Брой 4
Cezar M. Ornatowski
Abstract. The end of the communist regimes in Central/Eastern Europe led to the need of new vocabulary and idioms that could offer a compelling account of the East-European experience, including the experience of communism and of its aftermath. The current paper focuses on this search for new idioms with specific attention on Poland and the dabate about its “postcoloniality”.
Keywords: postcoloniality, vocabularies, collective identity.
През огледалото: За приложенията на постколониализма към Централна/Източна Европа – примерът на Полша
Сезар Орнатовски
Абстракт. Краят на комунистическите режими в Централна и Източна Европа доведе до потребността от нов речник, нови изрази, които могат да предложат убедителен поглед върху източноевропейския опит и преживявания, включително свързаните с комунизма и неговите последици. Настоящият доклад се фокусира върху търсенето на подобни изразни средства, посвещавайки специално внимание на Полша и дебата относно нейната „постколониалност“.
Ключови думи: постколониалност, речник, колективна идентичност.
“When I use a word”, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is”, said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” (Louis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass)
Posing the Question
As Noemi Marin and others have suggested, the collapse of communism in Central/Eastern Europe resulted in a discrediting of a vocabulary and a search for new idioms that would offer a compelling account of the East-European experience, including the experience of communism and its aftermath. The debate about the putative “postcoloniality” of countries such as Poland is part of this search for new idioms in which the Polish “story” (and the stories of other countries of the region) can be articulated, both for domestic and global audiences. In the course of this debate, “postcolonialism” has indeed, as Louis Carroll’s Alice put it, been made to “mean so many different things”.
My purpose in the present discussion is not to argue either side of this debate. From the rhetorical standpoint, which is my perspective here, the most salient point is not whether Poland – or other countries in the former Soviet-dominated Central-Eastern (and Southern) Europe – can be called “post-colonial”, but rather how the different articulations – or denials – of their presumed post-coloniality serve different, and competing, narratives of history and current political situation, as well as different conceptions of collective identity and competing visions of their civilizational choices and future. At stake is, among other things, who – in terms of the major political forces competing for power today – is, as Humpty Dumpty put it, to be master. The debate also involves the more general problem of the extent to which Poland, as well as other countries in a similar position, is able to retain a measure of mastery over its own story in a world in which this story may increasingly have to be told in idioms and according to narratives whose origins lie in other kinds of experiences and discourses. Finally, the debate also raises questions about the position and role of intellectuals as interpreters of their people’s vis-a-vis more universal experience and the idioms in which such experience is to be articulated.
My account thus takes what Kenneth Burke calls the “dramatistic” perspective, in contrast to the “scientific” one. The scientific perspective “begins with the question of naming, or definition” and stresses such propositions as “it is” or “it is not” (as in: What is colonialism? Is Poland (and other countries of post-Soviet space) postcolonial or not?). The dramatistic perspective, by contrast, regards “language” (including naming and defining itself) as “attitudinal or hortatory”; it thus emphasizes “idioms” whose meanings develop through “their use as instruments in the tribe’s way of living” (Language 44). I treat “postcolonialism” as such an idiom – one developed as an instrument within certain “tribal” context and now being fitted to another, with a variety of attitudinal or hortatory effects.
The Polish Tribal Context
Poland’s specificity lies, as a well-known Polish playwright and satirist Sławomir Mrożek put it, in the fact that it is located “east of the West and west of the East”. Like the Slavic pagan god Janus, it has thus always faced two different ways: both West and East. And, while it has always considered itself part of the West, and superior to the “East”, it has also harbored an inferiority complex toward the West through its very association with the “East”.
Some scholars (Janion) date the origins of Poland’s conflicted self-image to the violent Christianization of Slavic tribes in the 10th century. Christianity came to Poland from the West, specifically from the Holy Roman Empire. It was accompanied by a violent, public sack of Slavic settlements and rape of their temples, statues, and holy places at the hands of Saxons and Danes (Janion). The baptism and crowning of first Polish monarch Mieszko I in the year 966, an attempt to put a stop to the onslaught, marks the symbolic beginning of the Polish state.
Polish statehood has thus, from its very beginning, been identified with the expansion of Western Christianity, an expansion that has also been identified with a colonizing project. In this sense, Poland may be said to have been “postcolonial” for all of its recorded history – if we take colonialism to be an attempt to profoundly influence and change the character of a culture by an imposition of a different culture.
