On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency Suzana

Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna VOLUME 16 On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency Reconciliation, Shame, On Productive On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency Suzana Milevska (Ed.) On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency Suzana Milevska (Ed.) Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Eva Blimlinger, Andrea B. Braidt, Karin Riegler (Series Eds.) Volume 16 On the Publication Series We are pleased to present this new volume in the publication series of the Acad- emy of Fine Arts Vienna. The series, published in cooperation with our highly committed partner Sternberg Press, is devoted to central themes of contemporary thought about art practices and art theories. The volumes in the series are composed of collected contributions on subjects that form the focus of discourse in terms of art theory, cultural studies, art history, and research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and represent the quintessence of international study and discussion taking place in the respective fields. Each volume is published in the form of an anthology, edited by staff members of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Authors of high international repute are invited to write contributions dealing with the respective areas of emphasis. Research activities, such as international conferences, lecture series, institute-specific research focuses, or research projects, serve as points of departure for the individual volumes. With On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency we are launching volume sixteen of the series. Suzana Milevska, the editor of this publication, was Endowed Professor for Central and South Eastern Art Histories at the Academy from 2013 until 2015. This professorship is realized in cooperation with ERSTE Foundation, and we are very happy the symposium that Milevska organized as part of her term as professor at the academy can now be published in the form of proceedings. The editor has not only collected papers that were given at the conference, but has asked additional contributors to participate in the collection, which focuses on a topic that is very central to the Academy’s discursive agenda. Politics of memory and practices of reconciliation have been—especially since the late 1980s—an issue of particular concern within the arts. Whereas the close examination of how societies and nation-states deal with and remember the atrocities of National Socialism has been a source for much productive artistic practice and artistic research in the last decades, the question of how shame— in addition or in opposition to the paradigm of guilt—is dealt with has been largely neglected. Milevska takes up the notion of “productive shame” as devel- oped by Paul Gilroy, and has asked the contributors to this volume to analyze the paradigm from many different angles and within numerous concepts. Central to many of the articles is the question of how shame and agency can be linked, and of how the difficult matter of reconciliation must be considered in this relationship. We would sincerely like to thank Suzana Milevska for the huge editorial effort she put into the realization of this publication. In a very ambitious time frame she succeeded in putting together this book that—in our mind—will help us to better understand the complex “triangulation,” as Milevska puts it, of shame, reconciliation, and agency, and what role art and artistic research can play. The Rectorate of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Eva Blimlinger, Andrea B. Braidt, Karin Riegler Contents Introduction On Productive Shame: Triangulations of Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency Suzana Milevska 10 Beyond an Ontology of Guilt and Shame Shame: Intentionality in Reverse Jean-Paul Martinon 44 Postcolonial Melancholia Protocols, Affects, and Effects of Shame Restitution and Compensation in Austria after 1998 Historiography, the Politics of Memory, and Compensation Policy Eva Blimlinger 60 “Auschwitz Is Only Sleeping” Editor: Suzana Milevska On Shame and Reconciliation in the Roma Context Editorial coordination: Christine Rogi, Martina Huber Tímea Junghaus 78 Proofreading: Niamh Dunphy Design: Maximiliane Schling, Surface, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin Making Visible Printing and binding: Holzhausen Druck GmbH, Wolkersdorf Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 92 ISBN 978-3-95679-149-9 From Commission to Commission Social Movements versus Institutionalized Forms of Reconciliation © 2016 Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Sternberg Press in Post-Apartheid South Africa All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole Jakob Krameritsch 102 or in part in any form. The Massacre Underlines the Wrongness of the Situation Sternberg Press Primrose Sonti and Trevor Ngwane Caroline Schneider in Conversation with Jakob Krameritsch 122 Karl-Marx-Allee 78 D-10243 Berlin Gay Pride, Queer Shame: Austrian Cases www.sternberg-press.com Andrea B. Braidt 130 Naming and Renaming: Rewriting and Recasting Memories The Homecomer On the Road with Képíró Sándor Part One & Two Zsuzsi Flohr 148 How (Not) to Shame a Name Jasmina Cibic 162 An Allegory to Post-Nazism Eduard Freudmann 174 Conciliatory Potentials of Memorials: Pondering into Collective Memories via Participatory Research Materials of Commemoration The Changing Landscape of Mauthausen Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, with Das Kollektiv 190 Polished Smooth How to Think Shame, Solidarity and Politics of Bodily Presence Working Group Four Faces of Omarska 208 Participation and Representation in the Doing of History of Austria Some Thoughts on Tal Adler’s Voluntary Participation Karin Schneider 226 Why I Started Visiting a Church Regularly Tal Adler 240 Image Credits 248 Biographies 252 Acknowledgments 258 Suzana Milevska 13 Shame usually implies something negative; it has been mainly linked to a certain personal traumatic experience of loss, absence, or lack. It stands both as a Introduction word for vulnerability because of being uncovered, and for trying to conceal the shameful parts.1 Shame is thus inevitably related to the gaze of the other. It also often marks the emergence of a profound individual fear from not be- longing to community. The moment of revelation that the subject does not fit the conventional representation and the expectations of others becomes On Productive instrumental for constructing the socialized subjectivity. In his seminal book Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy made a distinction between “paralyzing guilt” and “productive shame,” thus entrusting shame with Shame certain affirmative features, as potential for overcoming the collective affect of guilt.2 This volume is obviously profoundly indebted to Gilroy for this concept and also for his looking at collective shame as an agency capable of prompt- ing affirmative multicultural nationality and society. Shame is put in opposition to the conservative overidentification with the past as a form of national pride, Triangulations which is usually based on phobia from exposure to otherness. In the context of the postcolonial critique of the long and still praised British colonial history, Gilroy wrote about the need “to transform paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame that would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality of Shame, that is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers or otherness.” 3 More importantly, he emphasized “the painful obligations to work through the grim details of imperial and colonial history.” 4 However, in the context of the European past in the twentieth century, there is still very little written about the positive potentialities of shame as a movement of a certain Reconciliation, epistemic agency that may prompt the overcoming of the initial traumatic experience of facing and looking at truth. In Gilroy’s writing, this traumatic event is usually the truth about the fragmentation of the empire because of both the loss of the territory of the historic British colonies and the loss of power in and Agency more general terms.5 However, Gilroy does not make it very clear how to deal with shame and/or distance from the burdened past without the “paralysis” contained in his understanding of the relation between guilt and shame. Therefore, the symposium “On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency” attempted to Suzana Milevska 1 Sarah Ahmed, “The Politics of Bad Feeling,” 3 Ibid., 99. Australian Critical Race and Whiteness 4 Ibid., 99–100. Studies Association Journal 1 (2005): 76. 5 Ibid., 87–95. 2 Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 99. 14 Introduction Suzana Milevska 15 develop this concept further through cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary reflections on shame in such frames of postcolonial theoretical and critical discourse.6 Among the main aims of the symposium were to question the ontological dimen- sion of guilt and shame in terms of subjectivity and cultural analysis of the post-trauma suppression of memory, on the one hand, and to search for methods for overcoming the self-perpetuating vicious circle of relentless clinging to ontology and genealogy of shame, on the other hand. Furthermore, the symposium prompted a discussion on shame in the context of analysis of visual cul- ture phenomena, public memorial art, and contemporary visual arts. Most importantly, it offered a selection of artistic and humanist research projects that dealt with the issues of “unrepresentable” guilt and shame in the context of performative, collaborative,

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