In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker

by Luke Bennett

  Understanding place, for Edward Casey, is bound up with an understanding of the temporal, where the past is continually reshaped in the present through memory traces, and memory is a set of possibilities or ‘expanding eventualities that might happen’ (2002, 277). Casey argues that there are always unresolved remainders of memory, and for this reason, memory is never a question of permanence, but rather of what he calls ‘remanences’ (2002, 273). For Casey, unresolved remainders of memory exist beyond consciousness yet are known spatially through body memory, place memory and social ritual. Memory traces are re-transcribed and re-discovered through time as, Casey argues, the past is continually reshaped in the present into the possibilities of memory. Casey writes that these ‘do not consist of depositions laid down – as is assumed in theories preoccupied with leaving marks and traces in an unchanging material base – but in pathways that branch off ever more diversely into a multiple futurity’ (2002, 277). We may search for unresolved residues and traces without being conscious of what we are doing, and in the process we remember and recognize new ways of experiencing and knowing place. Climbing into the ROC post in the course of my fieldwork is arguably a way of ‘deep-sounding’ the continuing echoes of human occupation of these sites of my research, evidenced in the accounts in my field research notes.

  ABJECT TRACES

  Probing the ruins of a once-coherent civil defence network could be criticized as a longing, as Brain Dillon puts it, for some moment of a ‘military-industrial sublime’ (Dillon 2010) or as Adam Piette describes it, a ‘weird nostalgia’ (2009, 2), something akin to disaster tourism. While this could be said to occupy many of the sub-cultures that have grown up around these ruins, my research interests have operated in how, rather than why, these abandoned places operate as resonant sites of Cold War memory and trauma. Arguably the post functions in terms of what Cathy Caruth calls a ‘site of trauma’ (Caruth 1996, 56) in an oscillation between ‘a crisis of death and a correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival’ (Caruth 1996, 7). The traces of occupation in the posts point to an imaginary future of a post–nuclear war situation: arguably because the war failed to materialize it has become a place of resonant imaginings (or what I term in my fieldwork notes ‘future memory’) derived from a permanently deferred state of emergency allied with the proliferation of Cold War themes in popular culture, in which it becomes a ‘shorthand for an unflinching and serious-minded interrogation of the legacy of conflict’ (Beck 2011, 88). At the same time these sites, according to Darian Leader, ‘have lost the symbolic value they once had: that of modernist precision, of imperialism, of protest and of military hindrance. These spaces have not only become uninhabited by people, but by symbolic value. They have become odd liminal spaces, filed with graffiti, piss, litter and condoms’ that, for Leader, signifies ‘a strange kind of life’ testifying ‘to presence, not absence’ (2011, 122).

  My drawing and research work in these places has been concerned with their human traces, the objects and ephemera of their occupation by shifts of observers for over 40 years. These traces of habitation and bodily necessity hold what Julia Kristeva describes as ‘the abject … edged with the sublime. It is not the same moment on the journey, but the same subject and speech bring them into being … the sublime is a something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling’ (1982, 11). For Kristeva, the abject forms aspects of our moral compass, a matter of disgust that delineates our societal limits. However, she goes on to describe it also being contained within those horrors that, via their totality and catastrophic nature, cause a sense of sublime and awful wonder: the bombed city, the abandoned military complexes and, in a deferred way, the remains of human occupation in the installations of the Cold War.