But Poland also played its own part in this colonizing project by carrying the “civilizing” mission eastward. For much of its history, Poland’s self-image has been that of the eastern “bulwark of Christianity”. Warsaw University historian Jan Kieniewicz, himself a child of the pre-war eastern edges of the Polish Republic, notes that Poland “as the bulwark of Christianity was in the 17th century the most oriental country in Europe” (Kieniewicz, Spotkania 99). Polish gentry in the so-called Kresy, the eastern territories on Poland extending over much of today’s Byelarus and Ukraine, absorbed over time many Persian, Turkish, and Tartar influences in language, customs, and fashion. Manor houses were typically decorated with “oriental” rugs and textiles, men wore long robes with belts made out of broad, colorful, frilled textiles, tall leather boots (typically red or yellow), head coverings that looked like turbans, and carried curved sabres. In the Battle of Vienna in 1683, which looms large in Polish historiography as the occasion when Polish forces “saved” the West from the “Saracens”, Polish forces resembled the Turks so much in armor, dress, and weapons that they had to wear bunches of straw tied to their helmets to distinguish them from the Turks and identify them to their Western allies.
Kieniewicz points out that there are several different “Easts” in the Polish imagination: the near, familiar east (Kresy), the threatening “imperial” east (Russia), and the Muslim “Orient” (for instance, Crimean Tartars), with which Poland alternately fought, traded, and entered into alliances (Tartar troops helped Poland fight the Swedish invasion in the 17th century) (Spotkania). The “East” is thus, in the Polish historic imagination, identified both with danger as well as with splendid, heroic national past and a colonizing, “civilizing” mission – a mission that in effect made Poland, in its cultural self-perception, a part of the West”. Just as the American frontier helped define the “American character” and left an indelible imprint on American culture, the image and presumed character qualities of Kresy gentry (backwardness and conservatism, but also staunch patriotism and religiosity) forever defined the image and attributes of Polishness (the image that has been assiduously revived and cultivated by the nationalist right after the transition of 1989).
The sense of national victimhood deepened during the Partitions between 1795 and 1918, when Poland was divided up between Prussia, Russia, and Austria. In the 19th century Romantic imagination, Poland became the “Christ of nations” whose suffering and eventual resurrection was to redeem Christian civilization. Resistance to communism and resentment at being part of “Eastern” Europe deepened alienation from the “East”, along with the sense of civilizational backwardness and inferiority, and identification with the West. Communism contributed at once to the “otherization” and “orientalization” of “Eastern” Europe by the West and to a mythologization of the West in the countries of Central/Eastern Europe. After the transition of 1989, the slogan of Polish post-Solidarity elites was “return to the European home” – a return symbolically fulfilled by Poland’s (domestically contentious) entry into the European Union in 2004.
Janion suggests that the experiences of the last two hundred years created a “paradoxical Polish postcolonial mentality”, which manifests itself in the sense of helplessness and defeat, inferiority and peripherality of the country and its narrative. This relatively common sense of inferiority in relation to the West contrasts, within the same paradigm, with a messianic pride in the form of a [national] narrative of [Poland’s] exceptional suffering and merit, of [Polish] greatness and superiority in relation to the “immoral” West, of [Poland’s ] mission in the East (12, my translation).
The Polish experience has thus, for much of the country’s history, been characterized by liminality.
Historically, this liminality involved existing between, and partaking of, two different states or conditions: part of the West, yet not completely part of the West; superior to the East, yet at some level identified and identifying with it; orientalized and colonized from the West and orientalizing and colonizing toward the East. Since at least the 16th century, the “occidental” and “oriental” tendencies have been in tension as competing civilizational alternatives for Poland: the Latin and the Slavic. These alternatives manifested themselves in lifestyles, dress, habits, and even language (these debates have been analyzed in a seminal study by Jerzy Jedlicki). It might be suggested that the current debate on Poland’s “postcolonialism” is a continuation of this still unresolved polemic, albeit in different, contemporary and global idioms.
Today, “postcommunist” Poland is also liminal in the sense adumbrated by anthropology: as existing between the previous way of understanding and structuring identity and community and a new way that has not defined itself yet. (In this latter sense, much of Central/Eastern Europe as well as most post-Soviet states may be said to be in a liminal situation). The historical assessment and moral/political evaluation of this “previous way”, along with the definition of the present state and future course of the Polish polity, have been among the central points of political contention over the last two and a half decades, and to a large extent constitute the dividing line between the major political forces in Poland today.
