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Goldfarb Source: International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 19, No. 1/2, The New Sociological Imagination II (Dec., 2005), pp. 53-67 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20059694 . Accessed: 13/09/2013 10:35
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DOI
Published ? Springer
online:
Science
Media,
LLC 2007
Abstract
In this paper using reflections on a dramatic moment in the life of the author's ethnographic study of theater in Poland as a starting point, the relationship between art and politics is analyzed. The relationship between two central propositions is explored, leading to a conclusion: (1) Cultural freedom is a d?finitive characteristic of modern social life and (2) the freedom constituted by culture as the arts and sciences opens up public space for alternative social and political practices, and thus: cultural freedom is a base for political freedom. Applying these propositions to a study of theater in Poland, it is shown that art constitutes cultural freedom through its relative autonomy, and the politics of small things
results. Societies are transformed.
Key
words
Theater
Politics
Freedom
At the time, the circumstances of my arrest in Poland, seemed trivial. I hardly thought about them afterward. But now, when I consider the fall of 1989, and the fall of communism, my little run in with the Polish authorities seems highly suggestive of
how things were then and what has since come to be.
With these words, I opened my book After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe (Goldfarb 1992). I used a description of my brief detention in Lublin at a student theater festival to reveal the struggle for a free public in Communist times. I used my memory of the event to open my exploration of the relationships between public and private, the official and the unofficial, and how those relationships formed the bases for the
J. C. Goldfarb (El) of Sociology, New School for Social Research, Department 65 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003, USA e-mail: goldfarj@newschool.edu
?) Springer
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54
Goldfarb
pursuit of democracy of post communist Central Europe. Today, Iwould like to return to my experience in 1974 as a way to open a more general discussion about the relationship
between art and freedom, and its political significance. The way art and freedom were
related
in the dark times of "modern tyranny" (Hannah Arendt's definition of as a serve on will for reflections the between totalitarianism), starting point relationship
in our present, rather dark, circumstances. In developing these reflections, I
will take three steps. Iwill startwith a return to my account of my run inwith the Lublin authorities of the Polish People's Republic.1 Iwill then reflect upon how the run in informs an understanding of the relationship between art and freedom. With this understanding, I will consider how the freedom constituted through art can and has supported what I call "the politics of small things." Iwill thus be connecting my work on theater in the 1970s with my work on the power of the powerless in the world today.
The Arrest Disorientation iswhat I remember about thatApril afternoon in Lublin, when the People's Militia detained me for a couple of hours. I was attending a Festival of Youth Theaters.
Because such theaters were an important arena for cultural experimental and critical
political expression, Iwas writing my Ph.D. dissertation about them. This dissertation led to the publication of my first book, The Persistence The Sociological of Freedom: Implications of Polish Student Theater (Goldfarb 1980). But the bulk of the theater presentations in Lublin thatweek were not very interesting. Some of the best theater groups of the Polish youth movement were not represented in this relatively minor festival, and
others of mediocre theater quality critics, were in great number. directors, and actors were generally a colorful When dissatisfied, Veteran journalists, little more
It took place
slide show, a group
in a
and of
it ended,
to make
They real
things more
stood one
to go outside with
their merrymaking
The journalists under the sheet led the other members of the audience, along with the actors of the failed performance, down two flights of stairs onto a busy thoroughfare in downtown Lublin. As soon as they hit the street, their act of ordinary horseplay became a public event. Traffic stopped. Crowds formed on both sides of the street. Theater at an open in marveling participants mingled with shoppers, clerks, and workers
spontaneous public event.
Most
particularly
seemed
to enjoy
the break
one man
in an oversized
companion started shouting at those under the sheet: "You will hurt yourselves!" "Not only yourselves, but others!" "You can't breathe properly under there! And the like. With a
refined, cosmopolitan sense of what happenings were supposed to provoke, the theater
people laughed and enjoyed the couple's contribution to the show. Others just scoffed at them and shouted back at them to leave the kids alone. The couple left. With that the
]The following
the Fall,
p 1-7.
?} Springer
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Why
Theater?
55
interest of the passersby dissipated, and the happening moved on. The sheet being turned up a side street and draped itself over a small Italian Fiat 850-S with German tourist license
car. plates: my Some friends the next logical coaxed step was me into the car with the engine, the at my sheet Polish performers. colleagues' When it was clear I turned that on
to start
instigation,
the ignition. Ten seconds later, the man in car and, with a paddywagon behind him, People's Militia, and he politely indicated At the militia headquarters, we had to
personal "legitmacja," I my American
the oversized trenchcoat swept the sheet off my showed us his identification. He was with the thatwe were to follow him. hand in our papers. The Poles presented their
Then we were taken to a secured lockup
passport.
to be at this
performance
and political order had been breached. They wanted to put an end to the event in as uncompromising a way as possible. But the officers on duty did not seem to have the
authority to either release us, or further process our detention.
They told us that they had to confirm our story with the theater festival organizers. But first they confiscated film from the cameras of the journalist photographers. And then we
waited.
