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When Monuments Fall: The Significance of De-Commemorating

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Guy Beiner suggests there is more to decommemorating than meets the eye. Moreover, the implicit dichotomy that associates commemorating with memory and decommemorating with forgetting warrants reconsideration. Here he speaks to examples from modern Irish history.

Image courtesy of interviewee. May 23, 2024

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This video video discusses the complex relationship between memory and monuments, particularly focusing on the act of commemoration and the emerging trend of "de commemorating." The speaker, an historian of memory, highlights the paradox that while monuments are meant to represent memory in a fixed form (stone), memory itself is fluid and constantly changing.

The speaker references psychologist Charles Frederick Charles Bartlett's theory of memory as an imaginative reconstruction that evolves over time. Monuments, however, become static and can lose relevance as societal contexts shift. To maintain their connection to memory, monuments must be continually "recharged" with new meanings.

"De commemorating" is introduced as a process that can involve the destruction or defacement of monuments, often sparked by social movements or public dissent. While these acts may appear to signify forgetting, they can paradoxically serve as forms of remembrance by drawing attention to what the monuments represent and instigating new dialogues about their meaning.

The speaker provides historical examples, such as the frequent attacks on the statue of King William III in Dublin, to illustrate that de commemorating often follows a cyclical pattern of destruction and subsequent restoration or re-commemoration. This video video cyclical relationship is evident in various social movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the removal of monuments associated with colonialism.

The speaker calls for a deeper understanding of de commemorating as a valid historical phenomenon, deserving study on its own merit alongside traditional commemorative practices. Ultimately, the act of dismantling monuments may inadvertently reinforce their significance, as participants often believe they are erasing memory when in fact they are actively engaging with it.

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I'm an historian of remembering and forgetting.

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So I've got an interest in commemoration

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and of course in monuments.

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But I've always found that the relationship between

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monuments and memo and memory are not as straightforward,

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is not as straightforward as it may seem.

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See, monuments purported, at least they claim

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to represent memory and stone.

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But that's a paradox there, which we need to appreciate.

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You see remembering and there's many

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definitions of remembering.

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But if we go for example,

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at Charles at Frederick Charles Bartlett,

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who was a psychologist in Cambridge in the 1930s, one

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of the pioneers of experimental psychology of memory.

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He talked about memory as an effort

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after, meaning it's an imaginative reconstruction

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of the past in the present, which changes all the time.

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It's fluid. Memorials.

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On the other hand, when they want to represent memory,

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they cast it in stone literally.

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And so we have a paradox here.

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Memory is fluid and memorials is this kind of attempt

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to put texture on memory.

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It's what the story of the holocaust, of commemoration

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of Holocaust memorials,

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James E. Young calls, the texture of memory.

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And the moment they put in stone, they're frozen in time,

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they're static, but times change,

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circumstances change, context change.

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It was the, the great critic, in Austrian, Gian Empire,

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Robert Musil, who, who said

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that nothing is inconspicuous as a con, as a monument.

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We pass by them. We don't see them.

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They become less relevant with time.

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So for a monument to retain its relationship with memory,

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it has to be recharged with memory all the time.

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We have to put new meanings on it. And that's the paradox.

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So we have something frozen in time,

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which becomes irrelevant because times change

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and how, what do we do with them?

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And that's the paradox which I'm trying to get at.

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Alright, so de commemorating a tom,

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which is slowly getting into vogue

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and I use it as de

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commemorating rather than de commemoration.

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'cause it's a process like remembering. It's a process.

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It's essentially an iconoclastic assault on commemoration.

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And it can take different forms.

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Often we think about it as a tearing down of statues.

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And the catch here is that we usually refer to these

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as kind of mindless events.

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That somebody goes and tears down a statue.

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It's a moment of rage.

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When we look at it historically, we see

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that there's familiar scenarios

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that keep repeating themselves almost

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as if there's traditions or rituals of de commemorating.

