Memory, Intra-activity, and Spacetimemattering:
Reading the Tram-Museums of Kolkata
Sayan
Parial,
Ph.D. Research Scholar
& Contractual Teacher,
Department of
English,
Kazi Nazrul
University,
Asansol, West
Bengal, India.
Abstract:
This paper explores a cultural reading of the two recently curated tram-museums
in Kolkata through the lens of memory and spacetimemattering. These partition
museums, housed within two trams of Kolkata, adopt a material-discursive
approach to commemorative practices, evoking nostalgia, empathy, and the trauma
of the partitions of Bengal and Punjab. The co-constitutive performances—emerging
from the intra-action between objects, artifacts of India’s partition, and the
human observers or visitors—offer a microscopic view into the relational
entanglement shaping the cultural production of that era. Drawing on Karen
Barad’s concept of “spacetimemattering,” this paper examines how matter,
contexts, and people iteratively co-create affective responses and knowledge
within this historic mode of transport in Kolkata. As a historical heritage of
Kolkata, the tram embodies accessibility, mobility, and intra-activity with
people and places. It presents memories of partition not as static or inert
moments of history but as evolving ones, condensing the spaces and times of
past, present, and future. This paper also illuminates how the memories of
India’s partition, akin to Derrida’s “spectres,” generate a haunting affect in
the present. Performed through temporal diffraction and dis/continuity, these
memories reveal temporality and spatiality as active, and transformative forces
rather than passive backdrops.
Keywords: Memory, Intra-activity, Spacetimemattering, Museum,
Partition, Agency
On the 75th
anniversary of Independence, The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust, in
collaboration with the West Bengal Transport Corporation, established a lieu
de mémoire by inaugurating the Independence and Partition Museum in
Kolkata, housed within two Kolkata trams. These partition museums guide
visitors toward a material-discursive approach to commemorative practices,
evoking nostalgia, empathy, and the trauma of the partitions of Bengal and
Punjab. The first tram car showcases resistance against the British Raj,
spanning the period from 1900 to 1947, while the second focuses on the mass
migration following partition. These museums feature paintings, material
belongings of refugees, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, printed slogans, and
more. The museum space offers an intra-active, dialogic environment where the
separative properties—museum contents and human visitors (agents)—dissolve the
ontological determinacy of being, creating an entangled condition and a
composite epistemic domain rich with multiple possibilities.This ontological
relationality between humans and nonhumans exhibits a dynamism, characterized
as a “shifting entanglement of relations” rather than a fixed “property of
things,” fostering co-constitutive performances that reconfigure past and
future (Barad 35). These reconfigurations emerge from the relational
entanglement of matter, contexts, and people. The memorial objects of
partition, displayed within Kolkata’s historic mode of transport—the
tram—generate affective responses and knowledge by mediating pre-existing
memory culture while simultaneously reworking the past and future. As a
historical heritage of Kolkata, the tram, with its accessibility, mobility, and
intra-activity with people and places, presents partition memories not as
inert, fixed moments of history but as evolving ones. It co-situates spaces and
times of past, present, and future, where subjects, objects, and the world exist
in an inexhaustible dynamic state of “becoming.”
This paper draws
on Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology to explore how the memorial artifacts
preserved in Kolkata’s tram museums “intra-act” with human agents in the
process of “spacetimemattering.” The museum’s approach to preserving and
studying partition memories provides an alternative diffractive space, bringing
matter into the discourse. Matter, in this context, is “substance in its
intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency”
(Barad336). This “intra-active becoming” challenges the reflectionist framework
of critical studies, instead employing diffraction to recognize the
multifarious differences and nuances within any phenomenon. Barad, in her book Meeting
the Universe Halfway, asserts:
Diffraction does
not fix what is the object and what is the subject in advance, and so, unlike
methods of reading one text or set of ideas against another where one set
serves as a fixed frame of reference, diffraction involves reading insights
through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge:
how different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those
exclusions matter. (30)
The concept of
diffraction, first proposed by Donna Haraway as a counterpoint to reflection,
suggests that “diffraction can serve as a useful counterpoint to reflection:
both are optical phenomena, but whereas reflection is about mirroring and
sameness, diffraction attends to patterns of difference” (Qtd in Barad29).
