What is conflictual aesthetics in times of the extension of the conflict zone? Extreme simplifications have found their way into current art practices. Some artistic and curatorial strategies have turned into politically empty gestures. So the question arises as to whether critical art can do justice to the true complexity of our present circumstances. Oliver Marchart, Havîn Al-Sindy and Nora Sternfeld discuss questions such as: how do visible and invisible structures produce powerlessness? To what extent is artistic practice entangled in this? What mechanisms of representation and exclusion determine these processes? To what extent do social media and digital communities pretend to shape the conditions for unlearning violent worldviews – while they actually at the same time reinforce their persistence? In short: how can a sense of aesthetic and political complexity be regained in times of excessive simplification?

 

Oliver Marchart

So, we said that I will start and present only a few words about this strange topic of complex simplicity and simplistic complexity. The main idea behind this is that we have encountered for many years this very problematic notion that things are supposedly ‘complex’. The very term ‘complexity’ has become a catchphrase, which in neoliberal discourse has above all become highly disempowering, because if things are so incredibly complex, we cannot do anything about them. We must leave it to the experts who have the cognitive capacity to understand all the complexity. However, if you think about it, things might not be that complex after all, so the discourse about the complexity of everything might be a ruse.

In the art field, too, the idea of complexity has always been part of the default ideology of the art field. Artworks are supposed to be complex. If they are simplistic, they’re usually seen as not very good art. If they are too straightfoward, they don’t seem to produce a lot of surplus value. Now, I think there has been a countermovement to that in the last decade or so, leading people to abandon this idea of fake or simplistic complexity. What we see both in the art world, but also and above all in political activism, is a return of very Manichaean, dualistic worldviews where you’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem. A sort of simplistic, friend/enemy logic has gained traction in activism, as if there were no other alternative to the ideology of fake complexity.

Not that I’m denying that politics is always about erecting an antagonism against something. But if you do this, you must cognitively process what you’re doing, and I think there’s very little reflection on that. People just easily fall into that friend/enemy logic. This is the first, let’s say, natural reaction to the ideology of fake complexity: total simplification, a world in which everything is either good or bad. But there is another kind of reaction by those who would say: “No, the world isn’t black and white, it’s grey. There are shades,” or something like that. And this has also been expressed with the notion that we need to be tolerant with regard to ambivalence or ambiguity, so everything is portrayed as ambiguous. And, by claiming this, you are of course silently returning to the form of complexity I have criticised, the simplistic complexity where you say that everything is very complex, end of story. So the discussion basically goes back and forth between these two poles. On the one hand, you’re making a claim for ambivalence, for a thousand shades of grey. On the other, you’re falling back into a friend/enemy logic where you’re either part of the solution or part of the problem – you’re either with us or against us, and you must take a side. What got lost in the process is what in previous ages would have been called dialectics – the idea of taking account of contradictions, by which I mean contradictions that cannot easily be overcome by simply taking a side.

I would like to illustrate this with an example from the field of memory politics. During the time of the Black Lives Matter protests, the idea of toppling monuments was, as you know, a major activist strategy. Some activists wanted to get rid of the monuments of the colonisers, and there are many cases, I think, where it would be perfectly fair to just topple them. But there are other cases where I’m not saying that they are ‘ambivalent’, but they are contradictory. One case that comes to mind is the Winston Churchill statue in London, which was also attacked and people wanted to topple the statue. They wanted to topple it because Churchill was a racist and a colonialist, which he certainly was, so there is no reason to deny that, and there is no reason to find a compromise. But at the same time, they wanted to ignore that Winston Churchill was also the one in charge when Britain decided not to enter a pact with Nazi Germany, like the Soviet Union did and Stalin did, but to fight basically the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe. At that point, to remind you, Europe, with the exception of a few neutral countries, was either occupied by the Nazis or in alliance with them. So, at a time when basically the whole of Europe stood with the Nazis, Churchill said, “We’ll fight them anyway.” And let’s not forget that to this day, among neo-Nazis, Churchill is still seen as their historical arch enemy, as the ‘war criminal’ Number One, because he commanded the forces that dared to confront Nazi Europe.