Both of these issues – the assessment of the past and the vision of the future – are at stake in the debate on Poland’s putative “postcolonial” status. It is well established that interpretations of the past help shape and rhetorically frame the visions of the future, and the other way around: every new vision of the future reshapes the view and interpretation of the past.
Can You Make Words Mean Different Things?
Postcolonial Idiom in the Polish Context
“Postcolonialism” entered Polish political and academic discourse via Ewa Thompson’s study Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism. The 1991 publication of a Polish translation of Edward Said’s 1978 classic Orientalism passed without much notice. At the time, the issues and idioms it foregrounded did not appear relevant to a country plagued by massive inflation and unemployment and intent on rebuilding the foundations of public life and democratic political institutions. By 2001, however, the Polish political scene began to divide into two major opposed currents: the liberal, pro-European current, represented by the Citizen’s Platform party and the conservative, nationalist, anti-European current, represented by the Law and Justice party (both parties were created in 2001 and as of this writing still represent the major political forces and currents of public opinion in Poland).
Thompson’s book pointed to the absence of postcolonial debates concerning non-Russian territories historically or currently controlled by Russia and the former Soviet Union. While the “self-consciousness of colonial wrongdoing” is common in Western discourse, Thompson pointed out, there is no parallel self-searching and historical self-consciousness in Russia or its former possessions. This absence has been interpreted in the West as a confirmation of the legitimacy of Russia’s and Soviet Union’s claims, “according to the rule that if there is no discourse, there is no problem” (Imperial 23). Part of the reason, according to Thompson, is the preoccupation of post-colonial theory (because of the focus of Western colonialism) with race. Hence, “[m]odern Russia has managed to avoid a terminological appropriation by the West” (Imperial 41), and “the white Europeans subjected to Russia’s or Germany’s (or imperial Turkey’s, in centuries past) colonial drive are dead last in coming to a realization that they were in fact colonial subjects” (Imperial 40). Another reason, according to Thompson, was that Western academics “who deconstructed Western colonialism often sympathized with Soviet Russia’s political system” (Imperial 46). As she notes elsewhere, “[t]he overwhelming majority of postcolonial scholars teaching at American universities are still associated with the leftists, who considered the Soviet Union a natural ally (the movement was also financially supported by money from Moscow). That’s why scholars are so reluctant to notice the elephant in the China shop….” (“It Is Colonialism” 74).
Thompson’s ideas fell on especially fertile ground on the right, nationalist side of the political spectrum in Poland. As Janion noted, the beginning of the 21st century has been marked by the “deconstruction of the Polish romantic-warrior myth” (243). Thus, another mythology had to be found, and postcolonialism provided an updated, in fact a Western, language for diagnosing and mythologizing the Polish condition while giving new life to what Aleksander Fiut’s sarcastically (but accurately) described as the “worn out and exhausted image of Poland as martyr, unjustly persecuted and always crushed under the invader’s heavy boot” (37).
Thompson’s narrative of relentless “colonization” from the “East” (with its equalization of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union as different incarnations of the same empire), abetted by an indifferent and “orientalizing” West (which has historically played its own role as colonizer in Poland), fit neatly with the nationalist right’s political agenda, based on national victimhood and anti-Europeanism. In demagogic right-wing nationalist rhetoric, the transnationalism of the European Union simply replaces the transnationalism of communism, with Brussels taking the place of Moscow as the new “imperial” center. In this updated adaptation of the post-colonial narrative, after the political transition of 1989 Poland merely exchanged one sort of colonization for another: soul-destroying communism for economic and cultural “colonization” by the increasingly “degenerate” West, with its sexual and racial promiscuity, homosexuality, commercialism, irreligiousness, and so on.
In the Polish right-wing, nationalist version of post-colonialism, as in the right-wing understanding of post-communism, “post” does not merely mean “after” but rather designates a condition characterized by the persistence of the malady-respectively colonization and communism (the two now interconnected, thanks to Thompson’s linking of imperial Russia to the Soviet Union)–in hidden, thus more virulent, forms. This narrative allows the right to see the pro-European liberal elites as dupes of a cosmopolitan, “colonized”, consciousness. At the same time, the postcolonial narrative vindicates the right’s own nationalist stance; as Thompson herself acknowledged in a debate on post-colonialism at Warsaw University in 2007, “[i]n the twentieth and twenty-first century resistance to colonialism has been taking place mostly under the banner of nationhood” (in Kieniewicz, Debaty 17).
