M O D ER N ISM AN D P O S T M O D E R N IS M IN E A ST E R N E U R O PE
A m erican and W est-E uropean authors have tended to link P ostm odernism w ith a certain stage in the developm ent o f m ultinational capitalism . Fredric Jam eson, for exam ple, uses the term as:
"a periodi/.ing concepi whose function is to correlate the em ergence o f new form al features in culture with the em ergence of a new type of social life and a new econom ic order... This new m om ent o f capitalism can be dated from the postw ar boom in the United States in the late 1940s and early 50s or. in France, from the establishm ent o f the Fifth R epublic in 1958. The 1960s are in many w ays the key transitional period, a period in which the new international order (neocolonialism , the Green Re volution, com puterization and electronic inform ation) is at one and the same tim e set in place and is swept and shaken by its own internal contradictions and by external re sistan ce."1
Such an attitude excludes a w ide spectrum o f events from the discourse on P ost m odernism . T hese events have been shaking a large part o f the w orld betw een Berlin and Beijing. If the recent changes w ithin W estern societies are a result o f the exhaustion or ideals o f the M odem Era, how can one describe a m uch m ore spectacular rupture, which has occurred in so-called com m unist cou n tries? W hat happened there certainly d o esn ’t fit into the concept o f P ost-M odern society. An inhabitant o f M oscow w ho cannot buy a pack o f cigarettes, w hich are not even available for em p lo y er-issu ed coupons, will hardly agree that he lives in a C o n su m er S ociety, ju st as a farm er from a village in the Lubin district, w ho uses a horse to plow his land, will not belive that Poland has entered a post-industrial epoch. N evertheless, I w ill insist that w hat is going on in the countries o f the form er C om m unist B lock relates also to the issue o f the crisis o f M odernism , and can be d escribed in term s o f P ostm odernism .
The contribution o f avant-garde artists to the rise o f totalitarianism is not an u n know n story. Let me rem ind you that the Italian Futurists w elcom ed F ascism as the fulfillm ent o f their m inim al program . T hey fully supported M ussolini in his struggle for pow er and jo in ed him during his “ m arch on R om e” in 1922. R ussian cubo-futurists also saw a chance for them selves in contem porary politics. “ W e w ould not refuse if
1 F. J a m e s o n , Postm odernism and Consum er Society, in: H. Foster (ed ). The A nti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Port Tow nsend 1983, p. 113.
40 M A R C IN G IŻ Y C K I
we w ere o ffered the use o f the pow er o f the State in order to realize ou r id eas” , wrote N ikolai Punin in 1918.2 In fact, during the first years after the R evolution, activists of the A vant-G arde took o v er all im portant postions in art education and cultural adm in istration in the country. T his love affair did not last long. S ubsequent repressions co n verted the ea rlier supporters into the victim s o f the new regim es. It is not my intention to accuse those w ho w ere oppressed o f opening the door for totalitarianism . Igor G olom - stock, in his brilliant book on totalitarian art, advises us to resist this tem ptation. But he agrees that:
"It is clear that the artistic-structure of these (A vant-G arde) m ovem ents-like the political structure of the dem ocracies of the tim e-contained a certain ideological com ponent which helped the dictatorships during their rise to power, even if they later destroyed both the one and the other."
T he declining com m u n ist regim es w ere, like Fascism , nothing m ore or less than the realization o f the m odernist dream o f a totally co ntrolled political system , breaking entirely w ith the already existing social status quo. F or the first tim e in political history, theory preceded practice. Such a procedure had already been exercised in M odem art, and as it often happens in art, practice did not alw ays confrom to theory. T otalitarian doctrine resolves the problem easily: if a theory d o e s n ’t suit a reality, som ething m ust be w rong with the latter. B erthold B recht presented this in a m etaphorical way: a g overn m ent announced its d isa p p o in tm en t w ith people, so the decision w as m ade up to d is solve... the society! T he ideology o f totalitarian ism is alw ays right. G olom stock writes:
"If the principal characteristic of totalitarianism is that it proclaim s its ideological dextrine as both uni quely true and universally obligatory, then it is the artistic avant-garde o f the 1910s and 1920s who first elaborated a totalitarian ideology o f culture. O nly the art has right to exist which is an effective instrum ent for the transform ation o f the world in the necessary direction, while everything else is coun terrevolution or bourgeois reaction: to the revolutionary avant-garde this was an absolute and unshakable truth."4
T he aw aren ess o f being fail-safe, so typical o f totalitarian ideology, em erged directly from m odernistic “ ratio n ality ” . It is the sham e o f the M odem Era that the w orst failures, including the crim es against hum ankind on a scale never seen before, w ere com m itted in the nam e o f rationality. A nthropological argum ents w ere developed to oppose one race against another. G as cham bers w ere built in accordance with a scientific principle o f the econom y o f m ass destruction. Institutes w ere founded to provide evidence that attitudes d ifferen t from those approved by state are sym ptom s o f m ental illness. The reason w hy M arxism had been accepted as the official ideology in the com m unist c o u n tries, we w ere taught in school, was that it had represented the only one truly scientific cu rrent in philosophy. Leszek K ołakow ski, a form er M arxist and to d a y 's leading critic o f M arxism , is right that "a to talitarian system w hich treats people as exchangeable parts in the state m achinery, to be used, discarded, o r destroyed according to the sta te’s needs, is in a sense a trium ph o f ratio n ality .” 5
■Quoted from. J. G olom stock. Totalitarian A rt in Soviet Union, the Third Reich. Fascist Italy and the People 's Republic o f China, New York 1990, p. 22.