Iwas nervous and angry with myself. Like other American scholars visiting Poland, at the very beginning of my year and a half stay in Poland, I had been warned by the security chief of the American embassy not to take part in illegal political activities. Now, just as I was about to finish my research, I had disobeyed his advice and gotten myself arrested. But the advice was not easy to follow in my case. Aside from the fact that the American official's cloak and dagger speech had been hard to take seriously (in a safe room in the embassy), itwas difficult to realize on the day of the happening that anything political was
developing.
As it happened, geopolitics was a key to that day's events. Lublin is in eastern Poland, close then to the Soviet border. It had been the first seat of the Soviet supported provisional government, formed under the cover of the red Army in opposition to theWestern-backed government in exile. On the day of the theater festival, a special Soviet delegation was commemorating Soviet-Polish friendship. And so the Polish authorities, who usually
demonstrated little tolerance for unsupervised at public activity, were especially touchy.
Ordinarily, their attitude to youth theater involved a typically socialist repressive tolerance.
Youth critical theater students. was viewed It kept by them those off the the streets, top as a carefully out of politics. its mere controlled The students for valve safety a could create
fictive world of critical judgement, but through censorship and controlled publicity,
world was contained, and at the same time existence gave the appearance
that
of
liberalism. If it hadn't been for the Soviet delegation that day, the militia might have very well ignored the public disorder, or dispatched uniformed police to stop it gently. After all,
even in the free West, use street performers police was and demonstrators necessary to show needed permits. But on an open of undercover the Soviet comrades that day, that Polish
the Polish game of control and tolerance, repression and the less subtle Soviet totalitarianism, as well as the
come to an end. The means to such an end explain
repressive
transformation
of dynamic movements
agents. In the Soviet Union,
of political
when ? the
Springer
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56
was came
Goldfarb
repression
lifted,
first
the change
from
above
and
then
there was
confusion
and
disorder from below, inmany of the former Soviet Republics, strikingly in Russia. While we were locked up in themilitia station, my Polish friends, veterans of Poland's subtle politics of cultural life, assured me that nothing serious would happen. They
realistically assessed our situation. If I weren't there, some greater unpleasantness might
ensue. Maybe
charged. But
they would be detained for the permissible 48 hours without being formally
our little escapade on the street was not really significant, and the city
wouldn't want to risk an international incident over it. Indeed, the local party hacks might have been afraid that their actions would meet disapproval inWarsaw. Itwas the era of
d?tente. Western Poland was governments experiencing and banks. an Tensions apparent were economic relaxed and boom political based on loans was from not to muscle
be flexed. Therefore, the Poles predicted that we would wait for a few hours and then would be warned and released. And they turned out to be right. After 2 h our papers were returned (though not the film) and we were released with a warning not to take part again
in an unauthorized theater event.
In spite of the assurances, when I returned to the festival and later to my apartment in Warsaw, Iwas shaken up. I had not intended to become involved in Polish politics, except to study its relation to Polish culture. I knew the relationship was intimate, but hadn't expected to be caught up in it. Yet, the whole adventure almost immediately became the subject of jokes, and I soon forgot it. But Iwas to be reminded of it again.
A photographer what in our had group, it seemed, And had somehow after but the managed event, to retain a weekly rendition a roll of film in Red documenting Krakow happened. an account?not months story, newspaper of Little
published
a news
a comic-book
Riding Hood. The sheet-being was depicted as Little Red Riding Hood, and the city street became the forest in which we met the Big Bad Wolf: the undercover agent who finally
showed his teeth when we were in Grandmother's House?my car. The newspaper didn't
reveal all of the circumstances of the arrest, but it clearly showed the political police doing
its work. In retrospect, or read I realize about. that It crossed this happening the divide was between more successful and than any other and I have it also
observed
the aesthetic
encompassing It began its own repressive inside on the street, because the authorities outside settings. The authorities wanted
a life of
its own,
a large and formidable context: itwas forced did only not permit
territory. to occur
reflections
performances innovation,
of that
conventional
channeled
without the proper channels, cultural autonomy might not easily find acceptable limits. But those in the world of theater, as well as in the other arts and sciences, pushed limits as a matter of fundamental principle; and in Lublin that day, they did it spontaneously.
There was a certain banality about those events in Lublin. The performance was
mediocre. The fact that passersby paid attention to a group of kids fooling around on a city sidewalk in a closed society could be understood as little more than totalitarian version of rubbernecking on a busy American highway. When the man in the trenchcoat intervened, trying tomaintain the appearance of order for the special Soviet guests, I doubt if he or his colleagues had in mind any grand principles, political projects, or ideals. They certainly didn't even like what they were doing. As individuals of independent judgement, they may
very well have known that there was it was much just ado a little about ripple next streets of Lublin. In the end, of disorder to nothing on that afternoon a very calm on the sea. But
and exercise
paid,
were
?) Springer
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Why
Theater?
