The Implicated Subject by Rothberg Michael;

Author:Rothberg, Michael; [Rothberg, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503609600
Publisher: Stanford UP
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 9. Still image from The Legacy of Abused Children: From Poland to Palestine, a looped projection by Alan Schechner. Courtesy of the artist.

FIGURE 10. Still image from The Legacy of Abused Children: From Poland to Palestine, a looped projection by Alan Schechner. Courtesy of the artist.

However, if one reading of The Legacy of Abused Children places it securely in the equation/solidarity quadrant of the map of memory, a rereading of the work also suggests another possibility. Through its self-consciously manipulated form, Legacy undermines deterministic genealogical explanations that present an endless cycle of reciprocal violence and reproduce notions of two victim peoples. The digitally manipulated photographs ironize “realist” accounts of causality. Hence, even as the endless loop of the video suggests the circular nature of violence, it also subverts all claims to the morally justified originary position of the victim that frequently justifies violence—and certainly does so in the Israeli case, where Holocaust memory has been mobilized for just this purpose.40 The particular nature of the photographic manipulation is also crucial and leads us back to the question of implication: in placing a photograph in each boy’s hand, Schechner transforms an image of absolute innocence and abject powerlessness into one of solidarity, defiance, and constrained agency.41 Indeed, one might say that Schechner transforms the children from pure victims into victims who can also conceive themselves as implicated subjects. Their suffering is not canceled by being placed in relation to the suffering of the other, but rather recontextualized. If Robinson deploys an appropriative logic, this rereading of The Legacy of Abused Children suggests that analogy need not function in this way. By deconstructing the claims to origin that underlie much of the rhetoric of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (in terms of land claims and suffering), the artwork offers the possibility that analogy can become part of a depropriative and transformative work of memory in which the juxtaposition of different histories reorganizes understanding of both. Ultimately, of course, the implicated subjects—and potential subjects of solidarity—at issue here are not the boys in the images, but the artist himself and many of the artwork’s viewers. Indeed, Schechner challenges viewers to consider their own implicated relation to the histories of violence depicted in the piece—and by analogy to other histories of victimized children.

In opening up a potentially differentiated solidarity along the lines illuminated by Du Bois, Schechner’s work begins to imagine the outlines of a new conception of justice—one in which transcultural comparison does not simply produce commensurability out of difference, but reconfigures the elements it brings together. Cultural memory and discourses on the past do not themselves constitute institutionalized agencies capable of redressing injustices. However, they can create arenas where injustices are recognized and new frameworks are imagined that are necessary if not sufficient for their redress.

Nancy Fraser, whose work helped us rethink redress for slavery in the previous chapter, characterizes the production of such new frameworks of justice as a two-step process: first, she argues, we need to recognize how many conflicts arise

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