The postcolonial perspective allows right-wing intellectuals and politicians to absolve themselves from complicity in the communist system. If Poland was “colonized”, than communism – a flawed Western idea in a botched “eastern” (read: Russian) implementation – was forcibly imposed onto “healthy” native, that is Slavic, soil, with the connivance of cosmopolitan (here, overtones of anti-Semitism often creep in) elites and abetted by the Western “treachery” at Yalta. Right wing politicians use Thompson’s approach, especially her notions of mimicry and hybridity (characteristics of postcolonial attitudes, according to Thompson), to critique Polish liberal governing elites for “mimicking” presumably “superior” Western culture. In effect, they divide Poles into “natives” and “creoles”: with nationalist right wing conservatives as “natives” – the privileged term – and their liberal, pro-European opponents as “West loving”, subservient “creoles.” The “natives”, who claim to represent the bulk of the Polish people, presumably escaped post-colonial “subject” mentality and “returned” to authentic Polishness, while the “Creoles” “returned to Europe” (echoing a popular post-1989 slogan), hence to an alien spiritual home (Bill).
As Stanley Bill notes, for the nationalist right wing, claims to postcoloniality thus serve as a prop to a fundamentally essentialist political and cultural project of redefining “Polish” identity in exclusionary terms. In this project, the conjunction of post-colonialism and post-communism leads to nativism and xenophobia that support anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant (esp. in regard to immigration from Ukraine, Byelarus, and other “Eastern” countries) sentiments. Some on the neo-fascist fringe even reject Christianity and espouse a new paganism, based on a romantic vision of a lost, pre-Christian native Slavic culture (not dissimilarly to Nazism, which espoused a Romantic, pre-Christian “Germanic” mysticism). Such views are deeply ironic, considering both Poland’s reputation as the most Catholic country in Europe and the religious grounding of Polish nationalist right wing rhetoric), while also rejecting 19th century pan-Slavism for its complicity with Russian, and by extension Soviet, domination.
Bill suggests that the Polish case highlights the implicit tendency of postcolonial theory toward essentialism. In its denial of universal values and cross-cultural interests, such as class, postcolonialism, in the Polish context, serves fundamentally conservative agendas – in spite of its liberal roots and pretensions to a critique of global capitalism. Postcolonial theory provides the Polish nationalist right wing with a convenient “frame of rejection” (Burke, Attitudes 3–33) for the post-1989 political reality – a frame that at the same time implies their openness to and conversance with global intellectual currents. This frame rejects liberal democracy, European Union, multiculturalism, gay and women’s rights, and all other “liberal” Western influences as subaltern “mimicry” and denial of “authentic” Polish identity: Catholic, conservative, homogenous, shaped by a unique historical experience – one that was, precisely, one of colonization.
Ultimately, in the Polish context the post-colonial idiom may perhaps be regarded as the latest fashionable vocabulary change in the centuries-long debate on the causes of and remedies for Poland civilizational backwardness in relation to the West. The debate, as Jerzy Jedlicki points out, goes back to the mid-18th century, when the economic and cultural gap between Poland and Western Europe became increasingly noticeable. The sense of marginality and provinciality in relation to “Europe” deepened under over the 19th century under the Partitions. The Polish intelligentsia, Jedlicki suggests, “[c]onsidered itself as belonging to the world of European culture, at the same time [it was] aware of its subordinate position within it.” As a result, it developed “contradictory feelings of jealousy, admiration and mistrust, toward the thrifty and cocksure metropolis, [feelings that] often transformed into genuine or make-believe contempt for the corrupt values and sham glitter of the West” (Jakiej 19, my translation). This “specific combination of collective sense of inferiority” and compensatory “national megalomania” is, Jedlicki suggests, “typical of the educated classes of peripheral countries” (Jakiej 19, my translation). The sense of marginality continued over the half century of being part of Soviet-dominated “Eastern Europe” and came to the fore as the gap between “East” and “West” became apparent with the relaxation of travel restrictions beginning in the mid-1970s and culminating in the opening of 1989.