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It's what the classicist, Peter Stewart,

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who were looking at antiquity talked about patterns

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of disorder that emerge.

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I mean, think about it. We used these kind of scenarios

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where there's dissatisfied disgruntled crowds

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that angrily voice, complaints about a monument.

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And they chant and they shout,

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and then they,

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move ahead at the monument and they topple it down.

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Uh, there's a spectacle that's there, which is followed

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by mutilation and the dragging of the statue in the streets.

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And ultimately they dispose it

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and it follows this kind of pattern again and again.

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And if we think about it, this is an inversion.

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It's a reversal of commemoration.

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Commemoration has rituals, has patterns,

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and here it's an attempt to dismantle it.

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And this is the most interesting bit, is the people

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who are doing it believe that

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what they're doing is putting an end to memory.

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That this is an act of forgetting. We're putting

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An end to memory.

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But by calling attention, by following these rituals,

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by following these patterns, it's a form of sham oblivion.

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It actually is a form of remembrance.

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They're actually recharging new meaning into the monument.

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So if we think of times, there's even times

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where just like there's times of commemoration

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where people are engaged in commemoration, it's what,

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the French historian of the, the third Republic,

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Marissa Golan called Statue mania.

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We erect monuments everywhere at certain periods.

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There's also periods where we tear down monuments think

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of roads must fall 2015 cape down.

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And then in Oxford it becomes a global moment.

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Or even more recently, 2020 Black Lives matter.

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The tearing down, a renewed tearing down

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of Confederate monuments across the states

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or Bristol in England, the tearing down

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of Colson's monuments.

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Those are monuments of de commemorating

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and we need to historicize them and understand them.

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De commemorating exists in every country in the world.

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And there's different places

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that exists in different contexts.

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I find it particularly interesting in Ireland

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as an historian who's interested in Ireland.

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And Ireland has a long history of de commemorating.

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And I can give many, many examples.

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And this gives us kind of a historical perspective

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'cause we can really see these traditions at play.

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A good example would be the statue

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of King William III in Dublin City Center,

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opposite college green, which a place which used

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to be near its near Trinity College, Dublin today, opposite

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what used to be the Irish parliament back in the day,

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before independence.

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And it's an interesting moment.

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It's the statue of King Billy.

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It was set up to commemorate the Battle

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of the Boyne on an anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne.

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It's, it's unveiled in 1701 for a battle

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that took place in 1690.

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And it's a great place of loyalist commemoration.

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And it immediately becomes a site of contestation.

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It's repeatedly attacked. Mutilated, defaced covered in mud.

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Tar pieces are broken off very symbolically.

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Sometimes it's, the, the scepter.

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Sometimes it's a sword. Bits and pieces are, are broken off.

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And ultimately in 1836 it's blown up for the first time.

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Now you think that's an end to memory, right?

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They're kind of taking away that statue.

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On the contrary, this causes de commemorating leads to

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what I'd call re commemorating.

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'cause. So the statue is restored,

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new commemoration is instigated.

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This in turn starts another cycle of de commemorating.

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So there's this kind of pattern of commemorating,

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de commemorating, re commemorating, and it goes into cycles

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and context change.

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In the 18th century, there was different agenda.

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Sometimes it was around the time of the glorious revolution.

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So it's torries versus wigs later.

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It's a bit of town versus, campus, town and gown.

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It's students who feel that they're insulted

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that the horse is facing the wrong way.

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So the rear end is facing the college different.

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There's different agenda, different moments.

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But from the 19th century, nationalism steps up

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and constantly attacks from NISTs against the statue.

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Interestingly, it survives Irish independence only

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to be blown up in 1928.

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And this is interesting 'cause it's part of a larger,

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like I said, there's moments of de commemorating

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of de commemorative rage in the early decades of the Irish

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free state and Irish independence.

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One by one, the statues

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of British imperial commemoration are toppled, not

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by the government, but by various kind of acts

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of free agents acting,

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believing they're putting an end to memory.