These two partition museums move away from reflectionist knowledge-making
practices, instead diffractively bridging the gap between observer and
observed, human actors and nonhuman memorial actants, to offer a microscopic
view of the partition phenomenon. The museum space enables visitors to
transcend the Cartesian subject-object divide, entering a performative domain
with the material memories of partition to reconfigure the world around
them.This “critical practice of engagement” haunts the “I,” disrupting its
disengagement from the materiality of the past and compelling it to entangle
diffractively with multiple spaces, times, and nonhuman matter in the process
of becoming with the world. As Barad notes, “in our becoming there is no ‘I’
separate from the intra-active becoming of the world” (394). To become with the
world—a non-anthropocentric world populated by living beings (actors) and
living things (actants)—a co-active performance must be forged to grasp the
sense of worlding (Boje253–271).
The museums
recreate a new world of memories of the partition of India, where the subject
position of observers or curators encounters a transgenerational flow of
narratives through their engagement with photographs, newspaper cuttings,
paintings, and material belongings of the past, which reconfigure their
identities. The material-discursive approach of museum practice within the
trams of Kolkata establishes a renewed trajectory, bending the course of
hermeneutics in partition studies and inviting people to entangle with their
past through a more participatory agentiality.Our everyday reality is an
entangled quantum reality[i] where we co-exist with all human and
nonhuman actors. Museums are the reservoirs of all these associations with
which we reside, think, perceive, and die. The polyphonic human reality
enmeshed in these heterogeneous relationships disturbs the anthropocentric
epistemic determinacy in the creation of knowledge and disrupts the space-time
fixity by offering a multi-spatio-temporality where the past haunts the present,
disregarding chronology. In an interview, Barad (2012) argues:
The “past” was
never simply there to begin with, and the “future” is not what will unfold, but
“past” and “future” are iteratively reconfigured and enfolded through the
world’s ongoing intra-activity. There is no inherently determinate relationship
between past, present, and future... The past, like the future though, is not
closed. But “erasure” is not what is at issue. In an important sense, the
“past” is open to change. It can be redeemed, productively reconfigured in an
iterative unfolding of spacetimematter. (67)
In this museum
space, these evocative objects trigger emotional affects by intra-acting with
human agents and forming a spatio-temporal-bricoleur where past, present, and
future are entangled. The specter of the past haunts the linearity of time
through its constant recreations of itself. Jacques Derrida observes these
ghostly appearances of the past as "temporal diffraction, the idea that a
given entity can be in a state of superposition over different times"
(Hristova et al.779). This undecidability of spacetimes situates an aporia in
museum practice as:
Time has
loosened into a network of relations that no longer holds together a coherent
canvas. The picture of spacetimes (in the plural) fluctuating, superimposed one
above the other, materializing at certain times with respect to particular
objects, provides us with a very vague vision. But it is the best that we have.
(Rovelli115)
Hence, when
individuals intra-act with the “living things” of the tram museum, the
post-memorial engagement witnesses a subjective experience of time that even
transcends the individuality of the individual, since the individual in its
material engagements with the past is “making and marking of (social) space and
time in society” (Hristova16). The individual's subjective production of time
is performed in the present with all its spatial-material-temporal associations
and, thus, the individual becomes multiple. The museum practice is also a
practice of memory where commemoration becomes part of becoming. Barad argues,
“Memory does not reside in the folds of individual brains; rather, memory is
the enfoldings of space-time-matter written into the universe, or better, the
enfolded articulations of the universe in its mattering” (ix).