Since the Partitions, esp. since the defeat of the 1830–31 November Uprising, Poland, as Jedlicki suggests, has had “two histories of culture”: one, a “sacred history of the nation, its songs, prisons, and battlefields”, and the other, the “pedestrian” history of life in a second-tier country. Post-colonialism plays neatly into national victimology, whose flag is once again flying high thanks to the ascendancy of a nationalist government to power in Fall 2015. Post-colonialism redeems the “nationalist” tradition of struggle and feeds what Jedlicki refers to as the “ethical superiority of the oppressed” (Jakiej 234); paradoxically, as he notes, it is quite possible that it was precisely that tradition and the implicit inferiority/superiority complex implicit in it that had historically kept Poland isolated and backward (and, many fear, will continue to keep it so – while rolling the gains of the last 25 years – with the return of right-wing nationalism to political ascendency).
In his reflections on “terministic screens”, Burke notes that “if any given terminology is a reflection of reality [and there is no denying that Poland has been, throughout its history and in various senses, colonized from both West and East], by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality.” “Any nomenclature necessarily directs the attention into some channels rather than others” (Language 45). “Not only does the nature of our terms affect the nature of our observations”, Burke argues, in the sense that the terms direct the attention to one field rather than to another. Also, many of the observations are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of which the observations were made. In brief, much that we take as observations about “reality” may be but the spinning out of possibilities implicit in our particular choice of terms (Language 46).
Whatever one chooses to mean by “colonialism”, a replacement of “postcommunism” with “postcolonialism” directs attention away from the very term in the name of which (not in the name of cultural or economic domination or exploitation as such) millions of people in Poland and other countries, as well as in the Soviet Union itself, were jailed, murdered, displaced, exiled, put into work camps, and deprived of the inheritance of generations, as well as of basic freedoms. It also directs attention away from the human, economic, social, environmental, and psychological costs and consequences of this “historic experiment.” Reflection on these costs and consequences was a major focus of social studies in Poland in the immediate aftermath of the transition of 1989. The pathologies discussed in such studies – widespread apathy, lack of social bonds beyond the family, “learned helplessness”, fatalism, lack of interest and involvement in public affairs, lack of care for public property and the human environment, and inability to debate or deliberate – were the consequences not of “colonialism” as such (my argument is not meant to deny or obscure the fact the Russia and the Soviet Union were indeed also imperial powers) but of a system that destroyed all forms of social association not controlled by the state, theatricalized public action and language, destroyed personal initiative along with the sense of “ownership” of the life space and of the lived environment, reduced ideas to ideology and language to jargon, and infused human relations, as well as public life, with falseness, artifice, and suspicion. It is phenomena such as these, not colonialism, that dominate reflections on the Central/Eastern European condition in the memoirs, diaries, and essays (published only after 1989) of writers and intellectuals who lived this experience, such as Leopold Tyrmand, Stefan Kisielewski, Czesław Miłosz, Gustav Herling-Grudziński, or Vaclav Havel.
While colonialism represents a certain kind of project (imperialism, economic and cultural expansion, economic exploitation), a project that was not historically confined to the West (consider Islamic expansion; Ottoman Empire; Russian and Soviet empires), communism was an emanation of a different, thoroughly Western, and – in spite of its ancient pedigree – essentially “modern”2 project: one that F.A. Hayek characterized as the “transfer to the problems of society of habits of thought … of the natural scientist and the engineer” (72–3) with the hope of once and for all eliminating “injustice.” The early emblematic articulation of this project remains Plato’s Republic, which in its basic outlines – especially the wholesale remodeling of the lifeworld and subservience of individual autonomy to the dictates of a “philosophy”, as well as reliance on deception (Plato’s “royal lie”), propaganda, and ultimately violence – remarkably resembles the Stalinist system in its heyday.
While colonialism may have been one of the aspects (historically) of the Central/Eastern European experience, it does not exhaust its specificity, nor does it adequately cover whatever “lessons” there are to be learned from it4. The Soviet and Central/Eastern European “experiment” was the only actual modern attempt (regardless of what one chooses to call it or how one judges the specifics of implementation) on European cultural soil to replace capitalism with something else. The experience of this attempt, and of its failure, remains the unique historical inheritance shared by both Russia (quite besides and in addition to its imperial tradition) and the countries of the former “Eastern Europe.” It is this experience, not the experience of “colonialism”, that had shaped, and continues to shape, political attitudes across the region. As Dorota Kołodziejczyk points out, in Poland struggle against colonialism had not been a “grand narrative” during the social mobilization of the 1980s; the narrative that mobilized the Polish people in the name of “Solidarity” was restoration of freedom, autonomy of the individual, and – key term – dignity.
