre,” in which an onstage witness (either the original witness or an actor) performs painful memories for an audience. In return those memories are valued, and validated, by an audience who, in Paul Celan’s terms, “bear witness for the witness.”2 This bearing witness, on both sides, is a transaction of different forms of capital. While Banciu’s experience is unique to her, at the same time her life story is representative of a generation of artists and activists in Romania and across socialist countries more generally. In this way, Banciu’s memories have significant social and cultural capital; this capital is added to by her status as an award-winning writer and her willingness to autoperform these memories herself on stage. Land Full of Heroes thus enables audiences to learn about the socialist past of Eastern Europe (at the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Ceaușescu regime), to gain insight into one woman’s life, and to play the role of affective witnesses to Banciu’s expression of her feelings.
Banciu’s memory may be highly mediated, but nevertheless the emotional charge of “I was there, this was real” remains. This charge of the real or, in Jean Baudrillard’s term, the “hyperreal,” gives her witness testimony value in the memory marketplace.3 The production of Land Full of Heroes, funded by a grant by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of an academic project at the University of Birmingham, thus mobilizes both personal and institutional capital in order to create an authentic product that audiences will want to consume. Indeed, the premiere at Birmingham BE Festival (Birmingham Repertory Theatre, July 2019) was sold-out, and the show received a five-star