Tram museum
exhibits paintings by artists Chittaprosad Bhattacharya and Zainul Abedin from
Chittagong and East Bengal, respectively, related to partition to display how
new forms of expressions can evoke strong emotional affects. The paintings, the
exhibition of book covers, and pieces of writings are the possibilities that
shock, shatter, and provoke experience. When this visual gallery enters into an
intra-action with human visitors, the connection forms sensual experiences. This
sense allows certain powers of becoming. They can “induce spiritual engagement,
prompt bodily (re)actions, … stimulate thought and fuel the imagination; they
have therapeutic value by causing consolation and feelings of well-being, and
enforcing a sense of identity and belonging” (Marschall2). These paintings are
“cues” for memory and articulate horizons of expectations among the visitors as
their dialogues with these paintings transcend, even, the immediate perception
into a series of intuitive rememberings. The paintings are also entangled with
the museum space as the place also contributes its agential properties to
involve the audience or reader in the production of knowledge. David Carrier in
his essay “Remembering the Past: Art Museums as Memory Theaters” observes:
How you see one
painting depends in part upon what is in the room where it is hung. How you
view that room influences what you expect to see when you walk further. And how
you look at art in those galleries, in turn, is affected by the experience of
entering the museum and, sometimes, even by what you see in the streets
outside. (63)
So, the place of
museum becomes a fusion of self, space, and time. The material correlatives
stored inside the museum converse with each other, maintaining the continuity
of the flow of affects.
Memories are
materially affective and also contingent since the way remembering and
forgetting work transgenerationally. Memories interact with other memories and
events, and as a result, get affected by those influencing factors. Memories
are in flux; they are modifying themselves, affecting the
physio-psycho-material entanglements. Human psyche can't control the occurrence
of memory as it depends on the intra-actions between events, ideas,
materialities, etc. New-materialist sociological inquiry of memory studies has
opened up a new domain to rethink the notion of connection in this social
world. The trams are not only museum spaces but rather a performative
theatrical space where the material artifacts and visual entities behave like
theatrical props and work with human agents in the enactment of the past. Being
a mobile entity, the trams move throughout the city, performing their own
reproduction of past events through theatrical repetition. Every performance
comes out of a network of heterogeneous association. When we experience the
past in a particular context contrary to the context where the event actually
took place, we experience different sets of perception and thus multifarious
possibilities to look into the past.These museums become a fertile ground of
material interactions with human actors. Material bodies serve as a medium to
replicate the past in the present and imagine a new future.
The on-stage
collaborative performance involving human and non-human actors or actants
reveals the real-life enmeshment of human and nonhuman bodies. Barad (2012), in
an interview, states, “Matter itself is not a substrate or a medium for the
flow of desire. Materiality itself is always already a desiring dynamism, a
reiterative reconfiguring, energized and energizing, enlivened and enlivening”
(59). This suggests that matter’s capacity to shape, reshape, and influence
social phenomena reconfigures our understanding of matter, presenting itself as
a prerequisite for a plausible account of coexistence.This performative
material engagement deconstructs representational epistemology because
representing any phenomenon involves creating compartments within the world,
which disrupts the intra-connective associations between beings and non-beings.
In contrast to representationalism, agential realism posits:
On an agential
realist account, it is once again possible to acknowledge nature, the body, and
materiality in the fullness of their becoming without resorting to the optics
of transparency or opacity, the geometries of absolute exteriority or
interiority, and the theorization of the human as either pure cause or pure
effect, while at the same time remaining resolutely accountable for the role
‘we’ play in the intertwined practices of knowing and becoming(Barad812).
Agential realism explores the nature of agency, matter, and reality, as well as
the relationship between the material and discursive in epistemological
progression, where the subject and object, nature and culture, co-create each
other. Karen Barad draws influence from Niels Bohr’s argument about the
engagement between the “observer” and the “observed.” In the post-Newtonian
era, Bohr contends that the non-distinction between these ontologically
separate actors and their entangled condition constitutes a “phenomenon”— a
wholeness. He observes:
While, within
the scope of classical physics, the interaction between object and apparatus
can be neglected or, if necessary, compensated for, in quantum physics this
interaction forms an inseparable part of the phenomenon. Accordingly, the
unambiguous account of proper quantum phenomena must, in principle, include a
description of all relevant features of the experimental arrangement” (Bohr4).
Agential realism
provides a framework that prevents reality from being tethered to the
constraints of representationalism.