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And it's an interesting moment

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that this happens all across Ireland,

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particularly in Dublin, but across the aisle.

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And then this is renewed again in the late 1960s.

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As we move into the troubles in Northern Ireland, starting

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with the blowing down of Nelson's pillar.

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People think of Nelson's, pillar in London.

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There was a column also in,

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in Dublin, in Dublin city center.

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And it's blown up in 1966 exactly when the government is

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commemorating the 1916 rising.

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Some dissidents in i a blow down,

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a blow up, Nelson's pillar.

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And in the troubles, a whole series of tit

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for tat de commemorating happens,

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including loyalist de commemorating,

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quite spectacular events.

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The grave of the father virus,

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republicanism theo bold wolf tone is

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blown up in boden stone.

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His statue in Dublin city center is blown up.

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And again, this re restarts, re commemorating.

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And if it doesn't, then the very loss, this absence,

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this palpable absence, for example of Nelson's

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pillar in the center of Dublin, which is not rebuilt,

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is a gap which stands out then has to be filled.

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And people always comment with whatever it's filled in is

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not quite as much as what it used to be before.

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So people still remember this absence

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and it calls attention

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to a place which people might have

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lost interest in over time.

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And that's how de

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commemorating actually is an act of memory.

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Well, there's many implications

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and there's many conclusions, including people who want

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to see history as relevant.

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I'm not sure we always have to do it in those terms,

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but we want policy implications.

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There's a big debate today about what the, the,

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a Dutch historian of memory Anne Ney has called

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decommissioning monuments.

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What happens when a monument is no longer in favor?

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What do we do with it? It's a question we

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have to face time and time again.

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Certain art artifacts,

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which sensibilities have changed over time.

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What do we do with them? Do we remove them

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after they've been torn down in an act of de commemorating?

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Do we return and restore them to their place?

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Do we add contextual information about what happened?

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Do we bury them away? Do we dispose of them?

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Do we put them in a museum or a heritage park?

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The case of Colton is very interesting.

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He was pulled outta the river and

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put in the basement of a museum.

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And now he's put an exhibition

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with all the context of how it happened.

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Or do we just sanction this active comm of,

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of de commemorating it's obliteration and look aside.

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And then we find that bits and pieces keep haunting us

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and returning, I mentioned before the statue of King Billy.

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His head is kept somewhere

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and it crops up an exhibition years later.

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And the same with Nelson's pillar.

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His head is kept somewhere. And these kind of moments

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where people keep pieces

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and they get their own life of themselves as relics.

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But there's a more broader question,

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historical question here.

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I believe just as we have studies of commemorate

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of commemoration, which is the obvious, we've studied

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to death studies of commemoration.

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We think we understand them

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and we often neglect to de commemorating as kind

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of these random acts that happen on the side.

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They deserve study in their own right

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to understand them in different contexts over time in

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different countries and different cultures.

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And I think the more we look into it

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as an historian who's interested in remembrance

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and in forgetting, and the tricky relationship between them,

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is that we'll

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See that the people who partake in de commemorating,

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they believe that they see this offensive monument

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and they're dismantling it.

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They believe that they are in fact putting an end to memory.

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But unwittingly they are agents of memory.

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They're calling attention to a monument even

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as they're uprooting it.

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And it's this dynamic which I think is particularly

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intriguing, raises a whole series of ambiguities

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and complexes and paradoxes,

09:18.835 --> 09:19.795
which I think are worth stunning.