  Abjection is the overwhelming phenomenological experience of being in the ROC posts: repulsion at the rotting bedding, the curling and stained military documents referring to nuclear attack, the florid decay reminiscent of a crypt and the overwhelming impression of premature burial. Here, however, abjection is closely coupled with the uncanny, the concept of something being ‘un-home-like’, or foreign, yet familiar. So the uncanny, in terms of the ROC posts, appears to manifest through the duplication of the post equipment across the United Kingdom and in the posts being revealed when once they were secret. But there is also the means, as Kristeva writes, in which the abject can be uncanny in that we can recognize familiar aspects within it despite its being seen as ‘foreign’: in her example, a corpse, having fallen out of the cultural world which it once inhabited, becomes uncanny through its abject state: we recognize aspects of it although it has fallen from the symbolic order. This creates a cognitive dissonance (Kristeva 1982, 4). This mismatch or dissonance in experience is related in my field notes when I become aware of the implied human presence in the posts: ‘There is a feeling that a moment has just passed, or something has just happened, or somebody has been here, that is the feeling I have when in the posts underground. I can hear the voices and feel people down there in the walls of the place. The images are of escape, there is always a person in the post for me’. Dylan Trigg writes how ‘the memory of place’ (the surge of memories we experience upon encountering various places and non-places: an empty house, a supermarket, an airport, a service station and so on) fundamentally affects our sense of our own identity (2013, 114). Through Trigg’s account I will now examine how the uncanny and collective memories are preserved in specific places of modernity, such as monuments and sites of human trauma, how they profoundly affect us in their materiality and what implications this has for the drawing research.

  A SPARKLING FIELD OF THE UNCANNY

  For Dylan Trigg, place and time are affective categories and not transcendental categories of knowledge. They take their meaning from the lived experience of the embodied subject (2013, 13). Through the operations of memory and imagination, place and time not only fundamentally shape our identity as a cognitive construct, but they also leave their traces in the body itself. The memory of the body, for Trigg, is different from cognitive memory in that it supplements cognitive memory by orienting us in the world and forming our sense of identity and unity (2013, 53). Trigg focuses on ‘spatial memory’: when we remember a place, there is not an objective preservation of our sense impression of it stored in our mind; instead memory works together with the imagination and transforms the place (2013, 57). The mismatch between an actual place and the memory of it results in a layering of different images of place that never entirely overlap. Thus, when this overlapping sense reveals place as uncanny, we gain access to a fundamental tendency towards disunity, fragmentation or, as Trigg puts it, with something inhuman engrained in the core of our being: a fundamental unheimlichkeit that characterizes our being-in-the-world. (2013, 25). The result, Trigg argues, is a sense of fundamental strangeness or experience of the uncanny that occurs constantly in our daily lives (2013, 325) and that mirrors the cognitive dissonance described by Kristeva earlier. This also has parallels with a statement in my field research notes:

  I am looking for something else about these spaces. They do connect with our sense of awe and wonder and horror in front of some military event, but what I am looking for is a much smaller and quieter … that I relate as a ‘sparkling field’ of small shocks. It is about how we perceive things, how we tell jokes, about occluded objects, things that are there and not there. What I am trying to say about the uncanny and the sublime is that it is around us all the time and we have to establish boundaries to our perceptual world to exclude it. (Felmingham 2011)

  Relating this to the ROC posts, this unheimlichkeit occurs not only when we enter a space in which we have been before, for example an empty house that we have previously inhabited, but also when we are suddenly confronted with what Trigg relates as a ‘monument in the midst of a landscape’ (2013, 92). (The posts, along with other eleme
nts of Cold War military remains in the landscape, have in many cases become monuments.) Trigg goes on to relate that the monument’s affect is less in what it represents: indeed, the commemorated event or person is usually an experience that we have not personally lived and have no connection with. Rather the particular place and materiality of a monument can bring us in touch with a collective past that it embodies, not a familiar element, but something fundamentally foreign. When memory inscribes this past in our own body, we become part of a larger collective experience, not in the sense of a heritage or belonging, but in an encounter with the past without appropriating it (2013, 271). Trigg’s idea of a spatial memory has parallels with Aby Warburg’s concept of nachleben (Johnson 2012, x), translated as persistence or survival of images but also meaning their afterlife and their subsequent metamorphosis. This has an uncanny aspect: Warburg’s nachleben also means a capacity to recharge an original energy in a later time and place. Crucially, in considering drawing, trauma and the uncanny, Warburg describes an image as encoding what was once a living gesture and functioning as a ‘mnemonic device that can transport, via its iconic after-living, into other times and places, something of that original energy … when its formulae are reignited by contact with a different cultural movement that needs this charge’ (Pollock 2013, xxviii).