So now the question is: can you at one and the same time, cognitively or in your political judgment, process that contradiction or not? That is to say, can you think about Churchill as both a racist and coloniser and a fighter against Nazism, and hold on to both ends of that contradiction simultaneously without any ‘ambivalence’ or compromise – and certainly without any denial or omission? Or are you prepared in your activism to erase all memories of Churchill the anti-fascist, thus taking a side not only against Churchill, but also taking a side with the neo-Nazis, who would be the first to cheer when his statues are toppled.

Of course, holding on to both horns of a dilemma is not an easy exercise, but perhaps we should revisit the moment when people were still trained in thinking dialectically. To give you an example from literature, let us revisit Heiner Müller’s teaching play The Horatian. It takes place in ancient Rome when Rome was at war with Alba, another Italian city. The Romans and the Albans decided that they didn’t want to engage in mutual destruction and have a clash of their armies. So, they would outsource their battle to three members of a Roman tribe, the Horatians, and three members of an Alban tribe, the Curiatians, to fight it out among the six of them. In the end, a Horatian was the last man standing and Rome had won. He returned to Rome as the victor and was celebrated as the hero who won this struggle with Alba. The problem was that one of the Curiatians he had killed was engaged to his own sister, and when she had a nervous breakdown and accused him of killing her future husband, he killed his own sister too – which was a crime according to Roman law. So, in the eyes of the Romans, he had instantaneously turned from a hero into a murderer. And now the Romans had to decide what to do with this man who was a hero and a murderer at once. So what did the Romans decide? I will read to you the central passage from this play by Heiner Müller. In German, this is beautiful Brechtian language, but I will read it to you in the DeepL translation so you can enjoy the beauty of artificial intelligence. The main question is, similar to the case of Churchill: how should we remember him?

 

What shall the Horatian be called to posterity?

And the people answered with one voice:

He shall be called the victor over Alba

He shall be called the murderer of his sister

With one breath his merit and his guilt.

And whoever speaks of his guilt and not of his merit

Shall dwell where the dogs dwell, as a dog

And whoever speaks of his merit but not of his guilt

He, too, shall dwell among dogs.

But he who speaks of his guilt at one time

And at other times speaks of his merit

Speaking out of one mouth at different times differently

Or to different ears differently

His tongue shall be torn out

For the words must remain pure. For

A sword can be broken and a man

can also be broken, but the words

fall into the gears of the world uncatchable

making things recognisable or unrecognisable.

So they set up, not fearing the impure truth

in anticipation of the enemy a temporary example

of clean separation, not hiding the remainder

that was not absorbed in the unstoppable change.

I won’t be engaging in an in-depth analysis of this passage. Just note that the Romans are not searching for a compromise. The words, Müller says, must remain pure, if only to set a temporary example. Well, you don’t need to have read a lot of Derrida to know that words are never pure. Nonetheless, for the Romans, as an ethico-political imperative, the word ‘victor’ or ‘hero’ and, respectively, the word ‘murderer’ must remain pure. The Horatian is both a pure victor and a pure murderer. There is no easy synthesis or compromise, no shade of grey. Nor is there anything involved like tolerance toward ambivalence. There was no Roman prepared to make a claim along the lines of: “Well, I knew the guy, and he was not really that bad. He didn’t really mean to kill his sister, you know? In the heat of the moment, he just fell victim to his emotions.” And then another Roman would say: “I knew him, and he wasn’t really a hero either. He actually was a coward; and also he didn’t really mean to kill the Curiatian.” And then a third Roman says: “So maybe we should see the complexity of the case. Maybe we should be more tolerant towards ambivalence.” No, Müller opts for a completely different approach. The words – ‘hero’, ‘criminal’ – must remain pure because they must remain recognisable. We must be able to recognise a crime as a crime and heroism as heroism.

And yet, it is also clear for Müller that truth is impure. The Romans set up, he says, in the face of “impure truth” “a temporary example of clean separation”. And at the same time, he continues, they wouldn’t hide “the remainder that was not absorbed” in a world that is in constant flux. So while the words must remain pure, the truth is impure because the truth is the remainder that emerges when I try to hold on to two opposite, two contradictory things at once. This, of course, is an impossible enterprise, more of the nature of an ethical injunction that should guide our actions, nothing that is going to work out without remainder.

