Communist Ghosts - On the crisis of European identities and contemporary art

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project aims at consolidating and disseminating the research of my doctoral thesis on the post-communist condition as a threshold experience. My project discusses the particular nature of post-communist space and time and argues that post-communist transitory sites allow for new perspectives on the contemporary crisis of modern identities as they capture and bring to life the ambiguities at the heart of European modernity. Post-communist sites, as conceptualized in my project, are transitory psychosocial spaces which were created after the breakdown of European communism and the subsequent return of Eastern European countries to the so-called West. I argue that the relation of these transitory sites to dominant structures and experiences in the West is not one of strict otherness but of failed identity, in the sense that these sites reveal the fragility, fraudulence and finitude of the ideals and principles that have formed Europe's enlightenment project. They have been shaped by the conceptual frameworks and narratives of modern Europe but they represent particular instances and experiences in which these modern structures, their temporalities and identities, have been severely disrupted and undone. They don't offer returns to 'other' histories or non-European narratives nor do they allow for progressing towards a new stage in the evolution of European history, but they force us to acknowledge and confront the ambiguities and contemporary impasses characterizing today's Europe and its modern history. Post-communist sites, so the main argument of this project, are therefore sources for a critical reengagement with European modernity as they demand to rethink the modern project without ignoring or repressing the contradictions and the violence that have characterized its history. Alongside the epistemological argument, this project makes also a methodological claim by stressing that as liminal sites post-communist threshold experiences need to be explored through forms of knowledge production that are sensitive to the contradictory, sensual and uncanny realm of transitory sites. By drawing on aesthetic, social and psychoanalytic theory I show how contemporary artistic practice contains tools and strategies through which the particular nature of transitory sites and specifically of post-communist sites can be expressed and known. My argument on post-communist sites therefore starts from artistic situations and the symbolism used in particular contemporary artworks which engage with the material/social fabric of the post-communist realm. It uses these not to know the art through the means of thought but to develop an alternative form of social theory and thus an alternative form of knowledge which can be achieved if social theory mimics the forms and contents of contemporary art. When transmitted in art, post-communist sites, I argue, turn into sources for a particular form of knowing and remembering Europe's history which on the one hand brings to life painful memories of past catastrophes that fail to be comprehended across the continent, such as the disappearance of Europe's Jewish community or the structural violence enacted by totalitarian regimes, while simultaneously triggering memories of the radical hopes and ideals (freedom, social justice, communism) associated with the European project. Post-communist transitory sites are thus sources for an alternative, reflexive and critical epistemology which seeks to reactualize modern visions and practices while working through the catastrophes caused by the anti-semitic, racist and colonial social realities which have characterized Europe's history so far.