3 Ibidem, p. 28. 4 Ibidem, p. 21.
M any avant-garde artists w ere used, m an ipulated and finally d iscarded by this c ru sh ing m achine o f totalitarianism w hich they helped to establish. In the 1930s the A van- G arde had com pletely d isappeared in the Soviet U nion. A n other cultural d octrine w as proclaim ed as “ the only tru e” one: Social R ealism . The rulers had developed explicit ideas about dealing w ith the people. T hey d id n ’t need inventors o f new social concepts. W hat they sought w ere craftsm en, not artists, capable o f d epicting th e ir idealized vision o f post-revolutionary society. T hey w ere seeking an apotheosis o f them selves. Form s o f pre-revolutionary academ ic art, hated and totally rejected by the A vant-G arde, re turned to the galleries. T otalitarian ism w ore a pom pous costum e. Public buildings, even subw ay stations, w ere shaped like k in g ’s palaces, rather than B auhaus-like factories. The sculptural ornam ent and historic detail anticipated the architecture o f P ostm oder nism w hich w as to ap p ear m uch later in the W est. T he ideological content o f these buildings was cogently revealed by C harles Jencks, w ho used the M oscow S tate U ni versity as an exam ple.
“Classical realism , the architectural from o f Social Realism , here borrow s the repressive forms o f czarism , the stepped pyram ids, and the sings o f bourgeois pow er This coercive and borling sym bolism — the architecture o f monotony — is tied to an appropriate m egalom ania: the building houses 18,000 students in a kind o f battery-hatch palace "6
The description is ex cellent, but I do not understand why Jencks (the m ain proponent o f m eaning in architecture) considers this building, w hich is rich in m etaphors, to be m onotonous. M any things can be said about this kind o f architecture, that it is frig h t ening, irritating, and ugly — but not that it is m onotonous.
The Soviet vision o f the city o f the Future was not unlike the concepts o f the M etropolis, form ulated by m odem Utopians such as H ugh Ferris. The m eanings o f ar chitectural form s used by social-realists and m odernist Utopians w ere different, but the visual results were quite sim ilar.
A fter S ta lin 's death the architecture o f Social R ealism w as gradually abandoned, partly because o f a disastrous econom ic policy — the palaces o f pow er w ere costly - and partly because o f a slow but continuous process o f erosion the state ideology. T he headquarters building o f the C om m unist Party o f R um ania, built by C eausescu in the 1980s, w as perhaps the last m onum ent o f Social R ealism in E uropean architecture. The collapse o f the architecture o f Social R ealism soon revealed the full duality o f the political system : that the m onum ental facades hid an unappealing reality. The reality o f everyday life in the com m unist contries is perfectly expressed in the specific charm o f housing projects w hich have shaped the urban landscape o f m any E ast-E uropean cities It is the charm o f concrete barracks. If we are looking for a good exam ple o f boredom in architecture, we shall not find a b etter one than this. The dem oralizing environm ent o f these places is also a fruit o f M odernism .