The postcolonial paradigm replaces this narrative with a different one. Its ascendancy will both hasten the process of forgetting, as generations change, and curtail debate and scholarship on this experience in the only region where reflection based on actual lived memory, not just theory, is still possible. In fact, the basically anti-capitalist idiom of post-colonial critique makes it more likely to recuperate, not critique, the communist project.
If Soviet-style communism (especially Stalinism) was a Russian import, than it was Stalin and his Polish puppets, not the doctrine itself, that are accountable for the terror of Stalinism and the subsequent failures of the system. Such, in fact has been the general narrative espoused by the major figures of the former regime. In their view, they inherited an externally imposed system they tried to “democratize” – an attempt that ultimately led to the democratic transformation5. A shift of paradigms from postcommunism to postcolonialism helps the left – both in Poland and elsewhere – salvage the ideal from the ruins of what many once hailed as a “historic experiment”.
Behind the unwillingness of many Western scholars to deal with the actual experience of communism as such in Russian and Central/Eastern Europe may be a persistent “orientalizing” attitude. In diaries kept over the many years of his exile, Polish émigré intellectual Gustaw Herling-Grudziński cites an incident he witnessed while living in Italy. The Czech theater Divadlo Za Branou (Theater Beyond the Gate) was performing at the Florence theater festival Rassegna dei Teatri Stabili in May 1971. The theater group came to Florence accompanied by a heavy contingent of Czech secret agents to watch over them. At the hotel in Florence where they were staying, the agents requested that telephone connections to all the rooms occupied by the troupe be cut off. The management complied. Herling-Grudziński comments:
The Italian press will most likely ignore the matter. Who cares what the customs are of the exotic visitors from socialist countries? Exoticism is the appropriate word here, drained more and more each day of protest or indignation. We do not realize to what extent the increasing banality of such incidents, their dismissal with an indifferent, if not tolerant, shrug, expresses the acquiescence of the “free world” for everything that comes from “there” (62–63)
The collapse of communism in Russia and Central/Eastern Europe presented a dilemma for Western leftist intellectuals, one most conveniently disposed of by an assumption that these people in the “East” – economically underdeveloped, politically immature, perennially conflicted – simply bungled a perfectly sound political project, which, if implemented by Americans, Germans, or the British, would probably have ended up differently.
Such attitudes dovetail today with the desire of many Polish scholars (especially younger ones, who have not experienced life in a communist state but have absorbed Western academic vocabularies) to be present on the global (primarily Anglo-American) academic scene. To these scholars, the postcolonial idiom recommends itself as a means of securing a hearing for the “Polish story” in the Anglo-American West. If the Polish story is to be heard, their argument goes (Thompson in fact made precisely such an argument in the debate at Warsaw University), if the Polish voice is to be heeded (as opposed to Poland’s story being perennially told by others, for instance, Germans or Russians), it must be told in an idiom that is not only comprehensible but also appealing to academics, publishers, and the media. Some scholars have suggested that the postcolonial paradigm in talking about Polish and Central/Eastern European issues ought to replace the post-totalitarian paradigm, of which the West is tired and which does not appear to secure a sympathetic hearing among the, often Marxist, Western academics. Polish academics are held to increasingly strict publication standards that favor publication in highly rated, mostly US, outlets. Hence, they are anxious to speak a language that opens the doors to US and other Western academic venues. As one young Polish scholar has suggested, the postcolonial perspective would free Polish studies from the discursive and intellectual “ghetto” of post-totalitarianism and make them relevant to the contemporary world (Skórczewski). Adopting the postcolonial vocabulary opens to Polish and other scholars from the region broader avenues for global intellectual participation, acceptance, publication, and ultimately career advancement at home.
Freedom from the “ghetto” of postcommunism, however, carries a price. The price, as Jerzy Axer argued in an exchange with Thompson, is the liberty to understand one’s own past and one’s experience in one’s own terms. This means that “entering the global intellectual market and undergoing a translation [of one’s reality into a fundamentally foreign idiom, born out of a different “tribal” experience – here, “tribal” can be understood both in a cultural/ethnic as well as academic/professional sense], one loses a part of one’s discourse”, as well as of one’s experience and identity (Axer, in Kieniewicz, Debaty 56). The transfer of post-colonial theory onto the central-Eastern European experience becomes in effect an exercise in discursive domination: telling other people’s stories in one’s own discourse.
