What a Monument Can Do

This special issue of Future Anterior is an attempt to rethink what a monument can do, when all the underpinnings of the traditional monument—community, sovereignty, the nation-state, memorialization, symbolization—are under intense pressure. We are not claiming that these pressures are new, but rather that we are beyond a point of simply acknowledging them. It is the realm of possibility opened up by such pressures that we are interested in exploring. Making such a claim requires that we be equally interested in what a monument can do—its possibilities and capacities, both actual and virtual— and what it cannot do, its impediments and incapacities. We are therefore concerned not only with what monuments might help us intuit and fabulate for a possible politics or community to come, but also with acknowledging and critiquing the inability to unhinge monuments from present-day political formations. The essays in this volume suspend themselves in the gap where possibility and impossibility, actuality and virtuality, almost touch one another, in order to rethink the monument in ethical, aesthetic, ontological, and political terms. All the essays in this special issue are attuned to our present political moment, whatever their manifest content or time period.

Without subsuming the particularities of each essay into an overarching rubric, we would like to call attention to some shared sensibilities and resonances between their conceptions of monuments. They are not preoccupied with memory, commemorating the past, or recovering a fantasy of lost cohesive socialities, but rather have their ear to the future. Monuments appear in these essays as engagements in ongoing acts of becoming, fabulation, and invoking communities to come. In doing so, the emphasis is placed on the future-oriented and experimental aspects of restoration, preservation, and monuments, as opposed to a conservative return to already given aesthetic, political, and social formations. This future orientation hardly means an ignoring of history and historicity; in fact, quite the opposite. It embraces it much more fully if we are willing to take seriously Heidegger’s claim that “having-been-ness temporalizes itself only from out of and in the future.”¹ Which is to say that our history is not only not past, but neither has it been fully actualized. Our history is to come. It should be clear that this orientation does put much-needed pressure on the equation of memory with the past, and also calls into question the view that memory is the very matter and meaning of the monument.

Indeed, one of the primary contributions these essays make to historic preservation theory is to challenge the emphasis on memory in discussions about monuments. In fact, it would not be too far off the mark to say we identify and equate memory with monuments to such a degree that we probably no longer even need to insert the copula between monument and memory to make the connection. One might think about two of our most influential reflections on monuments in the last twenty-five years: Pierre Nora’s multivolume Lieux de Mémoire and James E. Young’s notion of the “counter-monument.” The former is predicated on a perceived rupture between the affective and living conduits of “true memory” in premodern society (milieux de mémoire) and their exteriorization and materialization in monuments and memorials in the modern era (lieux de mémoire). The latter places emphasis on shifting the “burden of memory” back on us and away from its apparent rigid ossification in the monument’s hieratic sovereignty.² Both of these accounts enact an antithesis between memory and its materialization, thus ignoring Derrida’s basic and powerful claim about the fundamentally prosthetic condition of memory and the body;³ that is to say, memory is never spontaneous, internal, and alive, and thus it can never be cleaved apart from its external materialization, traces, supplements, and repetitions.

Thomas Stubblefield’s “Do Disappearing Monuments Simply Disappear? The Counter-Monument in Revision” draws our attention to these material, prosthetic, and iterative qualities, requiring us to be much more aware of the highly complex temporality and modes of inscription that monuments enact. He cautions...