57
to enforce and comply with the despotic order actually made the order work. In the great majority of the Polish population supported the order in one way or
with reference to this social configuration that Hannah Arendt, the major critical
theorist of totalitarianism, coined the term the "banality of evil" in her controversial essay Eichmann in Jerusalem. One of the most evil men in history, Adolf Eichmann, appears in
Arendt's account advancement, apparently as a Everyman, modern-day not even cognizant concerned of his about his career, responsibilities family, for genocide. and With social less
horrific implications, the same process was evident on the day of my detention. But the banal evil, the enforcement of total control without reflection, was met in Lublin by a complex but submerged political good, by a public freedom, constituted in the relatively
autonomous cultural sphere of theater, of art. The police enforced a totalitarian control of
public
opened
joyfully
they saw
an autonomous
they acquiesced
to the
But the journalists were fighting back. This was not their first run-in with the authorities, which was made evident by their cool appraisal of the situation. And more significantly, even while we were locked up, they were forging on: the photographer hid his pictures, and an editor was imagining a way for our little escapade to be brought to the attention of the broad public. This activity of the young intellectuals was part of a long struggle with totalized political regimes over the issue of free public space. The happening revealed the nature of the battlefield. On the one side were the soft and hard totalitarians. On the other side were those
who were became who were For well the rulers, provoked true to their cultural collaborators "living with in truth." theater was youth it was their situation, a safety valve. For a base for freedom those and involved for what in this I call theater, who couldn't and resistance. help vocations, their struggling saw those who In the words for room to act on their own, who it, and those the room of Vaclav so created, Havel, enjoyed there were
the authorities,
understanding
the politics
of small things.
propositions
concerning
between art and freedom both then and now. They are propositions that have animated my studies in the sociology of culture and politics since that fateful afternoon.
1. Culture, as the arts and sciences, is a structural feature of modern social orders that has
2.
a relative autonomy from the other structures in the social order, particularly from the structures of reproduction of the social order, that is from the state and the economy.2 Cultural freedom is a definitive characteristic of modern social life. The freedom constituted by culture as the arts and sciences opens up public space for alternative social and political practices. Cultural freedom is a base for political freedom.
2For a comparative
(1983).
Springer
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58
Goldfarb
In societies
controlled
and
directed
by Communist
parties,
there were
structural
supports
for cultural freedom. While in retrospect the ideological control and direction of cultural life is what is most striking about Communist cultural policy, in comparison to the post
communist believing system, communists, with but its censorship also mainstream and propaganda, sociologists, there even was Talcott more going on. along True with Parsons,
his major critics such as Alvin Gouldner, knew that the communist system was an alternative, competing modern social order (Gouldner 1971; Parsons 1971). The communist
order was modern, in its aspirations and many of its policies. There was a commitment to
social development along with ideology. The arts and sciences were called upon to serve the socialist system, but in order to do so they had to have an identity beyond their ideological definition. They had to accomplish the same goals and functions achieved in
liberal social orders.
This is most clear in the sciences, but is also quite evident in the arts. Scientists and artists had to be trained in their disciplines. While the criteria of ideology interfered in disciplinary development, if the disciplinary development was not permitted on its own, the discipline died. The viability of the alternative modernity would then be weakened, and this could undermine the system. A striking case in point was that of Soviet genetics in time of Lysenko (Roll-Hansen 2004). But the more ordinary circumstance was for interference to
occur, with but greater the or course lesser of science and the arts success: sometimes leading to or at to proceed in opposition to the interference, to a more driven work, ideologically censor.
sometimes
was
tomore
independent work. There was censorship, but the thing being censored
in opposition least apart from the rules of the
constantly
reproduced
Both the limits and the cultural reproduction were variables. I saw both on the day of my detention in Lublin. Artists were constrained to operate within ideologically defined limits, but they
constantly tested the limits, and, more importantly, art. in their training they were taught be no
aesthetics
instruction
primarily before
before the latest
ideology. Color
party line on
into painting
socialist
there would
art. In the end, what went on in a science lab in the Soviet bloc was not thatmuch different
than what occurred in comparable settings beyond the more the bloc. Because science could develop
in this way,
Empirically,
it was
the more
a significant
purely scientific,
zone of
independence
clear the
from
ideological
definition.
independence.
And itmust be pointed out that this situation is not that much different from that of market directed political economies. In these, culture must find financial support. The arts
and sciences are under significant pressure to operate in some way that is related to the
bottom line, as we say in the States. As Nancy Hanrahan has put it in the case of music, there is "the sound of money" (Hanrahan 2000). Music exists when its development is independent of monetary imperatives, or at least not dominated by them. A music tradition ends when there is nothing in it other than money's sound. Turning back to the old bloc, in disciplines where the line between the cultural and the
political were not easily drawn, in the social sciences and the arts, things were more
complicated, but therewas independence nonetheless. My little experience in Lublin revealed the nature of the complexities. The makers of the happening were embedded in a tradition of experimental theater, both responding to a theater form dating to the first part of the
nineteenth present theaters in Poland, and to the alternative century a work to their national and international responding of the west. colleagues, They both were of to trying the present
day and of the past. By keeping the tradition alive and by responding to contemporary work, they contributed to cultural freedom. Put under the restrictions of the regime, they did not do this in a very interesting way, and, itmust be said, the restrictions of their imagination may ? Springer
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Why
Theater?
59
been
even
greater theater
than action
of
spontaneous politically
challenging,
also
But else, they did stimulate something not only because theater more it interesting, A cultural later theater group, grounds.