For the intellectual, as Miłosz notes, grand utopias and grand explanatory vocabularies such as “imperialism” remain “a candle that he circles like a moth” (6). The “spinning out of the possibilities” implicit in the choice of postcolonialism as a dominant “terministic screen” for the interpretation of the Soviet and Central-Eastern European experience leads at least to a blurring of boundaries if not to a falsification of this experience. The implicit analogy between the Soviet Union and other colonial powers, such as Britain or France, deflects attention from the political specificity of the Soviet system (which Fiut referred as an “anti-civilization”, 36), allowing one to avoid facing the human and civilizational costs of that particular utopia.
Ultimately, as Dorota Kołodziejczyk notes, the presence of any issue in the intellectual focus of attention is determined by the market: “The product will be processed in the industry of theory, which the American academy has become, only if someone proves its market value for the cosmopolitan capital that is the global circulation of theory” (23). This global capital now includes countries such as Poland in its orbit.
Which is To Be Master?
The problem of “mastery” involved in adapting the postcolonial idiom to the Polish experience involves the problematic central to postcolonial scholarship: mastery over one’s own narrative and one’s very identity. Thompson claims that interpretations of her work such as those by the Polish nationalist right are not what she had in mind. In applying the concept of postcolonialism to countries such as Poland, Thompson insists that her concern is with discourse: the hegemonic discourse of the colonizer that suppresses and/or replaces the voice of the people and imposes “a certain model of [self]recognition, from which it is very difficult to free oneself”, as Thompson explained in the Warsaw University debate (Kieniewicz, Debaty 36).
However, some argue that if one accepts this discursive interpretation of post-colonialism, the attempt to fit the postcolonial idiom to the Polish experience may in fact itself be precisely an instance of “discursive colonization.” One can try to remain master of one’s history and identity at the cost of that history and identity remaining opaque to the larger global academic community dominated by categories developed in the West, or one can try to gain a hearing by adopting a foreign idiom at the cost of the accuracy of one’s experience and a part of one’s memory and identity (academic idioms, in this sense, are like the Procrustean bed).
The debate over the adoption of the postcolonial idiom to tell the “story” of the Polish experience raises a major question of self-definition for intellectuals (intelligentsia in Central/Eastern European terms) in all liminal places: whether to embrace global vocabularies, thereby losing some of their own situatedness, or remain in the traditional role as intimate interpreters of their people’s experience. In multicultural Western societies, esp. in the US, the interpretation of one’s “own people’s” experience has largely become the domain of “ethnic studies” scholars, while the majority of humanities scholars seem to have embraced the role of interpreters of the “global” (including other people’s) experience (albeit inevitably in the idiom originating in their own historical situatedness).
Debates about postcolonialism have not only domestic political, intellectual, and academic implications but also geopolitical ones. It is not just a matter of having or not having been “colonized” (whatever one my choose to the term to mean) but what sorts of Self and Other identifications, with what sorts of geopolitical interests and consequences attached to them, attend on claims of “colonization” (both as perpetrator and victim).
Interesting in this respect is the position of Ukraine. “Colonized” by Poland over several centuries, Ukraine owes its claim to being part of “European” civilization, and thus to membership in the European Union, in large part to this colonization. This claim is supported by Poland not only for geopolitical reasons (to maintain a buffer between Poland and Russia and to weaken Russia’s position vis-à-vis Poland) but for reasons of its own vexed and complex historical and geopolitical identity, since Ukraine’s claim confirms Poland’s role as the historic “carrier” of “Europeanness”, thus as an indisputable part of Europe. Both having been the colonizer (in the case of Poland) and having been colonized (in the case of Ukraine) thus become arguments for being part of Europe (while the Polish claim ultimately rests on its prior “colonization” by Western Christianity).
Polish debates on postcolonialism reveal the complexities implicit in applying concepts originating in a specific historical, cultural, and political experience to a different historical, cultural, and political terrain, as well as the diverse – and often unexpected – ways in which such concepts may be locally appropriated. They also reveal the calculations of gains and loss (in terms of historical understanding and ideological positioning) implicit in such applications. This is something to be mindful of when Western intellectuals indirectly (and perhaps unconsciously) impose their terms on others thanks to the dominant position of Western academic venues – to the implicit demands of which academics in other parts of the world increasingly have to “conform or perish”.
Hence, the final thought: in a world increasingly dominated by unified vocabularies (at least within academic theory and intellectual fashion), vocabularies largely developed and current in the Anglo-American West, is there room for unique idioms that reflect specific experiences and perspectives of other parts of the world, without these perspectives automatically seeming peripheral, backward, marginal, illegitimate, or – the ultimate term of dismissal in the Western academy – conservative?
