Love & loss in the 1960s

AbstractRoland Barthes observed that though there is a ‘lover's discourse’ shared by all those who are in love, it is a discourse ignored or disparaged by ‘surrounding languages’. Concerned that the discourse of heritage may participate in this closure against the ‘in love’ experience, I begin to explore ways the field of heritage studies might start speaking this language. Specifically, I ponder the ways that a young Chinese woman in the film Days of being wild, following the breakup of a love affair, becomes locked in a landscape of lost love that is populated with objects sticky with affect, objects which although they transmit painful affects nevertheless bind her by a dynamic that Lauren Berlant terms ‘cruel optimism’. I then turn to imagine the way a Balinese house compound gateway might, in a similar way, have become impregnated with affects relating to victims of the 1965–1966 killings in Bali and how, for those left behind, it might assume the ability to ‘presence’ a lost one. Archaeology and heritage studies have great potential to foster empathy with the experience of past others, but this calls for a sophisticated understanding of how objects become imbued with affect and how they transmit it.Keywords: affectBaliheritageempathyHong Konglovephenomenology AcknowledgementsI thank Steve Brown, Emma Dortins and Caroline Ford for generously sharing their thoughts on an earlier draft of this article, and Steve Watson for advice on the distinction between affect and emotion.Notes1. Which presumably would not have been disorienting for Leslie Cheung (1956–2003) who was himself gay.2. This character is also played by Maggie Cheung but the Su Li Zhen of In the mood for love has no explicit connection to the Su Li Zhen in Days of being wild.3. For traumatised people, as Tumarkin (Citation2005, p. 12) observes, ‘the past enters the present as an intruder, not a welcome guest’.4. Victims of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) in China were left in a similar situation. Eric Mueggler (Citation1998) writes of how in southwest China such people became socially invisible and inaudible, incarcerated as they were within the space of their own memories. His use of the word ‘encrypted’ led me to realise that it could stand for the crypt as a burial site while simultaneously referencing the hidden meaning of an encoded message.5. Morris (Citation2006, p. 5) has urged scholars in the humanities to develop a ‘critical proximity' to their subject matter, as distinct from the usual critical distance that ‘objective', instrumentalist academic writing usually strives for (see also Simon Citation2010).