Akademia Ruchu, worked exactly with such material with great inventiveness and cultural and political success in the eighties. A cultural form, thus, developed. As I observe Pogranicza in Sejny, today this form is reaching its full potential.3 Such development is a consequence of a created independent public space. In the Lublin
case, this was In observed. repressed, the arts but beyond and sciences, that situation, there was a something logic enduring that pointed can be and powerful to the power that
transformed the geopolitical system. Cultural freedom contributed in a significant way to political freedom. I don't think this is the place to try to develop a clear and definitive philosophical understanding of cultural freedom or of political freedom. Itwould lead us too far afield, and besides it is beyond my competence, perhaps such clarity is not even possible. Rather, I will approach the theoretical issue pragmatically, by summarizing my past research on cultural freedom and the political theory of Hannah Arendt to examine the link between art and freedom as the ground for consequential independence and critical politics. In On Cultural Freedom, Imaintain that "cultural freedom, in light of the experience of the East and theWest, is constituted by critical creative culture, informed by and extending given cultural traditions, received in a relatively free public sphere" (Goldfarb 1983, p. 2). In her essay "What is Freedom?" Hannah Arendt argues for a specifically political understanding of freedom. She identifies "the faculty of freedom" with "the sheer capacity to begin, which animates and inspires all human activities and is the hidden source of all the
great and beautiful things. But as long as this source remains hidden, freedom is not a
worldly, tangible reality; that is, it is not political" (Arendt 1968, p. 169). The Lublin case reveals the link between cultural and political freedom enacted.
In the move from the gymnasium to the streets, we observed the contours of the demise
freedom.
the basis of action of the democratic opposition of the late 1970s and Solidarnosc in the 1980s. The art opened the space for free action. It constituted freedom immediately, and when itwas brought out into the open, it had large political consequences. Cultural freedom was something that was quite observable throughout the Soviet
experience. Artists and scientists maintained coherent conversations with their predecessors
and contemporaries extending their disciplines. They did this in a way thatwas beyond the logic of the reproduction of the "socialist system," following the logic of their cultural
concerns. To paraphrase Milan Kundera, novelists answered and discussed among
themselves in their works the questions raised by Cervantes, as did a broad range of other artists (Kundera 1988). Their freedom was accomplished using a variety of supports and
tactics. In gaming with the censor, national traditions were extended. Inherent contra
dictions of socialist cultural policies were exploited, as were complexities of the system of support and controls of the arts, which allowed for zones of greater freedom from the centralized state ideological apparatus. This was something I analyzed intensively in the case of Polish Student Theater (Goldfarb 1980). Cultural freedom in the arts became the support for genuine political freedom when it became openly visible. Fleetingly, this occurred in Lublin in 1973, as the democratic
3I describe website: this cultural group in the concluding pages of this paper. For information on its activities see its
http://www.pogranicze.sejny.pl.
Springer
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60
Goldfarb
opposition in Poland developed in the mid and the late 1970s and then flourished in the Solidarity period, this became more enduring and a significant challenge to the prevailing
socialist order.
The real challenge to the old regime occurred when the critical chose to secede from the rules of the game of the socialist order. They walked downstairs out of the auditorium supplied by the authorities and onto the street. They stopped playing the games of officialdom and they started writing their own scripts. They began towrite without thinking
about the censor. They acted as if they lived in a free society, and as a consequence they
created their own political freedom. They spoke their own language, distinct from the newspeak of the official order, "beyond glasnost" (Goldfarb 1989). Often starting with the
space others. created They by free created each other. They art, they met a capacity to act in concert. And spoke they and did acted so act. in the presence In Arendt's of sense,
they created and exercised political power, as the opposite of coercion.4 In Poland this occurred over a long period of time, step by step a special zone of cultural
freedom emerged and supported an ever more open political At freedom. Free art supported
ideological
supported regime,
content was
the new late 1940s
simple.
through
by in the
authorities.
"agit-prop" productions.
simple cabaret-theater
in 1956, their
form
Student Satirical Theater, STS, among a number of other such theaters from around the country, a space was open for independent judgement by simply quoting newspapers and raising eyebrows. And then even in the face of escalating political repression, following the brief liberalization of 1956, they developed as a place for the carnivalesque and the theatrically innovative, where the great works of the Polish avant garde, of Stanislaw Witkiewicz andWitold Gombrowiz, had their Polish premiers. Political pressure increased,
but artistic innovation was the response. It was this innovation coupled with political
daring, which formed the work of these theaters in the 1970s. Itwas my good fortune to study these theaters at a high point. In theaters from Poznan (Theater of the Eighth Day), Lodz (77), Krakow (STU and Pleonazmus), Wroclaw (Kalambur and Nawias) and Lublin and (Teatr Plastyczna of KUL), among others, through theatrical experimentation
refinement, worlds of independent nor cultural and political sensibility nor was created.
The politics of these theaters was hard to describe using conventional political means.
They were neither communist anti-communist, a-political. They used official
rhetoric to explain what they were doing, "teatr zaangazowany," supported by the Polish Socialist Student Association. But their engagement and their socialism were clearly not what Party ideologues had inmind. They ferociously gamed with the censor. But they had no political project other than their cultural independence. In terms of my day in Lublin, they remained in the gymnasium and did not go out to the streets, but what they produced
in their officially supported spaces was of great cultural value. There was a vernacular
poetry of the body in the tradition of Stanislavsky and Grotowski (Eight Day, Nawias) and (STU). There was the profanity and grand spectacle in the tradition of Meyerhold absurdism of Gombrowicz (77) and the visual aesthetics combining the Bread and Puppet
in Arendt
(1968,
pp. 227-264).