This
interrelationship between subjects and their surroundings is vividly
constructed in photography. Museums often house photographs in which the past
is embodied with a sense of longing, reclamation, rethinking, and reworking
through the practice of recollection. Images of revolutionaries, writers, and
movements related to freedom struggles and partitions negotiate the notions of
absence and presence. As Crang (1997) notes, “Photography is to capture how
‘now’ becomes the past and so in some sense to depict a world at the point of
its disappearance. In this way, photos materialize the pastness of the past,
and simultaneously they are also evidence of its having occurred” (442). Yet,
the “now” remains brimming with possibilities, extending beyond its own
presentism. Barad (2017) suggests:
‘Now’ is always
already thick with possibilities disruptive of mere presence. Each moment is
thickly threaded through with all other moments, each a holographic
condensation of specific diffraction patterns created by a plethora of virtual
wanderings, alternative histories of what is / might yet be/have been.
Re-membering, then, is not merely subjective, a fleeting flash of a past event
in the inner workings of an individual human brain; rather, it is a
constitutive part of the field of spacetimemattering (113).
The museum also
houses two brass serving spoons donated by Uma Pada Bhattacharya and Rekha
Saha. These spoons evoke the memory of the last meal a family shared before
being compelled to cross borders. When the family fled what was then East
Pakistan, they carried these spoons with them. These personal belongings of a
displaced family transcend time, existing simultaneously across multiple cultural
and personal spacetimes. Consequently, the materiality of these objects
transforms from inert relics into historical agents, engaging in an
intra-active companionship with human bodies. Anchal Malhotra, in her book Remnants
of a Separation: A History of the Partition Through Material Memory,
writes, “If you imagine an experience to be the construction of a memory, then
its recollection years later can be defined as its reconstruction” (28). These
spoons, as agential entities, possess the unique ability to instantly transport
and connect Partition victims to both private and collective histories.
This
human-nonhuman, subject-object engagement—or co-action—is what Karen Barad
terms a “phenomenon.” The visual gallery of the tram museum becomes such a
phenomenon, where all bodies, encompassing both human and nonhuman, are
co-created through intra-performance. This dynamic claims a critical,
non-reflectionist, diffractive inquiry into museum practice as
“nondeterministic enactments through which matter-in-the-process-of-becoming is
sedimented out and enfolded in further materializations” (Barad823). Thus,
knowledge does not pledge allegiance to a singular reality; it exists in a
constant flux of meaning-making, intertwined with all worldly human-nonhuman
relations. As Barad asserts, “We know because we are of the world. We are part
of the world in its differential becoming” (Barad185). This co-constitution of
knowledge—shaped by myriad social, cultural, scientific, and technological
agencies within Kolkata’s tram museums—disrupts the fixity of “reality” and
offers what Barad calls “agential reality.” This reality emerges from
material-discursive, intra-active phenomena, extending beyond the
representational nature of knowledge. Agential realism, Barad explains, is:
not about
representations of an independent reality but about the real consequences,
interventions, creative possibilities, and responsibilities of intra-acting
within the world… scientific literacy becomes a matter of agential literacy—of
learning how to intra-act responsibly within the world” (237).
The inter- and
intra-connected nature of historical artifacts, photographs, paintings,
material remnants, the tram itself, human visitors, and curators—within the
techno-scientifically constructed museum space—gestures toward a quantum
reality. This reality unravels Newtonian deterministic individualism, embracing
the plurality and inseparability of space, time, and matter. Karen Barad
describes this entangled multiplicity as “spacetimemattering,” a “dynamic
ongoing reconfiguration of a field of relationalities among ‘moments,’
‘places,’ and ‘things’” (111).The concept of spacetimemattering in museum
practice opens non-anthropocentric pathways to explore human memory, which is
not confined to the cognitive domain of the human brain. Instead, it
intertwines the human mind with nonhuman memorial entities spanning diverse
spacetimes. Thus, the active performance of nonhuman objects or things provides
an indispensable material affect in the formation of memories. The
materiality—or entangled matter—is plural and complex, uneven and contingent,
relational and emergent, sparking generative possibilities, actions, and
practices. Matter, therefore, is not inert but performative. Temporality and
spatiality, likewise, are not passive; they are active, generative, and
transformative components. In these tram museums, when visitors encounter
objects from the past, their subjective responses intra-act with material
bodies in the process of recollection. As Barad articulates, remembering:
is not a replay
of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future
that is larger than any individual... The past is never finished. It cannot be
wrapped up like Scrapbooka package, or a scrapbook, or an acknowledgment; we
never leave it, and it never leaves us behind (ix).
