Why Theater? Sociological Reflections on Art and Freedom, and the Politics of Small Things Author(s): Jeffrey C.

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

Int J Polit Cult Soc (2005) 19:53-67 -7 10.1007/s 10767-007-9011

Why Theater? and Freedom,

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

on Art Reflections Sociological and the Politics of Small Things

Published ? Springer

online:

Science

24 July 2007 + Business

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

art and freedom

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

particularly with one performance

and constituted gymnasium some actors student playing of with

I attended, billed as a "happening."

than a rock and soundtrack, sheet. an orange on yellow

It took place
slide show, a group

in a
and of

it ended,

Polish journalists wanted

spread it over themselves.

to make
They real

things more
stood one

interesting. They grabbed the sheet and

another's shoulders, made pyramids, and

horsed around; then they decided

pseudo-happening into the thing.

to go outside with

their merrymaking

and turn the

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

in the normal order of things. But a few others,

trenchcoat, seemed to be offended. He and a woman

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

is taken from After

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.

area. I presented unanticipated problems. They hadn't expected an American

provincial performance, let alone at a place where the divide between theater

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

life was appropriately Sovietized;

freedom, was not appropriate.

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

Now, after the fall of Communism,

much more subtle Polish variety have

both the nature of the end and where

Eastern and Central Europe, there was

it has lead. In Poland and the other countries of

some real tolerance contained within socialist

repressive
transformation

tolerance, and it led to the development

initiated by citizens as autonomous

of dynamic movements
agents. In the Soviet Union,

of political
when ? the

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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

the social, These

developed included. not

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,

in a gymnasium, outside knowing

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

they had to fulfill their responsibilities

successful promotions. fashion. Their In this way roles in the they repressive

and exercise
paid,

their duties in at least a minimally

their probably families, small, even but received their little

were

supported were apparatus

?) Springer

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Why

Theater?

57

decisions this way,

another. It was

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

life with banal motivations.

up, even if fleetingly,

The public who

alternative,

reacted to the happening

a zone of freedom. When

joyfully
they saw

an autonomous

our arrest and did nothing

totalized order.

(although they couldn't do much),

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.

Art and Freedom

The circumstances of my arrest reveal two general the relationship

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

study of this see Goldfarb

(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

and line, for example, went

If this weren't so,

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

have our was

been

even

greater theater

than action

those which but

of

the authorities. made on their purely

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

of the Soviet Empire, the move

freedom, to an open political

from an embedded public autonomy, the hidden faculty of

The openness became a matter of principle that was

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.

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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

free politics. This was observable

The movement practices. on the European killing started fields,

in the history of Student Theater, among other artistic

immediately in theaters after of the War. a time of students, entertainment unrest, significant was Its presented.

ideological
supported regime,

content was
the new late 1940s

simple.
through

Itwas Polish entertainment after the Nazi prohibitions,

These the theaters, early 1950s, subsequently, as vehicles were of used by the Stalinist for explicit propaganda, In the Warsaw

by in the

authorities.

"agit-prop" productions.
simple cabaret-theater

But even before

became the

the Stalinist regime collapsed

location for critical expression.

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

4See "Truth and politics,"

in Arendt

(1968,

pp. 227-264).

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Why

Theater?

61

Theater and Russian

commented upon the

Icons (Teatr Plastyczny).

situation of young people

All

of this emerged from, and critically

Poland. I learned more about

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

facts on the ground, which

contributed significantly

to our changed political world.

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.

6See "The new

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,

and the Politics of Small Things

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

society was a very different kind of society because

such groups could be found

these theaters existed.

here and there, from time to time,

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

these differences. And, very significantly,

conservative were. The policies of significance Party the power

this was not just determined by how liberal or

as much as Havel how creative and this, active is not artists only understood

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

and hundreds of others (Murray 1997). And

Since the war, its greatest authors are

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.

There is a fundamental tension between democracy and culture, as

Culture is hierarchical, while democracy is egalitarian. In the arts and

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

lighter, in novels, poetry, film, video, and music,

self consciousness about the nature war

have provided a rich stream of

peace, nation and humanity,

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

little bit. And Mapplethorpe.

very seem existence to be a of

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

the syntax and sensibility of a profoundly discredited

accepted. But because the problems of patriarchy and

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

ideological project but a dissident voice

Polish society is very different because

in a new ideological order of patriotism and piety.

artists present their work.

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

Movement. order sense

Its founders

In 1989, movement, even by

the Communist in a very real

challenged the alternative

them. What won? The

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

get on a train that their work freedom are

reveals

in Sejny. More about that I have been to outline trying autonomy, and

in the future. in this paper: of small

now

art constitutes things results.

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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