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Introduction: Being Afterward

This began for me some years ago, during a few days in Lima. I was there to work with the Red Conceptualismos del Sur (Network of Southern Conceptualisms) on an exhibition they were preparing about the disappeared histories of artistic militancy in opposition to the dictatorships and state violence of 1980s Latin America.¹ The group of mostly young researchers had convened to share their findings with one another and to fit those pieces together into a whole. The intensity of that meeting rendered me, literally, speechless: It was clear that the project was not merely an act of historical vindication, since these were histories that cut to the anguished core of a legacy that was felt on the most intimate terms.

After that, I began to notice more and more of these acts of return to the radical past, and it seemed to me that they had a few things in mind, and in common. There was a sense of confrontation, in the form of a commitment to undo the cynical erasure of histories that had been deemed inconvenient but that held—maybe—importance in the present; such confrontations moved amid the uses and shadows of those traumatic, insurrectionary legacies, tracing their presence through absence. There was often a sense of participation, rather than merely a recounting or recapturing of the past; a gesture of insertion into thwarted and unrequited historical projects in order to heal them or bring them to a close. This, it seemed to me, extended the meridian of doubt opened in any historical return, variously caressing or brutalizing the moments to which the redeemers went back. There was radicalization: Radical histories demanded a radical response, their unrequitedness pushing the question of what to do now.² And, sometimes, there was reparation, conciliation—a recuperative register, springing from the license of a dream. Vectors, conferring on memory the power to unlock the past and return it to the present as a force field of utopian imagining; whirlpools, returns drawn back in, then spinning out from that; legends, taunting companions with whom we still walk. All this arises out of the acuity with which we desire and need to know the past—all the more so, perhaps, when it has been withheld from us.

All those histories that have been lost or cancelled out—whether of revolution, violence, resistance, or defiance—we go back in order to reclaim, declaim, or learn from them. This continual process of return is at the heart of some of the most disconcerting, difficult, and compelling artworks I’ve seen in recent years: There’s a pervasive sense of many scores still remaining unsettled and of a need to return that is fueled, in large measure, by the painfully asymptotic footing of our time. Current aspirations for meaningful participation in the urgent struggles of the present resonate powerfully against earlier experiments along those lines that are lost and then brought, later on, to light. These are projects that come out of powerful emotional attachments and that, in turn, often arouse painful and conflictive feelings in their viewers.

We Are Afterward

Looking back like this now could be fraught. Self-validating victimization narratives abound in American popular culture (think Trump): Trauma is sacralized, steeped in what Michael Roth has called “the awesome stimulation of the negative sublime,”³ and claims to victimhood flourish. Ours is a society bound to its traumatic experiences, contends Patrick Duggan, a “wound culture” in which “trauma has become a cultural trope.”⁴ Even if we don’t do it outright, this ubiquitization often verges on the trivialization of “trauma”: We’ve come to give a lot of psychic space to our wounds. Nevertheless, our world is haunted and besieged by its lingering pasts: The global proliferation of truth and reconciliation commissions since the 1990s is testament enough to this festering condition. A post-traumatic condition, as Geoffrey Hartman noted in 2004, “begins to resemble the human condition as a whole.”⁵

But some of those wounding pasts cut deeper than others. The works I look at here are tellings in the wake of historical watersheds—foundational and precipitate moments in the history of twentieth-century radical politics. The Cuban Revolution is an existential question at the heart of “Lupe at the Mic,” an account of Tania Bruguera’s 2009 performance Tatlin’s Whisper. Patricio Guzmán’s decades-long cycle of returns to Allende’s Chile, to its destruction, and to the structures of its forgetting is the subject of “The Tenuous Moonlight of an Unrequited Past.” Herta Müller’s aching denominator—“Something That Opens a Wish and Closes a Door”—provides the starting point for a journey through the recountings of the thwarted 1989 revolution in Romania in Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s Videograms of a Revolution and Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest. And the cascading reactions in postwar West Germany—the denial of the Nazi past and the ways that came to shape and deform ideas of justice in the succeeding generation—are the infernal tangle at the heart of “Whoever Knows the Truth Lies,” considered here through the film Germany in Autumn and Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 suite of paintings.

The fallout from the denial of the past, the betrayed promise of popular revolution, the normalization of modern state-sponsored terror, the miasmatic death throes of ideological collapse. Four forms of extreme political and psychological violence, each one upping the ante of what the state would justify in its own name—of the “superposition of life and death,” in Hito Steyerl’s chilling diagnosis, as a “standard feature of … [twentieth-century] government.”⁶ Four challenges to the very idea of an emancipatory movement. Four forms of damage, of disbelief, that have by now hardened into routine, no longer felt in their awful rawness. Parts of a process, steps along the way, that lead to what we can now find ourselves accepting as the grain against which we live our lives.

Four manners of denying the past, leaving people isolated, afraid, angry, silenced, desiring. Four moments in which a state of being “missing” became paramount: missing through denial, erasure, and institutionalized forgetting. But why does that matter so much? That’s a central question for this book, along with its pendant query about what exactly it is that we want from the past—the radical past, in particular, especially in the wake of its failures. These tellings deal with legacies of political struggle and transcendent hope, of risk, cravenness, of societies that have done horrific, immoral things on a drastic scale. Their relation to the past hurts, it heals; the past hides and is hidden, insists and refuses our entreaties for connection. The tellings broach affective recognition, identification; they flinch, alienate, and explode; they live in a state of doubt. They ask the age-old question of how we are to live with—or without—the past. What we see in these tellings, and in the whole genre of such works, is a complicated effort to discern what those pasts might mean to us now and, no less, why the fact of their being missing is such a problem. The missing leads us contradictorily, to want and dread the truth: The missing stays with us through its absence, like a foreign body unrelenting in our unconscious.