So, what is basically Müller’s point according to my interpretation? He wants to give us an idea not of what I have called fake or simplistic complexity. He doesn’t want to say that things are very complex once we look at them in more detail. He wants to give us an idea of what I propose to call true complexity or complex simplicity. Truth is impure, not because we can’t understand it, but because truth involves the acceptance that things are contradictory, and it makes no sense to water them down to find a compromise. We need to cling to the contradiction, but – and this is why I would speak about complex simplicity – accept that contradictions evolve on multiple fronts. In political reality, we’re rarely confronted with a single antagonism. Only in cases of civil war does a single antagonism cut across a country, putting one part of the people on one side and the other part on the other side of the antagonism. One could discuss whether this is really the case even in civil war, but in everyday politics, we never encounter a single antagonism. There are always many antagonisms criss-crossing the political field, but also criss-crossing ourselves and our own subjectivity.

There is a very nice performance piece which I use to illustrate my point. It’s called Positions by the performance collective Public Movement, and it is very simple. You draw a line and then you call out binary choices. So, for instance, freedom/equality, left/right, Israel/Palestine, or whatever. And then you ask people to take sides. And the more contradictions you call out, the more people will realise that they need to change sides. There is no totally congruent position, because on one issue you may find yourself with some people on the same side, while on the next issue you find the same people on the opposite side. So the position of the group turns out to be inconsistent, and your own position turns out to be quite idiosyncratic, rather than being made from a single mould. And so you realise that you hold many different opinions that stand in a contingent rather than a necessary relation to each other. Conversely, people who you think are on the same side turn out to be standing on the other side. I think that a sense of true complexity means understanding the simultaneity of many contradictions. And fostering a sense of true complexity, or what I would call complex simplicity, is also what art could actually be quite good at. Isn’t it one of the advantages of art – or, in Müller’s case, literature – that it can cling to the paradox of a contradictory relation, of saying one thing and saying the other thing at the same time, and of processing this cognitively? The job of art is to provide us with a sense that the world is not more ‘complex’ or ‘ambivalent’, but much more contradictory than we tend to see.

 

Oliver Marchart and Nora Sternfeld at Radialsystem, Berlin,

 

Nora Sternfeld

Well, I will now take up from what Oliver Marchart was talking about with regard to a simultaneity of many contradictions. And I want to add a concrete reflection on history work to our discussion of the dialectics of simplistic complexity and complex simplicity: ‘analogy’ on the side of simplistic complexity, and ‘archaeology’ on the other side, on the side of complex simplicity.

 

Analogy or Archaeology?

If we now know that history is contested, how should we deal with it? If memory must be understood as conflictual, then the question arises as to what happens when different narratives of memory clash and have to be negotiated. Two authors stand here paradigmatically for two positions that have been formulated in this regard in recent years, for two different forms of dealing with contradictory and contested memories: Michael Rothberg’s book Multidirectional Memories[1] and Dan Diner’s essay ‘Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse’[2]. The controversial positions could be described as concretion versus narration and singularity versus globalisation of the Holocaust.

 

Multidirectional Memories – Michael Rothberg

Michael Rothberg is concerned with the fact that memory always relates to other memories.[3] With his book, he wants to counter the zero-sum conflicts of a memory competition with the approach of multidirectionality and argue in favour of productive interaction between different historical memories. This seems to make sense insofar as Rothberg describes struggles over memory as intertwined and interrelated. He can thus show that memory not only produces identity and is always contested, but also always produces gaps, entanglements, ruptures, unexpected outcomes and relationships. And he suggests focusing on precisely this multidirectionality, which is associated with all historical politics and historical work. His book ends with the following sentences: “Thus, finally, understanding political conflict entails understanding the interlacing of memories in the force field of public space. The only way forward is through their entanglement.”[4] So when it comes to what history means for the present, we have to start from entanglements and relationships.