Springer
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Why
Theater?
61
All
in People's
the sociological structure and dynamics of Polish society and of socialism from these theaters than I did from my social science colleagues in and beyond the old bloc, as I tried to explain in my first two books. Indeed as I progress in my work, including in these reflections here, I find myself returning to the insights I learned from those theaters to this
day.
But there were limitations. The authorities positively supported the theaters. Moving beyond this support, stepping down the stairs into the street, turned out to be world historic.
Three years after that afternoon in Lublin, such steps became an on going societal project,
with broad political consequences. It started in space of embedded freedom, and moved in the direction of open freedom. It started with a protest against changes in the constitution in 1975 and in a social effort to support workers arrested for their participation in protests against food price increases of 1976, and it ended with the collapse of the Soviet regime in Poland and beyond. In between was the democratic opposition of the 1970s, Solidarnosc, above and below ground, in the eighties, and the elections of 1989, which ushered in the
first here. post-communist I do want But in post government a theoretical to make war Poland. observation. I obviously same The cannot logic as retell it applied this history to the
arts was applied ever more broadly in public life. InArendt's terms, the capacity to bring something new into the world was brought out into the open, and political freedom was
constituted.5
After the strikes of 1976, the democratic opposition was born. The Committee toDefend Workers (KOR) was formed as an independent social support system, and, starting with Zapis (Censored), an independent publishing and cultural system was created. A key to these activities is that they were in the open. The membership of KOR was public, as were editorial board and contributors of independent publishing. They acted in a sense in a
normal period, open fashion. not Their means were their ends. Like the student or theaters of In the the earlier 1980s, it they were It operated as a union explicitly communist or anti-communist a-political.
was the same form of political freedom that empowered Solidarnosc, both above and under
ground. action, not and the old regime, against primarily an social movement, independent but apart from it, and in its zone and enduring of it created important
contributed significantly
The Politics
of Small Things
This was the major finding of my studies of theater and the democratic opposition in Poland. As I observed it, there was an unlikely but actual progression, from student theater to the democratic opposition to Solidarnosc, to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Obviously, this was not a matter of causation. But it also was not only chance. In The Politics of Small Things, I attempt to show the link by developing a theory of an unexamined dimension of power, drawing upon the political theory of Hannah Arendt and the sociology of Erving Goffman (Goldfarb 2006). Now, to highlight how this linkwas also understood as amatter of theoretical reflection of practical actors, Iwant to show how Adam Michnik in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, two leading intellectuals of the democratic opposition, applied the logic of the politics of small things.
5See "What
is freedom,"
in Arendt
(1968,
pp.
143-172).
f? Springer
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62
on new evolutionism" and Havel's on "the power of
Goldfarb
Michnik's
essay
"the
the powerless,"
were drawn from the lessons of cultural freedom, they anticipated and accomplished the project of political freedom.6 They were essays, which were situated "between past and future," as Arendt would put it. I know itwas an accident that the first time Imet Michnik was in a student theater performance (In 1978 in the audience of a performance of Teatr STU inWarsaw). It is not an accident at all thatHavel, before he turned to political action, was an important absurdist playwright. in 1976 reflected on the difficulty of progressive transformation of the Michnik previously existing system. Radical transformation from below, "revolution," proved to be impossible, in East Germany of 1953, in Hungary of 1956 and in Poland of 1956, 1968, and 1970. Reform from above proved equally to be a failure in Poland of 1956 and in 1968. Reflecting on embedded freedoms revealed in the approaches to Czechoslovakia the Znak andWiez groups, liberal Catholic intellectual circles that acted on their of politics the in prevailing system, he suggested a long cultural march of reform from principles
below.
And Havel, Michnik's close friend and colleague, described the phenomenology of this cultural march with his notion that by "living in truth" "the powerless" could constitute a
distinctive form of power. In his stories about the greengrocer and the brew master, he
as supporters of the imagined what would happen if people refused to publicly appear was taken for granted). What of lack and order disbelief genuine support (their prevailing would happen if the greengrocers of theCommunist orders did not put the sign workers of the world unite in their shop windows along with the fruits and vegetables? What would happen if people dedicated to their cultural expertise, like the Havel's brew master, put the support of their expertise before ideological rituals of daily life?What would happen if theman in the trenchcoat put a commitment tomaintaining public safety and order, before the ideological
order? Both Michnik and Havel note the answer to these questions. The social order would be transformed.
Indeed, this iswhat happened, specifically in Poland. Broader circles of people began to act as if they lived in a free society. Cultural freedom supported political freedom. The link
between free culture When and people free came autonomous together, transformation. spoke yielded politics and acted the in each potential other's for presence, societal and
developed
the power
a capacity to act in concert, they created power, a kind of power that challenges
of coercion. The situational constitution of this power was revealed in Lublin. Its
potential
world.
long-term consequences
are evident
in the transformation
in our geopolitical
But I think, along with Arendt, that the greatest significance of this power is as an end in itself. The relative autonomy of culture is a particularly powerful support for the politics of small things. And, the link between free art, political freedom and the politics of small that happens in a things is not specific to Central Europe and it is not just something totalitarian situation. The power of art, political freedom and the politics of small things is
most dramatically revealed in the most repressive contexts, and the connection between the
arts and politics which has been a definitive one in Central Europe. Yet, this power is also important and not unchallenged in liberal democracies and beyond Central Europe.
evolutionism,"
in Michnik
(1987)
and Havel's
"The power
of
the powerless,"
in Wilson
(1992). ?} Springer
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Why
Theater?
