Culture in both the Republic of Poland in the years 1944–1952 (routinely referred to by propagandists as the People’s Poland) and in its legal successor, the Polish People’s Republic, was institutionalized and politicized as part of the ideological programme of the modern authori-tarian state. The cultural identities and activities of citizens became ob-jects of modernizing and educational efforts; they were also subject to ideological indoctrination.241 This does not mean, though, that the state administration, the party apparatus and public institutions of Commu-nist Poland, were the only agents in this field. The Catholic Church also exerted a powerful influence on the shape of the Polish national com-munity and the concept of national tradition, carrying out its religious and educational mission in conflict with the secular state but also within a society that was almost homogeneous in terms of religion and ethnic-ity and thus ready for a communal vision of the world. The third ingre-dient defining that community was mass culture. As a result of the post-war ideological democratization of access to national and world cultural heritage, and thanks to new technical means of popularizing culture, the cultural audience substantially increased in that period, at the same time, however, yielding to far-reaching unification, losing its agency in the
241 Stanisław Siekierski maintains that the Communist authorities pursued a patronal cultural poli-cy, centrally planned and executed, until the mid-1970s. Culture in those days remained subor-dinated to state modernizing and reorganizing projects. At the beginning of the Gierek-regime decade, for example, there were plans to “make secondary education common”, “to extend the period of mandatory general education”, to “change the proportions in family and state budgets in favour of culture”, to shorten the work week to 40 hours, which was supposed to “create new conditions for participation in cultural activities”, to “open up new venues for artistic expan-sion of the young generation”, to “saturate Polish culture with electronic means of expresexpan-sion”.
S. Siekierski, Książka literacka. Potrzeby społeczne i ich realizacja w latach 1944–1986, Warszawa 1992, pp. 220–220. The end of the Gierek decade means the end of this cultural policy. “Party and government programmes practically cease to function in the years 1979–1981. They are clearly but mere attempts to survive the politically and economically difficult period, attempts to find a new status.” Ibid., p. 222.
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process and turning into a society of consumers rather than co-authors of cultural artefacts. The competences and the style of participation in culture were by and large a result of the rules imposed by the state cul-tural industry, geared primarily towards propagating national identity and traditions in a truncated, sanitized, and abridged form, interpreted in accordance with the regime’s political principles. These principles did not necessarily manifest themselves in strictly modern symbols and nar-ratives. The new Polish community constructed under Communist rule was indeed new in regard to social and communication (technologi-cal) criteria, but when it came to some of the community’s dominant self-images, it also utilized some of the past cultural patterns (e.g. the models of patriotism, cultural memory, and ethnocentrism practised on a daily basis) but these were consciously transformed, however, into the modern national experience.242 As a result, the “cultured” community (a social environment of high political and material status, actively par-ticipating in culture and pursuing an elitist lifestyle) yielded after 1939 and 1945 to metamorphoses that lowered its social and economic status, while the Polish cultural community (a community of national culture, language, history, and religion) was empowered and expanded, covering almost the entire society.243 The latter had an enormous influence, there-fore, on the cultural contents circulated nationwide via school education and the mass media.
242 Such a (re)construction was based primarily on hierarchization, that is a systemic comparison of national and foreign values and their due purification, which reduced natural interpersonal relations to cultural bonds and then legitimized them, transforming particular experiences of specific individuals and groups into a discourse or a worldview. Creating a collective national ex-perience also required translating national ideology into an educational programme, i.e. replac-ing an intellectual formation with a “school” one. See J. Kurczewska, Nowoczesne doświadczenie narodowe (z różnorodnością teraźniejszości w tle), op. cit., pp. 222–240.
243 By “cultured” identity (the identity of a cultured individual) I mean identification with a tured community or polite society, whereas by cultural identity – one’s identification with cul-ture understood in broader, anthropological terms.
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Needless to say, the individual’s personal identity is not a simple mir-ror-image of educational doctrines or common visions of the world as it emerges out of a dialogue between what is external and social on the one hand and one’s individual consciousness on the other. As Charles Taylor notes, such an identity is grounded not only in one’s personal experi-ence or self-image but also in the reflective work of imagination, which is a prerequisite for any self-definition.244 Personal identity is an ability to use pictorial and semiotic takes on reality, compare them with others, interpret them in one’s own way, apply acts of self-description or self-def-inition conceived in opposition to them, or use them as building blocks in one’s own personal narrative. The sources of such images and stories are art, ideology, religion, and language, which does not follow from their passive, illustratory relation to the world, but from their contribution to the symbolic dictionary in which the world acquires a meaningful form.