Monuments: Memory, Forgetting, and Commemoration Paradox

00:00:00 - I'm an historian of remembering and forgetting. So I've got an interest in commemoration and of course in monuments. But I've always found that the relationship between monuments and memo and memory are not as straightforward, is not as straightforward as it may seem. See, monuments purported, at least they claim to represent memory and stone. But that's a paradox there, which we need to appreciate. You see remembering and there's many definitions of remembering. But if we go for example, at Charles at Frederick Charles Bartlett, who was a psychologist in Cambridge in the 1930s, one
00:00:35 - He talked about memory as an effort after, meaning it's an imaginative reconstruction of the past in the present, which changes all the time. It's fluid. Memorials. On the other hand, when they want to represent memory, they cast it in stone literally. And so we have a paradox here. Memory is fluid and memorials is this kind of attempt to put texture on memory. It's what the story of the holocaust, of commemoration of Holocaust memorials, James E. Young calls, the texture of memory.
00:01:06 - they're static, but times change, circumstances change, context change. It was the, the great critic, in Austrian, Gian Empire, Robert Musil, who, who said that nothing is inconspicuous as a con, as a monument. We pass by them. We don't see them. They become less relevant with time. So for a monument to retain its relationship with memory, it has to be recharged with memory all the time. We have to put new meanings on it. And that's the paradox. So we have something frozen in time, which becomes irrelevant because times change
00:01:37 - And that's the paradox which I'm trying to get at. Alright, so de commemorating a tom, which is slowly getting into vogue and I use it as de commemorating rather than de commemoration. 'cause it's a process like remembering. It's a process. It's essentially an iconoclastic assault on commemoration. And it can take different forms. Often we think about it as a tearing down of statues. And the catch here is that we usually refer to these as kind of mindless events. That somebody goes and tears down a statue. It's a moment of rage. When we look at it historically, we see
00:02:08 - that keep repeating themselves almost as if there's traditions or rituals of de commemorating. It's what the classicist, Peter Stewart, who were looking at antiquity talked about patterns of disorder that emerge. I mean, think about it. We used these kind of scenarios where there's dissatisfied disgruntled crowds that angrily voice, complaints about a monument. And they chant and they shout, and then they, move ahead at the monument and they topple it down. there's a spectacle that's there, which is followed by mutilation and the dragging of the statue in the streets.
00:02:38 - and it follows this kind of pattern again and again. And if we think about it, this is an inversion. It's a reversal of commemoration. Commemoration has rituals, has patterns, and here it's an attempt to dismantle it. And this is the most interesting bit, is the people who are doing it believe that what they're doing is putting an end to memory. That this is an act of forgetting. We're putting An end to memory. But by calling attention, by following these rituals, by following these patterns, it's a form of sham oblivion. It actually is a form of remembrance. They're actually recharging new meaning into the monument.

Cycles of Commemoration and Decommemoration

00:03:11 - where just like there's times of commemoration where people are engaged in commemoration, it's what, the French historian of the, the third Republic, Marissa Golan called Statue mania. We erect monuments everywhere at certain periods. There's also periods where we tear down monuments think of roads must fall 2015 cape down. And then in Oxford it becomes a global moment. Or even more recently, 2020 Black Lives matter. The tearing down, a renewed tearing down of Confederate monuments across the states or Bristol in England, the tearing down
00:03:41 - Those are monuments of de commemorating and we need to historicize them and understand them. De commemorating exists in every country in the world. And there's different places that exists in different contexts. I find it particularly interesting in Ireland as an historian who's interested in Ireland. And Ireland has a long history of de commemorating. And I can give many, many examples. And this gives us kind of a historical perspective 'cause we can really see these traditions at play. A good example would be the statue of King William III in Dublin City Center, opposite college green, which a place which used to be near its near Trinity College, Dublin today, opposite
00:04:14 - before independence. And it's an interesting moment. It's the statue of King Billy. It was set up to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne on an anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. It's, it's unveiled in 1701 for a battle that took place in 1690. And it's a great place of loyalist commemoration. And it immediately becomes a site of contestation. It's repeatedly attacked. Mutilated, defaced covered in mud. Tar pieces are broken off very symbolically. Sometimes it's, the, the scepter.
00:04:44 - And ultimately in 1836 it's blown up for the first time. Now you think that's an end to memory, right? They're kind of taking away that statue. On the contrary, this causes de commemorating leads to what I'd call re commemorating. 'cause. So the statue is restored, new commemoration is instigated. This in turn starts another cycle of de commemorating. So there's this kind of pattern of commemorating, de commemorating, re commemorating, and it goes into cycles and context change. In the 18th century, there was different agenda.
00:05:15 - So it's torries versus wigs later. It's a bit of town versus, campus, town and gown. It's students who feel that they're insulted that the horse is facing the wrong way. So the rear end is facing the college different. There's different agenda, different moments. But from the 19th century, nationalism steps up and constantly attacks from NISTs against the statue. Interestingly, it survives Irish independence only to be blown up in 1928. And this is interesting 'cause it's part of a larger,
00:05:45 - of de commemorative rage in the early decades of the Irish free state and Irish independence. One by one, the statues of British imperial commemoration are toppled, not by the government, but by various kind of acts of free agents acting, believing they're putting an end to memory. And it's an interesting moment that this happens all across Ireland, particularly in Dublin, but across the aisle. And then this is renewed again in the late 1960s. As we move into the troubles in Northern Ireland, starting