Bibliography
Bill, S. W Poszukiwaniu Autentyczności. Kultura Polska i Natura Teorii Postkolonialnej. – In: Praktyka Teoretyczna, 11 (2014): 107–127. Web.
Bolecki, W. Various Thoughts on Postcolonialism. An Introduction to Unwritten Texts (Foreword). – In: Texty Drugie 4 (2007): 6–14. Web.
Burke, K. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Print.
Burke, K. Attitudes Toward History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Print.
Ferguson, M. Institutionalizing Extremism: Ideological Warfare at the Crossroads of Soviet Revolutionary Theory and Islamic Feudalism. MS Thesis, San Diego State University, 2015.
Fiut, A. In the Shadow of Empires: Post-colonialism in Central and Eastern Europe – Why Not? – In: Teksty Drugie 1 (2014): 34–40. English Edition: Special issue on Postcolonial or Postdependence Studies? Web.
Grossman, V. Everything Flows. New York: New York Review of Books, 2009. Print.
Hayek, F. A. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents. The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. II. Ed. Bruce Caldwell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Print.
Herling-Grudziński, G. Dziennik Pisany Nocą, Vol. I 1971–81. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011. Print.
Janion, M. Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna: Fantazmaty Literatury. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006. Print.
Jaruzelski, W. Byc Moze to Ostatnie Slowo (Wyjasnienia Zlozone Przed Sadem). Warszawa: Comandor, 2008. Print.
Jedlicki, J. Jakiej Cywilizacji Polacy Potrzebują? Studia z Dziejów Idei i Wyobraźni XIX Wieku. Warszawa: Wab/CiS, 2002. Print. English translation as A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999. Print.
Kieniewicz, J. Spotkania Wschodu. Gdańsk: Novus Orbis, 1999. Print.
Kieniewicz, J. ed. Debaty IBL AL. Vol. 1. Warszawa: Instytut Badań Interdyscyplinarnych “Artes Liberales”, 2008. Print.
Kłoczowski, J. The Younger Europe: Central-Eastern Europe in the Circle of Christian Civilization of the Middle Ages (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1998). Print.
Kołodziejczyk, D. Postkolonialny Transfer na Europę ŚrodkowoWschodnią. Teksty Drugie, 5 (2010): 22–39.
Leonhard, W. Child of the Revolution. London: Ink Links, 1979. Print.
Marin, N. After the Fall: Rhetoric in the Aftermath of Dissent in Post-Communist Times. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Print.
Miłosz, Cz. The Captive Mind. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.
Nycz, R. Polish Postcolonial and/or Postdependence Studies. – In: Teksty Drugie 1 (2014): 5–12. English Edition: Special issue on Postcolonial or Postdependence Studies? Web.
Ornatowski, C. M. Big Brother’s Shadow: History, Justice, and the Political Imagination in Post-1989 Poland. – In: African Yearbook of Rhetoric 2, 1 (June 2011): 31–40. http://www.africanrhetoric.org/pdf/Omatowski.pdf
Ornatowski, C. M. From Fish Soup to Fish Tank: Politics, Rhetoric, and the Dialectic of History in the Polish Revolution of 1989. – In: Rhetorics of 1989: Rhetorical Archaeologies of Political Transition, special issue of Advances in the History of Rhetoric 18, supplement 1 (2015): 30–59. Eds. Cezar M. Ornatowski and Noemi Marin. New York: Routledge. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15362426.2015.1010860
Plato. Republic. Five Great Dialogues. Trans. B. Jowett. New York: Walter J. Black, 1942. Print.
Popper, K. R. The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1. The Spell of Plato. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Print.
Rakowski, M. F. Jak to sie Stalo. Warszawa: BGW, 1991. Print.
Skórczewski, D. Dlaczego Polska Powinna Upomnieć się o Swoją Postkolonialność. – In: Znak 628 (Sept. 2007). Web.
Thompson, E. M. Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism. Westport, CT: Greewood, 2000. Print.
Thompson, Е. M. It is Colonialism After All: Some Epistemological Remarks. – In: Teksty Drugie 1 (2014): 67–81. English Edition: Special issue on Postcolonial or Postdependence Studies?
Tyrmand, L. Cywilizacja Komunizmu. Krakow: MG, 2013. Print.
Comments
0 comments