Ernst Cassirer, considering the relation between culture and the indi-vidual’s consciousness (perception), used the term “symbolic universe”.245 Through mediation of this imaginarium, man can describe and compre-hend his own experience. In short, the symbolic universe is a dictionary of images and signs mediating between the individual and reality. As Cas-sirer wrote:
244 See Ch. Taylor, Etyka autentyczności, trans. A. Pawelec, Kraków 2002.
245 In this work I conceive of the term “symbolic universe” by analogy with Bourdieu’s concept of the
“habitus”, that is as a system of cognitive and axiological dispositions given to the individual in the form of his/her symbolic-cultural capital. In order to avoid “introducing the pure cognitive self”
or the structuralist premises reducing the self, Pierre Bourdieu – following in Erwin Panofsky’s footsteps and engaging in a polemic with E. Cassirer, among others – proposes the term “habitus”, which is a reinterpretation of the Aristotelian term “hexis” denoting the individual’s “permanent disposition” to think, perceive, valuate, and act in accordance with certain scenarios. The habitus, Bordieau explains, constitutes a system of dispositions available to the individual. Its influence on the individual is, however, not a result of the workings of “nature’s powers or the universal reason;
[…] habitus, as the very term indicates, is something acquired, and also a form of ownership which, under some circumstances, may function as capital”. Habitus as a resource of relations be-tween man and the world is only partially realized by the individual. P. Bourdieu, op. cit., p. 274.
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Man can accomplish nothing more in the domain of language, re-ligion, art, or science than construct his own symbolic world which allows him to understand and interpret, formulate and organize, syn-thesize and universalize his human experience.246
The symbolic universe is not only a medium of experience. Hans-Georg Gadamer, debating with Cassirer, argued that reality becomes rep-resentable only after it has been represented, manifesting itself in all its complexity. Culture “brings to being an increase in representation. Word and image are not derivative illustrations, but [quite to the contrary] they allow what they represent to make the most of its presence.”247 The best example of the figurative mode of being is art. Pondering the figurative representation of experience in culture, Gadamer noted that,
A work of art belongs so much to what it refers that it enriches its being like a new existential process. A figurative take on something, a descriptive passage in a poem, the goal of the allusion recited on the stage are not mere side-effects, removed from the essence, but repre-sentations of the very essence.248
The symbolic universe does not render reality but, rather, depicts or images it, thus authenticating and embodying it, as it were.
246 E. Cassirer, Esej o człowieku. Wstęp do filozofii kultury, trans. A. Staniewska, Warszawa 1971, p. 349. As Cassirer explains, “Man can no longer directly relate to reality. He is unable, as it were, to face it. As man’s symbolic activity keeps progressing, physical reality seems to keep withdrawing. Instead of focusing on things in themselves, man, in a way, constantly talks with himself. He has wrapped himself so much in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mystic sym-bols or religious rites that he can no longer see or know anything that has not been mediated by this artificial means. […] He lives more among imagined emotions, among fears and hopes, among illusions and disappointments, among dreams and fantasies.” Ibid., p. 69
247 H.-G. Gadamer, op. cit., p. 211.
248 Ibid., p. 216.
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When the author of Truth and Method wrote about the image, he meant the “image sign”, i.e. a pictorial or verbal representation function-ing somewhere in between “pure reference – the essence of a sign – and pure replacement – the essence of a symbol”.249 Such an image refers to what it represents, that is it functions as a sign, but at the same time it does not “spend itself entirely in its referential function, but with its own being contributes to what it represents”, replacing it and embodying it.250 Gadamer, using the concept of representation, discovered that figurative-ness does not consist in replacing and embodying because works of art represent being, which means that as well as copying being they also ex-press the ambiguous relation between being and its copy, demonstrating by the same token the process of “arriving-at-representation”. Culture in general and figurative arts in particular – painting, sculpture, theatre, or film – are not merely there to “pass on what has been copied”, but they also cause an “increase of being” as it is “only through the image that the prototype becomes the archetype, i.e. only from the image’s perspec-tive the represented object becomes properly figuraperspec-tive” for the cogniperspec-tive subject.251 The double, semiotic-symbolic function of the image makes it possible to call forth the absent being and by the same token to replace it with an image in a way that is visible and comprehensible for the mem-bers of the same cultural community.