Understanding De-Commemoration in Historical Context

00:06:15 - People think of Nelson's, pillar in London. There was a column also in, in Dublin, in Dublin city center. And it's blown up in 1966 exactly when the government is commemorating the 1916 rising. Some dissidents in i a blow down, a blow up, Nelson's pillar. And in the troubles, a whole series of tit for tat de commemorating happens, including loyalist de commemorating, quite spectacular events. The grave of the father virus, republicanism theo bold wolf tone is blown up in boden stone. His statue in Dublin city center is blown up.
00:06:50 - And if it doesn't, then the very loss, this absence, this palpable absence, for example of Nelson's pillar in the center of Dublin, which is not rebuilt, is a gap which stands out then has to be filled. And people always comment with whatever it's filled in is not quite as much as what it used to be before. So people still remember this absence and it calls attention to a place which people might have lost interest in over time. And that's how de commemorating actually is an act of memory. Well, there's many implications
00:07:19 - to see history as relevant. I'm not sure we always have to do it in those terms, but we want policy implications. There's a big debate today about what the, the, a Dutch historian of memory Anne Ney has called decommissioning monuments. What happens when a monument is no longer in favor? What do we do with it? It's a question we have to face time and time again. Certain art artifacts, which sensibilities have changed over time. What do we do with them? Do we remove them after they've been torn down in an act of de commemorating? Do we return and restore them to their place?
00:07:50 - Do we bury them away? Do we dispose of them? Do we put them in a museum or a heritage park? The case of Colton is very interesting. He was pulled outta the river and put in the basement of a museum. And now he's put an exhibition with all the context of how it happened. Or do we just sanction this active comm of, of de commemorating it's obliteration and look aside. And then we find that bits and pieces keep haunting us and returning, I mentioned before the statue of King Billy. His head is kept somewhere and it crops up an exhibition years later. And the same with Nelson's pillar. His head is kept somewhere. And these kind of moments
00:08:19 - and they get their own life of themselves as relics. But there's a more broader question, historical question here. I believe just as we have studies of commemorate of commemoration, which is the obvious, we've studied to death studies of commemoration. We think we understand them and we often neglect to de commemorating as kind of these random acts that happen on the side. They deserve study in their own right to understand them in different contexts over time in different countries and different cultures. And I think the more we look into it as an historian who's interested in remembrance
00:09:18 - is that we'll See that the people who partake in de commemorating, they believe that they see this offensive monument and they're dismantling it. They believe that they are in fact putting an end to memory. But unwittingly they are agents of memory. They're calling attention to a monument even as they're uprooting it. And it's this dynamic which I think is particularly intriguing, raises a whole series of ambiguities and complexes and paradoxes, which I think are worth stunning.

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