The enfolding of
past and future, along with spacetime shifts, can be grasped through the
spectral turn in critical studies, which critiques the nature of reality, ways
of knowing the “real,” and memories of the past. The ghostly figure captures
how “time is out of joint” and highlights the constant recreation of the past
through the intra-action of various agents (Barad244). Thus, the specter
transcends its diminished status as merely dead, emerging as an effective
agential afterlife that disrupts the linearity of time, dislocates its fixed
position, and bridges opposites such as continuity and discontinuity, absence
and presence. Derrida contends:
One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this
non-present presence, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer
belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by
the name of knowledge” (6).
This haunting effect of the past challenges prevailing notions of “reality,”
exposing the limits of understanding phenomena through anthropocentric
frameworks. It deconstructs our interpretive mediums, as directing or
representing any phenomenon in a singular way restricts the rhizomatic flow of
meanings. Fully comprehending this interconnected world of living things and
beings remains illusory, as any structure of interpretation or reflection in
critical hermeneutics cannot capture the uncertainty or undecidability of
worldly phenomena. The world is an amalgam of human and nonhuman agents
performing in and with one another.Rather than reflection, Barad’s methodology
of diffraction aligns with Derrida’s hauntology. Like spacetimemattering, the
haunting of the past reveals its potential to return, disturb the present, and
reconfigure the future. This multi-spatio-temporal travelogue of memory—forged
through the engagement between human beings and memorial artifacts—demonstrates
the fluid and active nature of both memory and matter. Memory continues to
operate through the revival of material bodies’ agency in intra-action with
human cognition. Marcel Proust once observed:
The past is
hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material
object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do
not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon
it or not before we ourselves must die (50).
This temporal
diffraction manifests in museum practice when the specter of the past reasserts
its presence in the “now” through the material interplay of human and nonhuman
agents of memory. The spoons of the displaced family, the paintings of Zainul
Abedin, or the photographs of India’s nationalist movement activate their
afterlives through ongoing intra-action with human agents of the present. The
actions of these material bodies, operating across a multi-layered plane of
spatio-temporality, establish an ethic of connectivity. This ethic of
connectivity in museum practice reclaims the memory of the past, fostering an
interplay of haunting and being haunted. Observers, intra-acting with these
memories, are haunted by the spectral presence of the artifacts stored within
the trams. This haunting effect extends through postmemorial transference to
subsequent generations.
End Notes
i.
The term “intra-action” was coined by quantum physicist
Karen Barad to mark an epistemological shift from “interaction.” According to
Barad, intra-action offers a novel framework for understanding worldly
entanglements. While interaction implies ontologically separate agencies—each
with independent properties—engaging with one another, intra-action emphasizes
ontological inseparability. Matter, people, objects, space, and time are all
part of entangled phenomena, participating in a process of intra-active becoming.
These agential entities engage in non-deterministic performances, generating
knowledge that is not pre-given but embedded within the process. This
relational entanglement is termed spacetimemattering. A specific
intra-action “enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut—an
inherent distinction—between subject and object), effecting a separation
between ‘subject’ and ‘object’” (Barad, 2007, p. 140).
ii.
Agency, in Barad’s concept of agential realism, is the
capacity to intervene in and intra-act with worldly relations, opening
possibilities for becoming. It is not a property to be possessed but a
performance. Thus, the ability to act equates to the ability to perform.
iii.
Reality is quantum because, in quantum physics, matter
and reality are not static, as depicted in the Newtonian worldview.
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