249 Ibid., pp. 222–223.
250 Ibid., pp. 224–225.
251 Ibid., pp. 204–209. Robert Cieślak writes that “man to whom being is to manifest itself as an image must simultaneously become the subject. It is the image, then, and by the same token – being manifested in its form, that is the source of information about modern man and his world. Man-poet will become the point of reference for any being only after he starts playing the
‘representation’ game, that is when he reconstructs his own being through other beings that he has encountered.” R. Cieślak, Oko poety. Poezja Tadeusza Różewicza wobec sztuk widowiskowych, op. cit., pp. 11–12.
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Every community relies on signs and symbols that represent it and confirm its existence, creating its image that the individual can identify with.252 When an artefact, a cultural idea, or a tradition is a prerequisite of identity, it becomes part of the imago mundi, referring to contem-poraneous times and commonly accepted norms and values. This holds true both for paintings or films and for memory narratives or literary texts. Viewed from the hermeneutical perspective, the world is “under-standable” because it manifests itself in human experience as an image which is understood in similar ways by individuals belonging to the same figurative-communicative community. This sense of community is shaped and acquired socially thanks to the sensus communis (literally: “the common sense”). The author of Truth and Method traces this concept back to stoic thought, developed in modern philosophy as “the sense that constitutes the community”, that is a certain “specific generalness”
defining for a member of a given community – through the image of that community – what is comprehensible, probable, morally right, feasible, valuable, and what is not.253 I assume, admitting that I might be simpli-fying Gadamer’s definition, that the sensus communis is an experience of reality in a naturalized form, resulting from the reduction and stabiliza-tion of the symbolic universe (of a given community) to the collectively acceptable worldview. While the symbolic universe, as a collection of im-ages, narratives, and symbols, is always open to new interpretations, even though its changes take a long time to materialize (synchronized with the
252 Following the sociological model, I assume that “the idea of identity is strongly connected with the ‘world of experience’. It follows that identity can be assigned to persons who acknowledge the importance of a given sphere of life. Consequently, identity is the property of humans, not that of culture, institutions, or collective, and should be thus understood as a type of experience – one’s awareness of important traits of one’s own. […] Man’s social identity from now on will be understood as a bunch of his identifications constituting a peculiar whole.” K. Koseła. Polak i katolik. Splątana tożsamość, Warszawa 2003, p. 46.
253 H.-G. Gadamer, op. cit., pp. 48-63.
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history of spiritual culture), the sensus communis expresses their meaning established in a specific historical situation, changing more frequently, following the rhythm of social phenomena.
It is the latter meaning, close to the sensus communis, that I would like to give the concept of “small stabilization”, repeatedly used in this chapter. This metaphorical phrase, used by Różewicz in the title of his drama Witnesses; or, Our Small Stabilization (1962) and subsequently ap-pearing in a number of his texts, is usually applied to descriptions of the Polish socio-economic system of the 1960s and Gomułka’s political rule, a relatively stable period after the suppression of post-October debates and reform movements.254 Given the problems discussed in this book, I understand the “small stabilization” in a slightly different way, primarily as a cultural phenomenon.255 I use the term to denote symbols, memory
254 Józef Kelera gives credit to Jerzy Koenig for being first to note the “career” of the title of Różewicz’s drama as “the formula of its epoch”. J. Kelera, Dramaturgia polska 1945–1978, “Di-alog” 1979, no. 4, p. 95.
255 Stefan Nowak refers to that period as “stabilization”, viewing it as a social and cultural phe-nomenon. Based on his research findings describing the worldview of Warsaw students in 1958 and 1961, Nowak noted the “decline of interest in social and political issues” accompanied by a decrease in popularity of heroic role models. At the same time he concluded that “the general process of the country’s economic and political stabilization” has caused “aspirations and inter-ests to shift to the realm of self-gratification, including personal, professional, and existential needs, leaving behind the questions of making a better world”. S. Nowak, O Polsce i Polakach.