And yet there seems to be something problematic about the focus on multidirectionality. Rothberg presents it from the outset as the right answer to existing competing memories.[5] But does the answer really lie only in the freely available references to history, which Rothberg also refers to as “comparative imagination”? Or is this not a dangerous call for analogisation and identification – instead of reflection and solidarity? He discusses the question of what actually happened, not in concrete terms, but as a discursive practice.[6] He therefore argues in favour of analogies as imaginative links, as a basis for solidarity and struggles for justice. However, if the discourse of memory is limited to analogies as appropriations and negotiations, it not only gains, but also loses an essential basis for solidarities – because critical memory work is not only work that focuses on history as a confirmation of collective identities; it has also always had the function of bringing historical facts into play with regard to the formulation of counter-history(ies) to collective narratives.

Although Rothberg shows that analogies not only have the function of delegitimising the memory of the Holocaust, but are also productive and offer new possibilities of alliance, it seems as if identitarian reclamations are repeatedly reproduced that are not necessarily geared towards solidarity. Although the book clearly writes against the existing forms of conflict between the claim to singularity on the one hand and comparability on the other, there seems to be little room for fragile perspectives that radically thwart existing identitarian propositions. But what if the possibility of unexpected solidarities lies not in prefabricated analogies, but in the concrete work with history? For if we focus solely on the multidirectionality of identitarian group narratives, there is a danger of producing those competitions and identities in the first place, which are then claimed to overcome them. For me, this is very much in the realm of what Oliver Marchart has defined as “a thousand shades of grey” of a problematic discourse. It’s in the realm of the possibility of a memory to identify with another memory for different reasons, maybe a victim memory that identifies in an analogy with another victim memory. But isn’t this exactly the problematic of simplification we talked about?

Precisely because memory discourses in post-colonial migration societies are fragile, it seems important to give space to ruptures that undermine existing identitarian narratives and to do justice to them – and this potential lies not only at the discursive level, but also at the level of the factual. With this in mind, it is worth taking a look at an essay by Dan Diner, who, as a historian, places the main focus of thinking about Holocaust remembrance and colonial history on what actually happened.

 

Conflicting Memories (Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse) – Dan Diner

In his essay, Diner uses a specific day, 8 May 1945, to work out the contradictions in perspective with regard to the events that took place on the day of the Nazi surrender in different places around the world: in this context, he speaks of “paradoxical situations of opposing memories” , which he would like to read together with the concrete stories of experience that preceded them. By examining the specific events of 8 May 1945 against the background of the respective involvement in the Second World War in Germany, the Soviet Union, Poland, the Baltic states, Czechoslovakia, Spain and, above all, Algeria, and against the background of the respective current national memory discourses, Diner shows the diversity and contradictory nature of the perception of a historical date.

It is not creative analogies, but concrete archaeologies that focus on what actually happened that are at the centre of historical work here. The essay’s work on the “latency of hidden memories” of colonial history and colonial violence in the course of decolonisation seems particularly interesting.[7] For example, Diner deals with the massacres in Sétif in northern Algeria, where tens of thousands of Algerian liberation activists were massacred by the French military, the police and the local settler militia during the liberation celebrations. Diner describes this as follows:

Everything had begun in a basically harmless way: thousands of Algerians came together on the day of the German capitulation to celebrate the Allied victory in marches and joyous rallies. Among the banners carried by the victorious coalition, including the French banner, the green and white flag of the Algerian national movement was also recognisable. After the organisers of the manifestation failed to comply with the authorities’ demands to confiscate the incriminated cloth, security forces opened fire into the crowd. Fuelled by the violence in Sétif, unrest spread throughout the Constantine department in the days that followed. The French military and police, supported by the local settler militia, sought to drown the riots in blood through summary executions and indiscriminate killings. Not only small arms but also heavy mortars were used. The force of the violence rained down on entire villages. The killing was accompanied by staged ceremonies of submission. Muslim Algerians had to prostrate themselves on the ground in demonstrative humility in front of raised French flags. The bodies of the Algerian civilians who were massacred were buried in makeshift mass graves or burned at the stake in public. To this day, there is no consensus on how many people fell victim to the bloodbath. Various sources speak differently of between 15,000 and 45,000 dead.[8]

The example shows very clearly that there are direct and concrete links between liberation from the Nazis on the one hand and colonial violence on the other. “The end of the Second World War and the beginning of decolonisation fall on one and the same date,”[9] says Diner. The concrete confrontation with the historical material not only makes the contradictory nature of memories visible, it also makes it more complicated to take a clear position in view of what happened. And this is where concrete transnational historical work seems to open up potential: by insisting on the concreteness of historical work, Diner creates spaces for possible solidarities that may thwart rather than confirm memory collectives.