63
Art, Freedom,
Moving down the stairs and onto the street transformed an embedded cultural freedom into an open political freedom that had very large implications. It anticipated the course of
history. But my account has been too rushed to this point. We went down those stairs and
onto the street a bit too quickly. Iwanted to show how small moves by ordinary people can have very big consequences; and since themoves I have been reporting have contributed to a world historic transformation, I have underscored this. Yet most political and cultural action, large and small, is not so linked to grand historical narratives, but can be of great
one, significance which nonetheless. must be Indeed, examined, there along is a contemporary with the temporal. social Art consequence, and freedom, a structural as they are
enacted, constitute a politics of small things that changes the social world. The ongoing immediate relationship between art and freedom is a societal end in itself, with
consequences. Understanding this will help us recognize the general significance, beyond
the historic narrative, ofthat day in Lublin. Iwill take one step backward, so that I can take
two steps forward.
Backward When Iwas studying student theater in Poland, of course, itwas not at all clear that such activities would anticipate historical transformations. These theaters, as I have
already noted, but want to emphasize, were not for the regime, or against the regime, or a
political. Their political significance was of a special sort, i.e. what Imean by "the politics
of small politics. To not that the theaters were It was in any way things." were of cultural It was that they, as centers freedom, some extent an ends instrument for in themselves. practical Polish
throughout the Soviet bloc. But the artistic brilliance and independence of the Polish Student Theater was unique. Without them, and other such relatively free artistic practices, Poland would be a very different kind of social order. There was accuracy in indicating that the countries of the Soviet Bloc had a "Soviet Type Society" (Arato 1993; Kennedy 1991).
A common relationship The relationships between between ideology and party and state led to very similar social and private, and leisure, work urban and rural, public were and followed similar and much else there also very Nonetheless, old, young patterns. common were to It to very observe differences. is how these differences related important structures.
different national histories. But the case of Polish Student Theater and similar movements
and institutions reveal how contemporary were. It mattered of practices at least as well as historical legacies determined
the powerless,
that it led toMichnik's window along with the brewers who concerned And when the brew was
form and content, the
long march. If there were grocers who did not put up in the shop fruits and vegetables the slogan "workers of the world unite," and themselves with the quality of their work, society would change. art thatwas aesthetically challenging and politically interesting in
change was striking.
societal
Forward #7 This significance ismore easily discernable as a normal part of liberal society, because the great historical drama does not distort the matter. Consider some examples in
the U.S. Racism is the great stain on American democracy. In our constitution, people were
calculated as being three fifths human. The great American dilemma was at the root of the ?} Springer
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64
our and War. And both while as a result was eliminated slavery of formal and informal as means, a
Goldfarb
carnage
of
Civil
result, have
racial persisted
discrimination
injustice,
as defining characteristic of American culture and the American way of life. Yet, this is only part of the story. Because, along with racism there has been anti-racism, and in fact the incorporation of the dominated into the definition of what itmeans to be an American.
Especially thanks to art, the word "incorporation" is actually not accurate. For the
African American experience through the arts has come to play a definitive role in American culture and society. I needn't go into details, just mention some highlights.
American tradition, demonstrated, of classical Bach, the music Mozart, compositions is a literature is really Beethoven, and not that of et. al. Rather the great European it is jazz, of Armstrong, tradition as Albert Count concert Murray Bassie, hall has Duke
performances
Ellington,
American
Ella Fitzgerald,
literature
John Coltrane,
of
the vernacular.
from the margins, defining the American experience as they develop the novel, for example, Ellison and Morrison, (along with Bellow and Roth). The free artistic imagination has transformed America, anticipating other political and social changes. Turn on the radio in just about any corner of the world and one hears American music, jazz, pop, rock, hip
hop. Or To a large extent one of that American the central music dilemmas is African of American. culture, observed long ago by consider democratic
Alexis
the arts
de Tocqueville.
and sciences.
sciences, judgement about what is good and what isn't is crucial, what is to be paid attention to, what is to be ignored, what is to be remembered and what is to be forgotten. In this way
culture develops. But democrats are reluctant to make such choices. If we are all equal, why
are our judgements and our tastes, also not equal? Tocqueville observed this tension in the in America, and he came to his aristocratic first part of his second volume of Democracy
conclusions. And many Fine art would and not develop as freely critics in American is an society, either conservative populists radical that There agree. a distinction to draw that it is. democracy or of democracy and the tastes of common
culture.