These are tellings about and from societies that have much to fear from the past and, for that matter, from themselves and their capacity to inflict such tremendous harm. They raise questions about remembering, representing, repeating, returning, and relating; about generational succession and inheriting pasts; about the half-life of messianic hope: They open up questions about the possibilities of telling.

Horizon

These works are intent on the past. They tell and retell those pasts in the interests of the radical energies that they embodied and unleashed, and they tell and retell them in the face of the retributions they engendered. Much of the writing about recovering the radical past points toward a project of rediscovery and redemption, a reworking in order to release their emancipatory potential: They’re in the business of verifying, affirming, cementing.⁷ But these works handle the matter of legacy differently. Martha Minow reminds us that, while “responses to collective violence lurch among rhetorics of history (truth), theology (forgiveness), justice (punishment, compensation and deterrence), therapy (healing), art (commemoration and disturbance), and education (learning lessons),” the fact remains that “None is adequate.”⁸ What we’ll find here, then, is not so straightforward and not so resolute: These returns trace uncertain horizons and sketch a condition of shared precariousness among the ordeal, its wake, and its telling. That condition of precariousness comes into view not as a crisis to be overcome but as something that is constitutive of our lives and with which we need to come to terms. The works evince the psychic afterlives of these histories, which extend beyond the terminable and remediable affairs of politics, speaking of the interminable project that parses justice in terms other than those of vengeance or conciliation. They reformulate history-work into a meter that persists, insists, pulses, and activates an emotion of recognition. The past as gnarled parentage, space of residues, “glimmer of an intimation that could animate a different future.”⁹ Our indecisive markers, sites of return: These are histories that need untangling, in no small measure because in them the loss itself has been lost.

We’re faced with the quandary of how it might be possible to tell these pasts, given that trauma resists telling by its very nature, and so these works straddle the dialectic between the impossibility and the urgency of really knowing the ordeals that they tell: They’re frames that make telling possible. Their consistency is in their fragility, told in languages made of pauses and fragments, told in a confusion of past and present, a time of nonhistorical form in which Then and Now punctuate each other. Told in minor voicings, they live in the time of consequences. They are deeply personal, but not in the business of revelation: Truth, History, Knowing, all shorn of their claims to certainty. Their claim is not of pure seeing but of a kind that is born of the lived interplay and tension between hope and fear. They tell of that dynamic with the im mediacy and urgency that their condition of being afterward demands. Or, to put it another way, they accept that being afterward, as we are, is a boundless process: Boundlessness is a condition perhaps more readily associated with love, but it’s deeply affiliated, too, with the condition of attachment to an unrequited past.

The works share a condition of being afterward; they’re tellings in the wake. They tell the undersong of these histories, of the wreckage of emancipatory hopes and energies and the consequences of that, and they tell in these kinds of languages so they might offer a different way to live afterward. Quarrels flicker throughout these incursions from the destroying past, but they hold fast to their relation to those difficult and suspended projects, respecting the ways that they’ve touched the world.

This book began as an effort to understand why we return to the radical pasts that have been lost to us and to learn what it might be that we want from them: to understand what work they can, or cannot, actually do. But if, at first, I was focused on those processes of reclamation, over time the center has shifted to the experience of the loss itself—that which forms the desire to go back. From reclamation to trauma’s tailwind. We are, Judith Butler says, marked for life by trauma, “and that mark is insuperable, irrecoverable. It becomes the condition by which life is risked, by which the questions of whether one can move, and with whom, and in what way are framed and incited by the irreversibility of loss itself.”¹⁰ The condition by which life is risked.

These are works that hit a nerve and can’t be easily dismissed, works that raise, and don’t put down, a question that matters: From what perspective might we best understand the historical condition we live in now, our own broken time of fearsome shadow and echo? The world I’m writing into today is volatile and ominous. We’re full of fear: This is what it feels like to stand on the brink of the maelstrom, to be aware of impending calamities, but also to live with them. The bewilderment of loss, the indescribable anguish of living in a condition of aftermath, the gradual narrowing of hope, shot into a future that is radically unknown. We want to be moved by the untamed world of the past, and not only metaphorically. Our fear is that its meanings will be lost.

These tellings tell their stories in ways that allow them to belong to people other than those who had laid claim to them; they tell their pasts differently. They tell their pasts against simple repetition, and they tell them as a claim for their importance, their continued traction. They tell them toward a different kind of thinking about radicalism, utopianism, and to do that they break narrative form open: forsaking the typical modalities for narrating such pasts (progress, loss, return)¹¹ and for leaving them (truth and reconciliation commissions, above all), sounding those pasts in idioms that hit home otherwise. They don’t rescue; they don’t champion; they don’t campaign. They refuse to leave their pasts behind, and they propose other ways to think about these legacies that haunt us.

This is a book about the stories we tell ourselves about the past and about some pasts in particular—radical ones, ones we loved or despised and ones ascribed to the ranks of failure, for the most part. Ones, however, that still matter, that we look to and ask for meaning, ones we hope into or harken to. Ones that, we suspect, can tell us something we need to know in light of present urgencies. Ones that can tell us things about how we might live in the present, if we learn how to ask about these pasts. This present, with its capacity to disgust and enrage; this present, which has taken shape in parallel to my writing, is the setting against which I read these painful but optimistic tellings (all attachments, says Lauren Berlant, are optimistic, since they pull us outside of ourselves). It matters how we tell these pasts, and this will be an effort to read some of these retold pasts toward that end.