However, Diner himself is not explicitly concerned with opening up such solidarities – for him, it is about the singularity of the Holocaust. And so the memories he pursues do indeed remain contradictory, unconnected and non-negotiable. In contrast, I would rather emphasise this necessary aspect of agonistic negotiation against the background of dealing with what has actually happened.

 

Counter-Narrations (Errungene Erinnerungen) in Agonistic Contact Zones

In order to present a position of complex simplicity, I want to introduce the concept of the contact zone as the context of a history that is always both shared and divided in the post-migrant societies we live in. In these shared and divided spaces we live in,[10] I opt for recognising conflict – because there is a lot to do in relation to the processes of current racist and antisemitic violence, current racist structures and official silencing in the work of remembrance.

I am therefore proposing an alternative to the alternative between Rothberg and Diner: counter-narrations in agonistic contact zones. These are neither simply multi-perspectival nor non-negotiable. Chantal Mouffe speaks of agonism as a “kind of conflictual consensus”, “which opens up a common symbolic space for the opponents as ‘legitimate enemies’”.[11] To avoid any misunderstandings: this in no way means that historical work should be neutral. Quite the opposite, because for Mouffe, agonism means partiality: “The fundamental difference between the ‘dialogical’ and the ‘agonistic’ perspectives is that the aim of the latter is a profound transformation of the existing power relations and the establishment of a new hegemony. This is why it can properly be called ‘radical’.”[12]

In this sense, the aim here is to argue in favour of historical work in shared/divided spaces of remembrance that sees itself as both participatory and reflexive, as well as taking a stance against antisemitism, a stance that dares to be both: anti-fascist and anti-racist.

If we now assume that memory is negotiated agonistically, then it is certainly changeable. The negotiation processes in the contact zone often, but not always, lead to hardening. The experience of history education shows that dealing with history in shared/divided spaces very often also offers the opportunity to position oneself unexpectedly within contradictions – especially on the basis of an examination of facts.

Existing hegemonic offers of identification are not always merely reproduced; these are also questioned in the contact zone. They can lead to historical-political positionings that challenge the hegemonic interpretation. The anti-racist thinker Peggy Piesche insists on the need for such negotiation: “… we have to broaden our perspective, recognise experiences of difference, but also always place them in relation to other experiences of difference. We can also demand that people put themselves in relation to others.”[13]

Because history is “geteilt” in the truest sense of the word: it is divided and shared at the same time. And so it is quite possible that unexpected solidarities arise in these processes of negotiation.

Oliver Marchart, Mag.Dr.phil. (University of Vienna, philosophy), PhD (University of Essex, Government), ‘habilitation’ in philosophy and sociology (University of Lucerne). 2001–06 scientific assistant in the Department of Media Studies, University of Basel. 2006–12 SNF-research professor in the Sociological Seminar of the University of Lucerne. 2012–16 professor of sociology at the Art Academy Düsseldorf. Since March 2016, professor of political theory at the University of Vienna. Fellowships: 1995 Research Fellow at the Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Essex. 1997/98 Junior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK), Vienna. 2005 Fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) Paris. 2013 Senior Fellow at the Inter­national Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) Vienna. 2016 Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Konstanz.

Nora Sternfeld is an art educator and curator. She is a professor of art education at the HFBK Hamburg. From 2018 to 2020 she was documenta professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. From 2012 to 2018 she was Professor of Curating and Mediating Art at Aalto University in Helsinki. In addition, she is co-director of the /ecm – Master Program for Exhibition Theory and Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in the core team of schnittpunkt. austellungstheorie & praxis, co-founder and part of trafo.K, Office for Art, Education, and Critical Knowledge Production (Vienna) and since 2011 part of freethought, Platform for Research, Education and Production (London). In this context, she was also one of the artistic directors of the Bergen Assembly 2016 and has been BAK Fellow, basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht), since 2020. She publishes on contemporary art, educational theory, exhibitions, politics of history and anti-racism.