Radical
know
between
people and the elite is to evaluate the worth of people with different tastes. Refined elitists know that to inject democratic sensibility in the arts is to compromise them. The music and literature just cited, I think, along with much else proves otherwise. But understandably the
tension tension and and the debate debate about it live on is democratic culture. Museums in discussions in art practices and are one of the central about locations art. This for this
debate to proceed (Zolberg 1990). The Museum of Modern Art, for example, has long been the bastion of a tough refined modern aesthetic. But one of itsmost popular and commented upon exhibits, "High and Low," explored the relationship between fine modernist art and popular culture, showing how they interacted, fed upon each other, contributed in their interactions to the culture of our times. The museum opened up a space for critical reflection on themeaning of democratic culture (Coleman 2007). Such space opened up by art provides opportunities for critical reflection in innovative ways about pressing societal problems.
Some can be quite surprising and unexpected. of Aesthetic responses to the Vietnam era
Zippo
societal
and
meaning and meaningless (Correy 2007). An exhibit of the sadomasochistic photography of in Cincinnati reveals the limits of the liberal and the conservative Robert Mapplethorpe comes to sexuality and art (Aslanian 2006). imagination when it American society would be very different if there were no African American artists. As the presence of an exhibit atMOMA opens up the possibility for its public to think about a ? Springer
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Why
Theater?
65
central
dilemma
in American
culture
the
culture
and
the
society
is transformed,
if only
the same applies to Zippo Lighter Art and the homoerotic photos of The relative autonomy of these and many other artistic practices in their
transform great the social world. just In any too small, one case with taken any one work, these this may small not things importance, culture, and but together
constitute
society's
its political
potential.
Forward #2 And returning to Poland, consider what itmeans that a group of artists moved theirwork from traditional galleries to the streets and to quite untraditional interior spaces. The posters (and satirical textbooks) of Twozywo, the billboards of Galeria Zewnetrzna AMS (Outdoor Gallery AMS) and CUKL (The Central Technical Office) and the temporary exhibitions in private apartments, shops and abandoned buildings, such as Nie Lekajcie Sie!
by their very appearance change Polish society. It is a society where art is no longer confined
and the uncertain separation of art and social and political life is highlighted, i.e. the same uncertainty that got me in trouble over 30 years ago. It is a society inwhich new prevailing
post communist and post solidarity orthodoxies are questioned. These art projects are
important both for the creative way they manage to circumvent the limitations of themarket in capitalist Poland, and for what they say about the new Poland (Grigar 2006). Indeed in Poland today the arts provide an alternative to present day dominant trends. With nationalism, xenophobia and intolerance ascendant in political and religious circles,
artists are presenting alternatives, creating worlds where political, cultural, religious and
economic trends are questioned. It is surprising in a way (at least for me) that this is notably being accomplished by feminist artists. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Communist regimes of the old bloc, Iwrote an article with a provocative title: "Why is there no Feminism after Communism?" (Goldfarb 1997). The title was ironic. Iwas imitating the classic question concerning the United States: "Why is there no Socialism inAmerica?" These are bad questions, I think.
Ideology Europe. as those specifically ideology and thing would leads But no us astray. There were emerging there were many social movements They the union its form be did so using not American addressed present, but Socialist in the States A broad Parties in America, like those projects of that pursued range of the same social
Parties.
means.
movements,
movement, were
observed
in Central
Europe.
the abuses of unfettered The capitalism. was. the practice I thought the same very much Because the rhetoric of western feminism used
ideology, Marxism,
sexism were very
itwould not be
much a part of
Central European experience, I thought that there would develop, and I thought I saw it already developing in the early 1990s, a feminism with a Central European face, with or
without the name.
This has clearly come to be, pushed forward by a remarkable group of women artists, as Elzbieta Matynia has demonstrated in her book Performative Democracy (Matynia 2007). Analyzing this art as it appeared in a 2003 Architectures of Gender exhibit at New York's SculptureCenter, Matynia illuminates how Polish feminist art is an unfolding embattled tradition constituting through its enactment a cultural freedom with deep political significance. She informs us that the first organized Women's art exhibition in Poland occurred inWroclaw in 1978, a group show entitled descriptively "Women's Art". There then followed another group exhibit by the same name organized in Poznan, in 1980,
followed by three more exhibits at the same gallery, entitled "Presents, I, II and III." These
exhibits were a kind of prehistory of an explosion of conceptual art by women in recent years. Sharp images and public interventions utilized by these artists question the new ? Springer
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66
Goldfarb
pieties of Poland. They dissent from what Matynia calls "Polish Salvational Culturalism," a political-cultural program developed as a project of Polish identity and patriotism in the
absence of a state.
of obligation to the romantic past by The artists question the historical mythology celebrating the mundane space of the present (in Julita Wojcik's My Garden and in Dominika Szkutnik's The Field). Matynia notes "The shift from time to space as the new organizing principle of societal life indicates a shift from the dominant discourse of national belonging to an identity that becomes gradually de-nationalized." The artists "resisted the national" deconstructing the fusion of family and nation, and the Matriotism of Matka Polka (Polish mother) and Matka Polska (Mother Poland), keys to the national mythology. "The required heroism and suffering on behalf of the group is replaced ... by a relentless
investigation cooking, of cuddling, ordinary, or?as unremarkable, documented unexceptional in Plotnicka's activities Livestories?chatting such as about gardening, sore
muscles after aerobics class." The work of these women subverts the rigid sexual division of labor. They challenge the uncritical celebration of commerce. They valorize everyday
life, the mundane, and undermine the patriotic and the sacred.