Soon after the birth o f Solidarity in Poland a group o f architects connected with the m ovem ent issued a docum ent accusing “ the m odem city o f being the product o f an alliance betw een bureaucracy and totaU tarianism , and singles out the great erro r o f m odem architecture in the break o f historical co n tin u ity .” 7 O f course, the authors o f
6 C h J e n c k s , The Ixin^ua^e o f Post M odern Architecture, New York 1977, p. 91.
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the tex t had in m ind m ostly those cites w hich w ere built in accordance with the housing policy o f the com m unist governm ent. H ow ever, this policy co rresponded directly to the m odernist dem ands for standardization, functionality, and econom y. G ro p iu s’s deliberations on the m inim al dw elling, “establishing the elem entary m inim um o f space, air, light and heat required by m an in o rd er that he be able to fully d evelop his life fu n ctio n s”8 w ere echoed in h u m iliating regulations w hich assigned to a fam ily (or a single person) a strictly lim ited space for living, in accordance w ith the num ber o f inhabitants. T he m ost d evastating im pact on the tow n and social planning in the c o u n tries u nder S oviet control w as a d okum ent know n as C harte d ’A th é n es, form ulated by the p articipants o f the fourth C ongress o f the C. I. A. M. in 1933 (published 1941). T he text (edited by Le C orbusier) d escribed point by point w hat had to be undertaken to desing a p erfect m o d em city. T he last sentence was: “ P rivate interest will be sub o rdinated to public in te rest.”9
The E ast-E uropean regim es w ere not the sam e. T hat life in Poland after 1955 becam e m ore or less b earable w as achieved thanks to the fact that the disintegration o f the system had started here early. If we agree, follow ing Lyotard, Jam eson, and Jencks, that one the m ain characteristics o f P ostm odernism is schizophrenia, then Poland d e finitely appro ach ed P ostm odernism very early. S ince the m id-1970s, Polish intellectual and social life w as schizophrenically split into tw o spheres: a so-called official sphere, con tro lled by censorship, and an underground one, w hich actually was not hidden at all. B ooks pub lish ed by underground publishing houses w ere w idely read by m em bers o f the ruling Party. T he econom y w as divided by the sam e split: a state controlled m arket co-existed w ith a black m arket. A ctually, the spectrum o f choices w as even w ider. The phenom enon o f the C in em a o f M oral U nrest provet that despite the existence o f censorship, som e institutions, like film studions, developed th eir ow n policy, openly opposed to the doctrines o f the C o m m unist Party.
Jam eson stresses one aspect o f schizophrenia as especially present in the Postm odern w orld. It is the disappearance o f a sense o f the past and present. T adeusz K onw icki recognized the sam e process w ithin to talitarianism and d escribed it in a satrical way in his novel A M in o r A pocalypse. The events o f the story, originally published in 1979 by the u n derground, before the S olidarity m o vem ent surfaced, take place during one day. T he m essedia claim s that this one day is July 22, the date o f the m ost im portant com m u n ist h oliday in P oland. The w eather indicates that it m ust be the fall, probably N ovem ber, but nobody know s for certain, because the calen d ar was m anipulated so m any tim es. The hero o f the book is a w riter, evidently K onw icki him self, w ho tries to determ ine the real date. He is seized by the secret police and at the police station he m eets a party o fficial, w ho has gone mad, done a strip-tease during a Party C ongress, and been arrested. The w riter takes an opportunity to ask him w hat truth is. This is their dialogue:
* W . G r o p iu s , ,J )ie Soziologischen G rundlagen der M inim alw ohnung", " D ie Ju stiz” , 1929. Vol. 5, n. 8. Q uoted in: L. Benevolo, H istory o f M o d em A rchitecture, Vol. 2: The M odem M ovem ent, Cambridge
1977, p. 522.
"O nly the know The security forces. They probably d o n 't know, either. O nly the m inister him self, or just the ruling council. They have an im ported calendar hanging in a safe as big as a room. Every day like a ritual, the m inister goes in that safe and tears o ff one sheet, which is then incinerated. No one knows the date, because for years they’ve been moving it, som etim es ahead, som etim es back. At one moment th ey 're chasing the W est, then they pass it, then th ey ’re chasing it again, and th e y 're behind again. Every branch o f industry, every institution, every state farm had its own calendar and had to struggle with it. Five m onths ahead, than tw elve back. 1974 turns into 1972, then 1977 becom es 1979. Everything got all screw ed up. W e re still going around the sun, but it’s a horrible m ess.”
“Maybe we could find out the right date from the W est? I h av en 't listened to Radio Free Europe for quite a while "
"T hat’s a possibility," Kobiałka said, laughing, and then began to choke horribly. “The W est took up the challenge. They started running aw ay when we started chasing them, and then they slow ed down when we ceased up. T h ey ’re exhausted, too. T h ey 're straddling the fence, too.” 10
A truly postm odern vision!