  It is this unheimlichkeit (Trigg 2013, 25) as a gap or dissonance that, I will argue, enables the bunker to operate as a locus for the sublime, through its uncanny and abject nature. I have also related, through my discussion of Dylan Trigg’s writing, how these places can contain the residues of traumatic memory, and how through the process of entering, drawing and interacting with them my practice seeks to detect those remaining traces with their implications for the uncanny and the sublime that are the focus of the research. Central to this enquiry is drawing, as an object and as practice, and it is to this that the wider discussions connect: that the communication that drawing can make has the potential to speak of the anxieties that are hidden in the individual and collective unconscious.

  HAUNTED VISIONS

  How can drawing act as a sensitive detector to uncover these uncanny forms and elusive, unconscious traumatic residues of memory? I will now briefly describe peripheral vision and its role in visual perception before outlining my drawing research. Peripheral vision functions as a means of recognizing familiar structures and movements without the need to focus with the central (or foveal) part of the eye’s retina, aiding the identification of similar forms and movements and delivering visual sensations that form the background to our detailed, or more conscious, visual perceptions. It has the ability to detect movement of a sudden or rhythmic nature and, for this reason, stationary objects are often rendered invisible in our peripheral vision. Peripheral vision is characterized by a lack of colour and depth perception while being sensitive in low-light conditions and to contrasts of black and white. (Peripheral vision has been described as necessary as a ‘motion-detector’ for our hunter-gatherer forbears to be able to hunt more effectively: by holding a disassociated gaze in a whole visual field, sudden movements of prey can be detected and responded to quickly.) Anton Ehrensweig describes visual perception as an allegory of how our consciousness works: we focus on the task to hand, while other half-formed thoughts drift around the outside, in readiness to emerge or to disappear forgotten (Ehrensweig 1965, 206). Peripheral vision is thus populated by memory, made up of the familiar ‘background of intentionality’ outside of our central foveal vision (Searle 1982, 86). There is considerable motivation for the brain to repress peripheral vision in a process of ‘active forgetting’ in order not to have to process unnecessary parts of our visual field (Ehrensweig 1965, 208). The ‘familiar’ is formed by memory, and this forms the basis of peripheral vision.

  There is causal evidence that loss of memory function has an effect on the field of vision and peripheral vision (Radovic & Radovic 2002): trauma, forgetting and repression of memory can therefore have an effect on perception. Ehrensweig also notes a ‘flattening’ of the visual field, a lack of distinction between foveal and peripheral vision (Ehrensweig 1965, 210). There is also a strong link with psychological trauma, and it is interesting to consider in terms of drawing that trauma could therefore have an effect on spatial awareness (Radovic & Radovic 2002). Thus anxiety states, for example depersonalization or derealization (prevalent in returning combat personnel and traumatized wartime civilians), have a direct effect on spatial awareness and visual acuity where the visual field is seen as if ‘behind glass’ in an unconnected and neutral manner. Loss of memory and depersonalization are extreme states that can evidence the connection between vision and cognitive states.

  For Alain Badiou the 20th century was one marked by tragic and traumatic events. In The Century, he emphasizes the predominance of these harrowing events in his ‘short century’ of 1914–1989, which saw two world wars, the Cold War and, centrally, the Holocaust. For Badiou, trauma has inscribed itself into our collective memory and assumed an essential cultural position (2007, 17) in what Griselda Pollock has termed our ‘post-traumatic age … that comes after events of such extremity that they challenge all existing modes of understanding and representation; … such traumas inhabit our cultures surcharged with their unprocessed and unbound affects…. The traces of these disturbances resonate across culture’ (Pollock 2013, 6) where trauma is transmitted through generations, becoming culturally transitive and affecting society as a whole.