In Poland, Matynia points out the ideals of civil society have been routinized. They have
been reduced to the sector of non-governmental organizations. The ideals and practices of
people like Havel and Michnik, and, from our point of view, the journalists who created that street walking sheet being in Lublin, have been enervated. And she shows how the
creative powers of women artist critically these enlivens, creating a feminism that is not an
A last example of art, freedom, and the politics of small things in Poland, one that is dear to me and takes us back to the goings on in Lublin, is Pogranicza (Borderlands) of Sejny.
It is a foundation, art Student center, community music school, center, and social theater, service agency, social movement, its roots cultural in the the institute, Polish fall when of with other among things, were in that movement. active is the victory role was
Theater
Its founders
of an alternative unanticipated
the
leaders of the political opposition, as itwas with the rest of the world. They came up with a novel idea, they moved from Warsaw to the small town of Sejny on the Polish Lithuanian border. They established their foundation in the old Jewish quarter of the city. One step at a time, they engaged the culture of the borderland, as itwas manifested in this remote town on the Polish border with Lithuania. They continue to make theater and they have a
documentary center. They produce a cultural magazine and have a publishing house. They
offer cultural heritage classes for students in the secondary school, and they take the students on trips to cities and regions where multiculturalism is very much alive. They have a Klezmer Band, with an ongoing relationship with great contemporary musicians from New York. And they organize a New Agora program devoted to developing intercultural town practices on a large transnational stage. Working with young people in this isolated and with some of the most prominent artists and intellectuals on a global stage, with the endorsement Czeslaw Milosz and in the spirit of poetry and prose, they have moved from
the gymnasium action, enriching onto the street, space. constituting cultural freedom through their art and practical public
Theirs is a politics of themselves and they reach evident in their Jan Gross's just as significant is their ?} Springer
small things, with big results. Their activities are an end in beyond their immediate circumstance of creation. This was most Neighbors (Gross 2002), but for this Jewish American, I believe activities with young Polish and Lithuanian neighbors, and the
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Why
Theater?
67
respectful way
movement. future. station, know cultural Societies Indeed
they inhabit sacred Jewish space.7 I have been impressed from afar by this
intention these and to work with after lectures visit in Lublin them what its and the organization I intend to go out onto to study the streets, them go But in the near to the even train I
It is my
reveals
in Sejny. More about that I have been to outline trying autonomy, and
now
through
relative
the politics
transformed.
References
to Democratic Arato, A. (1993). From Neo-Marxism Theory: Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-Type Societies. M.E. Sharpe Inc. in Political Arendt, H. (1968). Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises Thought. New York: Viking Press. L. (2006). The Art and Politics of Pleasure: Robert Mapplethorpe's The Perfect Moment and the Aslanian, New School for Social Research, New York. Culture Wars. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. as a Dimension Art Criticism of the Public Sphere. Coleman, K. (2007). 'High and Low' at the MoMA: Doctoral Dissertation in Progress. New School for Social Research, New York. and the Correy, M. (2007). The Vietnam War Zippo Lighter: Small Things Matter: Material, Symbolic in Progress. New School for Social Research, New York. Politics of Small Things. Doctoral Dissertation J. C. (1980). The Persistence The Sociological Student Goldfarb, of Freedom: Implications of Polish Theater: Boulder: Westview. J. C. (1983). On Cultural Freedom: An Exploration and America. Goldfarb, of Public Life in Poland of Chicago Press. Chicago: The University J. C. (1989). Beyond Glasnost: The Post Totalitarian Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Goldfarb, Press. Goldfarb, J. C. (1992). After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe. New York: Basic Books. J. C. (1997). Why is there no feminism Social Research, after communism? 64(2), 235-257. J. C. (2006). The Politics in Dark Times. Chicago: Goldfarb, of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless The University of Chicago Press. Goldfarb,
Gouldner, A. (1971). The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology. New York: Harper Collins. alternative: The politics of small things in contemporary Polish art. Grigar, E. (2006). Creating a democratic New School for Social Research, New York. Unpublished manuscript. The Destruction in Jebwabne, Poland. New York: Gross, J. T. (2002). Neighbors: of the Jewish Community Penguin Books. in Time: A Critical Theory of Culture. Westport: Greenwood Hanrahan, N. W (2000). Difference Publishing in Poland: A Critical Sociology Power and Solidarity of Soviet-Type Press. Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Kundera, M. (1988). The Art of the Novel. New York: Grove. E. (2007). Performative In press. Matynia, Democracy. of Chicago Press. Michnik, A. (1987). Letters From Prison and Other Essays. Berkeley: The University to Aesthetic Statement. American Approach Murray, A. (1997). The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary New York: Random House. Kennedy, Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Parsons, T. (1971). The System of Modern Society. Englewood N. (2004). The Lysenko Effect: The Politics Roll-Hansen, of Science. Prometheus Books. P. (Ed.) (1992). Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990. New York: Vintage. Wilson, a Sociology Zolberg, V (1990). Constructing of the Arts. New York: Cambridge University Inc. Group, M. E. (1991). Professionals,
Press.
7I consider problematic
this
relationship
in greater detail in another paper, entitled "Why Poland?" between Jewish and Polish collective memory.
In that paper,
I address
the
Springer
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