Prace rozproszone 1958–1989, Warszawa 2009, p. 83. The sociologist also noted at that time an
“increasing acceptance of socialism” as a way of socio-economic life (Nowak talks even of the
“majority” supporting the egalitarian model of society and socialized economy) accompanied by a low acceptance of Marxism as a worldview and a thorough intermingling of “previous axi-ological structures”. From the vantage point of 1981, the scholar also noted the emergence, ever since the 1950s, of a “social vacuum” separating the acceptance of post-war social transforma-tions such as “nationalization of industry, agrarian reform, economic central planning, abolition of pre-war class-based social structure”, strong national identification, and a strong position of family values and privacy, from the disintegration of basic social group identities (associations, unions, organizations). Analyzing the Polish system of values during the stabilization period, Nowak argued that it was a combination of social “values propagated by the new system and the old values cultivated somewhere deeper in the people’s consciousness”, such as nation and family, to name but the crucial ones. The “vacuum” resulted in the commonly felt need for
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narratives, behavioural patterns and role models, colloquial speech idioms and public discourses, that is figurative and linguistic forms of the sensus communis of the day, while discussing the political and socio-economic context of those times only indirectly, taking into account their cultural ramifications.256 Agreeing with Andrzej Werner, German Ritz, and other scholars that it was only at the end of the 1970s when a new, holistic model of national culture emerged, I extend the state (and concept) of
“small stabilization” to include also the first half of that decade. That is, approximately, how Różewicz defined the time span of the phenomenon in his conversation with Richard Chetwynd and Grzegorz Musiał, stat-ing that the “stabilization” covered the periods of “Gomułka’s and, later, Gierek’s rule” (W 194). In sum, I define the term as if against the grain of its own etymology, that is not as stabilization but, rather, as a return to the realm of traditional Polish symbols, norms, values, and beliefs, ma-terializing after 1956 as a result of the collective sense of social crisis, the widespread need to identify with commonly respected models (endorsed, for example, by the cultural industry of the Polish People’s Republic), and intensified educational pursuits of writers, artists, journalists, and such institutions as school and the Catholic Church.
social integration, for an “authentic sense of belonging and group support”. Ibid., pp. 163–169.
Małgorzata Szpakowska, reconstructing the reality of “stabilization days” in K. Zanussi’s screen-plays, writes that it is a world of “axiological uncertainty”, bereft at the same time, however, of the tragic dimension, a commonplace world, i.e. “relatively stable, peaceful, without major shocks or surprises”. It is a world inhabited by a “common individual – that is someone who is not excessively determined by national or class identities, not put to the unbearable test, not attempting to become a conscious agent of collective history”, someone who lives “a normal life – in a typical apartment in a standard housing project”. M. Szpakowska, Zanussi: moralistyka czasu stabilizacji, “Dialog” 1979, no. 3, pp. 138–139.
256 At this point I follow Václav Havel, who in his essay The Power of the Powerless (1978) described the situation in the so-called people’s democracies as dominated by a false picture (panorama) of reality, composed of “signs, gestures, behavings, words”. See A. Zura, Publicystyka Václava Havla, “Bohemistyka” 2001, no. 2, pp. 118–119.
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As Gadamer tells us, sensus communis not only defines the rules and limits of perception, but also establishes a community, laying the cog-nitive foundations of one’s comprehension of reality and interpersonal rapport.257 Forming the sensus communis through religious morality, edu-cation, or participation in political and cultural life results in creating a common symbolic and cultural experience of a generation, a nation, a religious denomination, or a social group. Based on this, Gadamer concluded that the community exists as a type of agreement within the framework of a “given linguistic and cultural tradition” grounded in
As Gadamer tells us, sensus communis not only defines the rules and limits of perception, but also establishes a community, laying the cog-nitive foundations of one’s comprehension of reality and interpersonal rapport.257 Forming the sensus communis through religious morality, edu-cation, or participation in political and cultural life results in creating a common symbolic and cultural experience of a generation, a nation, a religious denomination, or a social group. Based on this, Gadamer concluded that the community exists as a type of agreement within the framework of a “given linguistic and cultural tradition” grounded in