Observance, Notes towards Decipherability

Abstract

Provoked by the terrorist-related murders in England that marked the spring and summer of 2017, I have felt compelled to write this article on the idea of observance (observe, care, follow, obey). I engage with this idea in the context of our contemporary Memory Industry – that confluence of memorialization, remembrance and commemoration culture; Memory Studies and Trauma Studies; tangible and intangible heritage; digital memory and media archaeology; and its series of facing-backwards-to-go-forwards impulses (the archival impulse, the genealogical impulse and the archaeological impulse). Through the Contemporary’s prism, I deploy observance as a rejoinder to the seeming irreconcilability between, on the one hand, the incomprehensibility of the Shoah and, on the other hand, the prevalence of its rendering in figurative and abstract memorials, literature, art and film; and by way of dark tourism, Shoah selfies and genealogy websites. I propose that, because of its assorted senses, as a grievable moment observance may be a way of negotiating (without necessarily wanting or needing to reconcile) such irreconcilability. I argue that this is possible because of how observance (observing a minute’s silence, for instance) as a (secular, vernacular) performative action somehow opens up a space of the imagination that might lead, for good and ill, to a decipherability all the more necessary in our interminable state of exception that is the Contemporary.