  DRAWING FROM THE EDGES OF VISION

  How can one respond to forms that are in the periphery of vision? By their nature as soon as they achieve a cognitive focus, they cease to be peripheral. The act of drawing is a cognitive process in that the hand also thinks: as soon as a form, however indistinct, becomes a gesture or mark on the surface, it achieves the status of a visual ‘object’, no longer repressed but on the surface of the consciousness. The trained artist, in particular, is in danger of inventing form that is embodied in the drawing hand or derived from visual memory when attempting to draw from peripheral vision. While constructing a research methodology it became necessary to disrupt this process in a twofold manner. First, the ability to ‘become aware’ of the whole visual field is aided by the use of a head visor, constructed for viewing photographs with the addition of a point of focus. This focus became a painted white dot on the surface of the image that could become a fix for the eyes, allowing peripheral vision to become a static field as the eyes were prevented from saccading (or scanning) the visual field. This allowed elements of this wider field to remain on the retina for extended periods, causing phenomena to occur which included the reversal of contrast, solarization and distortion of perspective around the central point of focus. This produced an ‘uncanny’ field of affect, as familiar elements in the background became unfamiliar, and stable patterns of seeing broke down. This instability disrupted the surface of what could be seen as ‘normal’ retinal vision, allowing deeper levels of cognitive affect and memory to come into play in the visual field as a stimulus for drawing. Drawing itself is a cognitive response and becomes a memory as it is being traced (as Derrida states, the drawing, as a ‘blind’ act, is entirely dependent on memory for its evolution [Derrida 1993, 42]). Therefore the drawing response to the phenomena provoked by the strategy outlined in the first stage must itself be disrupted, and this is achieved by not allowing the eye-hand system to ‘see’, only to touch. By drawing blind and responding through the hand moving the media across the surface, without the visual feedback of an eye-hand dynamic customary to drawing, the response to those forms becomes intuitive and as far as is practicable a direct one.

  DRAWING [OUT] THE COLD WAR

  Development of my drawing research methodology that focused on photographs and objects of the Cold War period led to the Transition and to the Peripheral Artifacts series of drawings. The Transition drawings (see Figure 3.1) developed from fieldwork in the ROC bunker posts and an interest in the observer’s principal means of detecting the d
irection and elevation of an explosion on the horizon by means of a pinhole camera device (the ground zero indicator or GZI). This most primitive method of fixing an image was devised in this situation to withstand the forces in the moment of attack. The photographic paper in the detector was carefully designed to register only the centre of the intense flash, to enable an accurate fix to be taken on bearing and angle of elevation, with the detector pointing in the four cardinal directions of the compass. Daylight inevitably darkened the paper, so routine changes were made by the observers – the sun burned a distinctive black trail when there was no cloud cover.

  My field research and drawing work brought forth the possibility of latent negative images resulting from the long exposures in these detectors: the panoramas of farmland and hedges falling away from the raised site of the post. The drawings came about as a way of making visible these potential hidden landscapes, to give them form and an indexical trace. They could be seen as unremarkable vistas or banal views seen in transit between towns and cities. However, they are no longer innocent or benign: rather they have been militarized and the subject of a continuous gaze by observers who awaited the transition to war. These drawings of potential photographs operate as after-images, ones that are deeply layered in to the military machine of the Cold War and now brought to light. As unintentional photographic traces, the drawings also reference retinal after-images of a bright scene, turning to negative as the eye closes in shock. As after-images, the drawings operate in the transformational way that Griselda Pollock (paraphrasing Bracha Ettinger) asks whether artworks are a means of passage through trauma where ‘its after-affects are encountered in art or literature’ and whether they can become a ‘transport-station of trauma, hence a passage to the future through after-images that attempt the transformation of individual traces of human trauma?’ (Pollock 2013, xxvi, emphasis in original).